photorandy2023 Governmental and Political Both National and International

Could Secession happen again in the United States?

I have written several articles on postings related to politics. A list of links has been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however, address different aspects of these political events.

Despite increasing political polarization and interest in secessionist ideas, there is no credible evidence to suggest the country is on the verge of being divided by states seceding. A successful state secession is highly unlikely due to legal obstacles, practical challenges, and a lack of critical mass for such movements. 

Legal and historical precedent

  • Supreme Court precedent: The 1869 Supreme Court case Texas v. White determined that states cannot unilaterally secede from the Union. The ruling described the U.S. as “an indestructible union” and stated that Texas could only leave through revolution or with the consent of all other states.
  • Civil War precedent: The last major attempt at state secession led to the Civil War, the deadliest conflict in U.S. history, and reinforced the principle that states do not have the right to leave. 

Current secession movements

While modern secessionist movements exist, they face significant legal and political hurdles. 

  • Texas: The Texas Nationalist Movement (TEXIT) pushes for a secession vote, with supporters citing grievances with the federal government over immigration and other issues. However, it lacks the broad political support needed to overcome legal challenges.
  • California: A “Calexit” movement has been active for several years, though support has historically been low and inconsistent. A recent initiative was cleared to gather signatures to place a measure on the November 2028 ballot.
  • Greater Idaho: A movement has gained traction in rural counties of eastern Oregon, where voters have approved ballot measures supporting the idea of joining Idaho. This type of inter-state border change, however, would still require approval from both state legislatures and Congress.
  • New Hampshire: Legislative proposals have been introduced to study secession if the national debt reaches a certain threshold. 

Political polarization vs. secession

While talk of secession is often linked to political polarization, research shows a distinction between citizen frustration and a desire for outright separation. 

  • Ideological sorting, not splitting: Political science research suggests that while national-level politics appear highly polarized, the populace is less sorted than many believe. Furthermore, the two major parties are not cleanly divided by geography in a way that would allow for a simple “red state” and “blue state” split.
  • Frustration as a driver: Recent polling indicates that support for “national divorce” and secession is linked to voter frustration with political dysfunction rather than a firm political intention to separate. In recent years, only about 20% of Americans have expressed support for a “national divorce”.
  • Lack of support: Polling from 2024 shows that only 23% of Americans said they would support their own state seceding. Most Americans do not believe they would be better off if their state became an independent country. 

Secession in the United States

In the context of the United States, secession primarily refers to the voluntary withdrawal of one or more states from the Union that constitutes the United States; but may loosely refer to leaving a state or territory to form a separate territory or new state, or to the severing of an area from a city or county within a state. Advocates for secession are called disunionists by their contemporaries in various historical documents.

Threats and aspirations to secede from the United States, or arguments justifying secession, have been a feature of the country’s politics almost since its birth. Some have argued for secession as a constitutional right and others as from a natural right of revolution. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.

The most serious attempt at secession was advanced in the years 1860 and 1861 as 11 Southern states each declared secession from the United States, and joined to form the Confederate States of America, a procedure and body that the government of the United States refused to accept. The movement collapsed in 1865 with the defeat of Confederate forces by Union armies in the American Civil War.

In the history of the United States, the only territories to have been withdrawn from the country are the small portions of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 49th parallel north, established as the U.S.–British (now Canadian) border by the Treaty of 1818; and the territory of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, which became independent after the Treaty of Manila. The former is today part of Canada, while the latter corresponds to the Republic of the Philippines.

Boundaries of U.S. territories, such as the Nebraska Territory, were not defined precisely. The boundaries of each new state are set in the document admitting the former territory to the Union as a state, which Congress must approve. There are three instances in U.S. history in which a portion of a state successfully seceded to create a new state: Kentucky which separated from Virginia in 1792, Maine separating from Massachusetts in 1820, and West Virginia, which also separated from Virginia, in 1863.

American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.[4]

Historian Pauline Maier argues that this narrative asserted “the right of revolution, which was, after all, the right Americans were exercising in 1776”; and notes that Thomas Jefferson‘s language incorporated ideas explained at length by a long list of 17th-century writers, including John Milton, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and other English and Scottish commentators, all of whom had contributed to the development of the Whig tradition in 18th-century Britain.

The right of revolution expressed in the Declaration was followed immediately with the observation that long-practiced injustice is tolerated until sustained assaults on the rights of the entire people have accumulated enough force to oppress them; then they may defend themselves.[6][7] This reasoning was not original to the Declaration, and can be found in many prior political writings: Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690); the Fairfax Resolves of 1774; Jefferson’s own Summary View of the Rights of British America; the first Constitution of Virginia, which was enacted five days prior to the Declaration; and Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense (1776):

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; …mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms (“of Government”, editor’s addition) to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing…a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Gordon S. Wood quotes President John Adams: “Only repeated, multiplied oppressions placing it beyond all doubt that their rulers had formed settled plans to deprive them of their liberties, could warrant the concerted resistance of the people against their government”.

Overview

With origins in the question of states’ rights, the issue of secession was argued in many forums and advocated from time to time in both the North and South in the decades after adopting the Constitution and before the American Civil War. Historian Maury Klein described the contemporary debate: “Was the Republic a unified nation in which the individual states had merged their sovereign rights and identities forever, or was it a federation of sovereign states joined together for specific purposes from which they could withdraw at any time?” He observed that “the case can be made that no result of the [American Civil] war was more important than the destruction, once and for all…of the idea of secession”.

Historian Forrest McDonald argued that after adopting the Constitution, “there were no guidelines, either in theory or in history, as to whether the compact could be dissolved and, if so, on what conditions”. However, during “the founding era, many a public figure…declared that the states could interpose their powers between their citizens and the power of the federal government, and talk of secession was not unknown”. But according to McDonald, to avoid resorting to the violence that had accompanied the Revolution, the Constitution established “legitimate means for constitutional change in the future”. In effect, the Constitution “completed and perfected the Revolution”.

Whatever the intentions of the Founders, threats of secession and disunion were a constant in the political discourse of Americans preceding the Civil War. Historian Elizabeth R. Varon wrote:

[O]ne word (“disunion”) contained, and stimulated, their (Americans’) fears of extreme political factionalism, tyranny, regionalism, economic decline, foreign intervention, class conflict, gender disorder, racial strife, widespread violence and anarchy, and civil war, all of which could be interpreted as God’s retribution for America’s moral failings. Disunion connoted the dissolution of the republic—the failure of the Founders’ efforts to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a tragic cataclysm that would reduce them to the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. And yet, for many other Americans, disunion served as the main instrument by which they could achieve their political goals.

Abandoning the Articles of Confederation

In late 1777, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, approved the Articles of Confederation for ratification by the individual states. The Confederation government was administered de facto by the Congress under the provisions of the approved (final) draft of the Articles until they achieved ratification—and de jure status—in early 1781. In 1786 delegates of five states (the Annapolis Convention) called for a convention of delegates in Philadelphia to amend the Articles, which would require the unanimous consent of all thirteen states.

The delegates to the Philadelphia Convention convened and deliberated from May to September 1787. Instead of pursuing their official charge they returned a draft (new) Constitution, proposed for constructing and administering a new federal—later also known as “national”—government. They further proposed that the draft Constitution not be submitted to the Congress (where it would require unanimous approval of the states); instead that it be presented directly to the states for ratification in special ratification conventions, and that approval by a minimum of nine state conventions would suffice to adopt the new Constitution and initiate the new federal government; and that only those states ratifying the Constitution would be included in the new government. (For a time, eleven of the original states operated under the Constitution without two non-ratifying states, Rhode Island and North Carolina.) In effect, the delegates proposed to abandon and replace the Articles of Confederation rather than amend them.

Because the Articles had specified a “perpetual union”, various arguments have been offered to explain the apparent contradiction (and presumed illegality) of abandoning one form of government and creating another that did not include the members of the original. One explanation was that the Articles of Confederation simply failed to protect the vital interests of the individual states. Necessity then, rather than legality, was the practical factor in abandoning the Articles.

According to historian John Ferling, by 1786 the Union under the Articles was falling apart. James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York—they who joined to vigorously promote a new Constitution—urged that renewed stability of the Union government was critically needed to protect property and commerce. Both founders were strong advocates for a more powerful central government; they published The Federalist Papers to advocate their cause and became known as the Federalists. (Because of his powerful advocacy Madison was later accorded the honorific “Father of the Constitution”.) Ferling wrote:

Rumors of likely secessionist movements were unleashed. There was buzz as well that some states planned to abandon the American Union and form a regional confederacy. America, it was said, would go the way of Europe, and ultimately three or four, or more confederacies would spring up. … Not only would these confederations be capable of taking steps that were beyond the ability of Congress under the articles, but in private some portrayed such a step in a positive light, in as much as the regional union could adopt constitutions that secured property rights and maintained order.

Other arguments that justified abandoning the Articles of Confederation pictured the Articles as an international compact between unconsolidated, sovereign states, any one of which was empowered to renounce the compact at will. (This as opposed to a consolidated union that “totally annihilated, without any power of revival” the sovereign states.) The Articles required that all states were obliged to comply with all requirements of the agreement; thus, permanence was linked to compliance.

‘Compliance’ was typically perceived as a matter of interpretation by each individual state. Emerich de Vattel, a recognized authority on international law, wrote at the time that “Treaties contain promises that are perfect and reciprocal. If one of the allies fails in his engagements, the other may … disengage himself in his promises, and … break the treaty.” Thus, each state could unilaterally ‘secede’ from the Articles of Confederation at will; this argument for abandoning the Articles—for its weakness in the face of secession—was used by advocates for the new Constitution and was featured by James Madison in Federalist No. 43.

St. George Tucker, an influential jurist in the early republic era, and especially in the South, argued that abandoning the Articles of Confederation was the same as seceding from the Articles government. In 1803, he wrote that the unanimous dissolution of the Articles Confederation in 1789 by Act of Congress was legal precedent for future secession(s) from the Constitution one state at a time by state legislatures.

And since the seceding states, by establishing a new constitution and form of federal government among themselves, without the consent of the rest, have shown that they consider the right to do so whenever the occasion may, in their opinion require it, we may infer that the right has not been diminished by any new compact which they may since have entered into, since none could be more solemn or explicit than the first, nor more binding upon the contracting parties.

Others, such as Chief Justice John Marshall who had been a Virginia delegate to its Ratification (Federal) Convention, denied that ratifying the Constitution was a precedent for a future one-off dissolution of the Union by an isolated state or states. Writing in 1824, exactly midway between the fall of the Articles of Confederation and the rise of a second self-described American Confederacy, Marshal summarized the issue thusly: “Reference has been made to the political situation of these states, anterior to [the Constitution’s] formation. It has been said that they were sovereign, were completely independent, and were connected with each other only by a league. This is true. But, when these allied sovereigns converted their league into a government, when they converted their congress of ambassadors, deputed to deliberate on their common concerns, and to recommend measures of general utility, into a legislature, empowered to enact laws on the most interesting subjects, the whole character in which the states appear underwent a change.”

Nationalists for Union in the antebellum America argued the opposite of secession; that indeed the new Constitution inherited perpetuity from the language in the Articles and from other actions done prior to the Constitution. Historian Kenneth Stampp explains their view:

Lacking an explicit clause in the Constitution with which to establish the Union’s perpetuity, the nationalists made their case, first, with a unique interpretation of the history of the country prior to the Philadelphia Convention; second, with inferences drawn from certain passages of the Constitution; and third, with careful selections from the speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers. The historical case begins with the postulate that the Union is older than the states. It quotes the reference in the Declaration of Independence to “these united colonies”, contends that the Second Continental Congress actually called the states into being [i.e., “colonies” no longer], notes the provision for a perpetual Union in the Articles of Confederation, and ends with the reminder that the preamble to the new Constitution gives as one of its purposes the formation of “a more perfect Union”.

Adopting the Constitution

Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar argues that the permanence of the Union of the states changed significantly when the U.S. Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. This action “signaled its decisive break with the Articles’ regime of state sovereignty”. By adopting a constitution—rather than a treaty, or a compact, or an instrument of confederacy, etc.—that created a new body of government designed to be senior to the several states, and by approving the particular language and provisions of that new Constitution, the framers and voters made it clear that the fates of the individual states were (severely) changed; and that the new United States was:

Not a “league,” however firm; not a “confederacy” or a “confederation”; not a compact among “sovereign” states—all these high profile and legally freighted words from the Articles were conspicuously absent from the Preamble and every other operative part of the Constitution. The new text proposed a fundamentally different legal framework.

