How Americans Have Changed

Most Americans assume that the Civil War settled forever the question whether a state may secede from the Union. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that the majority of human beings think a question of principle can be settled by raw force. How often we say of foreigners that “the only thing those people respect is power!” Maybe it’s true of us too.

But it wasn’t true of the men who wrote and adopted the U.S. Constitution. Even The Federalist Papers, written to promote ratification of the Constitution and a stronger Union, foresaw the possibility that the states might have to reclaim their independence — even, if necessary, by making war on the Federal Government.

What makes this remarkable is that the two chief authors of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, would have preferred an even stronger Union than the Constitution prescribed. They were by no means champions of states’ rights.

Yet in Federalist No. 28, Hamilton wrote that “usurpations of the national rulers” — that is, the Federal Government — might give the people of the separate states no choice but to exercise “that original right of self-defense, which is paramount to all positive forms of government.” How? By taking “arms” and organizing like “independent nations.” Obviously a state that was at war with the Federal Government would have seceded from the Union. Self-defense presupposes secession.

In Federalist No. 29 Hamilton used the phrase “a well regulated militia,” which would be included in the Second Amendment. One purpose of the state militias, and of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” was to enable the states to resist tyranny — Federal tyranny. In other words, the Second Amendment was meant to put teeth in the right of secession!

Hamilton thought the state militias would be more than a match for any Federal forces; he didn’t foresee the modern weapons that would make Federal power as overwhelming as it is today.

But the principle remains, even if it now seems pretty useless: the American people have the right to resist Federal usurpation by any just means, including reclaiming their independence.

Madison offered a similar argument in Federalist No. 46. The states would have the power to meet “ambitious encroachments of the Federal Government” with “resistance” and “a trial of force,” just as they had recently done against Great Britain. Among other things, they had “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”

Like Hamilton, Madison contended that the states had the strength to prevail in a war with the Federal Government. In fact both men, eager to secure ratification for the Constitution, ridiculed the notion that the Federal Government could win! How times have changed. How Americans have changed.

In her book American Scripture, Pauline Meier reminds us that several of the American colonies — Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland — issued their own separate declarations of independence, long since forgotten in the shadow of the great Declaration of July 4. But these “other” declarations show that each state regarded itself as a “free and independent” entity, not as a subordinate part of a “union” or “nation.” These words were not yet in use.

All this shows once more that Abraham Lincoln was being both unhistorical and illogical in his claim that “the Union is older than the states.” July 4 announced 13 “free and independent states,” not Lincoln’s monolithic “new nation,” from which, he insisted, no state could ever secede.

Lincoln proved to be exactly the sort of “national ruler” Hamilton and Madison said could never defeat the states. But defeat them he did. He did so in large part by convincing many Northerners that his skewed version of American history and the Constitution was the true one. And those who couldn’t be convinced could always be arrested. Lincoln’s Constitution was what is now called a “living document” — one whose meaning can be changed at the convenience of the rulers.

Clearly Lincoln was out of touch with “the Fathers” he so often invoked. He had never read or digested The Federalist Papers, let alone the other side of the great ratification debate; the terms of that debate were pretty much a foreign language to him. He himself admitted that his knowledge of history was meager. How tragic that most Americans still accept as gospel his deeply defective account of their history.

Joseph Sobran