The President Who Became a Secessionist

Can you imagine a former President arguing for splitting up the country?  Can you imagine George W. Bush advocating for restoring the Republic of Texas or Joe Biden advocating for a Middle Atlantic federation including new York, New jersey, his native state of Pennsylvania and his home state of Delaware?  Could you imagine anything like that happening?

It already has.

John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States, of Virginia, was a classic Southern politician of the antebellum period in American history.  He supported territorial expansion of the country and was a strict constructionist who championed state sovereignty over local issues such as road and canal construction (and thus opposed Henry Clay's "internal improvements" program).  He had an impressive record with foreign affairs, having settled a border dispute between Maine and Canada with the British, expanded the Navy, and expanded trade with other countries.

Tyler's record on slavery was, shall we say, complicated.  Although he had considered slavery to be an evil and called it a dark cloud that he hoped would eventually dissipate, Tyler himself never freed any of his slaves. he was known to treat slaves humanely and abstain from physical violence against them, but that's as may be; calling a slaveowner humane is like saying that astronauts believe that the earth is flat.  Tyler considered slavery to be an issue left to the states - states' rights - and so he believes that the federal government could not abolish it, a theory that even Abraham Lincoln subscribed to upon his election to the Presidency in 1860.    

The slave states of the lower South, however, threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President.  While Lincoln had said he would not try to do away with slavery where it already existed - because he lacked the ability or authority to do so - he did support containing slavery to where it already existed and was specifically against extending it into the Western territories.  With every state having joined the Union since 1845 entering the Union as a free state - Kansas would become the sixth free state since the annexation of Texas, which President Tyler had overseen before leaving office - the Southern states, convinced that the federal government would become more hostile to them in the future, began to go when South Carolina seceded shortly before Christmas 1860.

To avert a civil war, a peace conference was held at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. in the waning days of President James Buchanan's administration.  The Peace Conference of 1861 aimed to prevent a civil war by offering a compromise on slavery that would constitutionally guarantee it in the fifteen states that still practiced it and would restore the 36°30′ parallel north line of latitude that was the boundary between the free territories and the slave territories set by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 before its repeal in 1854.  President-elect Lincoln was happy to compromise to prevent the eight slave states still in the Union, including Tyler's home state of Virginia, in effort to coax the seven states of the lower South to return to the Union (none of them sent delegates to the conference).  However, while remining quiet in public, Lincoln worked behind the scenes to get Republicans to reject any compromise that would allow slavery to spread into the territories.  He would compromise on anything but that.

As a former President from a slave state, Tyler accepted the offer to preside over the Peace Conference of 1861 out of a genuine desire to preserve the Union.  When it became apparent that averting war was all but a lost cause, he became a secessionist during the conference, believing that a state with grievances against the federal government had every right to leave the Union.  

In no way am I suggesting that Tyler came to the correct conclusion on the issue of secession; the states of the lower South had clearly left the Union to preserve the sanctity of slavery, which is not a valid argument for secession.  Yet Tyler, a man who had served his country in various political offices before holding the highest office in the land, still came to the conclusion that the secession of the states of the lower South was the only viable option because there was simply no compromise that would allow the states to maintain a peaceful co-existence - not just because of slavery but because of a myriad of other issues dividing North and South, some related to slavery, others not.   Tyler, by all indications, would have gladly chosen to follow any path that would avert a breakup of the nation, but as he saw it in 1861, there was no such path.  That doesn't mean that there was no such path; it only means that Tyler himself could not find it. 

I believe, still, that the question of secession is upon us once again, and for a cause for worthier than to preserve the sanctity of slavery.  I, like John Tyler in 1861, did not become a secessionist because of the outcome of one presidential election.  Though I'd had frustrations with this country for years, if not decades, and though had been festering for so long, I watched Trump again assume power in 2025 hoping that a healthy resistance to his authoritarian directives would help the country get through a difficult if not impossible time.  After only two months of Trump Mark Two and the pathetic positions Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer assumed, I looked at how the federal government had been failing us Americans for over forty-five years and I decided, on my own, that a federal system trying to govern an ethnically, politically, and geographically diverse land mass 3.8 million square miles in area could not work.  The system had left too many of our citizens relegated to a poor quality of life, and lawmakers and the President - not just the current President, any President, really - had made themselves too beholden to corporate interests.  The country's quality of life was circling the drain, the citizens had lost their faith and trust in the establishmentarian institutions that run this country, and Trump himself was already dismantling the administrative state and would soon desecrate Washington to make it resemble 1930s Berlin, and at a time when most American cities look like Berlin after the war in May 1945.  Trump also made it clear that he did not consider alliances with countries such as Canada and Denmark worthy of his time and pursued a foreign policy of xenophobic zeal that led to withdrawals form international treaties and agreements that he, his corporate supporters, and especially his allies in the technology sector did not like.  The attempt to name the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and name Lake Ontario Lake America - now both endorsed by two tech companies offering mapping services run by CEOs who don't want to be appended with concrete shoes and deposited in the depths of said bodies of water by MAGA zealots - are bookends to everything Trump has done so far to turn America into a lampoon-worthy basket case.  (Will he rename the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington State and Canada's Vancouver Island the Strait of America because of an aversion to Spanish place names  - although explorer Juan de Fuca was not Spanish, he was Greek - his name was Ioannis Fokas before he Hispanicized it when he went into service for the king of Spain?) 

Clearly, give everything that has happened in the past nineteen months and what is likely to happen in the months to come, this nation cannot go on.  Too much of this country has already been lost.  It became apparent to me as early as March 2025 that we could never find the path that would lead us to a better place and would allows us to leave Trump behind - there was no path.  Now, as with Tyler in 1861, there may have been a path I simply did not see, but I still believe that there was simply no path.  There still isn't.  Kamala Harris had run a presidential campaign of joy and optimism meant to generate excitement and also a sense of community among Americans - a sense of community not seen since the country came together in the aftermath of 9/11 - but the rejection of her presidential bid in favor of a felon convicted on 34 counts forfeited our last chance to save These States from Trump and MAGA.  Democratic states beleaguered by MAGA and its cruelty, from ICE raids and assassinations to denial of federal funds for infrastructure projects and alleviating national disasters, with such cruelty having been endorsed by a Republican Congress happy to abet Trump in his outrages, have led me to conclude that Democratic states at the mercy of Trump and MAGA must secede - not to preserve the sanctity of slavery, of course but to preserve freedom, and to provide for a new birth of freedom that Lincoln had hoped would prevail once the Union won the Civil War.  

I also believe that the secessionists of the 1860s stole the right to leave the Union for the purpose of preserving slavery and elitist government.  I say, as I always have, that the Democratic states should steal it back.  A conference like the Peace Conference of 1861 - not to preserve the nation but to allow states to separate from it and possibly negotiate a national divorce  that breaks up the Union into ten or twelve countries that allow nations with more accessible governments that are more accessible to the people - is the only possible, and worthy, solution.  Therefore, I take pride in the words, "I am a secessionist."

A postscript on John Tyler: When President Lincoln called for 75,000 military volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion that began with the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina in April 1861, Virginia, angered by the notion of the federal government using force against the seceding states, left the Union, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  Tyler accepted a provisional seat in the in the Congress of the Confederate States of America and was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives later that year.  He died in early 1862.