Secession Supplement

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Politically speaking, America was born of a secessionist movement, and our Declaration of Independence is, at base, a secessionist document. From the beginning, the American polity was based on a federal compact between sovereign political communities called States and not between the people themselves in the aggregate. No credible American statesman even questioned the legitimacy of this arrangement until the early 1830s.

When our Founding Fathers broke the bonds of political association with Great Britain in 1776, they declared the former colonies to be free and independent States constituting thirteen separate communities, each asserting its sovereignty. The governing document adopted by the States during the war for independence, the Articles of Confederation (1778), made this assertion of sovereignty clear. Article two reads: "Each State retains it sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled." The government of Great Britain acknowledged this fact in the Treaty of Paris of 1783 by recognizing the absolute independence of each State by name.

When delegates from the States met at the Philadelphia Convention in May, 1787, they came as representatives selected by the citizens of the States for the sole purpose of amending what was commonly called the 'Federal Constitution,' that is, the Articles of Confederation. That the Articles constituted an extant league or compact between the States was never called into question. These delegates were not given the authority by the people of their states to make any binding agreements in Philadelphia; rather, they were only to deliberate and discuss proposed changes to the Articles. The changes themselves might only become effective once they were ratified by the people of the several individual States.

This observation gives the lie to the nationalists Assertion that the Constitution, and hence the general government itself, was the creature of the aggregate of the people of America rather than of the people in their sovereign capacity as citizens of the States. Indeed, this is the foundation-stone of the argument of those who have perpetrated the nationalist myth of the American founding. If this assertion were true, which it is not, then the States would have been prior to the creation of the general government in 1788 mere nullities and thereafter, consequently, only administrative segments of the whole.

The nationalist position cannot stand against the facts of the actual ratification of the Constitution in 1787-88. First of all, each move to insert the phrase "national government" was thwarted at every turn, and nowhere does it occur in the finished document. Moreover, if indeed the aggregate of the people in America created the general government by means of the Constitution, why was the document established by the ratification votes of but nine of the thirteen States (a procedure in direct contravention to the letter of the Articles of Confederation, which required the unanimous consent of all parties for amending purposes)? If the aggregate of the people possessed sovereignty, then the majority of the nine States that ratified might compel the minority of the four dissenting States to join the new Union of 1787 against their will. That such a move was never contemplated proves that the people of each state possessed the requisite sovereign capacity to decide for themselves alone whether to accept the terms of this amended voluntary union or confederacy of States. Both North Carolina and Rhode Island opted to stay out of the union for several months after the formation of the general government in March 1789. No other state claimed any right to control their actions.

As evidence that the individual sovereign States were the principles to the compact that created both the Constitution and the general government, one has to look no further than to the original language of the preamble of the Constitution reported out of committee on 6 August 1787. It reads: "We the people of the States of . . . [all of the States are then listed] do ordain, declare, and establish, the following Constitution for the government of ourselves and our posterity." Clearly, then, this means the people of the separate and sovereign States. The reason that this language does not appear in the final draft of the document is obvious: what if one of the States listed chose not to ratify the Constitution? Again, ratification required only nine States out of thirteen. Thus it was seen as impracticable to assume beforehand that a particular State would vote to ratify. Instead of specifically enumerating the individual States, the Framers decided to use what they deemed as an equivalent phrase, "the people of the United States." To them, this meant without doubt the people of such States that agreed to unite under the terms of the Constitutional compact.

The salient Constitutional issue that divided South from North before the war and led to the secession of eleven Southern States in 1860-61 was States Rights or State Sovereignty. To say that a State is sovereign, however, does not mean that its government is sovereign. Rather sovereignty is lodged in the people in their capacity as citizens of the separate States. In the American system no government - general, State, or local - possesses sovereign authority. In the North (at least among many of the political leaders there) there developed the idea that some sort of allegiance was owed the national government, and that all men were first and foremost citizens of the nation and only secondarily of their States. In the early 1830s, both Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story contended (albeit in error) that there existed such a thing as 'divided' or 'delegated' sovereignty. These and other nationalists posited that the U. S. government was 'sovereign within its sphere' and the several State governments were 'sovereign within their sphere.' The upshot of this flawed theory was that the States had surrendered a portion of their sovereignty to the general government. However, it is evident from a close study of the debates of the Framers of the Constitution that they never conferred (or intended to confer) any sovereignty upon any government.

Again, sovereignty - undivided and unalienable--was retained by the people of the organic and authentic political communities known as the States, each of them with its own legal, religious, and cultural peculiarities. This diversity was so great even before the Revolution that Virginians and Massachusetts Yankees had trouble understanding each other's dialects, as well as each other's points of view.

That the American States, through the voice of their citizens, were free and independent political communities is well noted in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." International law scholar Emmerich de Vattel defined the nature of a confederated republic as follows: "Several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy, without each in particular ceasing to be a perfect [i.e. sovereign] state. They will form together a federal republic: the deliberations in common will offer no violence to the sovereignty of each member. . . ."

