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 than 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?"   

Secession Obsession

Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860.  What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states.  He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.

The South, in fact, didn't have to make a deal with Lincoln at all.  Indeed, the South had plenty of reasons not to secede.  Among them:

First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote.  The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.

Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.  Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.

Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.   

Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.

Which pretty much settles it.  The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery.  It was Southern stupidity.  Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks.  But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years.   The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.

And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom.  Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.

A Lincoln Sculpture Is a "Bust"

I'm taking a momentary break from commenting here on politics - and yes, I'll talk about how wonderfully well Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are doing - but this blog post is more personal.

Let me set things up.  Over a decade ago, a group of middle-school girls turned the town-owned vacant lot behind my house into a community park.  Called Waverly Park because its southern end borders Waverly Place, a short street that no one lives on, existing only to connect parallel avenues, the park has been enjoyed by local residents since its founding in 2013 but has not always been well-kept.  In fact, in the past couple of years, it was neglected so much that it turned back into a plain old back lot, with no plantings to beautify it and only one amenity - a bench overlooking a culvert entrance for the brook that bisects the lot.

This year, I took steps to revitalizing the park, starting with repainting the lettering on a "Waverly Park" sign that the girls made back in 2013.   I blazed a trail through the forested eastern side of the brook, planted flowers in seven different locations in the open western side of the brook, added a spur trail to connect the main trail and the street, added plastic chairs along the western bank of the brook, and added three trailhead markers that were originally legs from a table that someone had thrown out.  I even added a picnic table that I no longer needed but didn't want to throw out.     

But the biggest installation was yet to come.  back in June, I decided that everything I had done to revitalize the park said, "This is a park."  I needed something to say, "This is a park!"  I needed something to create the proper mood . . . a piece of public art. 

I went online for ideas and found bust sculptures for sale, including one of Abraham Lincoln.  That was it - I bought a Lincoln bust and also bought a pedestal in the guise of a Roman column on which to mount it.  The bust took nearly two months to make (they were made to order) and send to me, and when I finally got it, I took the bust, which was made out of fiberglass, and glued it to the pedestal, made of a similar material, with epoxy.  I also got a gray-white brick engraved with Lincoln's surname, an American flag, and a one-foot-square paving stone to put in front of it.

Here is the result.

I installed the art work this past Sunday (August 11) and I was proud of it.

Note past tense.

Yesterday (August 14), I received an e-mail from the director of my town's public works department relaying complaints the town had received from neighbors who objected to the Lincoln bust and ordering me to remove it immediately.  He said that even though the park had been started by the neighborhood and was developed by the residents without any help or input from the town apart from mowing the grassy field (visible behind the bust), the town still owns the land and has the right to reject any object placed there for decoration.  So Abe had to go.

What really hurt was that I had invited two friends from another town nearby to the park to see the sculpture.  They loved the whole park, and they loved the sculpture.  But the bust was there at the pleasure of the town officers and the neighbors, all of whom expressed displeasure and would not allow it.

Here is the site now.

I left the flowers I planted in the corners of the square block I made for the pedestal to mount in.  In the center, which can barely be seen here if seen at all, is a Japanese maple sapling one inch tall, which I got from my yard.  I removed the brick and found another use for the paving stone.

Oh yeah,  I was also ordered to remove the plastic chairs, which hadn't been a problem before.

I want to tell you all about the town of West Caldwell, New Jersey, where this was all happening here, it's a classic postwar suburban bedroom community that is, by nature, soporific.  The two friends I mentioned are from nearby Montclair, an arts community that prides itself on it jazz and film festivals and, yes, its public art in the form of modern sculptures in its own parks, so naturally they appreciated my contribution to Waverly Park as well as all of the other amenities I'd installed.  But the locals in West Caldwell are obviously, seeing as they're bedroom suburbanites who don't get a lot of action, philistines who dislike anything offbeat or interesting in their own neighborhoods to brighten up the landscape.  This art installation cost me over four hundred dollars, and now I've had to put the bust and its accoutrements in storage - my hard-earned money down the drain.  I'm now looking to see if anyone else in the area is interested in accepting the sculpture as a gift.      

