Secession: an academic discussion

[jamil]

The best scenario is state's rights becoming forefront again. Of course, first the USSC would have to start paring back the use of the Commerce Clause. That is the root of most of the issues at this point, as it is used to justify all kinds of stupid things that I doubt the founders ever foresaw.

When you need an unconstitutional law passed everything smells like interstate commerce. Or equal protection.

 

[Timjoebillybob]

The best scenario is state's rights becoming forefront again. Of course, first the USSC would have to start paring back the use of the Commerce Clause. That is the root of most of the issues at this point, as it is used to justify all kinds of stupid things that I doubt the founders ever foresaw.

Pare it back to sometime before wickard v filburn. Before then about the only thing it was used for was to prevent states from protectionism. Keep them from imposing taxes/tariffs on goods coming into the state that they produced themselves. Or preventing out of state citizens from doing business.

When you need an unconstitutional law passed everything smells like interstate commerce. Or equal protection.

Yep.

 

[KLB]

Pare it back to sometime before wickard v filburn. Before then about the only thing it was used for was to prevent states from protectionism. Keep them from imposing taxes/tariffs on goods coming into the state that they produced themselves. Or preventing out of state citizens from doing business.

Yep.

That is exactly what I think they intended when they wrote it.

 

[Timjoebillybob]

That is exactly what I think they intended when they wrote it.

So do I.

 

[BigRed]

A Primer on Secession – Abbeville Institute

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

"A Primer on Secession
- Terry Hulsey

A review of Secession, State & Liberty, (Transaction, 1998) edited with an introduction by David Gordon.

If there is a single book you should read on the subject of secession, Secession, State & Liberty is the one. Best of all, this collection of essays is entirely free, here:

Secession, State, and Liberty | David Gordon

The essays in Secession, State & Liberty argue that the political impulse to secede—to attempt to separate from central government control—is a vital part of the Lockean classical-liberal tradition, one that emerges when national governments become too big and too ambitious.Unlike revolution, secess

mises.org

The key point of the book is the demonstration that secession is the peaceful, non-violent alternative to revolution and civil war. Remove the possibility of secession, as Justice Salmon P. Chase admitted in Texas v. White (1869), and the only alternative is a “war of conquest and subjugation” (p111). Given that national boundaries do fluctuate, how can it be that reconsideration after joining a union be impossible, especially once that union becomes tyrannical? The reply, according to Chase’s written opinion: “There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through [an unspecified] consent of the States.” Note that Chase, who wants to forbid secession, is basically saying: Go ahead, try it; we would rather let loose the dogs of war than let you escape our power, no matter how tyrannical. His justification for this absolutism was that the United States was, on the basis of culture and the Articles of Confederation, “perpetual” and “indissoluble,” and that the Constitution’s one phrase “to form a more perfect Union” necessarily signified perpetual union – transparently flimsy reasoning. Historian Joseph R. Stromberg, an adjunct scholar of the Center for Libertarian Studies, provides the essay “Republicanism, Federalism, and Secession in the South, 1790 to 1865” that discusses this Supreme Court decision — and the more important topic of Jefferson’s support for secession.

The various essays cover every aspect of the topic — historical, economic, legal, philosophical, and even the Canadian use of limited nullification (discussed by Canadians Pierre Desrochers and Eric Duhaime) — but the most concise and closely-reasoned section is Dr. Gordon’s introduction. David Gordon, a Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and co-editor the Journal of Libertarian Studies, comes to the heart of the matter:

First, the position might hold that even if the government violates the rights it was established to secure, its subjects may not depart from it. But this is a strange contention: government exists for certain purposes, but it may continue unabated even if it acts against these very aims. (page x)

In other words, if those who oppose secession also support natural rights like those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, they must answer Dr. Gordon’s question: “Why should supporters of natural rights reject the peaceful and democratic right of secession?” He allows for argument’s sake that these opponents might logically forbid secession just because citizens like another government — that is, to secede for “light and transient reasons.” But if the larger government is violating basic rights, must the only alternative be that the citizens resort to violence?

