Anyone who has ever participated in an online discussion forum knows that, sooner or later, all political debates are reduced to analogies of Hitler or Nazism. This self-evident fact of human existence is unofficially known as Godwin’s Law.

But for those of us who believe in the Constitution, specifically its Tenth Amendment and the spirit in which it was ratified, there is another law; one that says, sooner or later, all debates will be reduced to charges of intolerance, racism, or some variation on that theme. Call it DiLorenzo’s Law.

Ostensibly, these charges are leveled because “states’ rights” and the Tenth Amendment have been used in the past to justify gross violations of basic individual freedom and liberty. Which is absolutely true. From slavery to Jim Crow to poll taxes, there is no question that state governments in every part of the country have legislated in discriminatory and harmful ways against their own citizens.

But it is also important to realize that bad laws and regrettable history do not themselves discredit the decentralized, federalist structure of our Constitution. Rather, they are an indictment of bad government and its limitless potential for harm; prime examples of the injustice that inevitably results from arbitrary power.

Which is exactly why a strong Tenth Amendment remains so vital. It would be foolish to think we can trust the federal government to act in accordance with freedom at all times, any more than we can trust the governments of each state to do so. Just ask the Sioux and the Cherokee. Or Japanese-Americans in 1942.

The best protection for liberty is a stiff and dynamic political competition between the states, and between states and the federal government, that allows for ideas to flourish or die on their merits. In that way, Americans cannot ever become permanently trapped by authoritarianism at any level.

However, for such competition to exist, states must retain their power to act as sovereign political units. That includes the ability of voters to judge for themselves through their elected officials the constitutional limits of federal authority within a given state, nullifying those laws that exceed Congress’s enumerated powers. When, as is the case today, five justices on the Supreme Court are allowed to impose their expansive view of central authority on the entire country, they are just five federal foxes guarding a hen house of 300 million taxpayers.

That is why, in order to protect its citizens from federal usurpation, the ultimate tool of each sovereign state must be its power to leave the Union altogether. Without that power to withdraw their consent, voters are nothing more than human cash machines residing in administrative fiefdoms of the central government.

But try explaining a concept as basic as “consent of the governed” to the average statist, and you will almost certainly be told that America already settled this question in 1865.

Except force of arms cannot settle questions of natural law, it can only postpone them. Given that the Constitution itself was ratified as a voluntary contract between the states for their mutual benefit, with no Perpetuity Clause or binding third party arbitration, the citizens of the southern states (the vast majority of whom did not own slaves) were not only morally, but legally, justified when they chose to void their participation in 1861. (Maybe even more so than the original slave-owning colonists had been in their secession from Great Britain in 1776.)

And while a desire to preserve the system of chattel slavery clearly did play an important role in the South’s decision to secede, it is really a case of doing the right thing for the worst possible reasons. Only sheer ignorance or intellectual dishonesty would lead someone to claim that support for the legality of peaceful secession is still tantamount to support for slavery. (Ever heard of Quebec?) They are two completely separate issues.

But, rather than acknowledge his total lack of constitutional authority to prevent any state’s peaceful secession, potentially saving 600,000 American lives, President Lincoln “preserved” the formerly voluntary Union with the bloody force of his federal boot heel. And did lasting dictatorial violence to the very Constitution he had sworn to protect. It was not until later that history sought to hide these facts, ascribing to a cynical politician and inveterate racist the ironic moral camouflage of “Great Emancipator.”

It is due largely to the dichotomy between Lincoln’s words and his actions, and to the crucial distinction between secession’s legality and slavery’s injustice, that people still hold such conflicting opinions and beliefs regarding one of our nation’s most complex and painful eras. And why those who call for state sovereignty now often find themselves accused of racism, or in the awkward position of attempting to rationalize the inexcusable.

The truth is that the confusion on both sides is wholly unnecessary because American society has changed permanently, and for the better, since the days of Lincoln. Far from seeking to perpetuate a rigid class system or forced servitude, today’s New Federalists come in every skin color and desire only to be left alone by the federal government, to conduct their lives and businesses as they see fit.

They no more need to defend slavery or segregation to support state sovereignty than peaceful Muslims need to defend terrorism to support Islam.

Despite some disgusting perversions, the Tenth Amendment, indeed our entire Constitution, has always been fundamentally about maximizing individual freedom through the greatest possible decentralization of corruptible power. Just as no reasonable person today would condone enslaving another human being, so none of us could reasonably believe that power sufficient to coerce the obedience of 300 million people can ever be trusted in the hands of 537 self-serving politicians and nine unelected bureaucrats.

Before we can regain our national spirit of self-determination, Americans of all political stripes will have to better understand their own history, taking from it what is right and noble, while leaving behind what was not. Freedom is always a risk in the future, but it’s time we made peace with our past.

Josh is a proud “tenther”, freelance writer, and activist originally from the Washington, D.C. area.

