Every Independence Day, I like to get somewhat reflective on some aspect of the unique national experience of America. This year, my thoughts turned towards the idea of secession and its role in American history. Given my libertarian leanings, the idea of declaring independence, of simply breaking the bonds with the current governing authority with nothing more than a few choice words, is an interesting and ultimately exciting notion for me.
We never really consider the American Revolutionary War through the lens of a secessionist movement, but that was by definition what took place: statesmen, fed up with rule of the British authorities on the other side of the Atlantic, broke off from the rest of Great Britain to form an independent government. I suspect that the reason for this is due to the deep association of secession in the American phsyce with the Confederate States of America and the Civil War. And given the chief desire of the rebel government to maintain slavery in North America, the idea of secession ultimately gets caught up with the idea of servitude and not freedom. This is really a shame given that secession can be used in any context to further a variety of possible ends, but instead secession is intricately linked with political oppression and regression.
This association was not always so well defined; the discussion of secession was certainly not taboo in the days before the Civil War. Seccessionist rhetoric arose in the South with respect to other issues in addition to the maintainence of slavery. The most notable of these would be tariff and trade policy with the events revolving around the Tariff of Abominations being the most pronounced example. Furthermore, secessionist ideas were not solely confined to the South; the Hartford Convention was brought together in part to discuss the possible secession of the New England states from the United States.
But there is no doubt that the Civil War ended the debate in the long-running American conversation concerning secession. If one were to ask any American today about the idea of secession, you will probably get a response informing you of how Lincoln “solved” the problem a century and a half ago. But such an argument only goes to demonstrate the immense impracticallity of such a movement rather than the moral and legal implications of secession. The above response would be satisfactory only if one were willing to accept some form of “might is right” moral philosophy, something I doubt many people would ascribe to.
There can be little doubt that the South’s actions in 1860-61 were quite unproductive in the grand scheme of things, though admittedly it is always easier to pass judgement after the fact. By almost any measure of economic progress and development, whether it be manpower, infrastructure, etc., the North had a distinct advantage which would play a decisive role as the war progressed; the South was already forced to play with a stacked deck, if you will. And given the South’s main goal of preserving the institution of slavery, they would probably have been much better served to remain a part of the Union anyway. The newly elected President Lincoln was not a hardcore abolitionist and probably would have treaded rather lightly around the issue. We often forget (given our desire to overly simplify historical events) that Lincoln’s first priority in creating the Army of the Potomac was not to end slavery but to maintain the integrety of the Union. The invocation of abolition, brought about with the issuing of the Immancipation Proclamation, was a shrewed move to further this ultimate objective, hoping that it would incite large scale slave rebellions in the South, keep the border slave states (who were NOT subject to the provisions of the Immancipation Proclaimation) within the Union, and greatly decreasing the probability of Britain (which had already abolished slavery by this point) entering the conflict on the side of the South. Due to Lincoln’s preoccupation of Union preservation, just the threat of rebellion would have been enough to keep Lincoln from aggresively attacking the problem. And though the balance of power was certainly in favor of the northern Free States by 1861, the South still had enough clout in the national legislature that they could have effectively derailed any possible reform for decades to come, if Lincoln or any future executive finally decided to curtail or end the practice.
Of course, one could have said many of the same things concerning the American Revolution. Indeed, the relative strength of Great Britain compared to the United States may have been even greater than that of the North and the South in the Civil War. In 1776, Britain was the greatest empire on the face of the earth, controlling territory and trade throughtout the world with a professional army and an unsurpassed navy. The fledgling United States, in contrast, could muster up little more than a ragtag bunch of regular army and militia as well as a navy hardly worthy of the name. Despite such enormous odds, the United States was able to persevere and overcome the onslaught of one of the greatest nations ever to have existed up to that time, thereby earning their independence from their former rulers.
Now, the two examples are not entirely congruous in every respect. Wars in the 18th century were foughts before the concept of ”total war” came into fashion as an accepted practice; there was a clear delineation between acceptable military targets and the sacrosanct civilian populice. That is to say, wars were only fought between armies on the battlefield (the so-called “gentlemen wars”). This is in marked contrast to war a century later, especially in the later stages of the Civil War, where the line between military and civilian targes blurred to the point that they were undistinguishable. Consider Sherman’s “March to the Sea” as a rather extreme example of such a practice, when essentially everything in a country was considered to be a tool of conceivable use to an enemy and thereby considered a legitmate target of agression.