Patrick Henry adamantly opposed adopting the Constitution because he interpreted its language to replace the sovereignty of the individual states, including that of his own Virginia. He gave his strong voice to the Anti-Federalist cause in opposition to the federalists led by Madison and Hamilton. Questioning the nature of the proposed new federal government, Henry asked:

The fate … of America may depend on this…. Have they made a proposal of a compact between the states? If they had, this would be a confederation. It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing—the expression, We, the people, instead of the states, of America….

The Federalists acknowledged that national sovereignty would be transferred by the new Constitution to the whole of the American people—indeed, regard the expression, “We the people …”. They argued, however, that Henry exaggerated the extent to which a consolidated government was being created and that the states would serve a vital role within the new republic even though their national sovereignty was ending. Tellingly, on the matter of whether states retained a right to unilaterally secede from the United States, the federalists made it clear that no such right would exist under the Constitution.

Amar specifically cites the example of New York’s ratification as suggestive that the Constitution did not countenance secession. Anti-Federalists dominated the Poughkeepsie Convention that would ratify the Constitution. Concerned that the new compact might not sufficiently safeguard states’ rights, the anti-federalists sought to insert into the New York ratification message language to the effect that “there should be reserved to the state of New York a right to withdraw herself from the union after a certain number of years.” The Madison federalists opposed this, with Hamilton, a delegate at the convention, reading aloud in response a letter from James Madison stating: “the Constitution requires an adoption in toto, and for ever” [emphasis added]. Hamilton and John Jay then told the Convention that in their view, reserving “a right to withdraw was inconsistent with the Constitution, and was no ratification”. The New York convention ultimately ratified the Constitution without including the “right to withdraw” language proposed by the anti-federalists.

Amar explains how the Constitution impacted on state sovereignty:

In dramatic contrast to Article VII–whose unanimity rule that no state can bind another confirms the sovereignty of each state prior to 1787 – Article V does not permit a single state convention to modify the federal Constitution for itself. Moreover, it makes clear that a state may be bound by a federal constitutional amendment even if that state votes against the amendment in a properly convened state convention. And this rule is flatly inconsistent with the idea that states remain sovereign after joining the Constitution, even if they were sovereign before joining it. Thus, ratification of the Constitution itself marked the moment when previously sovereign states gave up their sovereignty and legal independence.

Natural right of revolution versus right of secession

Debates on the legality of secession often looked back to the example of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Law professor Daniel Farber defined what he considered the borders of this debate:

What about the original understanding? The debates contain scattered statements about the permanence or impermanence of the Union. The occasional references to the impermanency of the Constitution are hard to interpret. They might have referred to a legal right to revoke ratification. But they equally could have referred to an extraconstitutional right of revolution, or to the possibility that a new national convention would rewrite the Constitution, or simply to the factual possibility that the national government might break down. Similarly, references to the permanency of the Union could have referred to the practical unlikelihood of withdrawal rather than any lack of legal power. The public debates seemingly do not speak specifically to whether ratification under Article VII was revocable.

In the public debate over the Nullification Crisis the separate issue of secession was also discussed. James Madison, often referred to as “The Father of the Constitution”, strongly opposed the argument that secession was permitted by the Constitution. In a March 15, 1833, letter to Daniel Webster (congratulating him on a speech opposing nullification), Madison discussed “revolution” versus “secession”:

I return my thanks for the copy of your late very powerful Speech in the Senate of the United S. It crushes “nullification” and must hasten the abandonment of “Secession”. But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.

Thus Madison affirms an extraconstitutional right to revolt against conditions of “intolerable oppression”; but if the case cannot be made (that such conditions exist), then he rejects secession—as a violation of the Constitution.

During the crisis, President Andrew Jackson, published his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, which made a case for the perpetuity of the Union; plus, he provided his views re the questions of “revolution” and “secession”:

But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offense against the whole Union. To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure.

Some twenty-eight years after Jackson spoke, President James Buchanan gave a different voice—one much more accommodating to the views of the secessionists and the slave states—in the midst of the pre-War secession crisis. In his final State of the Union address to Congress, on December 3, 1860, he stated his view that the South, “after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union”; but he also drew his apocalyptic vision of the results to be expected from secession:

In order to justify secession as a constitutional remedy, it must be on the principle that the Federal Government is a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties. If this be so, the Confederacy [here referring to the existing Union] is a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks which cost our forefathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish.

Alien and Sedition Acts

In response to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts—advanced by the Federalist Party—John Taylor of the Virginia House of Delegates spoke out, urging Virginia to secede from the United States. He argued—as one of many vociferous responses by the Jeffersonian Republicans—the sense of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, adopted in 1798 and 1799, which reserved to those States the rights of secession and interposition (nullification).

Thomas Jefferson, while sitting as Vice President of the United States in 1799, wrote to James Madison of his conviction in “a reservation of th[ose] rights resulting to us from these palpable violations [the Alien and Sedition Acts]” and, if the federal government did not return to

“the true principles of our federal compact, [he was determined to] sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved, and in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.”

Here Jefferson is arguing in a radical voice (and in a private letter) that he would lead a movement for secession; but it is unclear whether he is arguing for “secession at will” or for “revolution” on account of “intolerable oppression” (see above), or neither. Jefferson secretly wrote (one of) the Kentucky Resolutions, which was done—again—while he was holding the office of Vice President. His biographer Dumas Malone argued that, had his actions become known at the time, Jefferson’s participation might have gotten him impeached for (charged with) treason. In writing the first Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson warned that, “unless arrested at the threshold”, the Alien and Sedition Acts would “necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood”. Historian Ron Chernow says of this “he wasn’t calling for peaceful protests or civil disobedience: he was calling for outright rebellion, if needed, against the federal government of which he was vice president.” Jefferson “thus set forth a radical doctrine of states’ rights that effectively undermined the constitution”.

Jeffersonian Republicans were not alone in claiming “reserved rights” against the federal government. Contributing to the rancorous debates during the War of 1812, Founding Father Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and New York—a Federalist, a Hamilton ally and a primary author of the Constitution who advanced the concept that Americans were citizens of a single Union of the states, “contended that secession, under certain circumstances, was entirely constitutional.”

New England Federalists and the Hartford Convention

The 1800 election showed Thomas Jefferson‘s Democratic-Republican Party to be on the rise and the Federalists to be declining, and the Federalists felt threatened by initiatives taken by their opponents. They viewed Jefferson’s unilateral purchase of the Louisiana territory as violating foundational agreements between the original 13 states; Jefferson transacted the purchase in secret and refused to seek the approval of Congress. The new lands anticipated several future western states which the Federalists feared would be dominated by the Democratic-Republicans. Other things added to the Federalists’ alarm, such as the impeachment of Federalist district judge John Pickering by the Jeffersonian-dominated Congress, and similar attacks on Pennsylvania state officials by the Democratic-Republican legislature. By 1804, their national leadership was decimated and their viable base was reduced to the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware.

Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts and a few Federalists envisioned creating a separate New England confederation, possibly combining with lower Canada to form a new pro-British nation. The Embargo Act of 1807 was seen as a threat to the economy of Massachusetts, and the state legislature debated in May 1808 how the state should respond. These debates generated isolated references to secession, but no definite plot materialized. Historian Richard Buell Jr. suggests that “the secessionist movement of 1804 was more of a confession of despair about the future than a realistic proposal for action.”

Federalist party members convened the Hartford Convention on December 15, 1814, and they addressed their opposition to the continuing war with Britain and the domination of the federal government by the “Virginia dynasty”. Twenty six delegates attended; Massachusetts sent 12, Connecticut seven, and Rhode Island four. New Hampshire and Vermont declined, but two counties each from those states sent delegates. Historian Donald R. Hickey notes:

Despite pleas in the New England press for secession and a separate peace, most of the delegates taking part in the Hartford Convention were determined to pursue a moderate course. Only Timothy Bigelow of Massachusetts apparently favored extreme measures, and he did not play a major role in the proceedings.

The final report addressed issues related to the war and state defense, and it recommended several amendments to the Constitution. Massachusetts and Connecticut endorsed it, but the war ended as the delegates were returning to Washington, effectively quashing any impact that it might have had. The Jeffersonians described the convention as “a synonym for disloyalty and treason”, and it became a major factor in the sharp decline of the Federalist Party.

Abolitionists seek Northern secession

Tensions began to rise between North and South by the late 1830s over slavery and related issues. Many Northerners, especially New Englanders, saw themselves as political victims of conspiracies between slave owners and Western expansionists. They viewed the movements to annex Texas and to make war on Mexico as fomented by slaveholders bent on dominating Western expansion and thereby the national destiny. New England abolitionist Benjamin Lundy argued that the annexation of Texas was “a long-premeditated crusade—set on foot by slaveholders, land speculators, etc., with the view of reestablishing, extending, and perpetuating the system of slavery and the slave trade”.

The first petition asking for dissolution of the Union, from the citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, was presented to the U.S. Congress by Massachusetts representative John Quincy Adams in January 1842.

Newspaper editors began demanding separation from the South. William Lloyd Garrison called for secession in The Liberator of May 1844 with his “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States”. The Constitution was created, he wrote, “at the expense of the colored population of the country”, and Southerners were dominating the nation because of the Three-fifths Compromise; now it was time “to set the captive free by the potency of truth” and to “secede from the government”. Coincidentally, the New England Anti-Slavery Convention endorsed the principles of disunion by a vote of 250–24.

In 1846, the following volume by Henry Clarke Wright was published in London: The dissolution of the American union: demanded by justice and humanity, as the incurable enemy of liberty.

According to Theodore Parker, one of the Secret Six who helped finance John Brown, and writing in the 1850s, “Now more than ever should disunion be the motto of all freedom-loving men.

Northern “No Union with Slaveholders” conventions of 1856–57

Called by David Garrison, a convention to discuss “the dissolution of the American Union, and the formation of a Northern, non-slave-holding Confederacy”, was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in January 1857, and is known as the Worcester Disunion Convention.

Similar conventions were held in Angola, Indiana; Adrian, Michigan; and Oswego, New York (the latter of which Susan B. Anthony spoke at).

Shift of secessionism to the South

Southern members of Congress walked out in the 1830s in protest over support for slaves’ right to petition, and “were with difficulty persuaded to return”. The enslaved did not have the right to petition the government. Support of secession really began to shift to Southern states from 1846, after introduction into the public debate of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in the new territories acquired from Mexico. Southern leaders increasingly felt helpless against a powerful political group that was attacking their interests (slavery), reminiscent of Federalist alarms at the beginning of the century.

Nashville Convention of 1850

The Nashville Convention was a political meeting held in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 3–11, 1850. Delegates from nine slave states met to consider secession, if the United States Congress decided to ban slavery in the new territories being added to the country as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession. The compromises worked out in Nashville paved the way for the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and, for a time, preserved the union of the United States.

In 1851 Frederick Barnard found that, for the South, “the Union [was the] only security for Southern rights [slavery]”.

South Carolina’s secession history

During the presidential term of Andrew Jackson, South Carolina threatened secession, often called the Nullification Crisis due to the 1828 Tariff called the Tariff of Abominations, which threatened South Carolina’s economy, and South Carolina, in turn, threatened to secede from the United States. Jackson also threatened to send federal troops to put down the movement and to hang the leader of the secessionists from the highest tree in South Carolina. Also due to this, Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, who supported the movement and wrote the essay “The South Carolina Exposition and Protest“, became the first US vice president to resign. On May 1, 1833, Jackson wrote of nullification, “the tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.”[56] South Carolina also threatened to secede in 1850 over the issue of California’s statehood. It became the first state to declare its secession from the Union on December 20, 1860, with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, and it later joined with the other Southern states to form the Confederacy.

Seceded states form the Confederate States of America

The most famous secessionist movement was the movement which dominated the Southern states of the United States. Eleven slave-state governments voted to secede (but it was rejected in two other states). The seceding states formed a rebel government, declaring the Confederate States of America (CSA).

The eleven states of the CSA, in order of their dates of secession (listed in parentheses), were: South Carolina (December 20, 1860), Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10, 1861), Alabama (January 11, 1861), Georgia (January 19, 1861), Louisiana (January 26, 1861), Texas (February 1, 1861), Virginia (April 17, 1861), Arkansas (May 6, 1861), North Carolina (May 20, 1861), and Tennessee (June 8, 1861).