If the federal government were trying to do something within a state that was unconstitutional, the state government could say – you have no jurisdiction to do something illegal within our state.

Nullification has a long history in the American tradition, and as Napolitano points out, it was used in Massachusetts to resist the abhorrent federal fugitive slave act in the 19th century.

There’s a strong nullification movement growing in the states today.

Learn more about it here:
http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/the-10th-amendment-movement/

One thing that consistently vexes me is the amount of time the modern statists, particularly on the Left, spend labeling the idea of decentralization and secession as “kooky.” The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 – if they have read them or know about them – are often portrayed as quaint and unsophisticated pronouncements of provincialism; the Essex Junto and Hartford Convention are called the products of deranged Northern madmen; Andrew Jackson, they say, was on the right side when he threatened the use of force to keep South Carolinian secessionists in line in 1832; and of course, they revel in the ultimate coup de grâce to states’ rights and secession, the Northern victory in the War for Southern Independence. Who could root for the evil, “undemocratic slave power” clad in butternut, anyway?

This would be well and good if their arguments were logical. They of course forget that the South seceded through a democratic process, but beyond that, one only has to look at the history of American socialists and reformers to find that many of them were secessionists and viewed decentralization as the logical path to their “utopian” society.

The case of the failed “utopian” experiment Brook Farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts nicely illustrates how convoluted the Leftist argument against secession has become.

Brook Farm was established by George Ripley and his wife, Sophia, in 1841. They were transcendentalists who believed in the socialist ideology of Frenchman Charles Fourier, the intellectual progenitor of modern feminism. The Ripley’s devised an autonomous community that emphasized a communal lifestyle in the pursuit of leisure.

Every resident was to share equally in the task of growing products for market in order to maximize the time each individual could spend at leisure and learning. Sophia Ripley also ran the communal school. What they found is that most preferred leisure to work and a handful of the residents kept the rest afloat. Part of the commune ultimately burned down, and the Brook Farm “closed” in 1847.

But Brook Farm illustrated how socialist utopians viewed secession, or the removal from society, as the best means to practice their societal values. Fourier ultimately believed that no more than 1600 people should be involved in a single commune and each commune would be autonomous with only a loose confederation to oversee the entire process. In other words, there was very little large-scale centralization and tremendous decentralization, which they rightly viewed as the most democratic method of government.

Additionally, abolitionists consistently called for secession during the 1840s and 1850s. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, demanded an end to the Union in 1843. Henry David Thoreau simply seceded from society at Walden Pond. Other “reform” communities in New York’s “burnt over” district sought the protection secession offered for their way of life. Secession need not come from an established political entity to exist in fact. These groups in many ways viewed themselves as autonomous and democratic societies operating in disobedience of laws they considered unjust.

John Noyes and many of his followers were eventually run out of Oneida, New York for partaking in group marriage, a practice that violated the moral sensibilities of the rest of the state, but something the community believed was perfectly justifiable and natural. By flaunting their independent religious community and thumbing their nose at the state government, the Oneida community ultimately practiced a form of de facto secession from New York.

The same could be said for many individuals who headed west in the nineteenth century. Several towns operated outside the limits of the law, and federal or state power was often non-existent. “Boom towns” often exemplified the anything-goes spirit of the West, though in time churches, banks, schools, and other civilizing entities would show up. Even then, things remained fairly “rough” as long as the gold and silver kept pouring out of the mines.

These were virtually independent communities and many of the people who resided there were interested in evading government for one reason or another. The West offered anonymity and protection from government abuse. The Mormons, who headed to Utah after being kicked out of Illinois, chose the West for that very reason and ultimately went to war with the United States – and threatened secession – after they were placed under the federal heel. But in spirit, they were already independent and had their own laws and government in place.

These were not “right wing” groups by modern standards, particularly the “reform” communes in New York and Massachusetts, but they understood that decentralization offered a hedge against alien threats to their society and lifestyle. Thomas Naylor of Vermont, hardly a “right winger,” has been trumpeting the idea of an independent Vermont for almost a decade.

He has recognized that the lifestyle Vermont citizens want to enjoy will be consistently retarded by imperial bureaucrats in Washington D.C. This only makes sense. If Californians, for example, want universal health care, have at it, but don’t expect the people of Alabama to pay for it. If New York wants to severely curtail private gun ownership, go for it, but don’t subject the people of Georgia to the same loss of civil liberty. That is how federalism should work and is how the founding generation designed it to work.

Leftists would do well to remember that their complaints about a slow and unresponsive federal government could be solved by decentralization. They have more control over state and local governments and could implement their utopian vision of an egalitarian society more quickly and easily. And, if you don’t like where you live, you can always move to a more suitable republic of your choice. There would be plenty of “conservative” and “liberal” republics to choose from in North America.

