Was Secession Treason? No, It Wasn’t.

Back when he was still alive, I used to enjoy reading Joseph Sobran’s columns. He had sort of a humorous way of cutting through much of the contemporary bovine fertilizer and giving people the truth. He did several articles on secession over the years. In one, he noted that “…Jefferson was an explicit secessionist. For openers he wrote a famous secessionist document known to posterity as the Declaration of Independence.” And Sobran was right–that’s exactly what the declaration of Independence was. Don’t wait for your “history” books to emphasize that though.

After the shooting phase of the War of Northern Aggression was over the abolitionist radicals in Washington decided they would try Jefferson Davis as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination. That would have been just great for Edwin M. Stanton, and they wanted to try Davis for treason for leading the secessionist government in Richmond, though secession was hardly original with him. However, trying Davis for treason as a secessionist was one trick the radicals couldn’t quite pull off.

Burke Davis (no relation to Jeff Davis that I know of) in his book The Long Surrender on page 204, noted a quote by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, telling Edwin Stanton that “If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion…His (Jeff Davis’s) capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.”

Burke Davis then continued on page 214, noting that a congressional committee proposed a special court for Davis’ trial, headed by Judge Franz Lieber. Burke Davis wrote: “After studying more than 270,000 Confederate documents, seeking evidence against Davis, the court discouraged the War Department: ‘Davis will be found not guilty,’ Lieber reported ‘and we shall stand there completely beaten’.” What the Washington radicals were admitting among themselves, (but quite obviously not for the historical record) was that they and Lincoln had just fought a war of aggression against the Southern states and their people that had taken or maimed the lives of over 700,000 Americans, both North and South, and they had not one scintilla of real evidence, not one shred of constitutional justification for having done so, nor had they any constitutional right to have impeded the Southern states when they chose to secede from a union for which they had been paying over 80% of all the expenses.

I think most of my readers, as I do, detest big government and collectivism. Yet since the advent of the Lincoln administration we have seen government grow into the swollen Leviathan we are saddled with today. And where the founders sought to give us “free and independent states” is anyone naive enough today as to think our states are free and independent? When you look at the bloated bureaucracy of the Biden (really Obama) Regime “freedom” is the absolute last word you can apply to it! They are working to deprive us of the last little shreds of freedom we may still cling to, and they know exactly what they are doing. Abe Lincoln would have loved Joe Biden. They are indeed kindred spirits.