Secession was also declared by pro-Confederate governments in Missouri and Kentucky (see Confederate government of Missouri and Confederate government of Kentucky), early in the war the Confederacy controlled the southern portion of Missouri and more than half of Kentucky till 1862, but it never became effective as it was opposed by pro-Union governments that in both states retained actual control of the territory after 1862. In Virginia, Unionists in the northwestern part of the state quickly succeeded in forming a functioning government in Wheeling that opposed the pro-Confederate government in Virginia. By 1863 Unionists convinced Congress to admit fifty Virginia counties as the State of West Virginia and the “Restored Government of Virginia” relocated to Union-occupied Alexandria until the Confederacy’s dissolution.

This secessionist movement triggered the American Civil War. The position of the Union was that the Confederacy was not—nor had it ever been—a sovereign nation because “the Union” was always a single nation by the intent of the states themselves, from 1776 onward; thus, a rebellion had been initiated by individuals. Historian Bruce Catton described President Abraham Lincoln‘s April 15, 1861 proclamation, three days after the attack on Fort Sumter, as a proclamation in which Lincoln defined the Union’s position on the hostilities:

After reciting the obvious fact that “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by ordinary law courts and marshalls had taken charge of affairs in the seven secessionist states, it announced that the several states of the Union were called on to contribute 75,000 militia “…to suppress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed.” … “And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse, and retire peacefully to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.

Political effects of their secession

With the departure of the Representatives and Senators from the seceding states—most voluntarily, but some were expelled—the makeup and organization of the 36th United States Congress changed dramatically. Vice President and Senate President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky remained until he was replaced by Hannibal Hamlin, and then expelled, but gone was the President pro tempore (Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama) and the heads of the Senate committees on Claims (Alfred Iverson Sr. of Georgia), Commerce (Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama), the District of Columbia (Albert G. Brown of Mississippi), Finance (Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, expelled), Foreign Relations (James M. Mason of Virginia, expelled), Military Affairs (Jefferson Davis of Mississippi), Naval Affairs (Stephen Mallory of Florida), and Public Lands (Robert Ward Johnson of Arkansas).

Within days, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. Within a month Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota Territory followed. The end of slavery in the District of Columbia had been a goal of abolitionists since the slavery gag rule crisis of the 1830s. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act passed in 1862, as did the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, other measures the slave states had blocked.

Disputed legality of unilateral secession

The Constitution does not directly mention secession. The legality of secession was hotly debated in the 19th century. Although the Federalist Party briefly explored New England secession during the War of 1812, secession became associated with Southern states as the North’s industrial power increased. In the modern day, the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the Constitution to be an “indestructible” union. However, this stance was largely not developed until the Post-Civil War period. The Articles of Confederation explicitly state the Union is “perpetual”; the U.S. Constitution declares its purpose is to form a “more perfect union” than the Articles of Confederation. Other scholars, while not necessarily disagreeing that the secession was illegal, point out that sovereignty is often de facto an “extralegal” question. Had the Confederacy won, any illegality of its actions under U.S. law would have been rendered irrelevant, just as the undisputed illegality of American rebellion under the British law of 1775 was rendered irrelevant. Thus, these scholars argue, the illegality of unilateral secession was not firmly de facto established until the Union won the Civil War; in this view, the legal question was resolved at Appomattox.

Supreme Court rulings

Texas v. White was argued before the United States Supreme Court during the December 1868 term. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase read the Court’s decision, on April 15, 1869. Australian professors Peter Radan and Aleksandar Pavkovic write:

Chase [Chief Justice] ruled in favor of Texas on the ground that the Confederate state government in Texas had no legal existence on the basis that the secession of Texas from the United States was illegal. The critical finding underpinning the ruling that Texas could not secede from the United States was that, following its admission to the United States in 1845, Texas had become part of “an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States”…. In practical terms, this meant that Texas had never seceded from the United States.

Chase, however, “recognized that a state could cease to be part of the union ‘through revolution, or through consent of the States'”.

In 1877, the Williams v. Bruffy decision was rendered, pertaining to Civil War debts. The Court wrote regarding acts establishing an independent government that “The validity of its acts, both against the parent state and the citizens or subjects thereof, depends entirely upon its ultimate success; if it fail to establish itself permanently, all such acts perish with it; if it succeed and become recognized, its acts from the commencement of its existence are upheld as those of an independent nation.”

The Union as a sovereign state

Historian Kenneth Stampp notes that a historical argument against secession was that “the Union is older than the states” and that “the provision for a perpetual Union in the Articles of Confederation” was carried over into the Constitution by the “reminder that the preamble to the new Constitution gives us one of its purposes the formation of ‘a more perfect Union'”. Concerning the White decision Stampp wrote:

In 1869, when the Supreme Court, in Texas v. White, finally rejected as untenable the case for a constitutional right of secession, it stressed this historical argument. The Union, the Court said, “never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation”. Rather, “It began among the Colonies…. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form, and character, and sanction from the Articles of Confederation.”

Texas’s secession from Mexico

The Republic of Texas successfully seceded from Mexico in 1836 (this, however took the form of outright rebellion against Mexico, and claimed no warrant under the Mexican Constitution to do so). Mexico refused to recognize its revolted province as an independent country, and the Texas Republic did not have significant international recognition. In 1845, Congress admitted Texas as a state. The documents governing Texas’s accession to the United States of America do not mention any right of secession—although they did raise the possibility of dividing Texas into multiple states inside the Union. Mexico warned that annexation meant war, and the Mexican–American War followed in 1846.

Partition of a state

Article IV, Section. 3, Clause 1 of the United States Constitutions provides:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

The separation referred to is not secession but partition. Some of the movements to partition states have identified themselves as “secessionist” movements.

Of the new states admitted to the Union by Congress, three were set off from already existing states, while one was established upon land claimed by an existing state after existing for several years as a de facto independent republic. They are:

  • Vermont was admitted as a new state in 1791 after the legislature of New York ceded its claim to the region in 1790. New York’s claim that Vermont (also known as the New Hampshire Grants) was legally a part of New York was and remains a matter of disagreement. King George III ruled in 1764 that the region belonged to the Province of New York.
  • Kentucky was a part of Virginia until it was admitted as a new state in 1792 with the consent of the legislature of Virginia in 1789.
  • Maine was a part of Massachusetts until it was admitted as a new state in 1820 after the legislature of Massachusetts consented in 1819.
  • West Virginia was a part of Virginia until it was admitted as a new state in 1863 after the General Assembly of the Restored Government of Virginia consented in 1862. The question of whether the legislature of Virginia consented is controversial, as Virginia was one of the Confederate states. However, antisecessionist Virginians formed a government in exile, which was recognized by the United States and approved the state’s partition. Later, by its ruling in Virginia v. West Virginia (1871), the Supreme Court implicitly affirmed that the breakaway Virginia counties did have the proper consents required to become a separate state.

Many unsuccessful proposals to partition U.S. states have been drawn.

20th and 21st centuries

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen examples of local and state secession movements. All such movements to create new states have failed. The formation in 1971 of the Libertarian Party and its national platform affirmed the right of states to secede on three vital principles: “We shall support recognition of the right to secede. Political units or areas which do secede should be recognized by the United States as independent political entities where: (1) secession is supported by a majority within the political unit, (2) the majority does not attempt suppression of the dissenting minority, and (3) the government of the new entity is at least as compatible with human freedom as that from which it seceded.”

As of 2024, over six states are said to have growing secessionist movements, those being Alaska, California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and New Hampshire. Due to the increasing polarization of the country, it was reported that these areas are seeing growing calls for independence.

City secession

The island of Nantucket attempted to secede from Massachusetts three times in the 20th century. In 1937, it was over public utility rates, in 1957 it was over state ownership of passenger ferry boats, and in 1977 over redistricting that would have diluted their representation in Congress.

There was an attempt by Staten Island to break away from New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to a 1993 referendum, in which 65% voted to secede. Implementation was blocked in the State Assembly by assertions that the state’s constitution required a “home rule message” from New York City.

The San Fernando Valley lost a vote to separate from Los Angeles in 2002. Despite the majority (55%) of the valley within the L.A. city limits voting for secession, the city council unanimously voted to block the partition of the valley north of Mulholland Drive.

Other attempted city secession drives include Killington, Vermont, which has voted twice (2005 and 2006) to join New Hampshire; the community of Miller Beach, Indiana, originally a separate incorporated community, to split from the city of Gary in 2007 and Northeast Philadelphia to split from the city of Philadelphia in the 1980s.

A portion of the town of Calabash, North Carolina, voted to secede from the town in 1998 after receiving permission for a referendum on the issue from the state of North Carolina. Following secession, the area incorporated itself as the town of Carolina Shores. Despite the split, the towns continue to share fire and emergency services.

The town of Rough and Ready, California, declared its secession from the Union as The Great Republic of Rough and Ready on 7 April 1850, largely to avoid mining taxes, but voted to rejoin the Union less than three months later on 4 July.

The Northwest Angle is a small exclave of Minnesota that juts north into Canada due to a quirk in the definitions of the US-Canada border. Because of laws restricting fishing, some residents of the Northwest Angle suggested leaving the United States and joining Canada in 1997. The following year, U.S. Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota proposed legislation to allow the residents of the Northwest Angle, part of his district, to vote on seceding from the United States and joining Canada. The action did not lead to secession, but did succeed in getting fishing regulations synchronized across international (fresh) waters.

State secession

Some state movements seek secession from the United States itself and the formation of a nation from one or more states.

