Molon Labe! (84 page)

The secession of a state from the Union depends on the will of the people of such state. The people alone as we have already seen, hold the power to alter their constitution.
(p.296)

...But in any manner by which a secession is to take place, nothing is more certain than that the act should be deliberate, clear, and unequivocal.
(p.302)

— William Rawle,
View of the Constitution
(1825)

If the Union was formed by the accession of States then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States.

— Daniel Webster, 15 February 1833, U.S. Senate

The name of our federation is not Consolidated States, but United States. A number of States held together by coercion, or the point of the bayonet, would not be a Union. Union is necessarily voluntary — the act of choice, free association.

Nor can this voluntary system be changed to one of force without the destruction of "The Union."... A Union of States necessarily implies separate sovereignties, voluntarily acting together. And to bruise these distinct sovereignties into one mass of power is, simply, to destroy the Union — to overthrow our system of government.

— C.C. Burr (editor),
The Federal Government: Its True Nature and Character
(1840)

Any people whatever have a right to abolish the existing government and form a new one that suits them better.

— Abraham Lincoln,
Congressional Records,
1847

The Union is a Union of States founded upon Compact. How is it to be supposed that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard one provision of it and expect others to observe the rest? If the Northern States willfully and deliberately refuse to carry out their part of the Constitution, the South would be no longer bound to keep the compact. A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides.

— Daniel Webster, Capon Springs Speech, 1851

The South secedes

If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 colonists in 1776, I do not see why the Constitution ratified by the same men should not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of the Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861.

...when a section of our Union resolves to go out, we shall resist any coercive acts to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets.

— Horace Greeley,
New York Tribune

. . . we recur to the compact which binds us together; we recur to the principles upon which our government was founded; and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a government, which, thus perverted, threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence, and take the hazard. This is done, not in hostility to others — not to injure any section of the country —not even for our own pecuniary benefit; but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children.

— Jefferson Davis,
21 January 1861 Farewell Address to the US Senate

It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart, where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole; where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent, the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice and sustained by a virtuous people. Reverently let us invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which by His blessing they were able to vindicate, establish, and transmit to their posterity. With the continuance of His favor ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity.

— Jefferson Davis,
18 February 1861 Inaugural Address as CSA President

A nation preserved with liberty trampled underfoot is much worse than a nation in fragments but with the spirit of liberty still alive.

— Private John H. Haley, 7th Maine Regiment (1860s)

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.

— Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861, first inaugural address

Had
[President]
Buchanan in 1860 sent an armed force to prevent the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law, as Andrew Jackson threatened to do in 1833, there would have been a secession of fifteen Northern States instead of thirteen Southern States.

Had the Democrats won out in 1860 the Northern States would have been the seceding States, not the Southern.

— George Lunt (Massachusetts),
Origin of the Late War

All we ask is to be left alone.

— Jefferson Davis
President of the Confederate States of America, 1861

Modern secessionist sentiment

It very well may come to secession. Canada will likely lead the way, as she is much less cohesive a nation than America. Quebec came within a gnat's breath of seceding in 1995, and we expect it to do so within a few years, probably followed by B.C. Talk of secession shouldn't terrify you. Nations generally fizzle out after 200 years, and America is experiencing a vast polarization of politics to make disunion almost guaranteed.

We are no longer a workably homogeneous people. We are on the verge of a political revolution fought between the working class and the welfare class. Inner city gangs, formerly deadly enemies, are now making compacts. Informational entrepreneurs are abandoning the cities and fleeing to the countryside. Their tax base shrinking and their welfare roles rising, big cities must bleed their states for taxes. Such states (
e.g.,
N.Y. and California) are now losing productive people (taxpayers) to more free states (
e.g.,
Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho).

An
unprecedented
shift of demographics is now occurring. When the states realize that they can't stem the flow, they'll cry to Uncle Sam to equalize matters. Congress will comply — taxing us all so heavily that it won't matter
where
we live. A war will begin between those who
work
for a living and those who
vote
for it. When the productive class realizes that all political remedies have been handed over to the Federal Government; that they are inexorably bound up as galley slaves for the socialist ship of State and its welfare drones — -
that's
when the last resort of secession will be seriously contemplated.