Before I get to that, consider an ingeniously weird twist on this theme, described by Dr. Gordon, by historian Allen Buchanan. Buchanan says that, yes, great, secession is perfectly reasonable — except when the seceding government is in violation of basic rights, regardless of whether the larger government violates these rights. And since the South violated the rights of Negroes, it forfeited the right to secede. The problem here is that no one, not even Abraham Lincoln himself before the late summer of 1863, justified military action on the principle of abolition of slavery. The problem here is that Buchanan overlooks the entire history of Northern secession movements, which he falsely supposes were free of the taint of slavery, a history detailed in this collection by Thomas diLorenzo in his article “Yankee Confederates.”

But we are stuck with Dr. Gordon’s question: What are citizens supposed to do when exasperated by a government that violates their basic rights?

Scott Boykin, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in his essay “The Ethics of Secession” finds only three alternatives short of violent civil war: Secession, group veto (voting the offenders out of office), and nullification (interposition). (pp77-78) Since most opponents of secession are equally opposed to nullification, the popular reply is to say that if you don’t like your government, vote for another one. But it should be clear by now that voting is a rigged game. Both major parties have endorsed the massive government spending that has saddled the nation with a debt that approaches 30 trillion dollars — the amount that is admitted to, at least. Furthermore, consider the numbers. The population of the United States is 318.9 million. The total number of legislators is 435. That means that each one represents 733,103 people. If a measure passes by a bare majority, that number almost doubles to signify each vote representing 1,436,881 citizens. If you consider that this bare majority can succeed under the smallest quorum, the number increases yet again to about 2,873,762. Now consider that you can influence this one House member and two Senate members — and you with no more significance in terms of voting power than the 2.8 million other citizens that they represent. And even if you sway your Representative to your view, remember: He is merely one among 435 others.

Now it will be admitted that voting should have less influence in a truly free society, since if more things are privately owned, it is necessarily true that fewer things are subject to public decisions. But that would signify an option not contemplated by those who say “just vote ’em out,” and not evidenced by history: A national trend, supported by the Supreme Court, toward ever greater protections for private property. As Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, points out in his essay “Secession: The Last, Best Bulwark of Our Liberties”:

The alternative to state sovereignty, as Calhoun pointed out, is to give the final say-so to the black-robed deities of the Court, who go into their closets, commune with the gods, and tell us what our Constitution means and what orders we must obey, no matter how absurd their interpretation may be. (p93)

It is because secession offers the sole realistic peaceful and democratic alternative to overweening power that its suggestion must be silenced. This is why the opponents of secession fear it: It is because it is the one principle that undermines their political power. Against it they set the principle of sovereignty, no matter how much violence must enforce it, even when it contradicts basic rights, even when it defies the democratic wishes of its citizens. This is why, as Donald Livingston, Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, puts it:

Secessionist discontent, though a pressing fact of contemporary political life, is the most under-theorized concept in political philosophy. (p3)

Haven’t you yourself witnessed the fear, the urge to back away, in the faces of people when you even mention the word “secession”? The defenders of sovereignty at any cost have made the term a taboo, have deliberately surrounded it with an aura of treason, because it is the one direct tool that can check their currently unlimited power.

So again, the question remains: What can anyone do to stop the centralized leviathan that our federal government has become? One of the officers of Lee’s staff, Edward Porter Alexander, just before Appomattox suggested that he not surrender, that the South conduct a guerrilla war similar to America’s first Revolution (in Fighting for the Confederacy, Gary Gallagher, editor; University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pages 530-33). Lee rejected this. But really, the only option remaining in response to an implacable tyranny would be either guerrilla war or some form of non-violent resistance. As James Ostrowski (a practicing attorney in New York, and an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute) points out in his essay “Was the Union Army’s Invasion of the Confederate States a Lawful Act?”:

f a state were to pursue secession by means of non-violent resistance and complete non-involvement with the federal government, an anti-secessionist federal government would have to permanently occupy and rule that state in the manner of a colonial power, exercising even greater authority than Great Britain held over the American Colonies prior to 1776! (p173)

