I have found the Opinionator/Disunion blog to be a fascinating source for information from the period of the civil war. It is described as:
*Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period – using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded. *
Once the state leaves the Union, the Constitution is no longer valid in that state. Your points would only be valid if the state stayed in the union and tried to switch to an unconstitutional form of government.
Nope; you can’t have it both ways (claiming that the Constitution allows secession and that the Constitution is irrelevant to a seceding state).
(The actual answer is (b) – the Constitution is irrelevant to a seceding state because the only way a state can secede is to successfully fight off the Federal government’s attempt to put down its insurrection. Inter arma enim silent leges.)
WillFarnaby, you still haven’t established at all that the right/power to secede for all states (or even any state) lies with the state as opposed to the people. If no state constitution currently claims this right, than doesn’t it lie with the people?
Sure you can. A state secedes, boom, the state is no longer in the Union nor beholden to the Constitution.
(The actual answer is (b) – the Constitution is irrelevant to a seceding state because the only way a state can secede is to successfully fight off the Federal government’s attempt to put down its insurrection. Inter arma enim silent leges.)
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Ok. So where in the Constitution is there a power to make war to deny secession?
By its very nature secession is an act of a state, not an individual.
The states is the body that ratifies the Constitution, so the state is the body that has the right to secede.
Now, you’re not even trying.
There is no “right” to secession.
The government has the right to wage war.
Section 8:
Section 9:
The authors of the Constitution clearly foresaw the possibility of insurrection and rebellion and provided for it. (If you try to reply that secession differs from rebellion, I will have to conclude that you are simply posting to keep the thread going, particularly in light of the attack upon Fort Sumter.
I won’t go into the fact that this seems to contradict what you said earlier.
It’s not clear to me at all that “secession is an act of state, not an individual”- why can’t a person secede? Who decides which rights reside with the people vice the states with respect to the tenth amendment? What does it matter that the states ratified the constitution- what does that have to do with the tenth amendment?
Ot of curiosity, would you say that the ability to end a marriage via divorce is a “power”? It seems so to me.
And from there, the analogy to characterizing secession as a “power” seems apt.
There is a difference between the power to dissolve a contract contracted under the supervision of a government and the effort to simply walk away from a compact to which one was a party.
So, no, it does not seem to be the same thing, to me.
A divorce requires a superior entity, the government, to oversee the dissolution of a contract entered by two people under the rules set forth by that government.
Secession is a unilateral act by a party to a compact that does not seek authority from a superior entity.
Not the same thing, and certainly not a power vested in the seceding entity.
If a state wishes to separate from the United States, the appropriate method is to seek a Constitutional Amendment either granting that state separation or granting all states a right to secede. Armed rebellion, already mentioned in the Constitution, is not the appropriate method.
The “power” of divorce is created by law. If there was no law allowing people to get divorced, they could not legally get divorced.
There is no equivalent law creating a power of secession.
Well, I probably should have emphasized rural there, as Atlanta skews things. Not that rural locals are entirely honest, either, but I’ve found that rural Georgians are intensely honest and honorable.
Okay, so, the minute a state secedes, it’s no longer a part of the Union, is no longer bound by the Constitution, and is effectively a foreign nation.
Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government may not make war on foreign nations?
Sounds like a really great scam, doesn’t it? Join the union because you’re deeply in debt (as Texas did) and then a few years later, after the rest of the Union has paid off your debt, secede.
In reality, if succession had been intended to be allowed, the Constitution would have a procedure to resolve issues of commonly held debt and commonly held property. The absence of such procedures is an indication that secession was not planned for.
Which is why I called it the War of Northern Aggression.
Does anyone have an explanation, if secession doesn’t exist as some of you have said, as to why the Confederate states were not afforded representation even directly after the war?
Punishment for rebellion. They had to demonstrate that they were not planning to turn around and play the same game all over again. Secession is not permitted, but neither is rebellion.
When a person commits a felony, they are often stripped of certain rights, (such as the right to vote), that they do not have restored the moment they walk out of prison.
On the other hand, they were not all rounded up and hanged or shot for treason, so it tended to work out well for them in the long run.
The Republicans of the day also seem to have thought the war to put down the secessionist rebellion had something to do with slavery, since a lot of Reconstruction involved efforts to protect the civil rights of the newly-freed slaves from being taken away by their former masters–at least until the “Corrupt Bargain” in 1876, after which white Northern Republicans abandoned their black compatriots to the tender mercies of Jim Crow.
So the constitutional authority to deprive U.S. citizens of representation is found where?
Was every single southern citizen a “rebel” or “traitor”? If not, why were these citizens deprived of representation if their state had always remained a U.S. state?
Representation comes through the states and to the extent that citizens of those states failed to prevent the insurrection, they later suffered, (briefly), under the punishment accorded those rebellious states. (They were always free to move to a law-abiding state if they wished to be represented in Congress.)
You are also pretending that the a state of rebellion has no affect regarding the status of a state. That the states had no right to secede does not mean that their rebellion caused no disruption to their status as states in good standing.
The fact that Reconstruction was poorly handled isn’t really an argument for or against secession being legal… Yes, formally speaking, the military occupation of the South, and the interruption of representation and voting rights there, were unconstitutional. And it led to such abominations as the Hayes/Tilden fiasco, where, in the opinion of some, the U.S. Presidential election was illicitly swayed by Grant and the federal troops in occupation.
Still, the South was devastated by the war, and it would have been impossible to have gone back immediately to any kind of business as normal. They wouldn’t have been able to manage the logistics of holding full and free elections, at least at first.
Was it legal for the South to secede? We’ll never really know, as the parties settled out of court…