Of course, as we all know, modern state socialism is an ideology of power, money, and statism, which is why its “champions” at the federal level, the “progressives,” will never allow decentralization to infiltrate their political vocabulary; however, if enough Americans could be rightly persuaded that Washington is not the answer, either for “conservative” or “liberal” causes, then maybe the people would be willing to part ways and allow the Left to dominate the Northeast and West Coast and the Right to control the South and Mountain States.

This is a peaceful, just, and democratic solution to a centuries-old problem. Let the people of each sovereign state decide their own fate. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1801, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Brion McClanahan [send him mail] received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of South Carolina and is a History Professor at Chattahoochee Valley Community College in Phenix City, Alabama. He is the author of Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (Regnery, 2009).

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry said last month that his state had the right to secede from the United States, liberals scoffed, laughing at the mere suggestion.

When polls showed that one third of Texans believed in the right of secession, one liberal blogger said it was further proof of “just how whacked out Republicans are becoming during these days of their political exile.”

When various states introduced sovereignty resolutions, including South Carolina and Oklahoma, liberals considered it childish posturing; the Charleston City Paper’s Greg Hambrick wrote, S.C.’s legislature was just “stomping their feet in dissatisfaction” with the Obama administration.

For many, the question of American secession was settled once-and-for-all by Abraham Lincoln’s military victory against the South. Not so, writes Kirkpatrick Sale, author and director of the Mulberry Institute, a pro-secession think tank: “Of course, it is true that the particular secession of 1861-65 did not succeed, but that didn’t make it illegal or even unwise. It made it a failure, that’s all. The victory by a superior military might is not the same thing as the creation of a superior constitutional right.”

Sale raises a good point. If the Founding Fathers had lost the American Revolution to Great Britain, would the colonial’s quest to secede from England have been decided forever, all because of a military loss? The idea that the U.S. could still be an outpost of the British Empire is one that many today would find as laughable as some find secession.

Consider the secessionist movements around the world the U.S. has supported in just the last few decades. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and its 15 satellite nations declared their independence, America cheered. Our military intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s found the U.S. on the side of the Albanian secessionists. On the American Left, support for Tibet’s secession from China remains a popular cause célèbre.

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Can states secede? There are three levels on which this question can be answered:

1. the inalienable right of secession,
2. the international law of secession, and
3. the US law of secession.All three say yes.

The Inalienable Right of Secession

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America invokes the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that governments are formed to protect these rights and gain their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government becomes abusive of these rights, it is the right — no, it is the duty — of the people to alter or abolish that government.

To say governments were formed to protect the rights of men would be historically incorrect. Almost all governments were formed by ruthless men exerting their will over others through the use of force. Some governments, over time, evolved toward the rule of law, perhaps only because their rulers saw that this would sanction their own continued enjoyment of the wealth that they possessed. In some instances, this evolution involved one or more “revolutions” in which those who were governed were able to better establish the rule of law.

The language of the Declaration should not be construed as an argument about the historical origins of government but, rather, as what would be true and just to an enlightened person, namely, that as persons and as communities of persons, we have the right and the duty to alter or abolish governments that become abusive of our rights. As Benjamin Franklin once put it, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

The concept of an inalienable right of secession was not original to the American Revolution. It can be traced to the scholastics, to Reformation politics, and to the most ancient Greek and Hebrew writings. Without going into a dissertation on the subject, let me simply point to the flag of the state of Virginia, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson. It depicts a female warrior (Athena) standing atop a slain tyrant (Zeus).

According to legend, Zeus, the greatest and most terrible of the gods, was supposed to be the god of law, yet he was himself lawless. When he heard that he would sire a child who would destroy him, he swallowed his wife whole to prevent it. But the child grew within him and then burst from him fully grown. This child was Athena, the goddess of victory, liberty, and peace. And, she did indeed slay her father. It should be easy to see, in this legend, how the rule of law might be established from a government formed through the use of force.

Now, does a massive increase in taxes, in spending, and in the federal deficit constitute such an abuse of the rights of men as to justify secession under the doctrine of an inherent right to secede? I don’t think so. Ask me about the inherent right to secede when the government starts to restrict our freedom of speech, to shut down the independent media, to confiscate our guns, and to take away our children.

The International Law of Secession

The international law of secession is in the process of emerging at this very time. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights indicates that all people have the right to a country. A corollary of this is that no people should long be kept in nationless status, e.g., the Palestinians. A further corollary of this is that no people should long be kept in any subjugated status, such as by being citizens or subjects of a country from which they are alienated.

Now, as a practical matter, consideration has to be given to whether an identifiable people exist in an identifiable place. At least, this is the current thinking. But, if these several elements come together: an identifiable people in an identifiable place that grouse under the subjugation of the larger nation, there is a growing consensus that this people and place can be severed from the larger nation, even by rebellion and with support from outside the larger nation. East Timor, Eritrea, and the devolutions of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (including the ongoing situation in Kosovo) illustrate the development of the international law of secession.

