I have always had tremendous respect for the Founders of this country. But if, as people claim today, they created a federal government which states and their citizens have no right to leave (i.e., via secession) then they deserve no respect -- because they fought a war to become free of the British crown, only to create a federal government with the same tyrannical hold on the states.
Now, see, I don't think they did that. The Declaration of Independence identifies the right of the people to alter or abolish their government and create one better suited to them as a right endowed by the Creator, and that government is supposed to secure. Not only that, secession is not listed among the powers prohibited to the states in the Constitution, and prohibiting secession is not listed among the powers delegated to the federal government.
They wanted their experiment in self-government to work, of course they did. But I don't believe they wanted that so much that they re-created the same tyrannical government, minus the monarch, as the one they'd fought so long and hard to be free of.
If they did, they were frauds, and we might as well have remained subjects of the crown. But the government they created is not -- or is not supposed to be, at least -- a prison for states that they must fight to be free of.
That means the people who portray the country as indivisible, and the Confederates as traitors, are the real frauds -- or, at best, mistaken. A federal republic you can't leave is a monarchy without a king. If this is not a monarchy minus the king, the states have the right to secede without being militarily invaded, laid waste, put under a military dictatorship, and held in economic peonage for several generations.
Here is how James Madison explained the New Constitution to Jefferson in a letter in 1787...
ReplyDeleteYou will herewith receive the result of the Convention, which continued its session till the 17th of September. I take the liberty of making some observations on the subject, which will help to make up a letter, if they should answer no other purpose.
It appeared to be the sincere and unanimous wish of the Convention to cherish and preserve the Union of the States. No proposition was made, no suggestion was thrown out, in favor of a partition of the Empire into two or more Confederacies.
It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States. A voluntary observance of the federal law by all the members could never be hoped for. A compulsive one could evidently never be reduced to practice, and if it could, involved equal calamities to the innocent and guilty, the necessity of a military force, both obnoxious and dangerous, and, in general, a scene resembling much more a civil war than the administration of a regular Government.
Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which, instead of operating on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them; and hence the change in the principle and proportion of representation.