In your view the states seem to be like atoms free to combine and separate, but unbreakable in themselves. But the nation is more than a molecule to be dissolved chemically. There is a common national heritage to be disposed of when nations are dissolved, and doing so can be very problematic. It's also simplistic to assume that the states are the people. A working federal system allows for the majorities and minorities in the nation and the states to have their say. Secession at will doesn't incorporate the same safeguards for all interests.
I don't think there are any easy formulas to solve the problem. The founders could have resolved the problem by including a means of dissolution of the union in the Constitution. That they didn't means that subsequent generations must procede with caution and not presume answers that aren't present in the Constitution or acceptable to all concerned parties.
As for your example, I'd imagine a lot of Floridians would object to joining an "Antilian Confederation." One can imagine a convention called in Miami that does not at all reflect the views of North or Central Florida presuming to speak for the whole state and take it out of the union. One can imagine other Floridians taking objection, questioning the legitimacy of the convention, and trying to form their own loyalist state or states. Secessionists forces will assert their own legitimacy and deny that of their opponents. Violence is likely. That is why dissolution of the union is such a grave and ponderous matter. Simply arguing that "states" can leave at will is in the end a recipe for war. There has to be much negotiation and there has to be unquestioned procedural legitimacy.
Now we have had much more experience with nations and empires breaking up and new states seeking independence. The general lesson seems to be that patience and persistence win out in the end. In most circumstances the best path is not simply to declare independence and fight a war, but a long process of political, legal, diplomatic and propagandistic activity. If secessionist leaders had taken that path, they would have gotten their nation or nations. We would be the worse for it, though their own generation would have been spared great losses. Unfortunately, Southern political elites were mesmerized by the idea that they were struggling against some tyranny or oppression, rather than just trying to get a divorce. Therefore they had to make the federal government of their time out to be some sort of oppressor to be resisted by any means -- an evil misrepresentation that would poison the situation and have evil consequences. The secessionists were also misled by the dubious idea that they could simply walk out at their own will. And they were also in a rush to set up their own new nation or confederation and get what they thought was their due of the national spoils.
I'm not going to go to great lengths to malign the Confederates. They were Americans and they were fighting for their own conception of freedom. But justifying or glorifying them is another matter, and excusing them while vilifying their opponents is even further out of line. They joined a rather dubious, simplistic, and self-serving view of the Constitution to defense of a particularly heinous institution and garlanded their rebellion with high-flown rhetoric. They replaced constitutional government with violence and buried the old Republic. I might have had more respect for them if they'd shown more respect to our national venture and history and hadn't simply given up on it. That they were willing to throw away the country when, through their own folly, they lost an election, makes them unacceptable as a model for republican virtue. That they chose to cloak themselves in the garments of the Founders makes them more repugnant.
You may be moved by the sufferings of the South in the war. I am too. It is a moving story. But that the leadership wasn't prepared to act patiently and "suffer" the inconveniences of constitutional politics makes them not worthy of respect in my eyes. They had channels to get what they wanted within the system or by gradually separating from it. But they were impatient with the workings of a sucessful system and resolved to get out immediately, even at the cost of smashing it. I'd say that there was something about the idea of secession at will that made it likely to be used for trivial or wrongheaded purposes, but if you believe in secession as a right or as something desireable, you might reflect on the way that the idea was wasted by the cause these men put it to.
It sounds nice to some to blame Lincoln for the fall of the "Old Republic" and throw the Guilded Age corruption at him. One can't wholly absolve him of blame at least for the latter. But secession destroyed the older Republic. Whatever came afterwards would be new and different and very much a let-down.
I am reminded of Faulkner's comment that inside of every Southern boy there is a place where it's always July 3, 1863 with the fate of the South in the balance. Some people believe that but for Lincoln it would always remain 1860 with the same degree of freedom and scale of government that existed then (too often conveniently forgetting the degree of unfreedom). But time and history do bring changes. Forces similar to those working in our own world would have their effects in the parallel secessionist universe. Tensions and conflicts wouldn't stop. What's ironic is that those who advocated truly radical change -- the breaking of nations -- are seen by some as stopping the clock in 1860.
Just because the affair was transacted in a disorderly and passionate manner by some people does not mean that the equities are not susceptible of reasoned analysis, which I have attempted to do, and which frankly Jefferson Davis did a better job of doing, in his inaugural address as the president of the still-provisional Confederate government, four weeks after he gave his valedictory address to the United States Senate. It's worth a read, if you haven't seen it already. It's posted somewhere here on Free Republic, as a matter of fact, in one of the other Civil War threads.
Your argument seems to involve the idea that the states are the people, the people are sovereign, therefore the states are sovereign, and the federal government is a government imposed on sovereign people and states.
Almost. I would agree with your precis, with the exception that the federal government is a government summoned into being by a Constitution agreed to by the Sovereign Peoples/States in conventions of ratification.
The other side of the coin is that the states are governments and impositions on the public as well, ....
Well, not exactly. We commonly make the mistake of confounding the States with their corresponding governments. They aren't those governments, they are those Peoples, those populi, poleis, or polities.