Turning to the United States, it is now well established that the country consists of so many “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democrat) states, along with a few “purple” (battleground) states. Even in a so-called landslide, like 2008, only a few states “flip” from Republican to Democrat, and these states go from close Republican to close Democrat. Furthermore, the whole purpose of elections has become to decide whether Democrats get to raise taxes on Republicans while adjusting the Alternative Minimum Tax so as to minimize the impact on themselves, and whether Democrats get to force acceptance of gay marriage onto Republicans or whether Republicans get to force unwanted pregnancies onto Democrats. In other words, there no longer is any pretense of federalism in which domestic policy is left to the states of the Union.

Under these conditions, it can be argued that, were either party to fall into permanent minority status, and the other party to establish hegemonic control over the so-called federal government, the people in the other party could be said to be an alienated, identifiable people in an identifiable place, and could assert a right to secede under emerging international law.

The argument for secession under emerging international law might be strongest for Alaska. Geographically, the place is disjoint from the other states of the Union, making it an identifiable place. Furthermore, under their state constitution’s explicit right of privacy, possession of small amounts of marijuana is a right; yet, the so-called federal government imposes the costs of its war on drugs onto the citizens of Alaska.

Furthermore, the people of Alaska have been long frustrated in developing their natural resources because of the opposition by majorities in the “lower 48.” Indeed, as a separate nation, Alaska might be the freest place in the world, with zero taxes because of its wealth in natural resources, well-established civil liberties, and a socially tolerant, live-and-let-live attitude among its people.

Following Alaska, states such as Florida and Texas would have the next best arguments for secession under international law, since they are themselves on a seacoast and their secession would not much disrupt the road, transmission wire, pipeline or other infrastructure networks of the other states.

States such as Utah and Kentucky, being landlocked “enclaves,” would have a relatively weak argument. On the other hand, it would be relatively easy for these states to join with other states that have already seceded or are in the process of seceding, and form a patchwork of independent republics that develop compacts to facilitate interstate travel, commerce, water flow, transmission of electricity, and so forth.

US Law of Secession

The US law of secession is thought to have been decided by the US Supreme Court in White v. Texas, following the Civil War. The actual matter to be decided was relatively insignificant. The Court used the occasion to issue a very broad decision. Chief Justice Chase, speaking for the Court, said,

The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

Notice that the second sentence appears to totally contradict the first sentence.

The first sentence I just quoted invokes words such as “perpetual,” and in so doing may create the impression that the Supreme Court decreed that no state could ever secede from the Union. But, on careful reading, the relationship between Texas and the other states of the Union is merely “as indissoluble as the union between the original States.” In other words, Texas, having been a nonoriginal state, has no greater right of secession than do the original states. As to how states might secede, the second sentence says, “through revolution or through consent of the States.”

As to why a state might secede, either through revolution or through consent, Chief Justice Chase presciently discusses the 9th and 10th Amendments to the US Constitution, which reserve to the states and to the people thereof all powers not expressly granted to the federal government, and that the design of the Union, implicit in the very name “United States,” is the preservation of the states as well as of the Union:

the preservation of the States, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government.

The so-called United States of America ceases to exist when the political majority of the country attempts to rule the entire country as a nation instead of as a federal government. In such a circumstance, the “indestructible union of indestructible states” of which the Court speaks is already dissolved.

As to whether “Texas” continued as a state and, furthermore, as a state of the United States during the period of rebellion, the Court made clear that it continued as both although certain rights that normally accrue to states of the United States fell into suspension. Presumably, if Texas had seceded “with the consent of the States,” Texas would have been able to free itself from the Union described as the “United States,” and could have considered joining into another Union described as the “Confederate States.”

Also presumably, if the Confederate States of America had been able to impose their will onto the other states of the United States through force or had been able to induce the other states to consent, Texas and the other states of the Confederate States could have seceded from one Union and joined into another. But, the outcomes of wars are problematic.

How Do “the States” Consent to Secession?

The wide-ranging discussion of the Court in White v. Texas contains a lot of intriguing and obtuse comments. How, for example, do “the States” give consent to the secession of a state? The Constitution, as the Court says, does not envision such a thing, and does not provide a process. What if the legislatures of “the States” sent delegates to a convention that drafted a constitution for a more perfect union, which would take effect for those states that ratified it, providing that at least a two-thirds majority of them did so? For those who were not homeschooled, it may be necessary to point out that this was the process through which the Constitution of 1789 was created and through which eleven states seceded from the union provided by the Articles of Confederation, leaving Rhode Island and North Carolina as the only two states in that prior union. (Those two states eventually also seceded from the prior union, thereupon making it a nullity, and joined into the new union.)

