In 1869, The United States Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that a unilateral secession of a State was unconstitutional. It did allow, however, that either revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession. The debate continues in the present as the State of Vermont and several other states are sustaining active secession movements. Historian Maury Klein, a colleague of mine at the University of Rhode Island summarized the 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?" Klein then concluded, "the case can be made that no result of the (Civil) war was more important than the destruction, once and for all ... of the idea of secession." By this we must presume, as the case for secession with the consent of the states appears to be constitutional, he meant a unilateral secession.
I am going to argue in this essay that my esteemed colleague has it wrong. First, as anyone from Vermont knows the “idea of secession” is still alive and well. Secondly, there is actually little in the way of lessons one can learn about the idea of secession from the Civil War. Put simply, the Civil War was not about a peaceful, constitutional secession. Indeed, it was not even a peaceful unilateral secession. The Civil War was the result of an act of aggression by the South to gain, or should one say preserve, political domination and to increase the dominion of slavery and aristocracy in the territories of the west. As Karl Marx put it, the idea “of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. Nothing could be more false: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. What the slaveholders would call “the South,” embraced more than three-quarters of the territory of “the Union.” As a “large part of the territory claimed by the south was still in the possession of the Union it would have to be conquered from it.” Thus, Marx wryly comments, "The South" is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.”
Clearly then, those who are skeptical of, or who condemn contemporary movements for secession, on the basis of the national experience with the Southern “secession,” are seriously misguided. At the time of the secession, journalist Horace Greely avowed that should the states of the lower south declare their intention to leave the Union, “we feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty to say ‘let them go’.” The English also echoed such sentiments. “Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!” If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.” Another opinion expressed in a letter to the New York Times in 1860 expressed the view that South Carolina should be allowed to secede just to “to get rid of the eternal noise and trouble her politicians give this country. In the name of common sense let her go.” Many abolitionists also welcomed a peaceable secession. But, such sanguine sentiments ignored the warning of Alexander Hamilton proffered in the Federalist Papers:
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages (emphasis added).
The “South” did not take long after its formal secession to demonstrate the truth of Hamilton’s words. Even before Lincoln took office, the South fired on ships attempting to resupply Fort Sumter. Jefferson Davis warned the North that it would soon “smell Southern gunpowder and feel Southern steel.”
Abraham Lincoln had it right when he asserted that the South was not planning a peaceful exit from the Union, rather it intended to “destroy the government” unless the government yielded “on all points in dispute between us.” When the seven slave states “seceded” and formed the Confederate States of America, historian Eric Foner reports, “they immediately seized federal property such as post offices, forts, arsenals, and the US Mint in New Orleans, whose holdings in gold and silver financed the confederacy in its initial months.” Then, when President Lincoln announced he was sending a ship to Fort Sumter on a “humanitarian mission” to bring in food and medical supplies to the isolated fort in Charleston Harbor, Jefferson Davis ordered the bombardment of the fort. This was not an act of peaceful unilateral secession; it was an act of war and treason pure and simple. After Lincoln declared that there was an “insurrection” in the states that had seceded, and called for military action, rather than take military action against the Confederacy, four more slave states, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded.
Let us also not make the mistake of assuming that the purpose of the Civil War was to “free the slaves.” Northern Democrats clearly proclaimed that “we are not fighting for negro freedom or negro abolition.” It was a war about national unity, the people from Wayland, Massachusetts said to an abolitionist speaker, and “they wouldn’t hear a word about the niggers.” First, obviously, the people of the North were not free of racism, and like Lincoln worried about the consequences of the presence in society of millions of emancipated slaves deeply believed to beyond the pale of assimilation. Moreover, the apathy of northern workers and western farmers to the plight of the slaves was understandable in light of the fact that the Panic of 1857 had devastated their lives. The Panic and the depression that followed had stabilized by the end of the decade, but the recovery awaited the Civil War.
The focus of the people’s anger was on Wall Street not the Slaveocracy. Wall Street’s critics charged that it was the “extravagance in personal expenditures, the reckless speculation in land and securities, and the headlong pursuit of wealth, along with the corruption of politicians and businessmen” that had caused the calamity. Little wonder then that workers scavenging for scraps of bread were more concerned about “the extremes of depravity of Wall Street’s den of plunderers, the speculators, who sought wealth without labor” than the plight of the slaves.
