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One Nation, Indivisible? A Study of Secession and the Constitution

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I was required to memorize the Constitution of the United States as well as that of the state of Illinois and the State of Arkansas before graduating eighth grade. This was a bit of a refresher course for me, though I keep a copy of the Constitution in my desk. I had always maintained that nothing in the Constitution forbade secession and when a student in Illinois, was called "secesh" for my simple and irrefutable argument. My family were Unionist Arkansans and Georgians but were, upon reflection mistaken. Lincoln trashed the Constitution as has every administration since that time. The South had the legal right to secede and exercised that right. The Confederacy offered to compensate the US government for improvements on their territory but were never heard by President Lincoln. It seems quite apparent that Lincoln was the direct cause of the worst war in US history and contrary to my earlier belief was more sinner than saint in the business. The first two thirds of the book makes a Constitutional case for secession as a right reserved to the states. I simply can't argue with that and can't find any provision in the Constitution declaring the Union eternal or secession illegal. It seems that the states formed the Union and had every right to depart from it.

The last part of the book deals with violations of the Constitution on the part of President Lincoln. There was not only inconsistency and violation of the Constitution which Lincoln had sworn to uphold but there was the logical inconsistency of saying that states never left the Union but in some sense must be readmitted to the Union. If they never left, how would they be required to be readmitted? It goes downhill from there to all sorts of violations of the civil rights of people both North and South.

Unfortunately, such has been the pattern of the federal government ever since. Perhaps it was right to free the slaves. I would ask was it right to violate the rights and therefore enslave all Americans as a result of the illegal suspension of habeas corpus or the other violence done to the rule of law by Lincoln? My perception of the man has changed from almost hero-worship to revulsion.

I have thoroughly checked references in this book before commenting. I even questioned the quality of the references and found all but one to be reliable. The one I could not verify was due to lack of time.

Hawes shares quotes from the founders: Jefferson, Madison, and many others. Included are Congressional Records going back to secessionist feeling in the 1830's, speeches from Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun and Lincoln's speeches upholding the right of secession. The book documents the historical evidence supporting States rights to secession. Saving the Union was not seriously considered by New England in 1814 when it wanted to secede.
The book refutes that the war was over slavery. Lincoln is quoted speaking in favor of slavery. Slavery was Constitutional. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to Northern slaves, not to slaves in Confederate territory. A Constitutional amendment voluntarily ratified by the States was not tried. Instead Lincoln waged war and then forced Southern states to ratify that amendment.
The book documents how Lincoln turned from swearing to uphold the Constitution to subverting it -- such as ordering Northern newspapers against the war to be closed -- with force. The book explains how Lincoln usurped Congressional power: declaring war, calling out the militia and suspending the writ of habeas corpus even for civilians. Lincoln also ordered the arrest of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court -- all to "save the union."
Confederate ambassadors seeking peace before the war were refused an audience with Lincoln. Meanwhile Union troops threatened South Carolina's harbor with their actions at Fort Sumter. Lincoln's provocation to get South Carolina to fire the first shot is documented.
The book explains how the war was waged against civilians: homes burned, crops and livestock destroyed, fields salted, cities leveled, children murdered and women raped. All this upon the orders of union generals who, in turn, were supported by Lincoln. The South was conquered and occupied. Votes by Southern States are shown to be not by Southerners but by Northern puppets and carpetbaggers put in charge of Southern State governments.
This book is a powerful, well documented, heavily researched study of the real reasons for the War of North against the South. It also makes a strong Constitutional case in favor of near future secession of any group of States such as the West Coast, the Northeast, or Midwest -- all have which have talked of secession in recent years.

If you have not already, start your reading program on secession by seeking out, free online, Allen Buchanan's lovely essay on Secession in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Then buy and read Thomas Naylor's 2008 Secession: How Vermont and All the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire, and if you want the best over-all detailed review, also buy and read Albert Bledsoe's 1866 (eighteen sixty six) book, Is Secession Treason?. I have summarized both in earlier reviews.

This book is a solid recommended fourth reading. It replicates and complements Bledsoe's book, which I am surprised to not see cited as a reference. The two books dovetail perfectly with three bottom lines:

1) The Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution are all compacts among STATES, and the Union is a plurality of STATES, not a unity of one people.

2) Secession is not treason; secession is in fact the only moral legal option open to any state when the federal government becomes both lunatic and pathologically dangerous to the well-being of the citizens that each state represents.

3) The federal government is an administrative entity created primarily to help the STATES be competitive in commerce, and was never intended to be a "national" government with authority over the states. The author cites Thomas Jefferson on more than one occasion reiterating that the federal government is in no way its own "decider" and is always the creature of the states, in no way superior over any of them.

I am enchanted to find that the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that Quebec does have the right to secede, something I expect to happen one day, in part because Quebec is sitting on one of two long-term sources of clean water (Scotland has the other). If that happens, Canada will logically divide in three--the eastern portion joining New England in New Arcadia, and the Western portion joining the Pacific Northwest to create Ecotopia. See Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America, still the best rational study of the distinct character of each of these nine constituencies.

The author recommends Harvest Of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only The Beginning and I am ordering that tonight, The federal government is not just dead, it is rotten to the core (not the good people, but the bad system), and as much as I respect President-elect Obama as an individual, I am quite certain that he will find himself neutered by the Democratic machine, as Wall Street intended when they drafted the screenplay for Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography).

