Here’s a more important discussion I’d like to start — IS THE UNION A PERMANENT STATE? OR DOES THE CONSTITUTION PROVIDE A MEANS FOR STATES TO SECEDE?
Here’s what I personally believe ( and I could be wrong ).
The original 13 states formed a “Confederation,” under which each state retained its “sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” The Constitution didn’t change this; each sovereign state was free to reject the Constitution. The new powers of the federal government were “granted” and “delegated” by the states, which implies that the states were PRIOR and SUPERIOR to the federal government.
Even in The Federalist, the brilliant propaganda papers for ratification of the Constitution (largely written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison), the United States are constantly referred to as “the Confederacy” and “a confederate republic,” as opposed to a single “consolidated” or monolithic state. Members of a “confederacy” are by definition free to withdraw from it.
Hamilton and Madison hoped secession would never happen, but they never denied that it was a right and a practical possibility. They envisioned the people taking arms against the federal government if it exceeded its delegated powers or invaded their rights, and they admitted that this would be justified. Secession, including the resort to arms, was the final remedy against tyranny. (This is the real point of the Second Amendment.)
Strictly speaking, the states would not be “rebelling,” since they were sovereign; in the Framers’ view, a tyrannical government would be rebelling against the states and the people, who by defending themselves would merely exercise the paramount political “principle of self-preservation.”
The Constitution itself is silent on the subject, but since secession was an established right, it didn’t have to be reaffirmed. More telling still, even the bitterest opponents of the Constitution never accused it of denying the right of secession.
Three states ratified the Constitution with the provision that they could later secede if they chose; the other ten states accepted this condition as valid.
Walter Williams on the subject:
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2002/04/do-states-have-a-right-of-secession/
Basically, Lincoln decided the issue of secession by killing some 600,000 americans. Then there’s this from Williams article,
Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, “It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”
Your argument would hold more water had there not been actual articles of confederation. The United States operated under the articles of confederation between 1781 and 1789. However, the founders purposefully gave us a constitution that shifted the political power from the states which held almost all the power, to a more balanced approach where states were sovereign but beholden to each other under more powerful central government. We became at that time, a nation, not a confederation of nations.
There are three common antisecession arguments, all of them bunk:
1. the no constitutional provision argument;
2. the Articles of Confederation perpetual union argument;
3. the mystical bonds, translegal union of lollipops and chocolate argument.
1 forgets that state powers are left undefined. It’s as if they never read the tenth amendment. Unless the people knew that’s what they agreed to, as by its being written down, secession would be a retained right of the states. Actually, not even then, because popular sovereignty us inalienable.
Which brings us to 2. Unlike the Constitution, its forerunner had language that sounds maybe antisecessionist. “Perpetual” usually means forever. I doubt the Founders were stupid enough to think it would last forever. In fact it lasted less than a decade, superceded illegally—according to its amendment process—by the Constitution, which makes no use of the word “perpetual.” Let’s say it did, though. Would that make secession impossible? No, for the same reason we were able to replace the Articles despite its putative perpetual status. That is, because the people are sovereign, supposedly, and sovereignty is inalienable.
3 is toughest to combat, mostly because it is not a real argument. It was one of Lincoln’s favorites, and according to it our nation was founded by the Declaration of Independence, and thereafter we are one and indivisible until the crack of doom. It fails for various obvious reasons, one of which is, hey, what if we hadn’t lost the War of 1812 and Canada had been incorporated into the union? Then you’d be saying Canadian territory is part of the mystical union, and without it the US would be like a man without a liver, or something. Or maybe there really is a mystically unbreakable nation, and it is England. After all, it had been around a lot longer than the hiccup between 1776 and 1860, from time immemorial.
Do perpetual unionists ever wonder why no one was prosecuted for the crime of secession? The Yanks were vindictive enough, and there were plans. Wouldn’t they have wanted the legal question settled for history, in a more official manner, I mean, than various combinations of the above three arguments outside a courtroom. FDR got his concentration camps greenlit by SCOTUS. Why didn’t Republicans get their rubber stamp in 1865 or after? Mist likely answer is they were not confident of outarguing Jeff Davis et al when rifles and grapeshot couldn’t decide it.
None of this was specifically laid out in the Constitution though, so it's always going to be somebody's opinion, and that opinion could always be wrong (though people were ready to kill each other based on those opinions).
Even in The Federalist, the brilliant propaganda papers for ratification of the Constitution (largely written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison), the United States are constantly referred to as “the Confederacy” and “a confederate republic,” as opposed to a single “consolidated” or monolithic state. Members of a “confederacy” are by definition free to withdraw from it.
Maybe our sense of the word "confederacy" has been affected by that 1860s Confederacy. It looks like they used the expression "confederate republic" to mean what we would call a "federal republic." We'd have to go back to look at the usage of the day.
Hamilton and Madison didn't believe the country was a unitary or "consolidated" republic, but they also didn't believe that it was a loose league or alliance of independent states. So whether the states were free to withdraw from the union wasn't absolutely clear.
Hamilton and Madison hoped secession would never happen, but they never denied that it was a right and a practical possibility. They envisioned the people taking arms against the federal government if it exceeded its delegated powers or invaded their rights, and they admitted that this would be justified. Secession, including the resort to arms, was the final remedy against tyranny. (This is the real point of the Second Amendment.)
That is the "right of rebellion" against tyranny. It might have been practiced by the states or by individuals or communities. That right didn't mean that states could withdraw from a constitutional government any time they wanted to for any reason they wanted to.
The Constitution itself is silent on the subject, but since secession was an established right, it didn’t have to be reaffirmed. More telling still, even the bitterest opponents of the Constitution never accused it of denying the right of secession.
Three states ratified the Constitution with the provision that they could later secede if they chose; the other ten states accepted this condition as valid.
In so far as the Anti-Federalist thought the Constitution could become tyrannical, maybe they did think that it would remove some right of secession, or maybe secession wasn't something they were worried about. Those three states may have been asserting their right to revolution against a federal government turned tyrannical or their right to reassume their sovereignty if the union failed. I really can't say. I'd have to do more research on this.
The lesson of all the history is that unilateral secession doesn't work. It turns away from established channels and often leads to war. Even if you want to dissolve your ties with the country, it's best to work within the established framework (so long as it remains constitutional and democratic or republican) and not act as though one has the right to cut all ties just because one feels like it.