The secessionist is steadfastly a man of peace, and peace is his primary reply to the bloodthirsty dare of Justice Salmon P. Chase, who wrote in Texas v. White that non-violence is not an option. The secessionist is open to any peaceful suggestion. One proof of its opponents’ lack of a counterargument is their commitment to demonize it, to smear it as “traitorous.” Nevertheless, secession must come to the ungovernable American Union, as surely as any nation pinned together with bayonets will most certainly come apart, one way or another. The only question is how those committed to peace might overcome those who are committed to violence."

 

[Leadeye]

Secession only works for the chinese, there has to be a better way.

 

[NKBJ]

Secession from globgov isn't easy to do.
Not even in a Robert Heinlein novel.

 

[Angrysauce]

The anti-secessionist, American absolutist mentality of some is honestly the most interesting example of mental gymnastics I've ever seen.

"Never secession! We need to stay America! We're the land of the free! We can vote our freedoms back into existence! America's melting pot is the greatest! We can turn this all around!"

Whose going to fill these dudes in? Are you truly free if you are governed without your consent? Is a state sovereign if it can't, at will, exit the purview of a Federal power? Do you honestly have any faith in the ballot box? Has any country ever stood the test of time without social, philosophical, religious etc. homogeneity? How can you fix a system that is stacked against you and has already flagrantly disregarded it's founding documents and intent?

 

[NKBJ]

Well, you can't argue with secess.

 

[jamil]

The anti-secessionist, American absolutist mentality of some is honestly the most interesting example of mental gymnastics I've ever seen.

"Never secession! We need to stay America! We're the land of the free! We can vote our freedoms back into existence! America's melting pot is the greatest! We can turn this all around!"

Whose going to fill these dudes in? Are you truly free if you are governed without your consent? Is a state sovereign if it can't, at will, exit the purview of a Federal power? Do you honestly have any faith in the ballot box? Has any country ever stood the test of time without social, philosophical, religious etc. homogeneity? How can you fix a system that is stacked against you and has already flagrantly disregarded it's founding documents and intent?

Bye Felicia.

 

[BigRed]

Is Secession Treason? – Abbeville Institute

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

"The US Supreme Court, in Texas vs. White, ruled that secession from the Union was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, in 1869, wrote the majority “opinion of the court.” His opinion was not that of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, in which he had written:

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes… But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security… (2)
Nor was it the opinion of the Virginia Convention that ratified the Constitution, in stating the condition upon which Virginia was joining the Union:

We the Delegates of the People of Virginia … Do in the name and in behalf of the People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression… (3)
Nor was it the opinion of the New York Convention that ratified the Constitution, in stating the condition upon which New York was joining the Union:

We the Delegates of the People of the State of New York … Do declare and make known … That all Power is originally vested in and consequently derived from the People, and that Government is instituted by them for their common Interest Protection and Security… That the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary… (4)
Nor was it the opinion of the New England States in their Hartford Convention in 1814, when they threatened secession over the War of 1812. Nor was it the opinion of the Northern States that, at one time or another, threatened secession over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Mexican War, and the admission of Texas. Nor was it the opinion of the Radical Abolitionists who loudly clamored for “No Union with slaveholders!” (5) Nor was it the opinion of the States of the Southern Confederacy that did in fact secede. Nor was it the opinion of the many Northern newspaper editors who were thrown into prison for expressing it, and who had their presses destroyed when Lincoln unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus while waging his unconstitutional war (all in violation of Art. I, sec. 8 and 9; Article III, section 3; and the First Amendment to the Constitution, although all have since been cleverly obfuscated by the Lincoln sycophants and “Court Historians”). (6)

