Secession - Lost To The Unitary State
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ July 27, 2005
SECESSION AND REVOLUTION
I can still remember when I knew that America was a righteous nation and its wars were being fought to preserve freedom for ourselves and others. I knew that my country was not invading other nations and attempting to occupy them with troops and that this fact made us better than the Maos, Stalins, Hitlers, and Mussolini's of the world. Also, I thought that this was all I needed to know and that those who found fault with America were misled. Government controlled public schools supported this notion and instead of offering children a thorough critique, failed to teach the necessary elements needed to sustain freedom.
Then, too, wars that required ultra-patriotism came along often enough to make critics seem un-American. The results of this seemingly calculated policy can now be seen in the colored bows that are pasted on automobiles everywhere indicating support for our troops in an imperialistic, Jacobin war that is resulting in thousands of deaths of innocent civilians as well as our own young male and female soldiers.
Power not only determines the law but it determines history. The Northern victory in the Civil War allowed them to record their own skewed rendition. Abraham Lincoln was revered as the key figure in Black emancipation. He was pictured as a semi-tragic hero who had fought the evil southern slaveholders and won only to be assassinated by an equally evil assassin before he could really savor his victory.
Fortunately, I moved South before all of the Lincoln hating southerners had died off and was able to converse with several who still stung from his atrocities.
For about four years from 1861 to1865 the United States became two separate nations with two presidents and two legislatures. In 1860 and 1861 eleven Southern States seceded from the union; seated their government in Montgomery, Alabama; elected Jefferson Davis as their president and declared themselves a sovereign Nation. The Tenth Amendment to our Constitution provided their legal support. "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."
While most Americans thought the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, I learned that it was fought over the right of the Southern States to secede from the Union. Yes, slavery was an issue in both the North and the South but it was not slavery that caused this bloody war.
Northern power clearly overcame Constitutional law and the Federal Government asserted itself against the freedom of its former constituents. The Northern States with a larger population and immense industrial strength were able to force the Southern Confederacy into submission. As it always does in secular quarters, power prevailed.
From the seat of centralized power secession is treason. It is the theft of a part of the body that makes up the nation and of serious consequence. However, from the perspective of the Southern Confederacy the legal footing of the Founding Documents gave them every right to remove themselves from the Union.
Prior to the Northern victory in 1865 secession was a serious consideration on more than one occasion. In 1815 a secret meeting was convened at Hartford, Connecticut to discuss the secession of several New England States in rebellion against President Madison's 1812 war. In that instance and in others moderation prevailed and compromises were made.
Following the American Civil War and the French Revolution the prominence of centralized government overcame the idea of secession, the definition was obscured and until just recently the process was seldom considered.
Revolution can best be defined as the overthrow of an existing government replacing it with another and secession as the separation from an existing government and the formation of another. The former overthrows and replaces the latter separates leaving the original in tact.
The separation of the colonies from England has been known as the American Revolution even though it does not fit properly into that definition. The colonists had no intention of changing the English Government; they only wanted to secede and form their own. Even during the Civil War the participants seemed unclear on the distinction between revolution and secession. Robert E. Lee thought of secession as revolution.
The past several years have seen renewed talk about secession and it has been a fairly common occurrence throughout the world.
Charley Reese writes, "Jefferson Davis, one of America's greatest statesmen, said after the Northern victory that a question settled by force will always arise again in another form and in another time. He was right. The same division that was present at the Constitutional Convention, that was argued almost continuously during the early days of the republic and that led to war between the North and South remains with us yet."
Since the Southern States were thwarted in their attempt at secession and their right to secede was determined by force, secession remained a righteous option in the minds of many Southerners and it proponents are to this day fairly numerous in Southern America. In 1980 sovereignty for the Province of Quebec, Canada was put to a vote. The initiative was defeated with 40% of voters in favor and 60% against. Dr. Walter Williams, Libertarian, iconoclastic college professor, wrote an interesting article suggesting secession for contemporary freedom-loving Americans. Also, some citizens in the Canadian Province of Alberta are recommending a separation.
Since 1990 fifteen Russian republics have seceded. The peaceful secessions from authoritarian Communist states like Russia and the former Czechoslovakia contrasted with the belligerent attitude of former President Lincoln provide a stunning paradox. This aversion to secession has carried over and resulted in America being very slow to recognize newly seceded nations.
In spite of the famous Federal coercion that pivoted our history, the current Bush Administration has come out against China's new anti-secession laws aimed at Taiwan.
Smug American historians like to point to the busy guillotine that was prevalent in the French Revolution comparing it to the relative order that resulted from the American separation for England. The analogy is flawed since the French Revolution was a prototypical egalitarian quest while the American Revolution was really a mere secession. A more interesting simile might be made between the French Revolution and the American Civil War; both produced anarchy, both involved the random killing of innocents and both were intent on establishing a drastically different government.
In antebellum America states rights were frequently considered a check on legal breaches of the Constitution. Both Kentucky and Virginia ratified nullification laws in 1799, and in 1832 South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification in response to partisan tariff legislation passed by the Jackson administration. These laws assumed that the Federal Government derived its power from the states; as a result un-Constitutional laws could be thwarted and pronounced null and void.
THE STRUGGLE FOR GOOD GOVERNMENT
In the final analysis freedom is an illusion. Man is captive to his physical body; he is captive to time, to physical and mental limitations; and to the knowable world. He had no control over the event of his birth; his life was a gift. Though he can conceive it, infinity will not fit into his brain; he and his thoughts are captive to time and space.
