David Blight: Did South Carolina have a Constitutional right to secede?
Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University
The idea of secession is rooted in the long American tradition of federalism and the doctrine of states' rights. But the answer to this question is an unqualified no. There was and is no "right" to secession from the Union. Diehard believers in John C. Calhoun's theory of the "concurrent majority," or in the doctrine of nullification (the alleged right of a state to reject or overtly repeal federal legislation within their borders) may claim a logical extension to the act of secession. And we have current day politicians who like to flirt with the language and threat of nullification, such as Governor Perry of Texas as well as many who apparently hope to repeal parts or all of the new health care bill. But there was no Constitutional right to secession in 1860-61, and there is none today.
What the Southern states did have in their resistance to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was a "natural" right of revolution. That, indeed, is what they really did. They engaged in a revolution against the United States government as it was constituted. The right of revolution is, of course, one of the four first principles in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. As Jefferson well knew, the leaders of the American revolution were rebels against Britain. And in any reasonable definition, that is therefore exactly what the Confederates were in 1860-61: rebels, or revolutionaries, against the United States. They were not exercising a right to state sovereignty, which is what they would argue during and well after the war, and as their defenders still do today. They were engaged in revolution, and in legal-constitutional terms, treason. Revolutions are won and lost; in this case, a second American revolution resulted in the expansion of human freedom and equality, and the reinvention of the U. S. Constitution, not, as the Confederacy sought, a society based on slavery and white supremacy.
Secession is not only a dead letter, but one might hope a dead spirit, in American political and Constitutional life. States' rights doctrine, however, is of course alive and well and thrives on our Supreme Court as well as in right wing politics. Its adherents, one can hope against hope, will learn some caution and wisdom from the disaster of 1861. One hopes that they will remember that the purpose of the 14th Amendment in the wake of the war and emancipation was to federalize the enforcement of the Bill of Rights within the states forever.
| November 23, 2010; 7:31 AM ET
Categories: Views | Tags: David Blight
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