  • Alaska: In November 2006, the Alaska Supreme Court held in the case Kohlhaas v. State that secession was illegal and refused to permit an initiative to be presented to the people of Alaska for a vote. The Alaskan Independence Party remains a factor in state politics, and Walter Hickel, a member of the party, was Governor from 1990 to 1994.
  • California: California secession, known as “Calexit”, was discussed by grassroots movement parties and small activist groups calling for the state to secede from the union in a pro-secessionist meeting in Sacramento on April 15, 2010. In 2015, a political action committee called Yes California Independence Committee formed to advocate California’s independence from the United States. On January 8, 2016, the California Secretary of State’s office confirmed that a political body called the California National Party filed the appropriate paperwork to begin qualifying as a political party. The California National Party, whose primary objective is California independence, ran a candidate for State Assembly in the June 7, 2016 primary. On November 9, 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, residents of the state caused the hashtag #calexit to trend on Twitter, wanting out of the country due to his win; they argue that they have the 6th largest economy in the world, and more residents than any other state in the union. 32% of Californians, and 44% of California Democrats were in favor of California secession in a March 2017 poll. The Attorney General of California approved applications by the California Freedom Coalition and others to gather signatures to put Calexit on the 2018 ballot. In July 2018, the objectives of the Calexit initiative were expanded upon by including a plan to carve out an “autonomous Native American nation” that would take up the eastern part of California, and “postponing its ballot referendum approach in favor of convincing Republican states to support their breakaway efforts.” More recently, a pro-independence Californian movement known as “Yes California” wants a national divorce in order to avoid a civil war.
  • Florida: The mock 1982 secessionist protest by the Conch Republic in the Florida Keys resulted in an ongoing source of local pride and tourist amusement.
  • Georgia: On April 1, 2009, the Georgia State Senate passed a resolution, 43–1, that asserted the right of states to nullify federal laws under some circumstances. The resolution also asserted that if Congress, the president, or the federal judiciary took certain steps, such as establishing martial law without state consent, requiring some types of involuntary servitude, taking any action regarding religion or restricting freedom of political speech, or establishing further prohibitions of types or quantities of firearms or ammunition, the constitution establishing the United States government would be considered nullified and the union would be dissolved.
  • Hawaii: The Hawaiian sovereignty movement has a number of active groups that have won some concessions from the state of Hawaii, including the offering of H.R. 258 in March 2011, which removes the words “Treaty of Annexation” from a statute. As of 2011, it had passed a committee recommendation 6–0.
  • Montana: With the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States to hear District of Columbia v. Heller in late 2007, an early 2008 movement began in Montana involving at least 60 elected officials addressing potential secession if the Second Amendment were interpreted not to grant an individual right, citing its compact with the United States of America.
  • New Hampshire: On September 1, 2012, “The New Hampshire Liberty Party was formed to promote independence from the federal government and for the individual.” The Free State Project is another NH based movement that has considered secession to increase liberty. On July 23, 2001, founder of the FSP, Jason Sorens, published “Announcement: The Free State Project”, in The Libertarian Enterprise, stating, “Even if we don’t actually secede, we can force the federal government to compromise with us and grant us substantial liberties. Scotland and Quebec have both used the threat of secession to get large subsidies and concessions from their respective national governments. We could use our leverage for liberty.” In July 2024, the New Hampshire Independence Movement announced that it opposes the “tyranny” of the US government and that it is committed to New Hampshire being a “free, independent and prosperous” nation.
  • Oregon: Following the 2016 presidential election, Portland residents Christian Trejbal and Jennifer Rollins submitted a petition for a ballot measure relating to secession from the United States; the petitioners withdrew the measure shortly afterward, citing recent riots and death threats.
  • South Carolina: The Christian Exodus Movement, founded by Cory Burnell in 2003, aimed to relocate conservative Christians to South Carolina to form an independent country based on Christian principles.
  • Texas: The group Republic of Texas generated national publicity for its controversial actions in the late 1990s. A small group still meets. In April 2009, Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, raised the issue of secession in disputed comments during a speech at a Tea Party protest saying “Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that… My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”Another group, the Texas Nationalist Movement, also seeks Texas’ independence from the United States, but its methodology is to have the Texas Legislature call for a statewide referendum on the issue (similar to the Scottish Independence vote of 2014). In 2022, the Republican Party of Texas platform called for the legislature to introduce a referendum on secession. In March 2023, state representative Bryan Slaton introduced a bill that would add a referendum on independence to the 2024 election ballot.
  • Vermont: The Second Vermont Republic, founded in 2003, is a loose network of several groups that describes itself as “a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union.” Its “primary objective is to extricate Vermont peacefully from the United States as soon as possible.” They have worked closely with the Middlebury Institute created from a meeting sponsored in Vermont in 2004. On October 28, 2005, activists held the Vermont Independence Conference, “the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861.” They also participated in the 2006 and 2007 Middlebury-organized national secessionist meetings that brought delegates from over a dozen groups.
  • After Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election a number of state petitions to allow state secession were set up using the White House‘s petitioning system. There were eventually secession petitions set up for all fifty states, with six (Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas) reaching the 25,000 threshold. The Texas secession e-petition ultimately received the most e-signatures, almost 126,000. The petitions prompted others visitors to launch “counter-petitions, asking that the president stop states from seceding” or to deport secessionists. The petitions were started by individual citizens, not by the states themselves, and have no legal standing. The petitions prompted responses from various state governors and other elected officials, most of whom rejected the notion. In January 2013, a White House staffer officially responded to the various petitions, noting that secession was inconsistent with the United States Constitution. A spokeswoman for Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama said “Governor Bentley believes in one nation under God” and “We can disagree on philosophy, but we should work together to make this country the best it can be.” Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee said: “I don’t think that’s a valid option for Tennessee…I don’t think we’ll be seceding.” The press secretary to Governor Rick Perry of Texas released a statement saying Perry “believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it” but “also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government.” Conversely, a spokeswoman for Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas said that Paul “feels the same now” as he did in 2009, when he said “It’s very American to talk about secession — that’s how we came into being.” A number of conservative media figures devoted time to discussing the petitions, such as Phil Valentine and Sean Hannity. In January 2013, the “secession petitions filed by residents of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and five other states, as well as one counterpetition seeking the deportation of everyone who signed a secession petition”, received an official response from White House Office of Public Engagement director Jon Carson. Carson rejected the secession notion, writing that open debate was positive for democracy but that the Founders had established a “perpetual union” and that the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White (1869) that individual states had no right to secede.
  • After the Supreme Court of the United States rejected Texas v. Pennsylvania, Texas’ attempt to invalidate 2020 election results from four states, Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, Allen West said “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Some have interpreted this as an encouragement of secession from the United States.

Regional secession

National divorce

National divorce is the idea that the United States should separate by blue states and red states. Various editorials have proposed that states of the U.S. secede and then form federations only with states that have voted for the same political party. These editorials note the increasingly polarized political strife in the U.S. between Republican voters and Democratic voters. They propose partition of the U.S. as a way of allowing both groups to achieve their policy goals while reducing the chances of civil war. Red states and blue states are states that typically vote for the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. A common argument for national divorce is that “the US is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s.” Repeated polling by YouGov from 2017, 2022 and 2025 show an increase in people who say that a civil war is very likely or somewhat likely in the next decade.

The only official to openly advocate for a national divorce is representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Polling

A September 2017 Zogby International poll found that 68% of Americans were open to states of the USA seceding. A 2014 Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 24% of Americans supported their state seceding from the union if necessary; 53% opposed the idea. Republicans were somewhat more supportive than Democrats. Respondents cited issues like gridlock, governmental overreach, the possible unconstitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and a loss of faith in the federal government as reasons for desiring secession.

A 2021 poll found that 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters support partitioning the United States into multiple countries based on political party lines. A different poll that same year grouped the United States into five geographic regions, and found that 37% of Americans favored secession of their own region. 44% of Americans in the South favored secession, with Republican support at 66%; while Democratic support was 47% in the Pacific states.

Could the United States be headed for a national divorce?

There is a growing divide in US society and politics along old civil war battle lines – and the election could make things worse.

The American Civil War (1861-65) was fought over slavery and, to a lesser extent, states’ rights and the future of the economy. In the run-up to the 2024 US elections, there is talk of another civil war brewing over the country’s future.

While there is no imminent threat of armies clashing on the battlefield, increasing hyperbolic insurrectionist sentiment is a product of a growing realization that the US is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s.

The US is now more divided along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s.

An increasingly Balkanized US is likely to be even more inward-looking, preoccupied with internal divisions over immigration, race, inequality, and sexual and gender identity issues. Such self-absorption is already manifesting itself in isolationism and protectionism at the expense of the security and economic alliances that have greatly benefitted the US and the world for decades.  

Half (54 per cent) of self-described strong Republicans in America now think it is very or somewhat likely there will be a US civil war within the next decade. Four in ten (40 per cent) strong Democrats agree.

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Republican from Georgia, has called for a ‘national divorce’. ‘We need to separate by red states and blue states’. And one in four (23 per cent) Americans support their state seceding from the Union.

This split could be seen in the 2020 election between the blue states that voted for Joe Biden and the red states that voted for Donald Trump, with many of the Trump states among those that seceded from the Union in 1861.

But the emergent two Americas can also be seen across a range of divisive social issues that reflect deeper divisions than those that merely manifest themselves at the ballot box.

Of the 15 US states with the most restrictive abortion laws, all voted for Trump in 2020 and seven were originally in the Confederacy.

The emergent two Americas can also be seen across a range of divisive social issues that reflect deeper divisions than those that merely manifest themselves at the ballot box.

Of the 21 states with the most permissive gun laws in 2023, 19 voted for Trump, and six were in the Confederacy. 

Of the 19 states that enacted laws in 2022 making it harder to vote, 14 voted for Trump and seven were in the Confederacy.

And of the 23 states that enacted legislation in 2023 imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care, transgender participation in school sports, school instruction touching on LBGTQ issues and related matters, 22 voted for Trump and nine were in the Confederacy.

Moreover, these civil war era divisions have now emerged in a constitutional confrontation over immigration. In January, the US Supreme Court ordered Texas to remove razor wire it had put up along the Rio Grande river to stop migrants from crossing. Texas Governor Greg Abbot refused to comply, claiming the compact between the states and the United States had been broken by President Biden’s failure to halt illegal immigration. 

Abbot’s suggestion that the US Constitution is a mere compact that states may ignore at their discretion is reminiscent of the Confederacy’s rationale for being able to leave the Union in 1861.

Compounding such divisions are the growing differences in public opinion and voting preferences between rural and urban areas.

In terms of public opinion, nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of urban Americans believe immigration strengthens society, while a majority (57 per cent) of rural Americans say it threatens traditional American customs and values. Seven in ten (70 per cent) urban Americans hold the view that government should do more to solve problems. Half (49 per cent)of those in rural areas think that the government is doing too many things best left to businesses and individuals.

In terms of voting preferences, of the half dozen most urbanized states, only one voted for Trump and it was also in the Confederacy. Of the half dozen least urbanized states, four voted for Trump and two were in the Confederacy.

These growing divisions in American society are mirrored in a growing partisanship in many attitudes towards the US role in the world and pressing international issues.

70 per cent of Republicans who support Trump believe that Ukraine aid has not been worth the cost, compared with 69 per cent of Democrats who say it has been worth it. On the Israel-Hamas war, six in ten (61 per cent) liberal Democrats believe Israel is going too far in its military operation against Hamas, but only 8 per cent of conservative Republicans agree. 

The deep divisions in the American electorate manifest themselves in early projections of the possible outcome of the 2024 presidential election. At this stage, Biden is judged by the highly respected Cook Political Report to have 226 out of the necessary 270 votes in the electoral college, with the majority (116) coming from former Union states. Trump has 235 votes, with a majority (135) coming from former states in the Confederacy. The continuing legacy of the civil war remains.

The outcome of the 2024 US election is unlikely to resolve these differences. In fact, it may deepen them, whoever becomes president. Just as southerners never fully accepted the outcome of the civil war, Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen are unlikely to gracefully accept a loss in 2024, presaging more resentment and possible renewed violence. And if Trump wins, Biden supporters may attribute it to Republican election subversion, further alienating Democrats from their fellow Americans.

America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States.

America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States. There are effectively two Americas – and they are at war. They are fighting over social, political and constitutional issues, and over what role the US should play in the world. The 2024 US election is just another battle in this war. 

Fact check: Can states legally secede from the U.S.?

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently said she believes that states should have the right to do what their residents want to do — even if that means seceding from the United States.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently said she believes that states should have the right to do what their residents want to do — even if that means seceding from the United States.

In a Jan. 31 episode of “The Breakfast Club” radio show, host Charlamagne tha God asked Haley about Texas’ border dispute with the federal government and whether she still believes states have the right to secede, pointing to her previous remarks on the subject.

On the radio show, Haley acknowledged that Texas is not going to secede, but said, “If Texas decides they want to do that, they can do that. … If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make.”

Haley later walked back her comments in a Feb. 4 CNN interview, saying the Constitution doesn’t allow states to secede. Haley’s campaign did not answer PolitiFact’s request for comment.

“What I do think they have the right to do is have the power to protect themselves and do all that,” Haley said on CNN. “Texas has talked about seceding for a long time. The Constitution doesn’t allow for that. But what I will say is … where’s that coming from? That’s coming from the fact that people don’t think that (the) government is listening to them.”

For months, Texas and the federal government have been locked in a tense standoff over border security measures as record numbers of migrants illegally cross into the U.S. from Mexico. Meanwhile, social media has been awash with claims about Texas seceding and warnings of an impending civil war.

“Texas is about to become its own country to stop a civil war from occurring,” a Jan. 30 Instagram post claimed.

To address Haley’s initial comment and the internet buzz, we asked constitutional law experts whether a state could secede from the U.S. The consensus was a resounding “no.”

Experts said the Civil War tested and settled this question 159 years ago, and Haley’s radio show remarks ignored this significant part of American history. It wasn’t the first time Haley, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, had misrepresented Civil War history.

The Constitution does not say anything explicitly for or against secession, experts said.

“But it’s pretty significant evidence that during the debates over ratification, when states were deciding whether or not to join this new union, no one said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you can always leave,’” said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.

Roosevelt said if Haley was making a moral or political argument, she could appeal to the Declaration of Independence as the 11 seceding southern states did at the time of the Civil War.

“But that’s not the Constitution, and the aspect of the Declaration that we consider foundational to America now is more ‘all men are created equal’ than ‘it is the right of the people to alter or abolish’ their government,” Roosevelt said. “So Haley is offering a Confederate view of the Constitution that cost us over half a million lives.”

After the Civil War, in 1869, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Texas v. White that the U.S. is “an indestructible union” and states do not have the right to unilaterally secede.

“When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation,” the ruling stated. “There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.”

The late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia also weighed in on secession’s legality: “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede,” Scalia wrote in a 2006 letter.

If Texas or another state wanted to secede and the state reached an agreement via Congress with the rest of the country, then it might work, said Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor.