While the Constitution of 1789 required the secession of 9 out of 13 states, does this mean that a supermajority of the states would be necessary for consent? It seems to me that a supermajority would not be necessary, but only a simple majority, for a US version of what is called the “Velvet Revolution” in the former Czechoslovakia, now the Czech and Slovak Republics. In that country, dissolution involved nothing more earth shattering than a bunch of accountants who scurried about the country, totting up the value of the assets of the national government that would fall into the possession of each succeeding government so as to determine how to fairly apportion the national debt to the succeeding governments. Of course, in that case, both succeeding governments transitioned to membership in the European Union, guaranteeing the free flow of goods, labor and capital between them and the other members of the E.U., as well as guaranteeing certain civil liberties and democratic processes to the persons in each of the succeeding republics.

Looking at the electoral maps of the United States of recent presidential elections, it appears that the potentially disaffected red states of a socially liberal, economically socialist blue nation constitute a nearly compact, self-contained block from the southeast coast to the Rocky Mountain west, plus Alaska. Indiana and Ohio appear as two purple states jutting into an otherwise blue Great Lakes region.

New Hampshire is a purple state in a deeply blue New England (but, being a coastline state, it would not matter much that it was not connected by land to other breakaway states). Contrariwise, Colorado and New Mexico are two purple or blue states in the Rocky Mountain region that might wind up as enclaves of Old America amidst the independent republics of New America.

Of course, once it becomes clear that a majority of the states — and specifically those that are the most productive — are seceding, the remaining states of Old America will have to consider their options. Would they want to bail out the corporations, the unionized public-school teachers, municipal workers, and the UAW, and the bankrupt states of California and New Jersey, among others, when the burden falls much more heavily onto them?

A state like Minnesota, with a solid work ethic, which tends to vote Democratic in presidential elections, might think it could do better with New America than with the moochers of Old America. Even Iowa, where they bury farmers only three feet deep nowadays, so they can still get their hand out, will have to weigh the pros of the ethanol subsidies they receive versus the cons of the taxes they will have to pay to subsidize everybody else. Possibly, once the rush gets underway, the only “state” that will be left in Old America will be the District of Columbia.

Clifford F. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Chair of Free Enterprise at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA. Send him mail. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.

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“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi

All the mainstream news outlets are laughing at the secession sentiment across the nation, so brace yourself. There are over eight state sovereignty resolutions floating about under the rubric of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in addition to nearly twenty pending resolutions in other states. The DC embrace of Obamunism is frightening plenty of folks to include state legislators and driving Montana to kick the ATF out of the state in a landmark move to completely ignore the unconstitutional and hoplophobic notions of our rulers in Mordor on the Potomac when it comes to the keeping and bearing of weapons.

Secession has been broached in polite conversation by the Governor of Texas, no less. It is not as if the notion is new since the unfortunate victory of Union/Yankee forces in 1865. New England threatened it decades before Lincoln’s War and the Great Depression spawned a variety of secessionist discontents.

We don’t have to be embarrassed by the notion of secession. We are a nation birthed in divorce from a tyrannical Crown and the Second American Revolution popularly known as the Civil War. Lincoln’s Jacobins won that fight but we don’t have to suffer that forever nor yield them a high ground of virtue.

The esteemed Donald Livingston avers:

“As part of expanding this imagination, we must work to remove the moral and philosophical prejudice against the very idea of secession. America was born in secession; secession is essential to the idea of a self-governing people; and until 1865 was widely considered an option available to an American state in all parts of the union. But secession short of national sovereignty is also possible. Parts of cities and counties may secede. A part of a state may secede and form another state as twenty-seven counties in northern California proposed to do in 1992. The mere discussion of the merits of such proposals, whether or not they succeed, will serve to detoxify the idea of secession and re-awaken in Americans the long slumbering notion of self-government induced by the opiate of the Lincolnian ideology of a modern unitary American state.”

For the first time in generations, secession can be a topic of polite conversation albeit slightly odd. We need to capitalize on this and shake Americans out of the government supremacist fever dream that has gripped these united States since the woeful conclusion of the Second American Revolution.

A number of readers have written and inquired after a basic canon of reading to reinforce the intellectual gunships of our minds for the coming fight. I have made a number of book recommendations throughout my essays and these will be new additions. I am purposefully suggesting the more arcane or unknown tomes because many writers before me have provided ample lists or annotated bibliographies. Consider this an introductory sampling to whet your insurrectionist taste buds.

First and foremost, the number one imprint in my mind for these books is Liberty Fund. I have been collecting their books for nearly two decades and the offerings are huge and may consume a lifetime of reading pleasure and exploration in the mental forests of liberty and freedom. Tall timber indeed. Start with Cato’s Letters by Trenchard and Gordon loosely credited with providing tremendous impetus to the First American Revolution. They are lyrical, witty and eminently readable despite their eighteenth-century pedigree. In Cato Number 15 (1720), to wit:

“Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers, and encourages men of fine genius. Tacitus tells us, that the Roman commonwealth bred great and numerous authors, who writ with equal boldness and eloquence: But when it was enslaved, those great wits were no more.”

