The case against secession

John Hinderaker knows the history of the Civil War about as well as anyone I know, so I’m sure he’s ever more familiar with the case against secession than I am. His case for secession is pretty, pretty good, but I believe it runs contrary to the Constitution as well as American tradition and history. I thought the case was decided more or less definitively against it by the Civil War.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 and before his inauguration in March 1861, seven states purported to secede from the Union. When he took the oath of office, secession was accordingly on his mind. He made the case against it in his First Inaugural Address. Here is an excerpt:

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it–break it, so to speak–but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.”

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.

A few months later Lincoln had much more to say on the subject in his July 4th Message to Congress.

Well, times have changed. We have a president who doesn’t much believe in faithful execution of the laws. As Lincoln put it in his 1855 letter to his old friend Joshua Speed, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” His case against secession nevertheless abides.