However, it’s more likely a secession attempt “would constitute an insurrection against the United States that the central government would be entirely justified in suppressing by armed force, just as Lincoln did the Confederacy,” said Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor.

Haley said, “If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make.”

Constitutional law experts told us the Civil War’s outcome and Supreme Court precedent say the opposite.

We rate Haley’s claim False.

The Divided States of America?

There are at least two very different visions of what America ought to be, and they increasingly appear to be mutually exclusive.

“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting, Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? …For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other.” Thus muses Tom More, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, a half-serious, half-comical vision of an America on the brink of breaking apart—socially, morally, and politically. More’s reflection could serve as the epigraph to F.H. Buckley’s American Secession—a short, punchy treatise on the possibility of a national break-up. Indeed, Buckley’s depiction of America, on the whole, makes Percy’s dystopian novel seem impressively prescient: we have seen the rise of a populist right that adopts the derisive slur of the left as a badge of honor (in real life, “Deplorables”; in Percy’s novel, “Knotheads”), political sorting on a grand scale, and an interminable war in a developing country (though Percy’s fictional war has lasted only fifteen years). In general, if Buckley is to be believed, we are much closer to national disintegration than many people seem to realize. Buckley’s goal is to awaken the American people to the danger and to try to provide the outline of a possible alternative.

American Secession is divided into three sections. In the first part (“A Cure for a Divided People?”), Buckley tackles his most controversial—and, it must be said, his least persuasive—claim: that the specter of secession haunts American political life in a meaningful way. In the second part (“A Cure for Bigness?”), by far the longest and most convincing section, he marshals a host of social science evidence and political-philosophical arguments against the Madisonian vision of an extensive commercial republic and in favor of small republics. The third and shortest part (“Lesser Cures”) articulates Buckley’s less extreme alternative to secession, which he describes as an Americanized form of the British system of political devolution or “home rule” for the states. Buckley refers to this alternative as “secession lite.”

The premise of the book is at once compelling and dubious. On the one hand, there does not seem to be anything like a critical mass of political support for secession in the country. The brief surge in support for California secession following the election of Donald Trump, cited more than once by Buckley, was a blip or a show of outrage; support for “Calexit” has fallen to its lowest levels since the movement began. Indeed, according to polling done by Zogby Strategies, support for secession across the country has dropped off throughout the Trump presidency. In both the Northeast and the South, support for secession fell by almost ten points between September 2017 and July 2018 alone. Hispanic support for secession fell more than fifteen points in the same period. While there are of course outliers—African-American support for secession, for instance, has increased by around five points and support for secession in the Upper Midwest by some sixteen points—all of these wide swings in a short period of time are, I believe, better read as stand-ins for other phenomena (feelings of political impotence, perhaps, or concern about the future of the country) than as serious indications of political intention. In short, it seems very unlikely to me that millions of people in the Upper Midwest decided sometime between Thanksgiving 2018 and Independence Day 2019 that now is the time to break up the country.

Of the other modern examples of secessionist movements Buckley cites as precedents—Quebec, Scotland, Ireland, and Czechoslovakia—two failed and one succeeded. The other (Czechoslovakia) was the dissolution of a state artificially constructed and artificially held together by great powers for almost the entirety of its existence. The union survived the collapse of the USSR by a mere two years. Moreover, every one of the examples given includes a people with an ancient and distinct culture—and, importantly, with a distinct language—that preexisted the current political union in which those people found themselves. There are no real analogues to these conditions in the United States—with the possible partial exception of the American South. But while I find his argument that Southerners constitute their own people persuasive, Southern secession is irretrievably tainted in the popular imagination by its connection to Southern slavery. Finally, Buckley seems to me to be right when he argues that we lack the political will to oppose a secessionist movement, but that argument cuts both ways.

On the other hand, Buckley’s most fundamental, and most troubling, claim seems to be almost incontestable: regardless of how we got here, America is deeply divided. Split us up how you will—the educated vs. the uneducated, the Coastal elites vs. the heartland, the rich vs. poor, and so on—vast sections of the population today believe that their opponents are not just mistaken, but nigh-incomprehensibly evil. While some Americans compare the President to the biblical Cyrus, others find him indistinguishable from the fascist strongmen of the 1930s. But the president and the 2016 election did not cause this division; they merely revealed it. Are abortion, euthanasia, and transgender hormone therapy human rights or are they attacks on human dignity? Is gun-control a public health necessity or an attack on constitutional freedoms? There are at least two very different visions of what America ought to be, and they increasingly appear to be mutually exclusive.

How then can we heal our divisions? Buckley’s solution is, in a sense, that we shouldn’t try: we are a collection of different peoples and we should accept that fact. What works in Massachusetts might not work in Texas and vice versa. The central section of the book delivers an impressive series of arguments against the idea of a continental state and in favor of small, self-governing republics. Yet Buckley remains, as he puts it, a unionist. His answer is therefore not dissolution but devolution. We ought to return to the state level—devolve—a significant portion of the policy-making now done at the federal level.

But despite occasionally employing some of the same rhetoric, Buckley’s proposed “home rule” is not merely one more in a long line of calls for a return to federalism. He urges us to reconsider a more radical option: the doctrine of nullification—the doctrine that a state has the right to ignore federal law and even to pass laws contravening federal legislation. That nullification could lead to a constitutional crisis does not for Buckley constitute an objection; indeed, a constitutional crisis of this sort would pave the way for a new constitutional convention in which the relationship between the states and the federal government could be radically reimagined.

And while Buckley’s suggestion may seem outlandish, he rightly points out that a number of progressive states are right now effectively nullifying federal drug and immigration law, while many conservative states have long sought to circumvent or render impotent federal protections for abortion. In short, the country is too big, our interests too disparate, and our moral and political beliefs too different for policy to be made at the federal level. Why not then reduce the federal government to a body that deals exclusively with foreign affairs, regulating a common defense policy, and ensuring an internal zone of free trade among the confederated states? All other legislation—moral, political, and economic—would be left up to the states—including legislation regarding civil rights.

But how would this confederation work, especially when it comes to variations in civil rights? If, for instance, California could legalize polyamorous marriages, would Texas have to accept their marriage licenses? At one point, Buckley asks why a citizen of one state should “care what another state does with same-sex marriage.” But people do care about what goes on in other states, because many of the issues that divide us are not merely policy preferences, as Buckley at one point calls them, but matters of justice and injustice, right and wrong. And many people agree with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assertion that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Many supporters of same-sex marriage consider marriage to be a human right that ought to be recognized everywhere. In much the same way, opponents of abortion believe that abortion is the murder of a human being, and murder, like slavery, is not something that ought to be left up to the states.

In order to reassure those concerned about civil rights protections, Buckley insists that devolution “wouldn’t much change things” from how they are now. But if things wouldn’t really change, it is hard to understand why we ought to undergo a certainly difficult and potentially disastrous attempt to reorder our constitution in so radical a way. And when we realize that the case for home-rule presupposes that secession is suddenly and seriously on the table, as Buckley indicates toward the very end of the book, then the interesting, thought-provoking, and public-spirited case Buckley makes suddenly seems to melt into air, a mere thought-experiment or an academic musing.

At the end of Percy’s Love in the Ruins, the political crisis point comes—and then it just… goes. There is a brief, localized outbreak of confusion before things settle down. No problems are solved; no wrongs are righted. An oppressed class strikes it rich and immediately adopts all the works and ways of those they have replaced, with the head revolutionary returning to his cushy endowed chair at a major research university. The “beloved old USA,” contrary to all expectation, continues to limp along, held together by inertia and a lack of real political will in any particular direction. Perhaps here too Percy saw the future all too well.

Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation

Political polarization has been a constant in American politics since its founding but in recent years has become a grave and very real threat to the stability of the country. Two decades into the 21st Century, the U.S. is less united than at any time in history since the Civil War. And like during the Civil War, secession could very well be the consequence of this political divide. In DIVIDED WE FALL: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (St. Martin’s Press; On-sale: September 22, 2020), columnist and author David French warns of the potentially dire dangers to the country if political differences are not reconciled. In personal and accessible prose, he offers a hopeful path forward based on James Madison’s vision of pluralism.

The U.S. is more diverse in its beliefs and culture than ever before. But red and blue states, secular and religious groups, liberal and conservative idealists, and Republican and Democratic representatives all have one thing in common: each believes their distinct cultures and liberties are being threatened by an escalating violent opposition. This polarized tribalism, espoused by the loudest, angriest fringe extremists on both the left and the right, dismisses dialogue as appeasement; if left unchecked, it could divide the country in real and lasting ways.

DIVIDED WE FALL combines an engaging mix of cutting edge research and fair-minded analysis to provide an unblinking look at the true dimensions and dangers of this widening ideological gap, and what could happen if steps aren’t taken toward bridging it. French reveals chilling, plausible scenarios of how the United States could fracture into regions that will not only weaken the country but destabilize the world. The good news is that there is still time for change. By implementing James Madison’s vision of pluralism—that all people have the right to form communities representing their personal values—oppressive factions can be prevented from seizing absolute power. Everyone’s beliefs and identities across all fifty states can be maintained and allowed to flourish.

Reestablishing national unity will require the bravery to commit to embracing qualities of kindness, decency, and grace towards those we disagree with ideologically. French calls on all Americans to demonstrate true tolerance so the American divide can be healed.

BU Historian Answers: Are We Headed for Another Civil War?

A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”

Is that legitimately where we stand today in the era of Donald Trump, particularly in the wake of the ramped-up rhetoric stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow, or is Civil War talk just crazy hyperbole? BU Today put three questions to Nina Silber, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of history and American studies and the current president of the Society of Civil War Historians. Silber has done extensive research on the Civil War over more than two decades and has written several books on the subject, including Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992), Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (2005), and most recently, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Along with her teaching and research, she has worked on numerous public history projects, including museum exhibitions at the Gettysburg National Military Park and film projects on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.

So if anyone would have a knowledgeable perspective on the question of whether we are headed for civil war, it’s Silber. Read her answers about the proliferation of headlines referencing the possibility of another civil war.

BU Today: Democrats are demanding documents from President Trump, his family, and many associated with him. The political divide seems to be getting worse. Is it irrational to say this could be the beginning of a civil war?

Silber: I wouldn’t identify this most recent development [the demanding of documents] as the “beginning of a civil war” since I’m not sure that reflects anything other than the political divide we’ve already witnessed for the last several years and the fact that Democrats are taking steps they could not have taken before they regained control of the House. More ominous, I think, are indications of political violence and the willingness to enact political violence. This could be seen, for example, in the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, when the shooter spoke explicitly about targeting Jews who expressed sympathy for immigrants, or the recent case of the Coast Guard officer who was making plans to kill Democrats and journalists. I can imagine a future in which we deal with even more incidents of, or plans for, political violence—and that’s definitely a disturbing development. I’m troubled, too, by the role the president plays in contributing to this atmosphere.

But it would have to be something else to call this a “civil war.” That would indicate a willingness on the part of masses of people to engage in violence against their political enemies. That happened in the 1860s, in part because people had come to see their political opponents in extreme, even demonic, ways and found it impossible to find any middle ground. Maybe our politics and culture are moving in that direction, but I don’t see it yet.

The political map these days shows so much red in the middle, sandwiched by blue on the coasts. How is that different from the North vs South divide of the Civil War?

The electoral map, at least from the most recent presidential election, does show blue coasts and a red middle. But I think that’s also a deceptive picture since we know that in many states, such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, there are deep internal divisions. In other words, it’s not the case that Florida, Pennsylvania, and others are overwhelmingly Republican. The same could be said for a number of “blue” states too. The geographic divide today is less clear-cut, less along solidly sectional lines.

In 1860, the presidential contest reflected the way the political parties had divided and had become completely sectionalized. Many Southerners could not even vote for the Republican Party (which proclaimed opposition to the expansion of slavery) and the Democratic Party ran one candidate in Northern states (Stephen Douglas) and a different candidate in Southern states (John Breckinridge). Fundamentally, the split in the Democratic Party was over slavery: Southern Democrats were calling for a federal slave code (to regulate and permit slavery everywhere in the country) and Northern Democrats opposed this. As a result, the political divide reflected the division in the country between states that permitted slavery and states where it had been outlawed.

Some historians have been saying there was a similar political divide in 1860 to what we’re seeing today. Do you agree?