Next, I would suggest Hyneman and Lutz’ American Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760–1805. Worth every penny just to read the stirring Noah Webster entry, “An Oration on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” (1802). Take a gander at the selections available at Liberty Fund and you will find plenty of other books which speak to the issues of today despite their antiquarian vintage. There is a reason the Founders bridged back to the Greco/Roman epochs for their primary inspirations.

Now for the real intellectual heavy lifting. Start a liberty reading group and get together over adult beverages to discuss these. Look for a copy of the Anti-Federalist Papers and absorb these documents. They speak more to the libertarian mindset than the oft-quoted Hamiltonian articles and essays in the Federalist Papers.

The next volume would be a modest but important tome called Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism, 1827–1908 by James J. Martin. Martin rivals Harry Elmer Barnes as one of the most important historical revisionist influences in American letters and a bracing writer at that. He explores a relatively unheralded fight by the embryonic state resisters in the nineteenth century after the initial hopes of limited government are dashed against the rocks of statism. Martin’s books provides a wonderful introduction to the man I consider the giant of liberty in the nineteenth century, Lysander Spooner. Lawyer, abolitionist and fiery polemicist, Spooner was prolific and devastating in his critiques of the state and its predations. Spooner’s No Treason is the first stop but you will find his reasoning irresistible to pursue. In a letter to Grover Cleveland (one of my favorite Presidents), he comments on his Inaugural Speech:

“Sir, if a government is to “do equal and exact justice to all men,” it must do simply that, and nothing more. If it does more than that to any, – that is, if it gives monopolies, privileges, exemptions, bounties, or favors to any, – it can do so only by doing injustice to more or less others. It can give to one only what it takes from others; for it has nothing of its own to give to any one. The best that it can do for all, and the only honest thing it can do for any, is simply to secure to each and every one his own rights, – the rights that nature gave him, – his rights of person, and his rights of property; leaving him, then, to pursue his own interests, and secure his own welfare, by the free and full exercise of his own powers of body and mind; so long as he trespasses upon the equal rights of no other person.”

We move on to the trenchant critiques of the War of Northern Aggression of which Charles Adams is the first stop in his magisterial When in the Course of Human Events. I can recommend no more accessible and informative read for the layman than this treatise on why secession was not only justified but an imperative for survival of the Southron culture and people at the time. I eagerly await his anticipated volume on the exchanges between John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens as the latter manned the gunwales to mount a withering defense of the Confederacy in the London papers. There is an entire cottage industry on Confederate apologia available as evidenced by the King Lincoln archives on LRC. In addition, both of DiLorenzo’s books on Lincoln are excellent resources.

I find the twentieth century is chock-full of courageous writers who speak to the individualist/non-interventionist strain of political philosophy to draw intellectual armament for the secession fight here and now. Whether it is Mencken, Nock or Chodorov; they are a sampling of the vast pool of knowledge presently in the memory hole which will lead us out of our present regrettable circumstances as a nation.

I would recommend the entire canon of my friend, Kirkpatrick Sale, leading sage of the Middlebury Institute and a keen advocate of secession. I also consider Gore Vidal’s canon to be an almost seamless narrative education in historical fiction on why the American Leviathan was destined to become the monster it is. I actually consider Vidal the keenest novelist in the twentieth century. And lastly, I would offer the fascinating ruminations of Bill Kaufmann, the iconoclastic author of Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals, an excellent writer who offers some savvy observations on America’s historical flirtation with localism and decentralist tendencies.

This list is not comprehensive by any stretch and I am sure more recommendations will follow in the future. I have arranged the books in a relatively chronological order for simplicity’s sake. America has been the most nourishing soil for individualism in the West since the Hellenic world. Individualism and the state don’t mix. The scales are falling away. Eyes front, the fight is ahead of us. Tom Paine would be proud.

“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, it we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”
- Samuel Adams, article published in 1771

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry rattled cages when he suggested that Texans might at some point become so disgusted with Washington’s gross violation of the U.S. Constitution that they would want to secede from the union. Political hustlers, their media allies and others, who have little understanding, are calling his remarks treasonous. Let’s look at it.

When New York delegates met on July 26, 1788, their ratification document read, “That the Powers of Government may be resumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary to their Happiness; that every Power, Jurisdiction and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the departments of the government thereof, remains to the People of the several States, or to their respective State Governments to whom they may have granted the same.”

On May 29, 1790, the Rhode Island delegates made a similar claim in their ratification document. “That the powers of government may be resumed by the people, whensoever it shall become necessary to their happiness: That the rights of the States respectively to nominate and appoint all State Officers, and every other power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by the said constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States or to the departments of government thereof, remain to the people of the several states, or their respective State Governments to whom they may have granted the same.”

On June 26, 1788, Virginia’s elected delegates met to ratify the Constitution. In their ratification document, they said, “The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will.”

As demonstrated by the ratification documents of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, they made it explicit that if the federal government perverted the delegated rights, they had the right to resume those rights. In fact, when the Union was being formed, where the states created the federal government, every state thought they had a right to secede otherwise there would not have been a Union.

