THE FORMER CONFEDERACY
December 4, 2003

by Joe Sobran

     An extremely bright high-school student recently 
asked my advice about a few points concerning the U.S. 
Constitution. At 15, he was raising questions that didn't 
occur to me until I was well into middle age. Maybe, I 
thought, this lad should be advising me!

     But, accepting the role of wise elder in which he 
had cast me, I recommended a short curriculum, which I 
now offer to anyone who wants a corrective to the false 
history Americans are taught in government (as well as 
most private) schools. It may look simple, but I promise 
you'll find it challenging.

     First, three official documents: the Declaration of 
Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the 
Constitution (with the Bill of Rights and the Preamble 
to them). Learn them thoroughly, until you see how 
closely the Constitution resembles the Articles and how 
both documents presuppose the Declaration.

     Second, the debates over the ratification of the 
Constitution. This means THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, but also 
a generous sampling of the anti-Federalist writings, of 
which there are many collections in print.

     Third, Thomas Jefferson's 1798 Kentucky Resolutions. 
These are brief but remarkably logical and incisive. They 
tell you how the author of the Declaration understood the 
Constitution. No document in American history has been 
more undeservedly neglected.

     Finally, the most challenging of all: Jefferson 
Davis's RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT. You 
needn't read all 1,200 pages, but you should master the 
100 or so pages making the case for a state's 
*constitutional* right to withdraw from the Union. You 
may pass over Davis's defense of slavery, which is 
incidental: his argument for the right of secession 
applies in principle to every state, not just the 
Southern states.

     If cogent, this means that the U.S. Government 
abandoned constitutional government long ago. It also 
means that, say, Massachusetts and Hawaii still have the 
same right to withdraw from the Union that Virginia 
claimed in 1861.

     You may be surprised to learn that Washington, 
Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers took the right of 
secession for granted. Probably not one American in a 
thousand is aware of this today. But it was inherent in 
the Declaration's proposition that the original colonies 
"are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent 
States."

     This is what Abraham Lincoln actually denied when he 
said that no state could leave the Union. Unlike Lincoln, 
Davis wasn't even a lawyer; yet his grasp of law and 
history was far wider and deeper than Lincoln's.

     After the Confederacy was conquered, Davis was 
arrested and held in solitary confinement for two years 
on a charge of treason. But in the end the government 
dropped the charge and released him, having been warned 
by its own lawyers that Davis, defending himself in 
court, might well win acquittal by making a powerful case 
for secession -- and thereby dealing a terrific blow to 
Union war propaganda. The intended show trial might have 
backfired -- with Davis summoning the Founding Fathers 
themselves as his star witnesses!

     It was a prudent decision. To this day, Union 
propaganda passes for objective history. But in fact so 
many Northerners agreed with the South -- and with the 
Founding Fathers -- that Lincoln had found it necessary 
to suspend the freedom of speech, the free press, and the 
ordinary rights of accused persons to habeas corpus and a 
jury trial. Dissent became a crime, and truth itself a 
fugitive.

     But Lincoln's crackdown -- so comprehensive that the 
McCarthy era can't remotely compare with it -- succeeded. 
The North was deeply divided about his war, but effective 
criticism and opposition were crushed. Lincoln won 
reelection, the war, and a historical reputation for 
midwifing "a new birth of freedom."

     The long-term result has been the eclipse of the 
original understanding of the Union as a voluntary 
"confederacy" of sovereign states. Today that idea is 
regarded as a merely regional doctrine of the South. It 
was not. It was an idea once agreed on by virtually all 
Americans. Even Lincoln himself sometimes spoke of the 
Union as "this confederacy."

     It's startling to see how often the United States 
were called a "confederacy" in the speeches and letters 
of presidents before Lincoln. His supreme achievement may 
be a feat of historical obliteration: he consigned 
America's original self-understanding, perhaps 
irrecoverably, to the Memory Hole.

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