The author slams Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party that Bush-Cheney have been so fond of, pointing out that it was not secession that destroyed the Southern economy, but rather the northern attacks and the post-war "reconstruction" (carpetbagging, a precursor to Exxon and Wal-Mart). The litany of crimes against the public interest committed by Lincoln is quite fascinating, and my first exposure apart from Bledsoe to Southern revisionist history, a history I find morally compelling. I wrote a not-so-brilliant paper on the causes of the Civil War in high school (as I supposed all Advanced Placement students did), and I learn for the first time that the real cause of the war was Lincoln's desire to impose Northern values and controls over the varied territories being acquired to the West. The author points out that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the northern or border states, and was a military act, nothing more.

The book has two special values as the fourth recommended item:

First, it is a reader with key appendices including recommended amendments to the Constitution that I do not agree with (all we need is Electoral, Governance, Intelligence, and National Security Reform, OR a dismantling of the Union which is too big, too corrupt, and too stupid to survive as is).

Second, its third part explores "modern" (that is to say, current as of 2006) arguments against secession, and as the author intends, leaves the reader quite satisfied that the USA is no less open to secession than was the Soviet Union.

He cites Patrick Buchanan's The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, which I also recommend as a book-end to Thomas Naylor's first book, The Vermont Manifesto along with Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale.

Toward the end the author provides completely new information to me on the 1993 official apology of the US Congress to the citizens of Hawaii, an apology whose language both certifies the illegality of the US overthrow of the islands, and sets the stage for Hawaii's eventual secession from the United STATES of America.

For my own inquiry, in preparation for a brief presentation on 15 November to the secessionist conference in Manchester, New Hampshire, on page 62 the author provides a valuable quote from the Constitution, Article 3, Section 3, defining Treason:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against THEM, or in adhering to THEIR enemies."

The emphasis on them and their was in the author's original rendition as italics.

I am satisfied that secession is not treason, that it is legal, and that it is moral. However, I also like the United States of America as an entity, so I am going to start looking for Governors interested in forming a Council on Nullification and Secession that will educate the public and strive to break the backs of the two criminal parties that now violate the Constitution with impunity while shutting out Independents, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and others. We need to achieve the four reforms, or break up the United STATES of America.

President-elect Obama is either the last act in the theater of the macabre sponsored by Wall Street, or the first act in creating a Second American Republic. We can help him out-grow the first and nurture the second.

This is a most intriguing book which debunks many of the myths surrounding Lincoln, an easy read, easy to follow and most thought provoking.

Hawes writes in a sober, deliberate and compelling manner, offering several cogent arguments to demonstrate that the federal (not "national") government has overstepped its Constitutional boundaries ever since Lincoln, in violation of the limited and enumerated powers granted the federal government by the people in each of the states (by state referenda, not one national referendum), and he convincingly revives the notion that the states have the right to withdraw from the Union as a defense against federal government abuses and as the guarantee of their liberty.

Hawes draws on some key historical documents, such as the Federalist Papers and correspondence between the Founding Fathers, to illustrate how men such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison and even Hamilton and Adams viewed the states as sovereign, with the Union being a compact that could be as readily seceded from as acceded to. Particularly forceful is his analysis concerning how the original 13 states agreed to abandon the union created by the Articles of Confederation (which called its union "perpetual") in 1781, in favor of a different union contemplated by the Constitution in 1787, whereby only 9 of the 13 states had to approve its adoption for it to come into effect. That left, for a while, 4 states on their own after the 9th ratified (with Rhode Island the last to adopt, having been 2 years "outside the union" with no adverse consequences to it). As Hawes argues, the effect was for 9 states to secede from the old union to create a new "confederacy" (as many of the Framers referred to it), while happily leaving out as many as 4 sovereign states, if that would have been their desire.

This book provides more than an academic answer to whether, the North having won by brute force of arms and not by legal proceedings or logic, the South should have been allowed to leave the Union peacefully (to which Hawes provides a number of pages with a fresh historical view). As a number of states through their legislatures reassert their sovereignty in response to the Obama Administration's drive to socialism and federal pre-eminence in everything, this book is a timely reminder of what the Constitutional limitations are regarding the federal government, and what by right belongs to the states and "We, The People."

I read this book along with several others on Abe Lincoln and the Civil War. It provided additional facts from another view on secession and the Constitutional right to secession. I enjoyed it and would recommend a buy.

This book was the first I found in my look for books based on the politics of secession and while I haven't quite finished it, it is quite excellent and should be read by any serious student of politics.

I've always wondered if the South had any Constitutional justification for getting out of the Union, and finally here it is in this masterful,thought-provoking book.
The "smoking gun" is the Constitution's Reserve Clause: It says that if the power to secede was not prohibited to the states, and the power to prevent secession was not given to the federal government (it wasn't and it wasn't), then the power to secede was "reserved" to the states.
That's it. Period. Game over. I'm convinced. As glad as I am that the Union was preserved (I'm a New Yorker married to a Tennessee girl), it's clear that the South was legally entitled to secede.
Mr. Hawes, whoever he is (there's no bio in the book), is a clear, thoughtful writer. He and his terrific book deserve to be better known.

Well-wriiten, scholarly work, but really fails to remind the student that the South, after peacefully seceding, started the war. When General PGT Beauregard's southern batteries fired upon Ft Sumter, they began 4 years of unholy blooshed. Big Problem: author can't stop trashing Lincoln. Had the southern forces not fired their cannons, the secession issue would no doubt have been solved peacefully. Today, a state (or a whole region) is still free to secede, but cannot make war. Overall, thoughtful and interesting.