You do admit that the United States were born out of secession from the United Kingdom?
“But if you’re going to go outside of the Constitution and revolt, you better have a really good moral cause for your actions, because you’re going to have to justify it to God and the whole world.”
I imagine that Barack Obama’s idea of “a really good moral cause” and his conception of “God and the whole world” differ dramatically from mine. That’s always the problem with arguing for subjective judgements of that sort.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolves of 1798, authored by Jefferson and Madison, show the two to be strong defenders of state’s rights versus the national government, granting states the power to nullify federal law. George Washington didn’t like the resolves, clearly seeing that they could lead to disunion. But it can’t be argued that the Founders were set against secession when two of the more prominent ones authored the Resolves.
“If you can’t do that, and premise your rebellion on an unjust cause, you’re probably never going to gain access to the kind of physical means it’s going to take to carry out your revolutionary acts.”
King George believed that the American Patriot cause was unjust. But since France was happy to poke a stick in the eye of England they were more than happy to provide us with arms, French Marines, and more importantly their navy. The Revolution was won at the Battle of the Capes when Admiral Francois Paul defeated the British fleet sent to reinforce and rescue Cornwallis at Yorktown.
I don’t think the evils of chattel slavery or abortion are subjective at all. And there is no legitimate moral equation between the evils promoted by Barack Obama and the objective moral evils of chattel slavery and abortion.
As for King George the Third, I don’t care what he thought. The moral principles that this republic was founded upon are self-evident. And the founders did a fine job of identifying his tryannies. They were, quite objectively-speaking, evil. And the whole world was convicted of that.
There is no mention of secession in either the Kentucky or Virginia Resolves. In fact quite the opposite is true. The Virginia Resolve opens with a statement affirming the assembly's desire to uphold and defend the Constitution. It goes on to say that the assembly "solemly declares a warm attachment to the Union of the States". The argument it goes on to make is that that the Union is one in which the states have the power to over-ride any federal laws they deem detrimental to the state, not leave the Union as a result.
This would be the only resolution that Washington would have likely made any comment on since the announcement of the passage of the Kentucky Resolution coincided with the announcement of Washington's death being only separated by a couple of weeks. (Patrick Henry had died 5 months earlier)
But the Kentucky Resolution's language is even more pointed against the idea of secession. In is it states that the commonwealth of Kentucky "does now unequivocally declare its attachment to the Union....and will be among the last to seek its dissolution."
Does that mean that some of the founders would never entertain separation from the Union? No, but these examples really do not provide any proof to that supposition. These resolutions are an argument of state's rights over federal authority, not union or disunion, at a time when it was still being felt out what the limits of the new federal union was.
The Constitution itself is a series of compromises including ones that are designed to satisfy those who had very strong feelings toward individual states rights, like Madison and Jefferson, and those who felt the need for a more powerful central government like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams.
In the case of these resolutions the argument that they do make is correct in that the Alien and Sedition Acts did violate the Constitution of the United States, but no where do they suggest secession as a recourse to this fact.
We didn't secede from Great Britain - we openly rebelled against their rule.