Related to this idea was the willingness of countries in the 19th century to devote an ever increasing share of its economic output to a war effort. Life in America essentially ground to a halt for 5 years as both the North and the South directed all the resources they could muster towards raising and maintaining armies on both the Western and Eastern fronts, armies whose numbers were much greater than their counterparts in the American Revolution. Furthermore, the growth of the industrial revolution and sthe cientific enlightenment led to significant advances in miliary technology, thereby exacerbating the advantages to economic dominance in warfare. No longer were powerful states only able to compete in quantities with adversaries (like in most of the history of human warfare), but now advanced governments could now invest in the quality of their forces as well. The ability to invest a greater number of resources into a greater myriad of potential military ends exacerbated the pressure of less organized or less developed states to keep up and maintain an effective fighting force.
But such considerations do not even address the equally interesting issues concerning the legality and the morality of secessionist movements. Morally speaking, I have already mentioned above that secession is a very context-specific event; issues of morality must be considered on a case-by-case basis. It should be viewed in context with the defining goals and asperations of the group desiring independence. The South’s desire to seceed from the North can therefore never be considered moral as their chief goal from independence was to continue the egregious practice of slavery. Under this reasoning, even the Americans’ desire to seceed from Great Britain looks rather circumspect. The British Empire was heavily subsidizing colonial defense (I beleive the average colonialist faced a tax burden one-sixth that of his counterpart on the mainland) and it was not all together unreasonable to expect the Americans themselves to shoulder a greater portion of the financial costs of the protection from which they benefited most directly. Of course, the real complaint of the American colonists was not necessarily the taxes themselves but rather “taxation without representation,” but it would be somewhat creduluous to believe that the goal of representation in Parliament would be to secure higher taxes on their own citizens!
From a legal perspective, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt as to the Founding Fathers’ sentiments on this issue. They did not seem to delude themselves that what they were undertaking was not an act of treason against the British crown. This is partly the reason why they were so reticient to exacerbate the crisis; it was entirely accurate when one descirbed the Foudning Fathers’ as “relunctant revolutionaries.” Indeed, they were still strongly loyal to the King as late as 1776 itself: even as the increasingly frustrated state representatives gathered to figure out a way to get their grievances heard, they were toasting their soverign at the pubs afterwords. But when the time for talk had finally ended, they knew that their actions would precipitate a powerful response, one they fully expected to occur. It was not mere rhetoric when Jefferson wrote that “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” But they weighed their act of treason against the higher moral law to which they also followed, determining in the end that the number of abuses perpretated by the monarchy was too great to overlook, thereby justifing revolution.
With respect to the secession of the South from the United States, the issue seems to be less clear cut. Of course, the position taken by the Lincoln adminstration was that the South was illegally in rebellion and that they must be brought back under the laws of the Constitution, by force if neccesary. Then again, there does not seem to be any provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting states from seceeding from the United States (i.e. revoking their acceptance of the U.S. Constitution as the document under which they would be ruled by a federal government). And since the federal government does not explicitly have the authority to inforce a continual acceptance of the founding document, one could plausably appeal to the 10th amendment to the Constitution to credibly claim that states have the authority to seceed from the Union. And intuitively, it would have been rather odd if the writers of the Constitution included a provision prohibiting secession by its constituent states given that American itself had been established by an act of secession not even two decades before.
But it may not be entirely out of the realm of possibility to think just that. The Constitutional Convention was called to address supposed deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation, especially as it related to the general weakness of the federal government to assert its authority. Foremost on the minds of many of the delegates were the recent disturbances such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusettes, clearly demonstrating the fragile position of the governing authorities at this time. Stability was an overriding consideration for those wishing to create a new federal government; these people would not have been entirely unreceptive to the idea of granting the federal government broad authority to quell rebellions and other seditious movements.
Many people have used various provisions in the Constitution in order to find a justifiable legal argument granting such powers to the national government. Among the most persuasive of those is the authority granted to the federal government to maintain a republican form of government in all the states of the Union. At its face, it seems a somewhat innocuouls and ultimately futile proposition to invoke, especially considering that the Confederate government set up a Constitution which in many ways was identical to its Union counterpart. But the states of the Confederacy were not setting up a republic as it denied basic human and political rights for the signficant black population in their communities. This could provide the needed justification for the North to invade the South and bring them back into the fold. However, it would have been somewhat disingenuous for the North to invoke this clause, givent that they had been complicit from the start in maintaining slavery in the southern states, all the way from the “three-fifths compromise” to the Fugitive Slave Law. But it is important to remember that just because someone is hypocritical, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong!
But regardless of the legal and moral complexities of secession, I think that it can be generally agreed upon that secession is a very destabalizing event which should only be invoked in the most desparate of circumstances, not just for “light and transient causes.” This is something the founding fathers of America understood very well in their dealings with the British. Secession introduces immense costs on society by preventing the government from executing its fundamental objective: the maintance of stability and order in a populice. Without such protection, much of civil society can fall by the wayside. Such costs must be carefully considered when contemplating the supposed benefits of independence if a nation is able to sucessfully break the bonds of their former rulers.