There may be a few historians who think the divide is similar, but I think most would say we’re looking at different patterns in our political divisions, although the tendency toward heated and extreme political rhetoric might be similar. The inability to find a political middle ground, certainly in the federal government, seems also to be similar.

Secession: A How-to Guide

Frank Buckley compares the divided states of America to a married couple with irreconcilable differences.

Frank Buckley‘s ’new book, American Secession argues that when it comes to country size, bigness is bad and small is beautiful. And he thinks we are on the verge of a break up.

Would America be better off as many smaller countries? While the case has been made by many inferior minds, Buckley brings a historical context that makes it seem less far-fetched to envision a Republic of California, Vermont, etc.

When the Framers set out to tinker with the Articles of Confederation, few thought they would come up with a brand new Constitution.

28 states have proposed a constitutional convention, or “con-con,” to tie federal government’s hands with a balanced-budget amendment. If the necessary 38 states pass such resolutions, we could end up with a much more dramatic event — secession.

The United States is no longer one country, but at least two. He’s issued this warning in previous books and on my show before. A left-leaning elite (mostly clustered in coastal cities) now comprises a “New Class” that shares little in common with the rural population that elected Trump in 2016. And although “secession” is still a dirty word for most progressives, that hasn’t stopped a number of breakaway movements like Calexit and the Second Vermont Republic from gaining momentum. If Trump is elected to a second term, these will surely gain steam.

So let’s say California got fed up and wanted to opt out. Then what? Texas tried it in 1861, but was smacked down by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White after the end of the Civil War. The Court ruled that Texas’ vote to secede from the Union prior to the war didn’t count — in other words, the relationship between states in the Union was “dissoluble.”

Nothing has changed since then, meaning the only legal route to secession is through a “con-con.” While most historians look favorably on the preservation of the Union during the Civil War, Buckley argues that there’s more to be gained today from a legally-sought secession.

Today, America increasingly looks like a unitary state than the republic the Framers gave us thanks to the explosive growth of Federal government in 20th century. This “bigness” has taken a toll on our happiness, our wealth, our freedom, and the overall effectiveness of the government.

Listen to the show to hear the full argument and the “how-to” guide for a modern day secession movement. Those who read his new book will come away with a very message. Namely, that national self-determination can be exercised for progressive reasons, and that a looming break up may in fact be the best way to avert another Civil War.

Frank Buckley compares the divided states of America to a married couple with irreconcilable differences. Is it best for us to part amicably, or muddle through?

TRANSCRIPT

Bob Zadek: About the greatest gift that a scholar can give to Americans and to the world is to take a concept which is considered to be unthinkable, and to make it thinkable, if there is such a word as that. Our guest this morning has done exactly that.

Frank Buckley has written a book which raises a concept that my friends out there will think to be unthinkable. But it is not. It is fascinating, interesting, and provocative. Once you start wondering about the concept, if you are like me at all, you can’t let go.

Frank’s book is entitled American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup. Frank, welcome to the show this morning and thank you so much in advance for the writing and the Tuesday publication of your book.

Frank Buckley: Well, Bob, thanks very much for having me.

The Reasons For Thinking About Secession

Bob Zadek: Your book is entitled *American Secession, the Looming Threat of a National Breakup.* Secession, although it clearly has a defined meaning, can describe a continuum of political events or political circumstances. So secession isn’t one concept but a range of concepts. What is there about America today that makes you fear or wonder about secession?

Frank Buckley: There are maybe more now than in 1961different people of different persuasions in the United States — not just divisions. The divisions are so intense. There’s so much animosity that you have to wonder at some point where that is going to lead.

If half the country thinks the rest of the country is deplorable, why do they want to be in the same country as us? And if you’re one of the deplorables, do you want to be in the same country as the people who despise you so openly? Particularly so when secession is not the great bogey man but rather it is actually something quite feasible and quite doable, which is not what people understand. Most of the countries in the world are staring down some form of those secession crisis. Why do we think we are exceptional?

Bob Zadek: We will come back to the word crisis. Whether the session is a crisis or whether the crisis causes secession and secession is actually a cure, we will find out and revisit that. You said the country has never been more divided. I wonder if that is really the case. There are many social and political divisions in some ways, but they have always been here. People didn’t just start feeling a certain way.

I think the country has always been divided, but it didn’t matter so much when we had less concentration of power in Washington. If California chooses to organize its government and its lifestyle in a certain way, it didn’t matter to California and it shouldn’t matter if Arkansas makes a different decision or the people of Arkansas. California is free to live its way and Arkansas is free to live this way and while there may not be approval, it doesn’t matter because who cares if somebody chooses red rather than blue or green?

It is only when power becomes concentrated in Washington so that the team in power gets to impose its laws on others. If the team in power is Midwestern in its organization, it gets to impose that point of view on the coasts and vice versa. So would you agree with me or take issue with the fact that the divisions have always been there? It’s just that centralization of power makes it more significant to the average person than if the States where the where the locus of political power?

Frank Buckley: There are a couple of questions in that. So let me take them in turn. The first question is, are we really more divided now than at any time in the past? And I would argue the answer is yes. Maybe the exception is 1776, but in 1861 slavery did not divide people.

I might invite people to take a look at the last state of the union message that James Buchanan sent to Congress in 1860. What he said was that he understood why South Carolina was not happy, but no country in the world better protected slavery, and we we’ren’t going to change that. And indeed in the spring of 1861, the most prominent Republicans, William Seward and Abraham Lincoln, were prepared to have a constitutional amendment, which would guarantee slavery in perpetuity. So that really wasn’t much of a division.

Right now the divisions are greater and the animosity is intense. One of the great problems here is the effort to create a one size fits all government across the United States through Washington. In one sense the stakes are lower than they were in 1861. Slavery wasn’t an issue in 1861, but it became an issue. But right now, the civil rights revolution has largely taken hold. We are not going back to Jim Crow or anything like that in any part of the country, and if a session happens, it might well come from places like woke California, in other words it would be politically correct.

But here we have a federal government enforcing laws across the country and a Supreme court upholding rights applicable across the country and there is no opt out. When the federal thumbprint was smaller, it didn’t matter so much. We could settle where we wanted, and have the form of government we wanted, but you can’t escape the United States government short of something like secession, or a vast expansion of States rights, which I favor.

Demystifying Secession: The Two Templates

Bob Zadek: And of course the latter is just getting back to the Federalism the founders gave us. So that’s an easy one. There is widespread support for what you just said, which is power back to the States. In fact, I published a book a while ago on Power to the States. I’m hoping for that now. There are two templates. There is of course, Brexit — basically one small unit seceding out from a much larger unit. And then there is Czechoslovakia, both of which you discuss in your book. Tell us about those two templates.

Frank Buckley: There are two questions. The first is, who are the secessionists? One plausible source of secession would come from libertarians. Imagine the ability to get rid of one entire level of government by snapping your fingers. As for Brexit, here’s another potential group of secessionists. There are a whole bunch of people who worry about how we’ve become an administrative state and they claim we have departed from the rule of law and given it over to the regulators. Brexit is a form of regulatory reform. What the Brits objected to was the ceding of administrative power to Brussels, and Brexit completely reverses all of that.

If you’re one of those people who worry about the administrative state that would make you sympathetic to some form of either secession or broad devolution away from the regulatory state based in Washington. As for Czechoslovakia and Quebec, there are a lot of people who assume that if there is a session that it is going to involve violence. For example there was the attempt of secession in 1861 and that didn’t turn out terribly well. But that is not the history of modern secession movements, right? The history is that they involve people sitting around the table and cutting deals, which is Czechoslovakia. The differences between the Czechs and the Slovaks were fairly smaller. The Czechs were kind of more hip and with it and the Slovaks were more conservative, Catholic, agrarian, etc.

The differences were basically pretty slight, but nevertheless, they decided to go their own way and they’re getting on famously. The other example is Quebec, and I lived through a succession referendum and that came very close. What the separatist government in Quebec proposed was not outright independence. What they proposed was something called sovereignty independence.

What sparked this in Quebec was enthusiasm for something called Bill 101, which was legislation passed by the separatist government, which was really frankly kind of anti-English.The English in Quebec called the Bill 401. Why? Because 401 is the name of the highway between Montreal and Toronto. The Anglos just looked at what was happening and pulled up stakes and moved to Toronto or Montreal. That’s kind of what you would expect to see happen were there a secession movement in the United States. It would be great or U-Haul but there wouldn’t be any more.

Bob Zadek: A far less dramatic change would simply be if federal legislation were enacted with an opt-in or opt-out election, so that every state could elect to have a federal law. Something like nullification, which Jefferson and Madison speculated about with the Kentucky Resolutions, where states could not nullify, but could elect to adopt and be governed by regulation and otherwise not. That would be a huge relief of pressure and that would remove the pressure to secede. Whether we’re talking about minimum wage legislation or right to work laws, whatever federal legislation abounds. If by a vote of the state legislature opt in or opt out, that would in effect be secession light, wouldn’t it?

Frank Buckley: Yeah, it would be. Although I think it would take more than that because the problem is not Congress perhaps so much as it is the Supreme Court. That gives one a clue as to why the debates are different in 2019 than they were 10 years back or 20 years back. Something cataclysmic happened for the left in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. Why did the left go nuts? What exactly happened was the left had assumed that they had won the culture wars. Back in 1992, Irving Kristol, the father of Billy Crystal, said “the culture Wars are over, the left won.” And the left pretty much assumed that. Republicans like Mitt Romney or even George W. Bush never seriously threatened the hegemony over the culture enjoyed by the left in the media and through the courts.

The left had the courts and now they don’t. If Trump makes a couple more Supreme Court appointments, the changes with respect to the Supreme Court might be fairly substantial. For the left this is an existential crisis. It is like a religious war. So Trump represented something entirely different in American politics, which is a complete reversal of something that left thought it had won. That explains the psychosis with respect to the Antifa people.

It seems to me that the left is going to either admit defeat and compromise. Drag queen story hour, forget about it. Right? That’s one possibility. I don’t think it will happen. The other possibility is that they will look seriously at secession.

Bob Zadek: When you talk about secession, do you foresee it being like the Brexit model or do you imagine that the country will virtually divide itself in half, and the complex division occurs?

Frank Buckley: Probably the 1861 model, which is one state taking the lead (that was South Carolina in 1860) and other States following. My assumption has been it would be a movement from the left. So you can expect a state like Oregon to leave and then have other States join. Other States would come along rather slowly.

Would would happen afterwards would be a recognition that there might be such a thing as a right of secession. Up until 1861 people assumed there was a right of secession. The originalists, faithful to the intention of the framers, would agree that there was a freedom of secession. So like you’d expect with a referendum in a state followed by a declaration of secession from the state legislature signed by the governor. All these things inevitably end up before the Supreme Court and I think the Supreme Court at that point would be forced to conclude that there is neither an absolute bar nor an absolute right to secession. The parties would have to get together and talk about it.

Bob Zadek: Since succession can be carried out as a negotiation, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There are degrees which we will talk about after the break, where a country where the end result is federalism simply with a different label with power devolving back to the states, which in my view, relieves the pressure. If the stakes are not that great, then the left can have their way of life and the right can have their way of life and there’s no external force affecting that. Once people are allowed to live their life and to pay the level of taxes they think is appropriate and to provide the level of public services they think is appropriate, all of the pressure goes away.

We won’t need anything with high drama. How do you go about relieving the pressure in this country, the political, social, economic pressure caused by the division is the challenge facing us? Secession may be the ultimate remedy but the least likely remedy. But maybe not.

We are really discussing whether one group of people ought to be able to force their will as to lifestyle, to the level of taxation, and as to social control, on another group. Is it politically healthy to enable any group to be able to force their will as to other than the most basic standards such as “don’t harm me and don’t take my stuff”?

Probably not. And if that’s not healthy, is it healthy for one state to force its will upon another state? Probably not.

The Results of Secession: Downsizing

Bob Zadek: Are Americans better off if we are big and powerful as opposed to being less big and less powerful? You discuss that in the book, because the byproduct of secession is that the resulting countries are smaller and less powerful. Is that good or bad?

Frank Buckley: I described the kinds of people who might favor something like secession. They would include the people who were just tired of being hated. It would include the people who are libertarian and like the idea of getting rid of one level of government. It would include the people who worry about the administrative state and they would see secession as something like regulatory reform. It would include people like Peter Schweitzer who worry about corruption, which is mostly the Washington based corruption. So who are the people on the other side? Nationalists, and what drives the nationalists? I mean, what is it about America that would make them want to hold the whole thing together? One of the things is the idea that in America, of 330 million people, we are the toughest kid on the block.