.....and the nation is a people as well, and "the people" that rights are reserved to under the Constitution is not "the people of the states", but simply "the people" which many would take as the people of the nation.
Unless I missed a post, that hasn't been argued here, except by you. I suggested it be bruited, but it hasn't. In my reductio ad absurdum, I tried to show that the Constitution does not contain explicit language that would establish that to be the case. If it was the intention of the Framers, I should think they would certainly have said so.
The deletion or addition of a word, in such circumstances, is very heavily loaded. For example, in the U.S. Senate's official discussion of the Tenth Amendment, which I linked to above, it is pointed out that much has been made of the omission of the word "expressly", between the writing of the Articles of Confederation in 1777 and that of the Tenth Amendment several years later, when referring to powers delegated to the United States, as opposed to those reserved to the People. The omission of the word "expressly" has been used to construct a legal argle-bargle to perfume wholesale invasions by Congress and the courts of areas of the law reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment, to the point that in the 20th century the amendment became very nearly a dead letter, as I showed. (It was my purpose to show what cavalier treatment of reserved rights and powers has looked like, as a triumphant "consolidation" movement launched by Lincoln has progressively invaded the People's rights.)
The Centrist Consolidators and imperialist Statists having made much over language, to argue that the failure to re-use the word "expressly" signals original intent to overthrow an entire theory of government, I reserve the same right, and I do not concede that I am less than they a citizen with the right to interpret the Constitution's plain language as the Framers intended everyone should have the right. Of course, that runs contrary to the new theory of government, under which attorneys on retainer to Money and Power do all the interpreting, and we have recourse only to their hired opinions, about what our rights in the law are.
Therefore I insist that the Constitution's reticence about a transfer of Sovereignty, or the creation of a new Populus and the subsumption of the extant Peoples who created the Union by a new populus or polity of the Union, is explicit and every bit as wilful and determining as the Framers' omission of the word "expressly" when referring to delegated powers. I conclude from the omission, that the intent to subsume and displace the People of the State in a People of the Nation was deliberate, and that the Unionists may not correctly infer such an intent, only because it is convenient to their larger purposes.
And I should also apologize for my slowness in reply, which I can account for only by confessing that I felt the burden of your argument and thought that I ought to reply carefully, but nevertheless I was drawn off by certain red-meat challenges offered elsewhere.
In your view the states seem to be like atoms free to combine and separate, but unbreakable in themselves.
That is a fair construction, and the idea rests on the idea of a Sovereign People. In the United States, the State preexisted the Union, pace Lincoln's lawyerly (not to say Clintonesque) argument and his support by the Declarationists, and so the People of the State are the basic building bloc of government, the essential Polity that enjoys Sovereignty as a result of the American Revolution.
But the nation is more than a molecule to be dissolved chemically. There is a common national heritage to be disposed of when nations are dissolved, and doing so can be very problematic.
Agreed. But it's also true that the South had tried for 30 years to deal with Northern political aggression, and came lately, and I think overall fairly, to the reasonable conclusion that the United States was Siamese twins, two separate nations divided by speechways and folkways, by values and interests, and even ethnographically. It's easy to argue that the United States should always have been two countries -- so says Roland Garreau, in The Nine Nations of North America -- and its political leaders' early strategic decision to hang together in order to avoid hanging separately outwore its usefulness after the British threat had receded.
It's also simplistic to assume that the states are the people. A working federal system allows for the majorities and minorities in the nation and the states to have their say. Secession at will doesn't incorporate the same safeguards for all interests.
Omitting for a moment the necessary objurgation of your use of the phrase "secession at will", I am otherwise unable at the moment to assess your assertions. Is there a way to test them? My first reaction is that, in the American system as we've received it from Orville Babcock and the Whiskey Ring -- the true refounders and exponents of the Newly Industrializing American Empire and its pillars of oligarchy and access capitalism -- if you aren't a member in good standing of the U.S. Chambers of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers, you're not really a citizen anyway, but more a policy object.
Your well-reasoned argument that, had history followed the path not taken, other problems would surely have presented themselves, is correct. They would have. The more immediate problem for the historian surveying the wreckage of the Civil War and Reconstruction and all that flowed from both, is the ineluctability of the central proposition that Lincoln's Revolution unleashed what John D. Rockefeller I called "the age of combinations", viz., of the submergence of the individual by heartless and ruthless economic organizations. Something like that would have occurred in the North, no doubt, but it would not have achieved the popular legitimacy it did as the dominant culture of inequality, social Darwinism, timeclock serfdom, and the horrible diminishment of the sense of self that lies at the core of modernism, and makes modern individuals mendicant supplicants of giant, Orwellian apparatuses of one ideological stripe or another. It is no accident that this folkway, this "Gorebot" way of being, is much less common in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West than it is in "Blue Country"......and if the South had gone free, it would have been much less pronounced, I think, and the values and teaching of freedom much more prominent, in the inner life of 20th-century North America.
I don't think there are any easy formulas to solve the problem. The founders could have resolved the problem by including a means of dissolution of the union in the Constitution. That they didn't means that subsequent generations must procede [sic] with caution and not presume answers that aren't present in the Constitution or acceptable to all concerned parties.