Of course, the South gloated over the misery of northern workers and farmers. A Tennessee newspaper urged northern abolitionists to spare the slaves their benevolence and instead apply it to the “ragged starving poor” unemployed workers in the North. Such widespread misery could not happen in the South, the Mobile Register avowed, because in the South the “black slave is both labor and capital” and was “therefore tenderly guarded as the humanity and avarice of it owners can induce.” In the words of the Richmond Enquirer, under its “patriarchal institutions the laboring population suffer no pangs of penury, (and) no diminution of the comforts and necessaries of life.”
Lincoln also avoided the slavery issue; he cast the war in terms of defending democracy viz. “maintaining its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” Lincoln did not directly attack slavery, but he did raise the issue of class. He avowed that democracy was the only form of government “whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, and that lifts artificial weights from all shoulders to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all, to afford to all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.” But, Lincoln insisted, that since the secession was illegal, the states remained in the Union and sustained all of their traditional rights, including one must presume the right to own slaves. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,” he proclaimed in his first Inaugural Address, “to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Lincoln vowed, “if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.”
In a lengthy letter published in the New York Times in November of 1860. Times publisher Howard T. Raymond chided the South for seceding simply because a Republican President was elected “on the mere apprehension of dangers that may never arrive” given Lincoln’s “declared sentiment that no trespass upon southern rights will be permitted which he has the power to prevent.” The uncomfortable truth of the matter is the southern cotton states had deeper and more sinister reasons for seceding and the North’s reason for fighting to preserve the union were less noble than the eradication of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves, or even the fact that the unilateral secession was unconstitutional. In fact, the south was fighting for the right to colonize and control the new western territories and to restore the African Slave-trade, the latter being a necessary condition for the success of the former. The North was fighting to prevent the spread of an aristocratic social system into the domains desired for the growth of a society based on democracy and free labor, and to prevent being surrounded by a resource- rich, and hostile empire.
As for Northern motives, Howard Raymond argued, that those who would accept the secession to clear their conscience of the “sin of slavery, are few and powerless.” On the other hand, the multitudes that were opposed to the secession “would wage a war before they would assent to any surrender of their aspirations and hopes.” If secession were allowed, the United States would be “surrendering to a foreign and hostile power more than half of the Atlantic seaboard, the whole Gulf, the mouth of the Mississippi, with its access to the open sea, and its drainage of the commerce of the mighty west, all the available railroad routes to the Pacific, and all prospects of ever extending our growth and national development in the only direction in which such extension will ever be possible.” It was, after all recognized by “nine-tenths” of the people of north and west that states like South Carolina were “Tories in the revolution and had never had a particle of sympathy with the fundamental principles which lie at the basis of our republican institutions.” The Confederacy, they believed, upon independence, would establish a military despotism upon our southern border. What in fact the South intended, was not the dissolution of the Union, but the reorganization of it on the basis of slavery, under the control of the slaveholding oligarchy.
The Civil War was in effect a contest between two rival and essentially incompatible social systems over the control of the spoils of previous wars; the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of 1846. Much of the vast expanse of the Louisiana Purchase was also at stake.
The Southern Cavalier v. the Northern Roundheads
Vladimir Lenin once quipped, “there are no principles, only interests.” In a conversation conducted in 1812, a certain Commodore Stewart observed to a young John C. Calhoun that “you in the South are decidedly the aristocratic portion of this Union. You are so in holding persons in perpetuity in slavery; you are so in every domestic quality; so in every habit of your lives, living and actions; so in habits, customs, intercourse and manners; you neither work with your hands, head or any machinery, but live and have your living, by the sweat of Slavery, and yet you assume all the attributes, professions and advantages of democracy.” Calhoun accepted the essential verity of the remark noting that the South’s attachment to democracy was only as strong as was necessary to protect its interests. Calhoun, an unrepentant aristocrat who denied that all men are born free and equal, indicated the South’s participation in the Democracy through the Democratic Party was a merely a matter of the “conservation of our interests.” However, he told a friend, “when we cease to control the nation through this disjointed Democracy, or any material obstacle in that party which shall tend to throw us out of that rule, we shall then resort to the dissolution of the Union.”
The South was without doubt ruled by an oligarchy with aristocratic pretensions or even delusions, a fact which did not go unnoticed in the North. In 1860, a northern businessman, John Murray Forbes wrote to a correspondent in the South that in the North, the “wrong of slavery preached from the pulpit…doubtless weighs upon the masses, but sinks into insignificance” compared to the prevalent impression of “the aristocratic nature of slavery” on the part of “the laboring classes.” “If there is anything in this country,” he goes on, “it is the prejudice against anything which has the appearance even of aristocracy.” The issue is now “whether this small class shall own half the senate and shall use the national arm to extend their institution at home and abroad.” Forbes warned his southern correspondent that “any attempt to strengthen the South in the Senate, by foreign acquisitions of territory or otherwise will only precipitate the crisis.”