We got all the guns in the room and we can dominate any other countries militarily. This is something the neocons supported after the fall of communism. So we would be giving up that sense of glory if we split up into smaller countries. But maybe glory is not all it’s cracked up to be. You could offer the following deal to California. If you didn’t have to pay for the military of the United States, you would save enough to finance a national health scheme in California. That is the deal offered to California. I think a lot of people would take it because the point is that glory has a price tag, in terms of American lives lost and in terms of how we dominate the world in terms of military spending.

If you want to indulge neocon dreams about dominating the world, okay. One of the reasons why Trump won in 2016 is he opposed that. He wants to pull back American troops except where there are American interests at stake. I think most Americans would trade off glory for other things at this point.

Bob Zadek: Earlier I said your book makes the unthinkable thinkable. Your discussion about glory makes that point exactly through a mind game that I invite our listeners to play. How would you feel in the deep corners of your psyche as a citizen of the country and of the planet if America were smaller militarily without being any less safe — if we were less dominant in world affairs, if we had a foreign policy that didn’t care all that much about what the rest of the world did, so long as they treated us fairly and we’re not a threat, you would just another country, a free country, a prosperous country, a happy country?

If that is appealing to you then you are signed onto Frank’s observation that bigness is not necessarily good and maybe kind of bad. America as a non-world power, no less safe, no less prosperous, just less important.

Frank Buckley: We live in a world that is completely dominated by the U.S. military. You wouldn’t be Denmark, but you’d be closer to Denmark. And when you take a look at the experience of other countries, it is easy to conclude that power is actually not good. The happiness countries tend to be smaller countries. They are less entangled in a swamp, the government is closer to the people and better reflects them.

What gives Washington the intellectual power to be able to tell you how to govern your life in San Diego? It’s bad enough in Sacramento but Washington? The bigger the country, the easier it is for interest groups to step in and get their own way. Small is beautiful. If you look at those smaller countries, you have countries that are free or freer than the United States. You have countries that are pretty well-governed and countries that are whole lot less corrupt and you’d be surrounded by people who tend to agree with you on most things.

I don’t want a passport to visit you in Ohio and San Diego. Those kinds of discussions would be on the cards. It wouldn’t be a Declaration of Independence. It would be something in between. We declared independence from Britain. Two years later the Brits came to their senses and said we’re going to offer you everything you want. We’d like to keep foreign policy and we want you to maintain your connection to the British crown. And the Americans at that point said, no. We are in the middle of a war. But that kind of a deal offered to the California’s and Oregon’s should be pretty tempting.

Bob Zadek: The great contribution of the book is that it invites in a very important way, Americans to rethink the core relationship of American citizens to Washington. While secession is at the very end of the spectrum, there are so many intermediate grounds as we have spoken about and Brexit is a good example of this. Although right now it’s really messy, it is expected that the UK will be trading with the EU, that they will still be a part of NATO. They already have defense treaties. So if done right, the effect upon the UK will be profoundly positive and very little negative. They will get back local control of a lot of their life without losing very much in exchange, and without warfare.

This is simply a negotiation. Who among us wouldn’t want to have more local control. The only people who don’t are the people who yearn to control others.If you surrender that yearning to control others, you really can’t oppose what Frank is proposing in one form or another. When you made reference to the founding era, you really want to go back to the past. You want to go back to the past in the most positive way where Washington was basically the postmaster general in terms of the effect upon the everyday life of Americans. We don’t have that today but that’s kind of the goal. It’s good old-fashioned Federalism that you want, correct?

Frank Buckley: I like going back to the framers for a lot of reasons.These guys were about the smartest people around then or anytime since, and they were eminently practical people. They well understood the possibility of the union splitting apart. When the framers met on several occasions, people said, “We are going to leave you guys. We’re going to go our own way. We might make alliances with some foreign country that will treat us better.” They were kind of carving up America at that point.

At one point, Madison suggested the possibility of federal troops being sent in to enforce federal laws upon the States. He proposed that at one point and then almost immediately there afterwards he said, “Oh my God, I don’t really think that. I don’t believe that. No federal government should be given the power to invade a state.”

Of course, when Alexandria was invaded in 1861 it was from federal troops on the other side of the river that did it. I don’t think that would happen. If it were Oregon or California that wanted out, a president like Trump might take a look at the electoral college and say, “Oh, okay, I can live with that.”

Bob Zadek: Therefore the whole concept of secession, which inevitably people in their consciousness associate it with the Civil War, a bloody conflict with 750,000 American lives lost. But that’s not at all what we are talking about. We are talking about a rejiggering of the relationship between citizens and the federal government and citizens and the state government. We are not talking about anything with high drama, or with any violence at all.

Explaining the Concept of Home Rule

Bob Zadek: Now Frank, you mentioned in your book a concept called “Home Rule.” Tell us about that.

Frank Buckley: Home rule was something that the Gladstone government in England offered to Ireland as a way of pacifying the country. The Irish objected to rules from Westminster. So England said we will give you a self rule within Ireland with the exception of certain things, such as Ireland establishing a particular religion, and foreign affairs.

There would be free movement of goods and people. Stuff like that would be discussed if we were to go that route in American. The way that this would happen would be something like an Article V Constitutional convention. People would have to bargain over this. I don’t think there’s a unilateral right of exit and I don’t think there’s a unilateral barrier to exit. I think there is a middle ground somewhere. If there were a referendum to secede which was ratified by the state legislatures, you have to choose between your allegiance to a unified country and the rule of democracy. Because you wouldn’t have democracy. So all things points towards renegotiation of federalism under something like home rule.

Smaller Countries, Happier Countries?

Bob Zadek: Is there a sensible starting point for the states to have “home rule?” If much federal legislation allowed the states to opt out, that would immediately weaken the negative influences of division in this country. It doesn’t matter if people feel different ways about ways of life and social and economic issues. It wouldn’t matter if States are not forced to adopt a point of view that most of its citizens don’t want. A negotiated change in that relationship would make us a far more United country and it would be perhaps a manner of secession or a secession-light. A simple act like that would make us so much happier place. You make reference to happiness. You did a little bit earlier in the book, but let’s close on an upbeat note and tell us about happiness in smaller countries versus happiness in big tough America.

Frank Buckley: That is a debate that goes back hundreds of years to Montesquieu vs Madison. If you look at the data, smaller countries are happier.

Bob Zadek: So I ask now, how would you feel if America was strong from a military defensive standpoint and strong economically, but unimportant in world affairs? We were just a happy, prosperous, safe place, but not exporting Americanism around the world. Would you wake up with a smile on your face?

Six ways to secede without war

Spoiler: Two thirds of them require Congress to agree “Good riddance!”

The very first statement in the Constitution is “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union“. But it seems that after 236 years, every election brings a union that is less and less perfect. When it was first created in 1789, its purpose was to remedy the problems with the very imperfect Articles of Confederation that had lasted for only eight years. It’s amazing that it has lasted this long with only fine tuning by 27 amendments.

The perfection of the Union has been put under stress before. It was severely tested in 1861, when eleven states decided that they could no longer tolerate unity in a nation of 34 states, and seceded to form the Confederate States of America. The remaining 24 states did not recognize this separation, and a terrible and bloody war ensued.

The Constitutional problem was that although its Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 provides for the creation of new states with a simple majority vote of Congress and the legislatures of any existing states involved, it does not include any provisions for states to be separated or dissolved. The Confederate states had stepped into extraconstitutional territory by seceding, and the Union had to resort to war to maintain its Constitutional integrity.

The end of the Civil War restored the states of the Confederacy to the Union (which they had never legally left), but it did not resolve the problem of what to do if a state becomes so estranged from the values of the United States that it feels that it would be better off as an independent entity.

Many observers conclude that the Civil War definitively answered the problem: The United States are indivisible, and there are no circumstances in which a State can become independent from the remaining country. This attitude is convenient, but it’s not an air-tight logical conclusion. Some creative thinking can uncover a number of ways for a State, or most of it, to achieve independence from an oppressive Federal Government.

The Hard Ways: Fix the Constitution

Start over: An Article V Constitutional Convention

If the Constitution has enough problems that states are considering leaving the Union, the precise mechanism of departure may be the least of the issues. Rather than remedy each one individually, it could be convenient to consider comprehensive revisions all at once. Article V specifies that a convention to propose amendments can be requested by the legislatures of two thirds of the states, and that the amendments that result are to be ratified by three fourths of the states. The Article states that the Congress then “shall call a convention”. Use of the word “shall” typically means that an action is mandatory, yet Congress has declined to act after enough legislatures requested a convention on at least two occasions, in 1929 and 1982.

In reality, it doesn’t take an explicit act to create a new government for the United States. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 wasn’t explicitly authorized by the Congress of the Confederation under the Articles of Confederation, it simply evolved and grew from a meeting of delegates from five states in 1786. The constitutional United States was self-authorizing; it became effective upon ratification by a sufficient number of states, regardless of what the Congress of the Confederation may have wished.

Add a Secession Amendment

The most obvious and least disruptive way to permit secession is to add a constitutional amendment that modifies Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 to allow it. This might require adding and changing only a few words.

Adding an amendment is a difficult, but not complex process. Two thirds of both houses of Congress have to agree on an amendment, and the legislatures of three fourths of the states have to ratify it. Yet not one secession movement has ever convinced even one Senator or one Representative to introduce an amendment setting out a procedure for secession.

The Stealthy Ways: Interstate Compacts

Other ways to secede go outside of the prescriptions in the Constitution, but that doesn’t prevent events from leading to situations where a state or group of states is de facto independent. No legal body gave the states that formed the Confederacy permission to leave in 1861.

But if a group of states wants to maintain a veneer of constitutionality while acting together independently of the Federal government, one path is via interstate compacts.

Section 10 of Article I of the Constitution presupposes that states have the ability to make Agreements or Compacts between themselves about an almost unlimited number of topics, by prohibiting them without the consent of Congress. That consent consists of a majority vote, a much easier threshold than the one to amend the Constitution itself. It doesn’t even require the agreement of the President, unlike ordinary laws.

Section 10 includes an escape provision that permits states to make agreeements without consent of Congress in case of war or invasion. In 2025 President Trump issued an Executive Order which declared that “an invasion is ongoing at the southern border”. This appears to provide legal justification for states to join together to exercise every power used by otherwise independent countries.

States have used the form of a Compact extensively, and established 270 of them so far. The most frequent topics of agreements clarify boundaries between states (51 of them) and define rules for water management (38). Abundant water is taken for granted in many places in the US, but it is a scarce, migratory resource that needs interstate legal support in the arid Western states, as exemplified by the maxim “Whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’ over.”

Most interstate compacts codify agreements between pairs or small numbers of states, but they can be among larger numbers of states as well, and can approach the power of Constitutional amendments. The most significant large compact in progress is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states agree to cast all of their electoral votes for the candidate that wins the most votes in the entire country, regardless of the winner in their particular state. Under the current system, national elections are decided by a few thousand voters in seven “swing states”, and votes for minority candidates in each of the other states are not represented in the votes of the Electoral College, regardless of which party won any particular state. This can cause the candidate with the majority of individual votes to fail to be elected, an event that has occurred five times in the history of the US. The compact is especially relevant to the District of Columbia, which despite its population of 702,000, larger than Vermont and Wyoming, is not a state and thus is given only a token single electoral vote, in contrast to the minimum of three electoral votes given to all the other states. This compact has to date achieved agreement by seventeen states and D.C, representing 77% of the electoral votes needed for it to come into effect.

Informal quasi-agreements

If there’s enough opposition in the remaining states to prevent Congressional approval of a formal compact, states can simply align their actions to each other without any official acts.

For example, the California Air Resources Board has established vehicle emissions standards that are more stringent than the federal EPA requirements. Eighteen states have adopted those standards for one or more categories of vehicles. There are no bilateral or group agreements to do this, it’s simply a convenient method for each state to avoid significant expenses of developing their own standards, and for manufacturers to avoid having to make the effort of complying with multiple sets of rules.

This approach could easily be expanded to all other aspects of state government. States with historical affinities and cultural similarities should naturally create laws and regulations with multitudes of similarities. It wouldn’t be surprising if those rules “spontaneously” evolved to converge to identical organization and wording.