While there were those of the Hamilton-Clay-Webster persuasion who wanted a stronger centralized government, the Jeffersonian States’ Rights view of the Constitution prevailed until 1865. Before the war, the Constitution limited the powers of the General Government and guaranteed the reserved powers to the States, but Lincoln’s War and the Radical Reconstruction that followed was a revolution, a bloody and murderous usurpation of arbitrary power that transformed the voluntary Union of sovereign States created by the Founders, into a coerced Empire pinned together by bayonets. Before the war, the General Government was made to conform to the Constitution. After the war, the Constitution was made to conform to the General Government, and Texas v. White, declaring secession unconstitutional, was just one of the many rotten fruits that fell from the corrupt tree of Radical Reconstruction. Thomas Jefferson warned of it at least as far back as 1820:

You seem … to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is “boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem” [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots… (7)
This warning became prophesy during the Radical Reconstruction after the war, when Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase followed Lincoln’s lead in the exercise of arbitrary power.

So who was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and how did he come to theopinion that secession was unconstitutional in Texas v. White in 1869? Chase was well-known as a Radical Republican (8) who had been Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and who had called for military action against Ft. Sumter (9). He evidently was a man of expediency when it came to money. In 1862 he endorsed Lincoln’s government-created fiat money known as “greenbacks” to finance the war, but the Money Trust on Wall Street didn’t like greenbacks because they couldn’t control the money supply or make any money off of them. So Wall Street sent Secretary of the Treasury Chase to Congress to “recommend” the creation of the Second National Bank of 1864, which would undercut the greenbacks and sell the monetary independence of the United States Government to the Money Trust. Chase engineered the sellout, and Lincoln got rid of him by making him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1864. (10)

Salmon P. Chase was a blessing to Wall Street as Secretary of the Treasury. Now, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, what other favours could he bestow? He could rule secession unconstitutional for them. The Money Trust well knew what secession could do to their finances. On the one hand, hatred ginned up by their financing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Dred Scott case, “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown’s Raid, and the media and the politicians who fanned these flames, had brought on secession. Lincoln’s war had in turn brought them wealth from bonds issued to finance it (11). On the other hand, States that had seceded could repudiate their debts if they won their independence, and the banks would not be able to foreclose on them. But that was not the worst of it: in the middle of the nineteenth century cotton was “King,” and if the “Cotton Kingdom” were allowed to secede from the Union and set up as a free-trading Confederation on her southern doorstep, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse (12). So Lincoln had launched his armada against Charleston to provoke the Confederacy into firing the first shot to get the war he wanted, and after four years of the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere, he had finally succeeded in driving the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union, but it had been a close thing. Now, with Radical Reconstruction cementing the Southern States back under the control of the North with the Army of Occupation and “carpetbagger” governments, and with the Fourteenth Amendment ratified by bayonet forcing the Southern States to repudiate their own war debt and finance the Union’s (13), there only lacked a ruling by the Supreme Court to make secession unconstitutional to put the icing on the cake of conquest, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase was their man.

Chase was to try Confederate President Jefferson Davis – who was imprisoned in chains at Ft. Monroe – for treason, but the civil courts had been restored and prosecutors started dragging their feet. They feared that charges of treason against Davis would expose them to the great secessionist tradition of America, the Declaration of Independence, and to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. It might also bring up the fact that Abraham Lincoln, who had not recognized the Confederate States as being out of the Union, had committed treason under Article III, section 3 of the Constitution when he invaded them. If this were to happen, it would expose Lincoln’s War as a war of conquest rather than a war to suppress a rebellion, so Chief Justice Chase quietly dropped the case on a technicality (14).