In his usual lucid style Joe Sobran writes about his evolution into Anarchism. He writes of his twenty year association with William Buckley and the National Review and how he finally came to the conclusion that "we didn't all want the same things after all". He writes of his awakening to the mortal wounding of Constitutional government by Lincoln's war and the lack of popularity this understanding wrought and of Murray Rothbard's outrageous contention that the crafting of the Constitution was "but a 'coup d'etat,' centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation".
When the Founders crafted the Constitution and each of the individual states ratified it, they created a potential monster. Intrinsic in the writing of the Constitution was human power that superseded the states. Though it was to be severely circumscribed, the power was real and it could have been expected that it would ultimately exert itself against state sovereignty and the Constitution. In Virginia Patrick Henry sounded a warning
"I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection, whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people, or by the tyranny of rulers. I imagine, sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny. Happy will you be if you miss the fate of those nations, who, omitting to resist their oppressors, or negligently suffering their liberty to be wrested from them, have groaned under intolerable despotism! Most of the human race are now in this deplorable condition; and those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power, and splendor, have also fallen a sacrifice, and been the victims of their own folly. While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom."
Thoughtful Americans willing to properly understand history can now comprehend the persistent devolution of American freedom that has taken place since the War Between the States but in addition they need to understand that the centralization of power in a single governmental unit, even with checks and balances, is planting the seed for an ultimate tyranny. Like virulent cancer, human governmental power grows until drastic steps are needed to bring it back under control.
Prior to the French Revolution the kings and monarchs that ruled Europe were limited in their authority by the makeup of the social order. There were numerous competing power centers "principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, papal states, small republics, city states, margraves, and free cities". These diverse centers of power diffused the ability of governments to amass large sums of money through universal taxation or to draft large armies.
In a classic treatise on secession and revolution entitled Secession and the Modern State which I have quoted from and used as a basis for this essay, Dr. Donald W. Livingston, writes of the drastic change the Revolution made in France.
"On the eve of the Revolution the French monarch had a military force of around 180,000, Frederick the Great had a force of 190,000, and Austria of 200,000. What no absolute monarch had dared to dream of, the French Republic now did. It ordered universal conscription, and suddenly placed in the field an army of a million men, which rolled back the frugal monarchies of Europe. New aggressive tactics were developed by Napoleon, which brought victory but required high casualties; something the monarchs could not have afforded. This, however, did not bother the Republic because the cost was born by an abstraction known as the "public" and not by proprietors. Through conscription the French would eventually raise three million troops, the largest army ever gathered in the world."
He notes that the French Revolution created the first modern unitary state and that it was created in an effort to guarantee natural rights to its citizens. This utopian effort resulted in the destruction of all competing social entities and allowed an unencumbered federal government to exert its unhampered will on the populace. Lincoln conducted a similar power play during the Civil War and as Napoleon set out to conquer Europe following the French Revolution, America today has set about bringing the entire world under its control.
America's Founders understood that the government they constructed was an experiment. Benjamin Franklin said they had created a Republic but quickly questioned its durability. Today, America bears a greater resemblance to the Nineteenth Century French Republic under Napoleon than to the dreams of its founders.
Accumulated power appears to be compatible with human nature. Sheep need a shepherd and throughout history the smartest and strongest have forced their will on their fellows.
During the Twentieth Century Marxist governments successfully enslaved large portions of the world. These Jacobin monstrosities were responsible for the annihilation of hundreds of millions of their own citizens and like the French revolution they never succeeded in providing the freedom and egalitarian social structure they claimed to seek.
Today, our leaders incessantly talk of "freedom" while they impose tyranny. As elite conclaves assemble at posh retreats to determine the fate of the world's population and the century old dream of world government progresses, America is being dismantled, losing its wealth and power, and succumbing to an incremental, bloodless, Jacobin revolution in which its formerly free and prosperous citizens will live in poverty under the foot of a new world order.
CONCLUSION
It was the Constitution itself which formed the fledgling entity that eventually under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln became the behemoth that set in motion the demise of all antebellum dreams of secession. The Civil War settled once and for all that the American Federal Government would never allow it.
The Roman Republic lasted for nearly 500 years but eventually succumbed to a quest for empire and an amoral tyranny that remains the quintessential debauchery of the ages. The seeds of failure are intrinsic in all human governments, even the best.
As the inexorable world order progresses driven by surreptitious power, thoughts of secession will no longer involve leaving a particular nation but separating from a powerful world government with unrestrained power bereft of ethical standards. This nonpareil unitary government will not be patient with dissent.
Tyranny is not a Christian doctrine. As I have written many times in the past, man was not created to govern himself. God has provided a simple legal structure that might even be acceptable to Libertarians and Anarchists. With the family as its basic unit federal government is limited to protecting families and dispensing justice. The social order is to be restrained by the Laws God gave to Moses. He becomes the regent through obedience to His Laws. God will not become a tyrant. His legal structure will ultimately provide a peaceful, prosperous, and free social order that can be maintained throughout the ages. He waits for the humanistic rebellion to wear itself out with murder and mayhem. When man finally tires of his flawed efforts to play God and again turns to The One True God, His perfect legal structure will sustain freedom, peace and prosperity - but not until!