Secession in the United States
can refer to secession of a state from the United States, secession of part of a state from that state to form a new state, or secession of an area from a city or county.
Attempts at or aspirations of secession from the United States have been a feature of the country's politics since its birth. Some have argued for a constitutional right of secession and others for a natural right of revolution. The United States Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.
The one serious secession movement was defeated in the American Civil War. In 1860 and 1861, eleven of the fifteen southern states where slavery was legal declared their secession from the United States and joined together as the Confederate States of America. It collapsed in 1865 after losing the war with the northern states.[1]
A 2008 Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that "any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic."[
Antebellum American political and legal views on secession
The issue of secession was discussed in many forums, and even advocated in the North and South, in the years before the American Civil War. With origins in the question of states' rights, preceding the Nullification Crisis, historian Maury Klein describes the contemporary debate: "Was the Republic a unified nation in which the individual states had merged their sovereign rights and identities forever, or was it a federation of sovereign states joined together for specific purposes from which they could withdraw at any time?"[10] He observes that "the case can be made that no result of the war was more important than the destruction, once and for all ... of the idea of secession".[11]
Historian Forrest McDonald argues that after the adoption of the Constitution "there were no guidelines, either in theory or in history, as to whether the compact could be dissolved and, if so, on what conditions". However during "the founding era, many a public figure . . . declared that the states could interpose their powers between their citizens and the power of the federal government, and talk of secession was not unknown." However in order to avoid the resort to violence that was necessary in the Revolution, the Constitution intended, according to McDonald, to establish "legitimate means for constitutional change in the future." In effect, the Constitution "completed and perfected the Revolution."[12]
Whatever the intentions of the Founders, secession and threats of disunion were a constant in the political discourse leading up to the Civil War. Historian Elizabeth Varon writes that
... one word [disunion] contained, and stimulated, their [Americans] fears of extreme political factionalism, tyranny, regionalism, economic decline, foreign intervention, class conflict, gender disorder, racial strife, widespread violence and anarchy, and civil war, all of which could be interpreted as God's retribution for America's moral failings. Disunion connoted the dissolution of the republic -- the failure of the Founders' efforts to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a tragic cataclysm that would reduce them to the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. And yet, for many other Americans, disunion served as the main instrument by which they could achieve their political goals.[13]
by Diane Alden
Whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." (Declaration of Independence)
What do Walter Williams, Joseph Sobran, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul have in common? Besides being very bright, responsible, intelligent and erudite men, they believe in the right of states around the world and in the good old United
States of America to secede.
In this day and age it is the unspoken option that simmers beneath the growing cultural, political, spiritual, regional, sexual and economic chasm that has developed over the last 50 years. The alternative to the spreading social and political balkanization of America is gathering energy and proponents.
As in any marriage gone bad, there is the hesitancy to speak the unspeakable. After attempts to change, to reform, to come to grips, to adapt, the basic problem and irreconcilable differences are still there. They grow like a killing tumor until the pain becomes so unbearable the only choice is to cut the cause of the pain from the body. Usually "cures" for this sickness only put off the inevitable.
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