While the chance was missed in the case of Jefferson Davis, Chase had another opportunity in the case of Texas v. White in 1869. It involved ten million dollars of bonds given to Texas during the Compromise of 1850. Radical Reconstruction was still in full swing, with the Southern States in the Union for the sake of plunder, but out of the Union for any Constitutional redress. The North’s astronomical national debt had to be collected, and the Wall Street Money Trust stood to lose money if Texas was ruled to be out of the Union – just as the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would have suffered financial disaster if the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” were out of the Union. The Chief Justice, using the specious arguments of Daniel Webster, ruled that since the Articles of Confederation made the Union under the Confederation “perpetual,” and the Preamble of the Constitution made the Union “more perfect,” therefore the Union was an “indestructible Union of Indestructible States.,” which made secession unconstitutional (15).

The Union under the old Articles of Confederation was indeed deemed “perpetual”, yet the States in that Union seceded from it under Art. VII of the Constitution of the new and “more perfect” Union. As John Remington Graham, former law professor, experienced trial lawyer, and specialist in British, American, and Canadian constitutional law and history, wrote in his work Blood Money: “The Union is perpetual, as a corporation can be perpetual, which means only that it is not limited by a term of years, and so will last forever unless lawfully dissolved.” He goes on to say that under the “more perfect” Union created by the new Constitution, “[n]o longer may secession be effected by legislative act of a State as under the Articles of Confederation. Under the intended meaning of the United States Constitution, only the people of a State in convention may effect withdrawal from the Union, which, consequently, is more perfect.” (16)

Thomas Jefferson would have agreed. He wrote:

[T]he several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government… [T]he Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers…(17)
Having just won their independence from Great Britain, the citizens of the new Republic could hardly have been expected to entrust their hard-won liberties to a half-dozen black-robed lawyers appointed for life by some politician. But that all changed with Lincoln’s revolution. With the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of all Constitutional questions, including those limiting the powers of the Federal Government, and with the Supreme Court being part of the Federal Government, the Federal Government, therefore, is the final arbiter of the limits of its own power, and that, said Jefferson, is the very definition of despotism. Instead of offering his specious opinion for the unconstitutionality of secession in Texas v. White, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase could have simply said “Secession is treason because we won the war.”

Notes

The Works of Tennyson: With Notes by the Author. Ed with memoir by Hallam, Lord Tennyson (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932) pg. 385.
Charles W. Eliot LL D, ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. Vol. 43, American Historical Documents (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910) pgs. 160-1.
Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government. We the States: An Anthology of Historic Documents and Cammentaries thereon, Expounding the State and Federal Relationship (Richmond: The Wm. Byrd P, 1964) pgs. 70-1.
Ibid. pgs. 75-6.
Charles Adams. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Lanham. Boulder. New York. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000) pgs. 14-6.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo. The Problem with Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2020) pgs. 75-93.
Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820, in We the States, pg. 258.
Philip Leigh. Southern Reconstruction (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2017) pg. 52.
Adams, pg. 66.
John Remington Graham. Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Co., 2012) pgs. 60-4. Also, G. Edward Griffin. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 4th ed. (1994; Westlake Village, CA: American Media,2002) pgs. 384-6.
Graham, pgs. 29-50.
Gene Kizer, Jr. Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument (Charleston and James Island: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 35-7.
Graham, pgs. 51-2.
Adams, pgs. 177-180.
Graham, pgs. 64-6.
Ibid, pgs. 66-7.
Thomas Jefferson. The Kentucky Resolutions, 1798, in We the States, pgs. 143-4."

 

[BigRed]

A Cascadian Confederacy? – Abbeville Institute

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

 

[Hawkeye]

Is Secession Treason? – Abbeville Institute

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

"The US Supreme Court, in Texas vs. White, ruled that secession from the Union was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, in 1869, wrote the majority “opinion of the court.” His opinion was not that of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, in which he had written:

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes… But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security… (2)
Nor was it the opinion of the Virginia Convention that ratified the Constitution, in stating the condition upon which Virginia was joining the Union:

We the Delegates of the People of Virginia … Do in the name and in behalf of the People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression… (3)
Nor was it the opinion of the New York Convention that ratified the Constitution, in stating the condition upon which New York was joining the Union:

We the Delegates of the People of the State of New York … Do declare and make known … That all Power is originally vested in and consequently derived from the People, and that Government is instituted by them for their common Interest Protection and Security… That the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary… (4)
Nor was it the opinion of the New England States in their Hartford Convention in 1814, when they threatened secession over the War of 1812. Nor was it the opinion of the Northern States that, at one time or another, threatened secession over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Mexican War, and the admission of Texas. Nor was it the opinion of the Radical Abolitionists who loudly clamored for “No Union with slaveholders!” (5) Nor was it the opinion of the States of the Southern Confederacy that did in fact secede. Nor was it the opinion of the many Northern newspaper editors who were thrown into prison for expressing it, and who had their presses destroyed when Lincoln unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus while waging his unconstitutional war (all in violation of Art. I, sec. 8 and 9; Article III, section 3; and the First Amendment to the Constitution, although all have since been cleverly obfuscated by the Lincoln sycophants and “Court Historians”). (6)

While there were those of the Hamilton-Clay-Webster persuasion who wanted a stronger centralized government, the Jeffersonian States’ Rights view of the Constitution prevailed until 1865. Before the war, the Constitution limited the powers of the General Government and guaranteed the reserved powers to the States, but Lincoln’s War and the Radical Reconstruction that followed was a revolution, a bloody and murderous usurpation of arbitrary power that transformed the voluntary Union of sovereign States created by the Founders, into a coerced Empire pinned together by bayonets. Before the war, the General Government was made to conform to the Constitution. After the war, the Constitution was made to conform to the General Government, and Texas v. White, declaring secession unconstitutional, was just one of the many rotten fruits that fell from the corrupt tree of Radical Reconstruction. Thomas Jefferson warned of it at least as far back as 1820:

You seem … to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is “boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem” [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots… (7)
This warning became prophesy during the Radical Reconstruction after the war, when Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase followed Lincoln’s lead in the exercise of arbitrary power.

So who was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and how did he come to theopinion that secession was unconstitutional in Texas v. White in 1869? Chase was well-known as a Radical Republican (8) who had been Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and who had called for military action against Ft. Sumter (9). He evidently was a man of expediency when it came to money. In 1862 he endorsed Lincoln’s government-created fiat money known as “greenbacks” to finance the war, but the Money Trust on Wall Street didn’t like greenbacks because they couldn’t control the money supply or make any money off of them. So Wall Street sent Secretary of the Treasury Chase to Congress to “recommend” the creation of the Second National Bank of 1864, which would undercut the greenbacks and sell the monetary independence of the United States Government to the Money Trust. Chase engineered the sellout, and Lincoln got rid of him by making him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1864. (10)

Salmon P. Chase was a blessing to Wall Street as Secretary of the Treasury. Now, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, what other favours could he bestow? He could rule secession unconstitutional for them. The Money Trust well knew what secession could do to their finances. On the one hand, hatred ginned up by their financing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Dred Scott case, “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown’s Raid, and the media and the politicians who fanned these flames, had brought on secession. Lincoln’s war had in turn brought them wealth from bonds issued to finance it (11). On the other hand, States that had seceded could repudiate their debts if they won their independence, and the banks would not be able to foreclose on them. But that was not the worst of it: in the middle of the nineteenth century cotton was “King,” and if the “Cotton Kingdom” were allowed to secede from the Union and set up as a free-trading Confederation on her southern doorstep, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse (12). So Lincoln had launched his armada against Charleston to provoke the Confederacy into firing the first shot to get the war he wanted, and after four years of the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere, he had finally succeeded in driving the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union, but it had been a close thing. Now, with Radical Reconstruction cementing the Southern States back under the control of the North with the Army of Occupation and “carpetbagger” governments, and with the Fourteenth Amendment ratified by bayonet forcing the Southern States to repudiate their own war debt and finance the Union’s (13), there only lacked a ruling by the Supreme Court to make secession unconstitutional to put the icing on the cake of conquest, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase was their man.

