When (and When Not) To Secede

It was 165 years ago today, Thursday, December 20, 1860, that South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency.

". . . that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."

Today I am advocating for New Jersey - or California, Massachusetts, New York, or one of the other heavily Democratic states adversely affected by Donald Trump - to take the first step of secession in the hope of triggering a mass withdrawal from the Union that will necessitate the breakup of the United States and a new arrangement for the fifty states that will result in new republics and possibly some of the states becoming provinces of Canada. 

The reasons for secession are quite clear - abuse of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents, illegal disruptions and contractions of government services, suppression of individual and civil liberties, crimes against humanity . . . I could go on.  To respond to those who say that secession is unconstitutional, I would argue that Trump's unconstitutional actions and the failure of the other branches of government to check him render that annoying inconvenience moot.  Again: If what Trump does is not unconstitutional, nothing is unconstitutional.  Not even secession. I admit that the chances of any state seceding are slim, but I would argue that states have plenty of reasons to secede today . . . though they have fewer reasons to secede that the slave states of 1860 and 1861 had not to secede.

Empty threats are a leitmotif of American politics (though I would argue that not all of Trump's threats are empty), and the governors of the slave states of the lower South repeatedly threatened to secede throughout the summer and autumn of 1860 if Abraham Lincoln were to be elected President.  Then Lincoln was elected.  And then nothing happened for six weeks.  The slave states suddenly found themselves having to consider whether they should actually make good on their threats to secede, and President James Buchanan urged all fifteen of the slave states to wait and see what Lincoln would do once he took office in March 1861.  In the meantime, the Southern states weighed their options.  There were already plenty of reasons for them to remain in the Union.

First of all, Lincoln, though he won a majority in the Electoral College and won the most popular votes of any of the four - yes, four - major candidates of the 1860 presidential election, was very much a minority President, having won only 39 percent of the popular vote.  As with Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, more than six out of ten voters thought Lincoln was too dangerous and radical to occupy the White House, but thanks to a four-way campaign - the Democrats fielded two nominees,  U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas from the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge from the South, and there was also John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party - Lincoln was able to squeak through.  Lincoln's position was so precarious that he barely defeated Douglas in New York; had he lost that state, he would have been denied an electoral majority and Congress would have had to select the next President and Vice President.

Second, throughout the 1860 campaign and after the election, Lincoln promised that he would not try to abolish slavery where it already existed; he did not have the constitutional authority or the political support to do that.  He only promised to stop the spread of slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.  Therefore, Southern politicians should have been reassured that slavery could remain legal in their own states.  

Third, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which guaranteed slaves as property under the terms of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, was the law of the land.  The President of the United States could not and cannot change a Supreme Court decision.

Fourth, even though the Democrats were badly divided over slavery - hence two 1860 Democratic presidential candidates, one from the free North and one from the slaveholding South - they had nonetheless elected majorities to both houses of the 37th Congress that would convene in the first half of Lincoln's term as President.  The majorities, based largely in the South, could block any legislation or presidential initiative that the Southern states opposed.

Despite these reasons for not seceding, however, the slave states of the lower South saw Lincoln's election as the first shot across their bow from a purely northern party, the Republican Party, that represented the fastest growing regions in the country - the Northeast and the Midwest - which would soon overwhelm the Southern states in the House with their greater populations and in the Senate with the likely ban on slavery in territories waiting to be admitted into the Union.  The even balance of free and slave states had been upset in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state; the subsequent admissions of Minnesota in 1858, Oregon in 1859, and, in 1861 prior to President Lincoln's inauguration, Kansas as free states meant that, theoretically at least, the slave states would be outvoted in the Senate.  The states of the lower South decided that, if they didn't leave the Union immediately, they would never have the chance to do so again and would forever remain subservient to the North.   Fatuous reasoning, to be sure, but that's how Southerners felt at the time.  So, just before Christmas 1860, South Carolina, which had attempted to nullify a tariff law in 1832 because of its dependence on foreign trade and had caused a disunity crisis for President Andrew Jackson to confront, naturally became the first state to secede from the Union.