Any government that is the exclusive judge to the limits of its own power is in effect a tyranny.

—
The South Was Right!
(1995), p. 233

Given the growing appreciation of the need for personal restraint and for institutional means for obtaining agreement amidst great social and political conflict, secession has become especially relevant to the present situation in the Western world — marked as it is by growing ethnic and cultural crises and social fragmentation. It is perhaps time to reconsider secession as a potential remedy — and as a return to the fundamentals of popular control.

— H. Lee Cheek, Jr., Prof. of Poli. Sci., Lee University
Taking Secession Seriously: A Primer
(2001)

Secession arises from individual rights.

— David Gordon,
Secession, State & Liberty

Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

Like a marriage that has gone bad, I believe there are enough irreconcilable differences between those who want to control and those who want to be left alone that divorce is the only peaceable alternative.

— Walter Williams,
It's Time To Part Company
, 9/13/2000

When one contemplates the political discourse over the next few years, disunion is a slam dunk. Does anyone really think that Tom Delay, Dick Armey and Jesse Helms are going to find common ground with David Bonior, Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank? They don't belong in the same country, let alone the same legislature. Why not separate them before someone really gets hurt?

— Peter Applebombe,
If At First You Don't Secede...
26 November 2000,
New York Times

Compact Theory must be explored as a legitimate constitutional doctrine for the very reason that James Madison supported it to the degree he did
[in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798]
. Madison, commonly known as the "Father of the Constitution," drafted the Virginia Plan, which became the body of the Constitution. He also proposed the amendments which became the Bill of Rights. In this sense he holds the position of ultimate arbitrator of constitutional questions. He clearly pointed out in the Virginia Resolutions that if a federal law violated the rights of a state without redress, then that state could nullify the law. If the federal government were to persist in its violating of that state's rights, then the logical continuation of the compact theory is that the state may eventually secede from (quit) the Union. It only makes sense that a governing entity such as a state may leave a larger governing body it has voluntarily joined..., if that association is harmful to it.

The 10th Amendment guarantees certain powers to the states. This amendment recognized that a state did not give up its sovereignty entirely just by joining the Union. Only if a state had given up all rights to self-determination would it be logical to argue that they must continue in a Union where that continuance is harmful to the state.

The best evidence of the legality of secession is that the states were asked to ratify the new Constitution in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1791. Ratification, defined as "to approve," allows the option of not approving. North Carolina and Rhode Island stayed out of the Union for several years after its creation. These two states felt that participation would be detrimental to their welfare. Since a state had the option of declining participation in the Union based on its fear of harm from such participation, it follows logically that if a state joined the Union and conditions later became harmful, then a state must retain the right to end that participation and leave the Union. Arguments to the contrary put one in the seemingly untenable position of supporting the idea that "an organization voluntarily joined cannot be voluntarily departed." Now, this may be the way things are done in the Mafia, but it should not be the rule in a democracy.

There is, in fact, constitutional doctrine to support secession. The Constitution does not discuss secession, so preventing it is not a delegated power of the federal government. Nor is secession prohibited, by the document, to the states. It is, then, a power reserved to the states or to the people. This reflects the wording of the "reserved powers clause" of the 10th Amendment...

— Chuck Shiver;
The Rape of the American Constitution

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

— John F. Kennedy

An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot.

— Lawrence of Arabia

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

— Yogi Berra

Successful secessions in history

1139: Portugal from Spain

It took four civil wars, but Portugal finally broke free.

1776: U.S.A. from Britain

In a 1775 address to Parliament ("Conciliation with the Colonies), Edmund Burke stated that to force the colonies back under British law was wrong because
"...you impair the object by your very endeavors to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing which you recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest."

1836: Texas from Mexico

1839: Guatemala from the U. States of Central America

1861: Southern States from the U.S.A.

Although the South was forcibly rejoined to the Union after War, the secession was itself initially successful. Had the South not fired on Fort Sumter (the last remaining Federal garrison in the South, which had only one week of rations left), and instead continued to blockade, the Civil War might have been averted. However, the cannon fire of 12 April 1861 was to the North a "Pearl Harbor" event.