The Secession Issue -- Revisited
contributed by Charles Adams
Buffalo, New York
When Chairman Gorbachev was faced with the secession from the Soviet Union of a number of its captive republics, at first, the use of force to prevent secession was to be his response. President Bush and many of the Western powers responded to that possibility with consternation, only to be told by Gorbachev that the American Civil War gave him ample authority to use force to preserve the Union in Russia as Lincoln had done to preserve the Union in America. To that, President Bush replied, the situations were not the same. They weren’t? Of course they were. The issue was in the United Nations Charter and it was called the right of the self-determination of peoples. This right had its roots in the Declaration of Independence, which was dedicated to the proposition that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In the end, Gorbachev accepted that proposition; Lincoln did not.
Lincoln proclaimed that the states had no right to secede and that had been settled by President Andrew Jackson during the nullification crises of the 1830s. Lincoln was not known for being knowledgeable about history, or even about the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. He was even more ignorant about the principles of international law and the law of nations. He wrote his thanks and approval to General Sheridan, while Sheridan was plundering civilian life in the Shenandoah Valley, for what were obviously war crimes under the law of nations. He went on to congratulate Sherman for his civilian devastation in Georgia and South Carolina. And today, one prominent Northern historian acknowledges that this destruction of civilian society proved that Lincoln was a brilliant war tactician; even though it produced undying hatred in the South for the names of Sherman and Sheridan, it did bring about a collapse of the Confederacy and thus ‘preserved the Union.’
The nullification crises during Jackson’s administration didn’t really settle anything, and certainly not the question of secession. Nullification meant the right of a state to nullify a law of Congress that violated the Constitution. It was first proposed by some of the Founders of the federation. But nullification and secession are different matters, and this was pointed out by President John Quincy Adams in 1839 when he gave the keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Jubilee of the Inauguration of George Washington as President. President Adams ridiculed the right of a state to nullify an act of Congress—that was for the Supreme Court, not the states. But on the right of secession, Adams was fully supportive with these words:
If the states ever lost their fraternal affection, gave way to cold and indifference, or a collision of interest should foster hatred, and the bonds of political association should sever, it would be far better for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint.
President Jefferson also recognized the right of secession, as did a host of others. After the Louisiana Purchase there was considerable national anger and talk of secession in the West. In response to this threat, Jefferson wrote:
"Let them part by all means if it is for their happiness to do so. It is but the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in Union if it be for their good, but separate them if better."
When Lincoln cited Jackson’s era as proof that no state could secede from the Union, one wonders to what he may have been referring. It was just another example of Lincoln’s logic, which in this case, made no sense and was a gross historical error. Secession had nothing to do with the nullification crises and didn’t really become an issue until South Carolina seceded in December of 1860. At that time a host of Northern as well as Southern editorials seemed to say that the right of a state to withdraw from the Union if its people wanted to do so, was a self-evident truth. One example is the following November 21 editorial in the Cincinnati Daily Press:
"We believe that the right of any member of this confederation [the federal Union] to dissolve its political relationship with the others and to assume an independent position is absolute—that, in other words, if South Carolina wants to go out of the Union, she has the right to do so, and no party or power may justly say her nay."
This was before Lincoln’s day. Within a year, no such editorials could be found, as newspapers that espoused such heresy, like heretics of the past, were silenced by Lincoln’s military tribunals—the presses were shut down and the writers jailed for the duration of the war. Any brief study of totalitarian regimes throughout history will reveal that the first act of every dictator is to shut down the press and stifle criticism. Hitler did it, the Communists have done it everywhere, and so did Lincoln. That is why it is enshrined in the Bill of Rights as the very first Amendment. As with the other aspects of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, Lincoln was quick to toss them out the window, and to toss the dissidents in jail.
But perhaps the most stinging criticism of all came from Judge George Comstock, of the New York Court of Appeals and a founder of Syracuse University—and a Unionist:
"If Mr. Davis is right as to all the circumstances and results flowing from separation, then the seceded states are the rightful possession of a perfect sovereignty . . . [the Civil War] was a war of invasion and conquest, for which there is no warrant in the Constitution, but which is condemned by the rules of Christianity, and the law of the civilized world."
If the war against the South to force it to stay in the Union was as bad as this, how did (and still do) Northern apologists escape condemnation? I’ll explain in a follow-up article.
Charles Adams is a historian and the author of Beyond Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization. See review of his latest, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America, on p 11 (‘Taxman’).
Still looking for the article that mentioned West Point..... |