The notion that the war was between an aristocracy and the common people was only inflamed by letters sent to newspapers in the South, one of which was included by Forbes in his papers. According to his daughter, it was only one of many of “similar character.” The letter was published after the first battle of Bull Run. The sentiments expressed in these letters are right out of Ivanhoe, and might have been later uttered by a “Cavalier” in the English Civil War between Cromwell’s puritan “Roundheads” and the aristocratic supporters of Charles I. These racist currents obviously run deep and surfaced again in Europe in the 1920s from the pen of the “master race” ideologue Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The letter reads:
This has been called a fratricidal war by some, by others an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery. We respectfully take issue with the authors of these ideas. We are not brothers of the Yankees (read Saxon dogs, or roundhead scum), and the slavery question is merely a pretext, not the cause of the war. The true irrepressible conflict lies fundamentally in the hereditary hostility, the sacred animosity, the eternal antagonism between the two races engaged. The Norman cavalier cannot brook the vulgar familiarity of the Saxon Yankee, while the latter is continually devising some plan to bring his aristocratic neighbor down to his own detested level. Thus, is the contest waged in the old United States (emphasis added)....
So long as doughfaces (northerners with southern sympathies) were to be bought, so long was the Union tolerable to Southern men; but when, owing to divisions in our ranks, the Yankee hirelings placed one of their own spawn ( the Republican, Lincoln ) over us, political connection became unendurable, and separation necessary to preserve our self-respect.
As our Norman kinsmen in England, always a minority, have ruled their Saxon countrymen in political vassalage up to the present day, so have we the “slave oligarchs” governed the Yankees until within twelvemonth. We framed the Constitution, for 70 years molded the policy the government, and placed our own men, or Northern men with Southern principles, in power. (But) on the 6th of November, 1860, the Puritans emancipated themselves, and are now in violent insurrection against their former owners. This insane holiday freak will not last long, however, for, dastards in fight, and incapable of self-government they will inevitably fall again under the control of the superior race.
After reading such letters, northerners surely had a pretty vivid idea of what the “new” United States would look like under Southern domination and the vision was not appealing. Hamilton’s warning was surely lent a great deal of credence by the ravings of these “Cavaliers” in grey and produced far more motivation to fight than did Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The Need to Expand Slavery’s Dominion
Frederic Douglas was less than subtle when it came to defining the situation of the Union. Douglas claimed that “we have a slaveholding war waged upon the government” which is “impossible to hide.” As any objective observer could plainly see the Slaveocracy was fighting for its political and economic survival, for dominion of the nation by an unabashedly aristocratic social system. Lincoln was surely correct in his surmise that the Southern insurrectionists were at war with democracy.
The Civil War was inevitable because for both political and economic reasons, the Slaveocracy needed to expand its dominion. First, for political reasons the Slaveocracy needed to insure that it had adequate representation in the Congress and in the Executive Branch to avoid being dominated by the North. There were very real differences between the economic systems of the North and South with each demanding different federal policy on matters related not only to slavery but also to matters such as tariffs, the central bank, and internal improvements (roads and railroads). Northern commercial and mercantile interests wanted economic expansion, free land, free labor, a free market, high protective tariffs for manufactured goods, government support for railroads, canals and roads, and a Central Bank. The Slaveocracy which held a Jeffersonian disdain for industrial society, was opposed to every one of these policies.
The central problem for the Slaveocracy was that the slave states were rural and not densely populated compared to the urban, densely populated, free states. The Slaveocracy had been able to avoid political domination by the more densely populated north only because the Constitution provided that each slave would count for three fifths of a person in determining the numbers of citizens in each state, and therefore the numbers of both the congressional representatives and the electoral votes to which each state was entitled. Indeed, it was with the help of that clause that Jefferson won the presidential election in 1800 and why he has been called “the Negro President.” As historian Gary Willis observed, “the North almost always had a majority of seats in Congress, Southerners, with Jefferson in the lead, were determined to gain the territory that would make the federal ratio give them a majority,” and I would add, by any means necessary.
