When a marriage becomes untenable for either the husband or wife, or both, the marriage is dissolved. They get a divorce, and few — outside of religious circles — would argue against their right to divorce or its necessity if one or other of the parties determines there are "irreconcilable differences" and a legal dissolution of the marriage is in his best interest.
Yet when secession — which is the divorce of a state from the nation or divorce of one part of the state from another — is mentioned, people seem to lose their minds. But make no mistake; secession is in the air.
You heard it in Virginia as the General Assembly discussed the very real possibility it would pass legislation to disarm the commonwealth's citizens.
The governor of West Virginia offered liberty-loving Virginians safe haven if they wanted to divorce themselves from dark blue gun-grabbing Richmond and it surrounding statist suburbs. Secession talk is also rife in Oregon, where rural Oregonians are seeking to become part of Idaho, and in Illinois, where Illinoians would like nothing better than to separate from Chicago — or separate Chicago from Illinois. There remains an active Calexit movement where factions are alternately trying to either separate entirely from California to form a 51st state, or break the state up into as many as six smaller states.
More and more, American people are becoming fed up with the elected class in both the Washington, D.C., cesspool and their heavily blue state capitols.
It seems that once elected and after sniffing the wine at the altar of power, most politicians lose whatever humanity they ever had. They quickly begin to ignore the will of their constituents, bowing instead to the will of their corporate masters, forgetting (or ignoring) the promises they made to get elected.
Once entrenched in office and buttressed by the crony/fascist system, they become almost impossible to unseat. This is occurring in state governments and the federal government.
What's more, these urban centers seem to concentrate statist bureaucrats who make their living off government, lawyers and minorities which seek to leach off it. Politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers love socialism for everyone else, but not themselves. Lawyers write the laws that channel all power, authority and wealth to the government. They create confusion so the people can't understand the law and can't understand esoteric (hidden) political and "legal" manipulation of the public.
So lawyers create socialism and label it democracy. Socialism is a disguised system of stealing the wealth and production of the producers of wealth with spurious laws. Stealing or taking from producers and transferring it to nonproducers make for very sophisticated and concealed class warfare. In other words, it is a parasite system with the parasites ruling and fleecing their host through deception.
In the halls of power there is a hostile movement against the people and toward more government centralization. While this idea sits well with much of the parasite class found in mostly urban areas of the country, it is disagreeable to many — if not most — in the more rural "red" portion of the country. Manipulated minorities love government intervention and intrusion (socialism) as a net for perceived social inequality, poverty and underachievement.
This is the exact opposite of what a free people want and need.
The American Union was formed as a confederation of States that joined together voluntarily. It was the States that joined together, not the people.
The Founders saw the states as checks on the Federal government. They understood that the federal government would attempt to assume more power than it was granted by the Constitution. So the senate was devised in Article I, Section 3 in such a way as to give the State legislatures Senate-appointing powers. This made the senators accountable to the States rather than special interests.
The War of Northern Aggression (aka the Civil War) took away one check the states had on federal overreach: secession. It also forever linked the idea of secession to slavery and/or white supremacy. Thanks to indoctrination from the public (non)education system, most people have no idea that secession has nothing to do with racism or slavery and everything to do with preserving liberty.
The Constitution drafted by the Founders was not intended to form a strong "national" government with heavily centralized power, but as a means to represent a group of states only on matters that concerned them all. The government was given a list of enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8.
The Constitution was not a document designed to restrain the people or the states, but to place restraints on the federal government the Founders were creating. This is an important distinction. It would not have been ratified if not for the promise of a bill of rights to further check the federal government. That's because most of the Founders — particularly the Anti-Federalists — feared the Constitution wasn't strong enough to prevent the Federal government from stealing power from the states.
To that end, the Bill of Rights established a set of restrictions on federal government. The preamble to the Bill of Rights expresses this quite plainly:
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.
The first eight amendments were checks on federal power. The 9th and 10th Amendments state the Founders' intent that all power not granted the general (federal) government in the Constitution was reserved to the states and to the people.
The Constitution was based on Federalism, or the concept that authority for governing local matters should be left to the purview of local and state governments, and authority for big items affecting the whole (trade, war, disputes between the states, etc.) was held by the federal government and determined through representatives of the people (House of Representatives) and the states (Senate).
The Founding Fathers understood that states joining the compact voluntarily were free to leave. They believed in the words of the Declaration that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when government becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of the people to change or abolish it.
In fact, it was New England states, or at least Federalists from those states, who first broached the idea of leaving the United States as early as 1800. They called it disunion.
Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts (who was George Washington's adjutant general during the Revolution and served as Washington's secretary of state and secretary of war), along with his Federalist cohorts, sought to separate after Thomas Jefferson was elected president.
Pickering called separation the remedy pointed to by "the principles of our Revolution."
"I will rather anticipate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence of the aristocratic Democrats of the South," wrote Pickering. "There will be a separation… [and] the black and white populations will mark the boundary."
Senator James Hillhouse, a Revolutionary War captain who went on to serve in the second, third and fourth congresses, said, "The Eastern States must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government."
New England Federalists believed that Virginia was gaining too much power and would act against the interests of New England states and in the interests of Southern ones. After Jefferson's election, Federalist Stephen Higgenson claimed the federal government "had fallen into the hands of infidel, anti-commercial, anti-New England Southerners" who would "govern and depress New England."
Federalist John Lowell Jr. expressed state's rights sentiments of the New England secessionists when he stated, "[I]t is our duty, our most solemn duty, to vindicate the rights, and support the interests of the states we represent."
Their complaints mirrored those made by Southerners advocating for secession in the 1860s, including Robert E. Lee, who told General Winfield Scott, "If the union is disrupted I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people and save in defense will draw my sword on none."
In 1804, Federalists began plotting their strategy to begin "disunion." Massachusetts was to take the lead by seceding first, Pickering wrote in a letter to Theodore Lyman, followed by Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Their cause disintegrated when Aaron Burr failed to win the governorship of New York and Burr was then tarnished after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
In the 1830s and 1840s, abolitionists, chief among them William Lloyd Garrison, called for "disunion." The New England Anti-Slavery Convention voted in favor of secession by a margin of 250-24.
The Civil War — aka the War to Prevent Southern Secession or the war of Northern Aggression — essentially neutered the 9th and 10th Amendments. The war was not started by President Abraham Lincoln to end slavery. It was fought to reign in a "rebellion" of states who were exercising their rights as outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln, the war's chief prosecutor, himself said, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." In fact, the official government name for the war is the "War of the Rebellion."
To "save the Union," Lincoln trampled on the rule of law. He suspended habeas corpus, ignored Supreme Court rulings, sent federal troops into state legislatures to prevent them from voting, arrested politicians, shut down opposition newspapers and held their editors without trial and signed illegal executive orders and congress-passed laws.
Americans are as politically divided today as they were in the mid-19th century. On the one hand are progressive/socialist/communists who long for stronger federal government and control over every aspect of life. They inhabit the corridors of power on the east and west coasts and the urban centers of the states — primarily state capitols. On the other hand are the people who desire liberty and a small government that doesn't seek to control them but instead seeks to stand aside so they can prosper.
These two philosophies are diametrically opposed. Why shouldn't there be a separation so we can determine which works best for the people?
Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
Editor,
The Bob Livingston Letter®