Perry is right when he says that there is no reason for Texas to secede. There are indeed intermediate actions short of secession that states can take. Thomas Jefferson said, “Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

That suggests that one response to federal encroachment is for state governments to declare federal laws that have no constitutional authority null and void and refuse to enforce them.

While the U.S. Constitution does not provide a specific provision for nullification, the case for nullification is found in the nature of compacts and agreements. Our Constitution represents a compact between the states and the federal government.

As with any compact, one party does not have a monopoly over its interpretation, nor can one party change it without the consent of the other. Additionally, no one has a moral obligation to obey unconstitutional laws. That’s not to say there is not a compelling case for obedience of unconstitutional laws. That compelling case is the brute force of the federal government to coerce obedience, possibly going as far as using its military might to lay waste to a disobedient state and its peoples.

Finally, here’s my secession question for you. Some Americans accept and have respect for the Tenth Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Other Americans, the majority I fear, say to hell with the Tenth Amendment limits on the federal government. Which is a more peaceful solution: one group of Americans seeking to impose their vision on others or simply parting company?

Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master’s degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

It only took the Obama administration a couple of weeks to prove that the national leadership of the Democratic Party is guided by totalitarian-minded socialists who seek to create an omnipotent government. The U.S. government is now controlled by people who have been dreaming of living out their utopian socialist fantasies ever since the fantasies were brought to their attention in college decades ago by their Mao/Castro/Che Guevara poster-hanging, capitalism-hating, communistic professors.

The administration’s main agenda is an explosion of federal spending and debt so large and outrageous that America will soon exceed Sweden in the proportion of the economy that is controlled by government – if it hasn’t already. That’s just for starters. They also want to sharply increase taxes on the most productive and hardest-working people in society; increase the capital gains tax to deter private investment; expand the welfare state; spend trillions on pure, pork barrel spending in a massive vote-buying spree; set all corporate compensation levels by governmental fiat; tax away the wealth of unpopular business people (only starting with those AIG executives); regulate and control all risk taking by private entrepreneurs; enforce a civilian draft to create a modern-day, American version of the Hitler Youth (See Rahm Emanuel’s creepy, Stalinist-sounding book entitled The Plan); nationalize entire industries, starting with the capital markets (they understand that there can be no capitalism without private capital markets); and double, triple, and quadruple the number of “regulators” who already regulate all aspects of human life in America.

At the recent G-20 meeting Obama even signed off on the creation of an international regulatory “authority” that could set compensation policies in American corporations. On top of this, there is a never-ending drumbeat of anti-capitalist propaganda coming from the administration and its worshipful mouthpieces in the “mainstream media.”

What can be done? How can this rush toward totalitarian socialism be stopped? Will the Republicans find another old, angry geezer to appeal to the angry white male vote? How about another mumbling and incompetent Bush family heir? Will there be another Reagan who will talk libertarian while governing more like a European Social Democrat? Will they trot out another old “war hero” who will plunge us into war with Iran, North Korea, China, or whomever, to divert our attention away from the economic mess government has placed us in? These are the likely alternatives if we cling to the fantasy that “throwing the bums out” at election time leads to something other than another group of slightly different bums.

The fact is that the American people have been servants or slaves to their government for generations. It wasn’t always that way. When the Adams administration enforced the Sedition Act that made criticism of the federal government illegal, Jefferson and Madison responded with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798 that clearly stated that the people did not intend to allow the enforcement of this unconstitutional law within those two states. Section One of Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve stated, for example, that “the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government . . .” Other states supported Jefferson and Madison in their defense of free speech.

When President Thomas Jefferson imposed a national trade embargo and consummated the Louisiana Purchase, New Englanders, led by George Washington’s Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, loudly threatened to secede. They decided against it (for practical economic and political reasons) at the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, but their actions sent a clear message to national politicians.

Outraged by the embargo, the Massachusetts legislature used the language of Jefferson’s own Kentucky Resolve to proclaim that the embargo “was not legally binding on the citizens of the state” while denouncing the federal law as “unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional” and reminding President Jefferson that “this state maintains its sovereignty and independence . . .” All the New England states, plus Delaware, did the exact same thing and nullified the embargo.

When Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, a precursor to the Fed, created 72 percent inflation in the first five years of its existence and corrupted politics with its politicized spending policies, citizens all over the country assisted President Andrew Jackson in eventually destroying the institution. The heroic Ohio legislature slapped a $50,000/year tax on each branch of the BUS, attempting to drive it out of business. “The states have an equal right to interpret the Constitution for themselves,” announced the Ohio legislature, and it decided that the BUS was not constitutional. Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, South Carolina, New York, and New Hampshire followed suit.

When the War of 1812 broke out the New England states effectively seceded from the union by refusing to participate. A proclamation by the Connecticut legislature was representative of the opinions of New Englanders: “[I]t must not be forgotten that the state of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic,” and that it was refusing to support the war.