The second reason the Slaveocracy needed to expand into new territory was economic. The slave labor system was built around large-scale production of cotton and other crops using unskilled gang labor. Inevitably, this system destroyed the fertility of the soil. Eugene Genovese developed this argument in his classic work, The Political Economy of Slavery, but we can find the argument succinctly stated, a century earlier, in Marx’s essay The Civil War in America:
The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. … due to the exhaustion of the soil South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago.
When the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War vastly expanded the territory of the United States the conflict between free-labor and slave-labor, between Democracy and Aristocracy became inevitable.
Southern Domination
In 1789 the Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance prohibiting slavery in the territories to the north and west of the Ohio River. This region ultimately produced the states of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. The Ordinance effectively made the Ohio River the boundary between the free and slave states in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The South supported this legislation because it wanted to prevent the emergence of a tobacco industry in this region based on slave labor and therefore a competitive threat.
In 1820, the Missouri Compromise established the boundaries of slavery in the western territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The law prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36 degrees 36 minutes except in the proposed state of Missouri whose southern border is defined by the parallel. This new boundary included as slavery territory what would become the states of Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. The boundary excluded slavery from the future states of Kansas, Nebraska and all the states to the north and west. In order to keep the balance of power in the Congress, the State of Maine was added as a free state.
Many expansion-minded southerners opposed the compromise, but the eminent and powerful Senator John C. Calhoun was able to push it through over strong opposition in order to protect the Union. Before his career ended, however, Calhoun’s attachment to slavery overpowered his love of the Union and he became the intellectual force behind “nullification” and the secession movement in the South. In the 1830s and 1840s, he opposed both the abolitionists, and the Wilmont Proviso (no slavery in Mexican “acquisitions”). The so-called Calhoun Doctrine declared that the federal government did not have the power to ban slavery in the territories.
The Missouri Compromise was revoked by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The new law, initiated by the northern democrat Steven A. Douglas, revoked the Missouri Compromise and demanded the federal government let the majority of the settlers decide whether a state would enter the union as slave or free. Thus, for the first time in its history, the United States had no geographical limit to the extension of slavery in the states that would be created in the territories. The choice of slave or free would be determined by “popular sovereignty.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act had the unfortunate consequence of setting off a bloody battle for domination of the “popular sovereignty” of Kansas. Agents of the Slaveocracy invaded Kansas from Missouri, ergo the name “Missouri border ruffians,” with the intent of driving “free-soilers” out of the territory. Men like John Brown organized a resistance movement and a great deal of blood was shed. The Ruffians were galvanized by the exhortations of leaders like U.S. Senator David Atchison of Missouri, who urged the “ruffians” to defend slavery "with the bayonet and with blood" and, if necessary, "to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district."
Northerners, according to Eric Foner, saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as only the first step in an “atrocious plot” to spread slavery not only into the western territories stolen from Mexico, but also into the heart of the now free labor areas of trans-Mississippi west. The political result was the formation of the Republican Party solely dedicated to the halting the spread of slavery.
Then, in the infamous Dred Scott case, in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that the Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Justice Taney ruled, quite gratuitously, that since the Constitution had “expressly affirmed” the right to property in slaves, slaveholders could freely transport their slaves into federal territories. In short, the recently repealed Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional. In the minds of many, Eric Foner writes, the decision had made “freedom the exception and slavery the norm, transforming the south’s peculiar institution into a national one that must exist everywhere it had not been prohibited by state law.” Indeed, it became questionable whether “states possessed the constitutional power to prohibit slavery.” With the Supreme Court now, in the words of John Murray Forbes, “nothing more than a sectional caucus of partisans” such a pro-slavery ruling was not unlikely.
Lincoln and most Republicans viewed the Dred Scott decision as “so erroneous that it could not be viewed as having established a settled doctrine for the country.” Yet, President Buchanan announced that by “virtue of the Constitution” as ruled in the Dred Scott case, slavery was to be sanctioned in all of the territories. In 1858 Buchanan tried to force slavery onto the people of Kansas the vast majority of which opposed slavery. In 1858, Kansas voters, in a referendum on a constitution which would have allowed slavery, overwhelmingly rejected it by a vote of 10,226 to 138. Buchannan’s attempt to force slavery into Kansas further outraged the North.