Chase was to try Confederate President Jefferson Davis – who was imprisoned in chains at Ft. Monroe – for treason, but the civil courts had been restored and prosecutors started dragging their feet. They feared that charges of treason against Davis would expose them to the great secessionist tradition of America, the Declaration of Independence, and to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. It might also bring up the fact that Abraham Lincoln, who had not recognized the Confederate States as being out of the Union, had committed treason under Article III, section 3 of the Constitution when he invaded them. If this were to happen, it would expose Lincoln’s War as a war of conquest rather than a war to suppress a rebellion, so Chief Justice Chase quietly dropped the case on a technicality (14).

While the chance was missed in the case of Jefferson Davis, Chase had another opportunity in the case of Texas v. White in 1869. It involved ten million dollars of bonds given to Texas during the Compromise of 1850. Radical Reconstruction was still in full swing, with the Southern States in the Union for the sake of plunder, but out of the Union for any Constitutional redress. The North’s astronomical national debt had to be collected, and the Wall Street Money Trust stood to lose money if Texas was ruled to be out of the Union – just as the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would have suffered financial disaster if the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” were out of the Union. The Chief Justice, using the specious arguments of Daniel Webster, ruled that since the Articles of Confederation made the Union under the Confederation “perpetual,” and the Preamble of the Constitution made the Union “more perfect,” therefore the Union was an “indestructible Union of Indestructible States.,” which made secession unconstitutional (15).

The Union under the old Articles of Confederation was indeed deemed “perpetual”, yet the States in that Union seceded from it under Art. VII of the Constitution of the new and “more perfect” Union. As John Remington Graham, former law professor, experienced trial lawyer, and specialist in British, American, and Canadian constitutional law and history, wrote in his work Blood Money: “The Union is perpetual, as a corporation can be perpetual, which means only that it is not limited by a term of years, and so will last forever unless lawfully dissolved.” He goes on to say that under the “more perfect” Union created by the new Constitution, “[n]o longer may secession be effected by legislative act of a State as under the Articles of Confederation. Under the intended meaning of the United States Constitution, only the people of a State in convention may effect withdrawal from the Union, which, consequently, is more perfect.” (16)

Thomas Jefferson would have agreed. He wrote:

[T]he several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government… [T]he Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers…(17)
Having just won their independence from Great Britain, the citizens of the new Republic could hardly have been expected to entrust their hard-won liberties to a half-dozen black-robed lawyers appointed for life by some politician. But that all changed with Lincoln’s revolution. With the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of all Constitutional questions, including those limiting the powers of the Federal Government, and with the Supreme Court being part of the Federal Government, the Federal Government, therefore, is the final arbiter of the limits of its own power, and that, said Jefferson, is the very definition of despotism. Instead of offering his specious opinion for the unconstitutionality of secession in Texas v. White, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase could have simply said “Secession is treason because we won the war.”

Notes

The Works of Tennyson: With Notes by the Author. Ed with memoir by Hallam, Lord Tennyson (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932) pg. 385.
Charles W. Eliot LL D, ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. Vol. 43, American Historical Documents (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910) pgs. 160-1.
Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government. We the States: An Anthology of Historic Documents and Cammentaries thereon, Expounding the State and Federal Relationship (Richmond: The Wm. Byrd P, 1964) pgs. 70-1.
Ibid. pgs. 75-6.
Charles Adams. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Lanham. Boulder. New York. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000) pgs. 14-6.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo. The Problem with Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2020) pgs. 75-93.
Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820, in We the States, pg. 258.
Philip Leigh. Southern Reconstruction (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2017) pg. 52.
Adams, pg. 66.
John Remington Graham. Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Co., 2012) pgs. 60-4. Also, G. Edward Griffin. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 4th ed. (1994; Westlake Village, CA: American Media,2002) pgs. 384-6.
Graham, pgs. 29-50.
Gene Kizer, Jr. Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument (Charleston and James Island: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 35-7.
Graham, pgs. 51-2.
Adams, pgs. 177-180.
Graham, pgs. 64-6.
Ibid, pgs. 66-7.
Thomas Jefferson. The Kentucky Resolutions, 1798, in We the States, pgs. 143-4."