The American Founders fought a war from 1775 to 1783 against a highly-centralized British state; thus, they had no intention, upon winning their independence, of creating a strong unitary government to which resistance would be a treasonable act. Nationalists make much of the so-called 'Supremacy Clause' of Article Six of the Constitution. To them, it undergirds the position that the national government is superior to the States and the people thereof. But to discern what the Framers meant by the 'supreme law of the land' clause, we must look at their original intentions. As noted above, the Constitution was never intended to empower any government; rather, it was intended as a check (Jefferson called it a 'chain') on the limits of the power of the general or central government. For the nationalist school to propose, as they have, that the Supremacy Clause gives ultimate power to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the general government constitutes a gross misunderstanding of the general nature of statutory or fundamental law. Confederate President Jefferson Davis remarked that "To have transferred sovereignty from the people to a Government would have been to have fought the battles of the Revolution in vain - not for freedom and independence of the States, but for a mere change of master."

The American 'Civil War,' or what should properly be called the War for Southern Independence, was not fought over the issue of slavery, as is proclaimed by today's American Establishment. Rather, it resulted because of a disagreement over the nature of the U. S. Constitution, especially where the question of the right of secession was concerned. After a cursory study of our founding document, it is obvious that the right to secede was never prohibited to the States, and, therefore, what is not prohibited is allowed. The right of secession, then, is a power reserved to the States, who are the principles in the original compact. Any State, upon its own volition, could secede from that voluntary compact to which it has voluntarily acceded. Even arch-nationalist Abraham Lincoln defended the right of secession as a young Congressman in the 1840s. When he became President in 1861, however, Mr. Lincoln reversed his position and used an illegal and immoral invasion of the seceded Southern States in order to re-establish 'union' at the point of a bloody bayonet.

That Lincoln placed the unity of the United States above the Constitution itself places him in opposition to the principles of the American Founders. To prevent the Southern States from exercising their properly understood right to depart a voluntary union on peaceable terms, it was necessary to employ naked coercion. Some seventy years earlier, Alexander Hamilton of New York, surely no friend of the States Rights position, noted: "To coerce the States in one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. . . . What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a non-complying State: Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another. . . . Here is a nation [sic] at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself - a government that can exist only by the sword? . . . But can we believe that one State will ever suffer itself to be used an as instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream - it is impossible."

In Hamilton's day even the most ardent nationalist could not imagine the coercion of one State by another. Yet by 1861 this 'impossible' situation had become reality. However, it was not Congress, but a tyrannical President, who initiated a war against the sovereign States of the South that would kill over 600,000 Americans and forever end the American 'experiment' in self-government. Lincoln's concentration of power at the center - in Washington - marked an end to the confederated, constitutional republic of the Founding Fathers, and in its place created a nascent American Empire, which, in our own, day has become the scourge of the entire globe. That great British man-of-letters Lord Acton, in his postwar correspondence with General Robert E. Lee, confessed that he grieved over the stake that had been lost at Appomattox more than he had rejoiced over that won at Waterloo.

Since Lee's surrender of his army at Appomattox in 1865, the United States (now singular instead of plural) has become the world's mightiest empire. Today, U. S. troops are stationed in over 100 countries, and the U. S. employs NATO as its cover for international aggression. At home, the U. S. government treats the Constitution as a dead letter, and indeed defines the limits of its own authority. It refuses to protect its own borders against an invasion of immigrants who seek to remake America in the image of the often bankrupt cultures from which they come. The poison of 'political correctness' has effectively served to muzzle free speech, especially by those who criticize the demise of the Christian, European order on which this country was built. Formerly free and sovereign States have become little more than administrative provinces of an all-powerful unitary state centered in Washington, DC.

In the South, where the roots of the old American order run deepest, there has begun a movement to return to the Constitutional principles that were destroyed by Abraham Lincoln and his imperial successors. The League of the South, the preeminent organization within the Southern Independence Movement, has called for a return to States Rights and local self-government by invoking the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, if the restoration of our God-given right to govern ourselves as citizens of our respective States is ignored, the League sees Southern independence as the only means of preserving our ancient liberties.

No people can be free without the means of withdrawing from an illicit regime that is destructive of their rights and liberties. In these United States, our Founding Fathers understood that some time in the future their descendants might find it necessary and profitable to dissolve the political bonds that joined together the sovereign States in voluntary union. That time came in 1860-61, and indeed it may be again necessary in 2000 and beyond if the American people are to remain free.

Secession, after all, is nothing more than the assertion of the inalienable right of a people to change their form of government whenever is ceases to fulfill the purpose for which it was originally established. Under our Constitution, this should be a peaceful remedy. The decision of a State or States to withdraw from a confederacy or league should not be seen as a revolutionary or insurrectionary act. To call the secession of a sovereign State from a voluntary union an act of 'treason' or 'rebellion' is sheer folly. Yet this is what most Americans - even Southerners - are taught today. Only by restoring in Americans a proper understanding of the system of government that men like Washington and Jefferson (as well as Jefferson Davis) intended for them to enjoy can we hope to preserve the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.