While I have vowed to move to Canada if Trump is returned to power, I have already left West Caldwell.  I still live in a house that happens to be in West Caldwell, but I don't feel like I belong to what passes for the community.  I am done with trying to contribute to this town in any way, shape or form.  I have already decided that Waverly Park will be much less of a concern going forward.  Next year - assuming Kamala Harris is President, of course - I will restrict plantings in the park to just one six-pack of marigolds and one six-pack of impatiens, and I plan to reduce the number of flower beds from seven to two.  Up to now, my efforts to beautify the park had been appreciated, but when it became apparent that no one wanted a Lincoln bust there - despite the total absence of public art not just in West Caldwell but in adjacent communities as well - I didn't want to bother anymore.  I'm only planning to plant a dozen flowers next year so the park doesn't look like a total mess because, hey, I still have to live next to it.

One final kiss-off.  I just quit a Facebook group called "I Love Living In the Caldwells."

Because I don't.

Little Note Nor Long Remember

Okay, this is really dumb . . ..

The National Park Service has opened a new museum devoted to Abraham Lincoln across the street from Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., where he was assassinated in 1865. The museum is called the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership. The museum's mission statement is to educate people on Lincoln's presidency and impact on popular culture. Visitors, the new museum's Web site explains, can "explore the lasting effect Abraham Lincoln’s presidency — and its untimely end — have had on our country." Umm, we already have something that does that. It's called the school system.

Any and all indications that this is going to be seen as Epcot at Northwest Tenth Street are likely to be confirmed when you walk in the building. The museum contains a replica railroad car with artifacts from Lincoln's funeral, as well as a theatrical model of the tobacco barn where John Wilkes Booth was cornered and shot to death by Union soldiers. Also on display are mannequin statues of Presidents who took inspiration from Lincoln, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with pictures of Lincoln, quotes from Lincoln, videos of portrayals of Lincoln, an interactive display of Lincoln on the five-dollar bill, Lincoln Logs . . . everything but a Lincoln Town Car.

This proves once again that Americans can't be taught history unless you jazz it up with all sorts of hands-on displays and irrelevant stimuli to entertain their short attention spans. Not too long ago, the site of the wonderfully preserved Ford's Theatre and the small, inconspicuous display of artifacts in its basement told the story of Lincoln and his assassination sufficiently and people could walk into the building - and the Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died - and feel all the emotion and gravity of what transpired that Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 1865. Now you need all sorts of Disneyfied displays to bring history to life. But, as walking into Independence Hall in Philadelphia, one of the few buildings in Independence National Historical Park that hasn't been retrofitted with drywall and Plexiglas partitions and with dropped ceilings with track lighting to tell the story of the American Revolution in a "contemporary" style, proves, none of that is necessary. You don't need rooms walled off and kept under glass to make what happened in them seem more special, nor do you need mannequin statues or video displays to make a visit to an historic site more compelling. Standing in that room in the old Pennsylvania State House (what Independence Hall used to be called) and pondering what was achieved there should be enough. But maybe we Americans don't have enough historical imagination to contemplate the solemnity of a vacant room anymore. We need an interactive display to explain history to us. Hence the National Constitution Center near Independence Hall, and now . . . the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership.

The focal point of the new Lincoln museum is a 34-foot-tall tower of books about Lincoln in the building's central atrium - seven thousand titles - to demonstrate just how important Lincoln still is. You know, in order to divine Lincoln's importance, maybe it would be better if we Americans actually read these books instead of stacking them.

In fact, I'll take one right now. Heads up!

Abraham Lincoln - 200 Years

Behold, the greatest President of the United States of all time.

Abraham Lincoln, born two hundred years ago today, not only preserved the Union and ended slavery, he set the nation on a new course for freedom and justice. He reinvented the country through four years of civil war, guaranteed opportunity and possibility for its people with his support for commerce, science, and education, and eloquently explained - and repeatedly so - what this nation is about: government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Barack Obama has some tough shoes to fill.