I find it rather interesting that essentially the same people who authored and signed or subscribed to the Declaration of independence did not incorporate similar language into the Constitution, just 11 years later.

 

[IndyDave1776]

I find it rather interesting that essentially the same people who authored and signed or subscribed to the Declaration of independence did not incorporate similar language into the Constitution, just 11 years later.

You can point to a number of cases where your statement applies. My own conclusion is that there were things they didn't feel the need to specify because they didnt anticipate anyone being so damned stupid as to make it necessary.

 

[Leadeye]

A Cascadian Confederacy? – Abbeville Institute

www.abbevilleinstitute.org

I see this as more of an economic and cultural difference inside the state of Washington. It's similar to the Virginia/West Virginia issue right at the opening of the US civil war. People in those counties probably feel like they are paying taxes to fund projects that they will revive no benefit from and I would imagine quite frankly don't want to be involved in.

Whatever political machine is running the big cities won't put up with it anymore than Chicago is going to let the rest of the state off the hook for it's largess. The question is how far are they willing to go to maintain control.

 

[BigRed]

I find it rather interesting that essentially the same people who authored and signed or subscribed to the Declaration of independence did not incorporate similar language into the Constitution, just 11 years later.

The Constitution is a negative document.

The language you are looking for is in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

 

[BigRed]

I see this as more of an economic and cultural difference inside the state of Washington. It's similar to the Virginia/West Virginia issue right at the opening of the US civil war. People in those counties probably feel like they are paying taxes to fund projects that they will revive no benefit from and I would imagine quite frankly don't want to be involved in.

Whatever political machine is running the big cities won't put up with it anymore than Chicago is going to let the rest of the state off the hook for it's largess. The question is how far are they willing to go to maintain control.

"People in those counties probably feel like they are paying taxes to fund projects that they will revive no benefit from and I would imagine quite frankly don't want to be involved in."


I suspect so. In that regard, there are similarities with the States that withdrew from the union.

 

[jamil]

You can point to a number of cases where your statement applies. My own conclusion is that there were things they didn't feel the need to specify because they didnt anticipate anyone being so damned stupid as to make it necessary.

I don't think a pragmatic explanation is off the table either. Sometimes ideology is hard to put into practical laws. And sometimes, when simply writing something, you don't always think about the practical limitations until you're POTUS and you're stuck between a rock and hard place and you're kinda glad you didn't spell some things out. The Louisiana purchase is an example.

 

[IndyDave1776]

I don't think a pragmatic explanation is off the table either. Sometimes ideology is hard to put into practical laws. And sometimes, when simply writing something, you don't always think about the practical limitations until you're POTUS and you're stuck between a rock and hard place and you're kinda glad you didn't spell some things out. The Louisiana purchase is an example.

The Louisiana Purchase opened an unanticipated door. I was thinking of things like that at the time a natural born citizen was understood to be a citizen born on our soil to two citizen-parents. Regulate was a synonym to facilitate, not control or micromanage. The phraseology of the Second Amendmeng was not made bulletproof based on the plain contemporaneous use of language being adequate in the absence if an entrenched class of domestic enemies. Same thing with a plain sense reading of the Fourth Amendment implying a warrant necessary fof ANY search of a citizen's property, person, and presumably conveyance.

 

[BigRed]

A Brief History of Secession Referenda in Europe | Ryan McMaken

Scotland still hasn’t given up on holding another independence referendum within the next several years. Although London opposes the measure, it is notable that the debate over Scottish secession is not over whether or not a secession vote is moral or legal.

mises.org