Parting company is an option
By Walter E. Williams
A
fortnight ago, in "Let's
Do Some Detective Work," I provided unassailable evidence that
Congress had vastly exceeded powers delegated to it by our Constitution.
In last week's column, "Getting
Back Our Liberties," I argued that liberties lost are seldom
regained, but there was an outside chance to regain them if enough
liberty-minded Americans were to pursue Free State Project's proposal
to set up New Hampshire as a free state.
Free
State Project intends to get 20,000 or so Americans to move
to New Hampshire and, through a peaceful political process, reduce
burdensome taxation and regulation, reform state and local law,
end federal mandates, and attempt to restore constitutional federalism
as envisioned by the nation's founders.
Since there was only a remote possibility we could successfully
negotiate with Congress, the courts and the White House to obey the
U.S. Constitution, I speculated that liberty could only be realized
by a unilateral declaration of independence - namely, part company.
Quite a few readers criticized the idea, calling secession unconstitutional.
Let's look at it.
On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before
Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin
proposed a constitutional amendment that said, "No State or any part
thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union,
shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United
States."
Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas
B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed
a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here's my no-brainer
question: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments
if secession were already unconstitutional? I'm guessing, no.
But there's more evidence. The ratification documents of Virginia,
New York and Rhode Island explicitly said that they held the right
to resume powers delegated should the federal government become abusive
of those powers.
There's more evidence. At the 1787 constitutional convention, a
proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding
state. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, rejected it,
saying: "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed
to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State
would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment
and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution
of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
Professor Thomas DiLorenzo, in his revised "The Real Lincoln," provides
abundant evidence in the forms of quotations from our Founders and
numerous newspaper accounts that prove that Americans always took
the right of secession for granted. Plus, secession was not an idea
that had its origins in the South. Infuriated by Thomas Jefferson's
Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the first secessionist movement started
in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and other New England states.
Every single bit of evidence shows that states have a right to secede.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution that prohibits secession.
What stops secession is the brute force of a mighty federal government,
as witnessed by the costly War of 1861. Only one thing good came
out of that war: It eliminated slavery. It's had a devastating legacy
for future generations of Americans, in that since the issue of secession
was brutally settled, the federal government is free to run roughshod
over the safeguards envisioned by the Framers, namely the Ninth and
10th mendments.
There's little to suggest that the same brutality wouldn't be encountered
if secession were tried again, as one writer cautioned: If New Hampshire
seceded, massive troops along with today's deadly modern military
equipment would be on its soil before lunch.
Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor
of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