The house was divided.

Mississippi was the second state to secede and the first to secede in the new year of 1861.  Ironically, one of its two U.S. Senators, Jefferson Davis, had proposed that the slave states could remain in the Union and form a self-governing dominion within the American commonwealth.  But when his state left the Union, he resigned his Senate seat and returned home from Washington.  Then the rest of the lower South followed, in this order: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, at the beginning of February, Texas.  The seven new republics weren't independent for long; they soon formed the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its President.  Eight slave states took President Buchanan's advice and waited to see what Lincoln would do as President.  Then, after Fort Sumter was fired upon, President Lincoln called for 75,000 Army volunteers to put down the rebellion.  Angered at the call for military action, Virginia left the Union, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  They too joined the Confederacy, and the Civil War was on. 

I don't advocate a second civil war to break up the United States when I call for my state of New Jersey to secede.  I call for enough states to secede in order to facilitate a conference not unlike the one that was held in Washington in February 1861 to avert civil war, and, this time, agree to a national divorce and not use military action to dissolve the Union.  Because when Fort Sumter in Charleston was attacked by the Confederacy, it led to a bloody conflict, and no one recalled what President Jackson had said during the 1832 Nullification Crisis: "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you ready to incur its guilt?"   

Nullifying History

"Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

So rhetorically asked Donald Trump in a recent interview, during which he theorized that Andrew Jackson, a staunch Unionist, never would have let the Civil War happen.

Old Hickory, Trump said, "had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'"

There's just one problem: Andrew Jackson died sixteen years before the Civil War began.

Trump apologists quickly stepped in to do damage control, musing that Trump meant to point out that President Jackson had to deal with the Nullification Crisis of 1832 - in which South Carolina nullified a federal tariff law - and moved to establish the sovereignty of the federal government over the states.  (In his "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina," Jackson wrote, "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you really ready to incur its guilt?")  Trump himself sought to clarify his position with this Twitter statement:

In fact, Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic President, facilitated the coming of the Civil War because, for all of his manly blustering on the need to preserve the Union and despite his break from his original heir apparent, South Carolina's pro-nullification John C. Calhoun, in favor of Martin Van Buren, Jackson was a slaveowner who supported the expansion of the institution and supported annexation of the slaveholding country of Texas in 1844, seven years after leaving office.  When Van Buren, having succeeded Jackson as President in 1837 and then having been voted out of office after one term, tried for a comeback in 1844, his refusal to endorse Texas annexation led Jackson to support James Knox Polk for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Polk was nominated and elected, and Texas was brought into the Union.  Jackson, like Polk, also opposed federal infrastructure projects, and he killed the Second Bank of the United States as President.  Both an infrastructure program and the Bank might have helped the slave states diversify their economies and led to the abolition of slavery without a war.   Yet Trump still lauds Jackson for seeking compromise to prevent a war.

No, that was Henry Clay.

Clay was also a slaveowner, but he nevertheless supported infrastructure spending, the Bank and tariffs to help American industry,  and he brokered compromises in Congress over slavery to preserve the Union.  Clay died in 1852 thinking he'd done that, and, as historian David Jacobs noted, was "spared the knowledge that nothing at all had been resolved by his compromises."

As an ironic footnote, Fort Sumter was fired upon on April 12, 1861 - what would have been Clay's 84th birthday.  As for the second Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, who lived to see the Civil War, he supported Stephen Douglas - who supported Kansas's decision to outlaw slavery by popular vote despite objections from the national Democratic establishment - for President in 1860 and, when the Civil War began, announced his support for President Lincoln.

If there was ever a possibility that a President could have prevented a civil war, Jackson's policies made sure that such a time would never come.  That we have a President who knows nothing about the history of this country beyond the sanitized Disney version - and he probably didn't know anything about the Nullification Crisis before someone told him about it the other day - is an absolute embarrassment.