You Didn’t Secede–You Only Thought You Did

In his convoluted thinking, Abraham Lincoln stated that the Union was much older than the Constitution. It was formed, so Lincoln claimed, by the Articles of Association in 1774. Now historians have noted that this association of the colonies before the Articles of Confederation were adopted was a body that could only suggest certain courses of action, none of which had the force of law. However, such minor political inconveniences as that made no difference to Lincoln. As far as he was concerned it was all “the Union” even though only his ethereal vision of it existed in his mind before the documents that founded the Union even existed. Walter Kennedy and I noted this in our book Lincoln’s Marxists.

In other words, in Lincoln’s thought processes, the Union existed before it existed. And it was based on such faulty thinking that the lives of 700,000 people were forfeited during the War Between the States.

Sad to say, these set in concrete thought processes seemed to be a rather strong tack in the Yankee/Marxist mindset. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, seemed to lean in this same direction in his view of the Union. John Niven, in his book Salmon P. Chase–A Biography has noted: “Had the Confederate States by their secession from the Union given up their former identity, as Sumner, Stevens and other radical politicians argued? If they had, then it would logically follow that secession was a lawful act and the Union had existed only at the sufferance of the states, an argument Lincoln dismissed as an abstraction.”

It has been argued by some that the South never really understood the Union. At least they never understood it in the way the Yankee did. Had they truly done so, I would submit that the Southern states never should have ratified the Constitution to begin with. Patrick Henry warned his fellow Virginians with common sense arguments against ratification.

Whatever else he did, Chase was, apparently, more than ready to accept broader, sweeping powers for the federal government. In 1866 he observed: “That the war had changed the government and the powers of government were essentially different from what they were before the war.” Now there was an understatement if ever there was one! Yet it was a revelation as well. He told you, right flat out, that the war gave the federal government more and expanded powers–probably not constitutional ones–but not to worry, Chase’s Supreme Court would remedy that thorny little problem. So, Chase ended up in the same vein that Lincoln had–the Union existed before the states and was indestructible and irrevocable. And once you were in, you were stuck there–even if you seceded–in fact you never really seceded–you only thought you did. Of course, then, to get back into this Union you had never really been out of, you had to ratify certain questionable constitutional amendments. At this point, the “logic” of the Yankee/Marxist defies description!

Where did those people get their delusions of an “indestructible Union?” When the delegates assembled in Philadelphia in 1787, they were supposed to amend the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they gave us a whole new government and, in so doing, they had to secede from the Articles of Confederation to give us that new government. The new constitution did not employ the words “perpetual union” and the new document did not forbid secession.

When the New England states sent delegates to Hartford, Connecticut in 1814 to consider New England’s secession from the union no one said anything. Admittedly they ended up not seceding, but they were strongly considering it, else they would not have met in Hartford. In those days you didn’t take trips like that just to schmooze politically. So why was it okay for New England to consider secession in 1814, but so horrendous and rebellious for the Deep South to consider it in 1861? Was there just a slight double standard here? Or could it have had something to do with the fact that the Southern states provided the entire country with 85% of the tariff payments? The South was the nation’s cash cow and all the rest of the states benefitted because the South was there to foot the tariff payments. If the South left, what would the rest do? They’d have to pay their own way–heaven forbid!

Contrary to Chase’s and Lincoln’s “indestructible Union” Professor Donald W. Livingston wrote in Secession, State & Liberty that “There was a time, however, when talk about secession was a part of American politics. Indeed, the very concept of secession and self-determination of peoples, in the form being discussed today, is largely an American invention. It is no exaggeration to say that the unique contribution of the eighteenth-century American Enlightenment is not federalism but the principle that a people, under certain conditions, have a moral right to secede from an established political authority and to govern themselves.” Livingston further wrote: “The Constitution of the United States was founded as a federative compact between the states, marking out the authority of a central government, having enumerated powers delegated to it by sovereign states which reserved for themselves the vast domain of unenumerated powers. By an act of philosophical alchemy, the Lincoln tradition has transmuted this essentially federative document into a consolidated nationalist regime, and in this version, the reserved powers of the states vanish, and the states themselves are transformed into resources for and administrative units of a nationalist political project.” And that’s where we find ourselves today, thanks to the views of those like Lincoln and Chase, who, in a political sense, “Changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1).

The Southern states, and some Northern ones, always considered the Constitution to be a compact between sovereign states. Had it been understood by them as anything but that, it is highly doubtful that many of these states a mere thirteen years after the end of our War for Independence, would have entangled themselves within the clutches of an indissoluble union from which they could never withdraw. The Declaration of Independence had, after all, been a secession document.

If the Constitution is looked to as a document that formed an indestructible union, then the states that ratified it have been lied to–sold a bill of goods, bought a political gold brick as it were. But the gold brick may well turn out to be iron–the iron to forge the chains of those states that may finally realize they have been lied to and want out.

This is a little food for thought as we look at a Biden/Obama Regime in Washington that is trying to run every aspect of our lives, including all those aspects they have no business messing with in any form, no matter what they claim. So, let’s think about it.