In 1857, the South’s electoral votes had elected James Buchanan to the Presidency. Buchanan was a man with well-known southern sympathies who, according to Kenneth Stampp, despised abolitionists and Free-Soil Republicans, who perceived no inherent injustice in the southern slave system, and who could never understand the passion of its critics.” Buchanan, Stampp says, had apparently internalized the classic southern apologetic to the effect that “slaves were treated with kindness and humanity; both the philanthropy and the self-interest of the master have combined to produce this humane result.” Buchanan, Stampp concludes, was the quintessential “doughface,” a northern man with southern principles.”
As the Dred Scott case revealed the Slaveocracy also owned five of the nine “Supremes” with the racist Roger Taney, a man with well-documented “proslavery proclivities,” according to Stampp, as Chief Justice. Another justice was such a proslavery fire-eating zealot that he refused to set foot on northern soil.
As of 1856, the South clearly still dominated the government. The Slaveocracy had enough representation in the Congress to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The federal government was only loosely enforcing the 1808 law regarding the ending of the slave trade, but was vigorously enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. Moreover, the detested Second National Bank had been shut down since 1836 and the equally detested high tariff wall had been brought down in 1846 and again in 1857. In short, the South appeared to have the Union firmly in its control. But along came Kansas and the proslavery south suffered its first major defeat in a decade. In the process of trying to force a proslavery constitution on Kansas as it was admitted into the union as a new state, the Democratic Party was divided on sectional lines and it lost its dominance in the House of Representatives. Even worse, Kenneth Stampp observed, “the Republican (presidential) victory in 1860 was logical result.” Given Calhoun’s statement quoted earlier to the effect that should the South lose its political domination it would “resort to the dissolution of the Union,” it would appear that that time had come.
The Importance of Being Unimportant: A Vermont Secession
This is clearly not the venue to discuss the reasons why Vermont would choose to secede from the Union. Our task is simply to establish what the response of the United States ought to be to such a proposal based on the historical case of the Southern secession in 1860. In 1860, the federal government chose to force the seceding states to return to the Union under the force of arms. If one can expect the federal government to resort to force in the face of a Vermont Secession, Maury Klein is correct – the idea of secession is impossible. But as we have shown there is no correspondence whatsoever between the situation in 1860 and that of Vermont in 2012.
First, should the citizens ever elect to do so, a Vermont Secession would proceed by constitutional means. Second, Vermont poses no threat to the territorial integrity, or to the political sovereignty of any other State. Third, while Vermont would choose to establish many institutions in the social, economic and political realms that may be seen as unconventional, Vermont would not establish any institutions outside the pale of the social, economic, or political morality of the nation. Indeed, if anything, the Second Republic of Vermont would approximate far more closely the expressed ideology of the “land of the free” than does the actual practice of the United States. It is ironic that the United States has become precisely the expansionist, aristocratic empire it fought against in the Civil War. The fact is that the globalist, imperial United States, like the aristocratic political moralists of the Slaveocracy, holds to the dogma that color is a matter of indifference, and the working class is everywhere born to subjugation and exploitation.
Vermonters who support secession simply do not want to be a part of a corporate-dominated, environmentally destructive, union-busting, labor-sweating, and bellicose empire that sacrifices the health and well-being of its people, and the people of other lands, to corporate profits. Nor do they want to part of a plutocratic “Citizens United,” faux democracy. Indeed, in my mind, the de facto legitimating of the implied critique of the culture, politics and economics of United States ca 2012 that would be manifest in allowing Vermont to secede is the main obstacle to it ever happening.
For its own reasons the North would not let the South go. Vermont’s petition for secession will face the same fate. While self-criticism, whether for a person or a nation, is absolutely necessary for making things better, I fear it will not come to pass in a nation whose history had been one of manifest arrogance rather than humility in the face of criticism. As we have heard of late, “the United States never apologizes.”
Regarding a secession of Vermont from the Union, the nation should heed the words of Horace Greely we quoted earlier: “we feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty to say ‘let them go’.” Let them have their organic food, small farmers, and sustainable agriculture, their community health centers, town meetings, strict banking and environmental regulation, rights to own seeds, a living wage, alternative energy and so on, and let them go. As for Hamilton’s concerns about “ambitious and rapacious men,” there is little chance of a Vermont Armada sailing across Lake Champlain to attack Plattsburgh, or a Vermont Militia marching into Hanover, or for that matter an invasion of Vermont’s Intervale, or its Yak and Dairy farms by New Hampshire. Moreover, Washington will be allowed to take its F-35s from Burlington Airport, and good riddance. The Federal Courthouse in Burlington can easily be converted into the U.S. Embassy and Bernie Sanders can become the Ambassador to the United States.