When the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” created an average tariff rate of 45%, applying mostly to Northern manufactured goods, South Carolinians clearly understood that this was a pure act of political plunder at their expense. They convened a political convention to utilize the Jeffersonian idea of nullification and refused to collect the tariff. They even got the South Carolina legislature to allocate $160,000 for the purchase of firearms with which to fend off any would-be federal tax collectors. The result was that they forced the federal government to lower the tariff rate.

During the 1850s the “middle states” of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey developed a very active secession movement that sought to either join a Southern confederacy, form a middle-states confederacy, or support Southern secession. (See The Secession Movement in the Middle States by William C. Wright). Their overriding desire was to separate themselves from the imperious New England Yankees.

When the Southern states seceded in 1860–61, Abraham Lincoln pledged his everlasting support for Southern slavery in his first inaugural address, an address in which he endorsed a constitutional amendment (the “Corwin Amendment”) that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. In the same speech he promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in any Southern state that ceased paying his beloved tariff on imports which, at the time, accounted for more than 90% of federal tax revenue. The average tariff rate had just been doubled by the Republican-controlled Congress.

The Southern states, along with most people in the North, still held the Jeffersonian belief that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when that consent is withdrawn the citizens have a duty to abolish the existing government and form a new one. Jefferson never wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the citizens have a duty to abolish the government and form a new one “as long as the other states all agree that you may do so.” If the right of secession depends on someone else’s permission, then one does not have a right of secession. That was a fantasy invented by Lincoln, which he used to “justify” waging total war on his own country, murdering some 350,000 American citizens, including some 50,000 civilians. From that time on, government in America was no longer “for the people, by the people, of the people,” as Chief Justice John Marshal once said in a phrase that was later plagiarized by Lincoln. From that time on the purpose of government has been for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Nullification and secession were no longer tools with which the citizens could control their own government.

The final nails in the coffin of government by consent were pounded in during the year 1913 with the advent of the federal income tax, the creation of the Fed, and the Seventeenth Amendment calling for the direct election of U.S. senators. The income tax and the Fed gave the federal government the ability to do whatever it wanted to do regardless of the Constitution – even to wage “undeclared” wars. These vast “riches” were used to make millions of Americans totally subservient to the state lest they lose their tiny government subsidies, and to bribe or threaten state governments to do whatever our masters in Washington, D.C. decree, lest they lose their cherished federal highway grants. The ability of the citizens to oppose the federal Leviathan by organizing political communities at the state and local levels was finally destroyed and the centralized, monopolistic bureaucracy that rules America and much of the rest of the world today was created.

The direct election of U.S. senators, as opposed to the original system of having them appointed by state legislature, ended popular control of the federal government. Today, candidates for the senate go to New York, California, China, or wherever the big money is that can be raised as “campaign contributions” to finance their political careers. The interests of such “contributors” are not necessarily congruent with those of the folks back home.

If American citizens are to resist the rush to Obammunism they must first give up on the fantasy that the Republican Party is anything but another cabal of crooks, conmen and clowns, just like the Democratic Party. The only realistic route to freedom, including a restoration of genuine free enterprise, is through the devolution of power away from Washington, D.C. via peaceful secession and nullification, the original American ideals.

Thomas Jefferson understood that democracy could never work in a country as large as the U.S., let alone one with more than 300 million people. In a January 29, 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly he wrote: “Whether we remain one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern.” On the topic of secession, Jefferson continued: “[D]id I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.” When the New England Federalists were threatening secession, Jefferson wrote to his friend John C. Breckinridge on August 12, 1803 that if New England seceded and created a second confederacy, “God bless them both if it be for their good, but separate them, if it is better.”

Unlike Lincoln, Jefferson did not believe in threatening “bloodshed” in the case of a “separation” or secession. He understood that such behavior would be a moral abomination and an unimaginable act of barbarianism. A civilized society does not wage total war on “our children,” as Jefferson described the future citizens of a new state formed by an act of secession. Yet it is Lincoln, not Jefferson, who is portrayed by American court historians as a kindly, benevolent, and charitable angel.

The Constitution long ago ceased placing any meaningful limits on governmental power. This social contract between the American people and their government was destroyed long ago by Hamiltonian nationalists. Americans now live under a series of dictators (called “presidents”) who all believe that they are essentially dictators of the world, capable of ordering the bombing of any place on earth without anyone’s approval. (Within weeks, Obama dipped his hands in blood by ordering a few bombs to be dropped in Pakistan).

As of this writing, several dozen states have reportedly issued resolutions in support of the Jeffersonian principle of nullification. These will all be completely meaningless unless the American public has the fortitude to actually enforce the resolutions and begin ignoring any and all federal government actions that they interpret as unconstitutional and illegitimate. In addition, citizens of every state should learn about the Second Vermont Republic which, for several years now, has been laying the groundwork for Vermont to secede and once again become an free and independent republic, just as all the states thought of themselves as being prior to 1865.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.