I disagree. I say rather that silence in the Constitution leaves us at liberty, in the best sense, to proceed by our lights. I think that that is what the Framers intended......or at least, what they said they intended: as long as Hamilton was speaking, I think one needed to watch his purse -- and his throat.
Silence in the Constitution does not withhold permission to act, it permits action. Or so I think.
As for your example, I'd imagine a lot of Floridians would object to joining an "Antilian Confederation"....Secessionists forces will assert their own legitimacy and deny that of their opponents. Violence is likely. That is why dissolution of the union is such a grave and ponderous matter. Simply arguing that "states" can leave at will is in the end a recipe for war. There has to be much negotiation and there has to be unquestioned procedural legitimacy.
Well, I thought it was the New York bankers who threw down the gauntlet, politically, on the idea of secession -- they and Lincoln, who wanted the Southern States in the Union so he could job them. It seemed to the Southerners that remaining in the Union -- and they said so -- was the course more fraught with danger.
As to procedural legitimacy, the South tried to show it by convening as the People, to rescind their long-ago ratification, and to secede from the Union. There was nothing left for them in the Union, nobody argues seriously, North or South, that there was. And their suffering ever since, either more or less at any given time, gives the lie to Unionist propaganda, that the South would have been better off if they'd tucked their chins, gone lily-livered, and crawled for the Northerners. To this day, they are still officially suspect characters under the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and may not hold elections, ever, without the express permission of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which is really a political bureau to which the Southern states must slavishly recur every time they reapportion.
The general lesson seems to be that patience and persistence win out in the end. ... If secessionist leaders had taken that path, they would have gotten their nation or nations. We would be the worse for it, though their own generation would have been spared great losses.
I agree as to outcomes, but whether we should be worse off by another outcome depends on who "we" is. The Northern Industrialists would have lost their generations-long stream of cream gravy from the tariffs, and their captive markets and price supports. Blacks would obviously have lost, but even so there might not have been as much Jim Crow -- I can't prove that, since I've only seen a few moderate expressions of view, e.g. w/ respect to black soldiering in the Confederacy, discussed elsewhere, and white attitudes toward the idea. Smallholding or propertyless Southern whites might actually have lost, I don't know -- the equities for them and other groups are harder to calculate and speculate about.
Unfortunately, Southern political elites were mesmerized by the idea that they were struggling against some tyranny or oppression, rather than just trying to get a divorce.
Well, their milieu was a lot closer to the Revolution and the War of 1812 than ours, and no-fault divorce was unheard-of.
Therefore they had to make the federal government of their time out to be some sort of oppressor to be resisted by any means -- an evil misrepresentation that would poison the situation and have evil consequences.
Not the federal government itself, but the federal government as a tool of the Republicans. As someone has pointed out elsewhere, Lincoln represented the more reasonable wing of the Republican Party. Please remember that it was the Abolitionists who began the sectional hate-baiting.
But justifying or glorifying [the secessionists] is another matter, and excusing them while vilifying their opponents is even further out of line. ...They replaced constitutional government with violence and buried the old Republic. I might have had more respect for them if they'd shown more respect to our national venture and history and hadn't simply given up on it. That they were willing to throw away the country when, through their own folly, they lost an election, makes them unacceptable as a model for republican virtue. That they chose to cloak themselves in the garments of the Founders makes them more repugnant.
Well, that is a value judgement you are free to take for yourself. I share your opinion, I think, of their leadership abilities and political perspicuousness; there was rather less of rational forethought than e.g. Abraham Lincoln brought to the table, and rather more of the manner manorial, of gentlemanly prickliness and early resort to drastic resolutions (many of them, remember, had lived by Code Duello as a metric of personal manliness). Too, a lot of slavocrats may have been arriviste new players and apt to overdo it, in order to impress the ladies. I think you err, though, when you persist in holding the planters of the antebellum South accountable for having practiced chattel slavery, as if they were moderns and not premoderns imbued with another body of law and custom, but you are free to reprehend anyone you want to. Please don't take it as a repudiation of your moral vision if other posters demur on teleological grounds, that it isn't fair to judge Aristotle by the standards of Fermi, for the purpose of belittling Aristotle.
Whatever their failings, and their failures, the leaders of the Old South had recognized an attempt on the Peoples' liberty, and had attempted to remove their Peoples beyond the reach of the aggrandizing and triumphant faction. Madison and Calhoun had never solved the problem in the Old Republic, of what to do about avaricious or ambitious Factions -- of which the Republican Party, in its aspect in 1860, was surely one, a fact we can recognize easily from the rapidity and ease with which it entrenched itself in four years' incumbency, even in time of war.
If there was no road map for dealing with such ideologically- and greed-driven.... drivenness, can you be so sure of yourself in condemning the Southerners for trying to avoid a contest they felt they would lose, by contracting the ambit of the Republic they would be willing to participate in? Theirs was a not-unreasonable response, even if they failed signally in the carrying forward of their attempted remedy.