THEY AREN'T WHAT THEY USED TO BE
May 27, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     If I had to sum up American history in one sentence, 
I'd put it this way: The United States aren't what they 
used to be.

     That's not nostalgia. That's literal fact. Before 
the Civil War, "the United States" was a plural noun. The 
U.S. Constitution uses the plural form when, for example, 
it refers to enemies of the United States as "their" 
enemies. And this was the usage of everyone who 
understood that the union was a voluntary federation of 
sovereign states, delegating only a few specified powers, 
and not the monolithic, "consolidated," all-powerful 
government it has since become.

     Maybe Americans prefer the present megastate to the 
one the Constitution describes. But they ought to know 
the difference. They shouldn't assume that the plural 
United States were essentially the same thing as today's 
United State, or that the one naturally "evolved" into 
the other.

     The change was violent, not natural. Lincoln waged 
war on states that tried to withdraw from the Union, 
denying their right to do so. This was a denial of the 
Declaration of Independence, which called the 13 former 
colonies "Free and Independent States."

     Washington and Jefferson at times expressed their 
fear that some states might secede, but they took for 
granted that this was the right of any free and 
independent state. They advised against exercising that 
right except under serious provocation, but they assumed 
it was a legitimate option against the threat of a 
centralized government that exceeded its constitutional 
powers.

     Before the Civil War, several states considered 
leaving the Union, and abolitionists urged Northern 
states to do so in order to end their association with 
slave states. Congressman John Quincy Adams, a former 
president, wanted Massachusetts to secede if Texas was 
admitted to the Union. Nobody suggested that Adams didn't 
understand the Constitution he was sworn to uphold.

     But the danger to the states' independence was 
already growing. Andrew Jackson had threatened to invade 
South Carolina if it seceded, shocking even so ardent a 
Unionist as Daniel Webster. Jackson didn't explain where 
he got the power to prevent secession, a power not 
assigned to the president in the Constitution. Why not? 
For the simple reason that the Constitution doesn't 
forbid secession; it presupposes that the United States 
are, each of them, free and independent.

     Still, Lincoln used Jackson's threat as a precedent 
for equating secession with "rebellion" and using force 
to crush it. This required him to do violence to the 
Constitution in several ways. He destroyed the freedoms 
of speech and press in the North; he arbitrarily arrested 
thousands, including elected officials who opposed him; 
he not only invaded the seceding states, but deposed 
their governments and imposed military dictatorships in 
their place.

     In essence, Lincoln made it a crime -- "treason," in 
fact -- to agree with Jefferson. Northerners who held 
that free and independent states had the right to leave 
the Union -- and who therefore thought Lincoln's war was 
wrong -- became, in Lincoln's mind, the enemy within. In 
order to win the war, and reelection, he had to shut them 
up. But his reign of terror in the North has received 
little attention.

     He may have "saved the Union," after a fashion, but 
the Union he saved was radically different from the one 
described in the Constitution. Even his defenders admit 
that when they praise him for creating "a new 
Constitution" and forging "a second American Revolution." 
Lincoln would have been embarrassed by these compliments: 
He always insisted he was only enforcing and conserving 
the Constitution as it was written, though the U.S. 
Supreme Court, including his own appointees, later ruled 
many of his acts unconstitutional.

     The Civil War completely changed the basic relation 
between the states, including the Northern states, and 
the Federal Government. For all practical purposes, the 
states ceased to be free and independent.

     Sentimental myths about Lincoln and the war still 
obscure the nature of the fundamental rupture they 
brought to American history. The old federal Union was 
transformed into the kind of "consolidated" system the 
Constitution was meant to avoid. The former plurality of 
states became a single unit. Even our grammar reflects 
the change.

     So the United States were no longer a "they"; they'd 
become an "it." Few Americans realize the immense cost in 
blood, liberty, and even logic that lies behind this 
simple change of pronouns.

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