The ability to come to agreements without formal communication has evolved into a fine art when it comes to pricing of products and services. The theory of pricing asserts that in free markets competition should drive prices down to a level where market participants are always on the verge of bankruptcy — “virtual cartels” (or illegal actual cartels) can be inferred whenever profit margins are significantly above the minimum needed to keep suppliers in business.

The amount and type of communication that constitutes illegal price fixing is always contentious, and occupies much of the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. As this essay is being written, the US Department of Justice and ten states are suing six massive landlords which operate more than 1.3 million apartment units for using software systems from RealPage to coordinate rent prices in 43 states and the District of Columbia without directly communicating with each other.

Convergence of laws and regulations among states, however it may occur, is far from unconstitutional, and could be accelerated by the creation of coordination organizations to track similarities and differences, and recommend changes to enhance those similarities. Regional Regulation Harmonization Organizations could be founded independently of any government, and acquire influence and authority in small degrees as their value is demonstrated over time. As groups of states begin to act together, their autonomous sovereignty can grow to degrees that are undeniable and unstoppable, to the point where it becomes more convenient to recognize their independence than to continue with a facade of membership in the remaining group of formerly United States.

The Loopholes Way: Territorial reversion and release

A fifth secession technique is somewhat tricky — it will surely work for border states; how it would work with interior states is not so clear. Call the process Territorial Reversion and Release. Here’s how it would work. Redraw the seceding state’s borders, converting 99% or less of the state to a territory, and leaving a tiny remnant to retain the un-secedable state identity. The remnant doesn’t even have to be contiguous with the other 47, as Alaska and Hawaii have proven already. Then give the territory its freedom.

There are precedents for each of these steps. Redrawing state borders happens occasionally without any fanfare, for example when a border is defined by a river and the river changes course. The majority of the land in California could be redrawn to become Eastern Guam, for example. One of the Federal military bases in the state could become the capital of the remnant State of California. China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, at 4500 square kilometers in size, is larger than Rhode Island. Camp Pendleton is the California base with the most people, though — China Lake is mostly bombed-out desert.

Then the newly expanded Territory of Greater Guam is given its freedom. Freeing territories happens all the time, equally without fanfare, because those territories are usually parts of the US that we don’t have much interest in anyway. The biggest release that I can find is the Philippines, which were acquired by the US following the US victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, and released as an independent country in 1946. Once Greater Guam has been given its independence, it can change its own name to New California, and dispose of the Island of Guam as it wishes. It could even lease the airbase there back to the US for additional income.

In a similar process, Texas could combine with Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. The 332 square mile enclave of Fort Cavazos, formerly Fort Hood, could become the new capital of the US state of Texas, although it might be more sensible to the have the current Texas panhandle with Amarillo, or the Big Bend and El Paso become the remnant Old Texas, adjacent to New Mexico. The hardest part would be Texans’ ornery, uncooperative nature, which would make them averse to joining forces with another territory to achieve a common goal. The New Texas Republic would probably want to keep Puerto Rico as a subject territory itself, just out of spite.

The Incremental Way: Just do it

In the election of 1860, four candidates received electoral votes, and Lincoln received less than 40 percent of the popular vote. If the second place finisher, John C. Breckenridge, been elected President, war would have been averted and the Confederacy would have been allowed to secede.

The issue of slavery made that secession effort a unique situation, but it shows that modern notions of the impossibility of secession are not as impregnable as many writers believe. The current Supreme Court has shown its willingness to reverse longstanding findings, and given a plausible legal foundation, it could reverse the prohibitions on secession as well. One line of attack, unsuccessfully raised numerous times since the Civil War, is via the underutilized Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers not explicitly assigned to the United States to belong to the States, or the People. The power to separate from the remainder of the Union, not explicitly reserved in Article IV, thus falls to the States, and the Constitution does not say that Congress has anything to do with it. The next attempt could be the one that succeeds!

In the end, secession is a political issue, and if a seceding state can convince Congress, the President, and the other states to take no action to prevent it from acting independently of the rest of the country, and convince the courts that no other entity has jurisdiction to object, then that state becomes de facto independent.

The Texas Governor is already negotiating and signing agreements with his counterparts in Mexico to address problems with security at their common border. He is also asserting his ability to control the borders of Texas with other US states by installing razor wire between Texas and New Mexico.

This is of course not the first time that states have instituted controls at their borders with other states, despite its Constitutional prohibition by the Commerce Clause . During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, Texas created checkpoints at all highway boundaries between Texas and Louisiana, and required quarantine of any travelers testing positive for the virus. California has long had checkpoints at its borders to prevent the import of fruit that may be contaminated with invasive insect pests.

Conversely, the absence of border controls does is not an indicator of the absence of sovereignty. In Europe, the Schengen Area consists of 29 countries that permit free transit across their borders, while not sacrificing their national sovereignty.

There are many other things that a state can do that assert independence from the federal government. In fact, Section 10 of Article I contains three full paragraphs of fifteen acts that “No State shall” perform. Two of those paragraphs are qualified by “without the Consent of Congress”; but without explicit intervention from Congress, a state could interpret “silence means consent” as permission, again citing the Tenth Amendment if necessary. By taking on these abilitites one by one, a state could erode the power of the federal government to control its fate, and slowly become effectively independent.

Finally, a seceded state only becomes a full member of the international community when it is recognized by other nations, and exchanges Ambassadors with them, with proper credentials and ceremonies. The Confederate States of America was never formally recognized by any country.

Secession has been an active topic within the constitutional United States since its origin. There are more than a dozen secession movements active within the US. While the most advanced efforts have resulted in proposed initiatives within state legislatures to place resolutions for secession on statewide ballots, none have succeeded. Nor have any secession movements mounted the nationwide efforts needed to convince other states’ Congressional delegations to agree with a state’s wishes to secede. For now, secession movements appear to represent simply a vehicle for airing of grievances rather than serious, planned efforts that have carefully considered the implications and consequences of secession. They remain far from the commitments of the signers of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 whose dedication to their cause was deep enough that they had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to its success.

Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state

Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.

These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, it seems to suddenly be everywhere.

Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a “cold” civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state to secede from the Union.

The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be “time to split the country.”

Researchers have found such downbeat assessments of America’s democracy are especially salient among the young. Last month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School published a poll that found half of voting age Americans under 30 thought our democracy was “in trouble” or “failing.” A third also said they expected there to be “a civil war” within their lifetimes. And a quarter thought at least one state would secede.

The more one hears this particular drumbeat, the louder it becomes.

Late last year, the University of Maryland and The Washington Post produced a poll saying that one-third of Americans thought violence against the government was “sometimes justified” — a belief they found even more widely held among Republicans and independents. According to the Post, just about 1 American in 10 held that view in the 1990s.

Do the respondents in all these polls fully realize what these terms mean or their answers imply? Possibly not. Talk is often cheap, and pollsters can ask a lot of provocative questions in pursuit of something noteworthy — or buzzworthy.

What do people even mean by “civil war”? Let us assume it would not be a return to the 1860s, when 11 Southern states left the Union and fought a four-year war to assert their right to do so and preserve the practice of slavery, which had about 4 million African Americans in bondage at the time.

The American Civil War cost the lives of at least 600,000 Americans and contributed to the deaths of many thousands more. It devastated the South economically and left most of those in the region who had been emancipated to lives of peonage and penury.

Moreover, it did little to settle the constitutional issue of “states’ rights,” a problematic point in our national conversation ever since. Salient in the struggles for civil rights and voting rights, it remains so in the squabbles over the mask and vaccine mandates of today.

States’ rights, still with us

The rights of states to go their own way on fundamental issues are also still front and center in the Supreme Court, where abortion rights pose an immediate example. Texas and other states want to make the procedure all but unavailable, while much of the nation prefers the access granted nationwide by the court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Biden and Trump supporters gesture at one another as they argue while Trump supporters demonstrate against the election results in Detroit on Nov. 5, 2020.

David Goldman/AP

“We already are seeing ‘border war’ with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places,” says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies, who have written a pair of articles on the fraying of the American social and political fabric.

They note that conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write:

Today’s toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all approach to politics. When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives.

And what do these careful scholars mean by “extraordinary means”?

“America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias,” they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person.

“Semi-automatic weapons comprise around 19.8 million in total,” they add ominously, “making for a highly armed population with potentially dangerous capabilities.”

The New York Times recently reviewed How Civil Wars Start by political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California at San Diego. In an interview with NPR member station KPBS in San Diego a year ago, Walter said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was surprising but should not have been because we had been watching “American democracy decline since 2016.”

A scholar of international law, Walter adds: “The U.S. used to be considered a full democracy like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland,” she said, “and it’s now considered a partial democracy like Ecuador, Somalia or Haiti.”

Drawing different lines today

The geographical divides in our time are different from those of the 1860s. We can still trace the original Mason-Dixon line that separated the regions of “free soil” from “slave states,” and there are real differences on either side of that ancient demarcation even today.

But the most meaningful geographic separation in our society is no longer as tidy as North and South, or East and West. It is the familiar divide between urban and rural, or to update that a bit: metro versus non-metro.

Thus a “blue state” such as Maine has populous coastal counties that voted for Biden and sparsely populated interior counties that went heavily for Trump, enough to tip the majority to him in one of the state’s two congressional districts. Conversely, in ruby red state Nebraska, one congressional district anchored in the city of Omaha went for Biden.

This dynamic also shows up in the biggest population states, the top prizes in the Electoral College. In California, where the coastal cities are famously liberal, the Central Valley counties are still far more conservative.

And in Texas, Biden carried the six largest metros in 2020, due largely to their growing numbers of people of color. But most of the state’s 254 counties are outside these metros; in rural Texas, the Republican vote share is still the lion’s share.

That may change over time, but for now we’re less a nation divided into 50 states than we are two nations that are both present in each of those states. Each is dominant in its own space and certain that it is the real America.

You can measure some of this geographic/demographic division in the 2020 election results. Trump won in 2,588 counties covering most of the national landscape, as Republican candidates usually do. (This is why we are accustomed to Election Night maps that are strikingly red even as the popular vote is close or leans Democratic.)

Biden, in stark contrast, carried only 551 counties, less than a quarter as many as Trump. But the counties Biden carried had a total population of nearly 198 million, while Trump’s altogether had just 130.3 million. That is a difference of nearly 68 million people. Put another way, Biden won the counties that are home to 60% of the total U.S. population.

It is hard to believe when staring at a map on which Biden’s counties are scattered blue dots on a sea of red. But those blue dots are where most of the country lives. When you look at the top ten states by metro percentage of total state population, Biden won all ten.

Trump did win a few inner-core urban counties here and there, with a combined population of 4.7 million. Biden won the rest of that category with a combined population of 97 million. That is a ratio of 20 to 1.

Moreover, the Biden counties are where most of the population growth is happening. Less than a fifth of the counties account for 77% of the Latino or Hispanic community and 86% of Asian American community nationwide.

Is civil war a self-fulfilling anxiety?

The forces of disunity are disquieting, to say the least. But must it all come to blows? Can we still center ourselves and pull back from whatever brink we are approaching?

Irish Times writer Fintan O’Toole offered a cautionary message just before Christmas in The Atlantic, recounting some of his horrific memories from “the troubles” in his homeland in the late 1900s. Even then, he says, with all the provocation on both sides, “it never got to a full-blown civil war.”

It doesn’t do to behave as if our divisions must compel us to bloodshed, he adds, because dwelling on such thoughts and making such predictions may bring that prospect closer to reality, even if intended to do the opposite.

That makes sense, especially if you believe that too much thinking about the unthinkable can become acceptance of the unacceptable.

And however you personally regard the meaning of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, we know now that nothing in American politics is unthinkable.

Resources

-chathamhouse.org, “Could the United States be headed for a national divorce?” By Bruce Stokes;

-en.wikipedia.org, “Secession in the United States.” By Wikipedia Editors;

-wral.com, “Fact check: Can states legally secede from the U.S.?” By Sara Swann;

-lawliberty.org, “The Divided States of America?” By Matthew Berry;

-clementscenter.org, “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” By Jay Hartzell;

-bu.edu, “BU Historian Answers: Are We Headed for Another Civil War?” By BU Today Staff;

-rzadek.medium.com, “Secession: A How-to Guide: Frank Buckley compares the divided states of America to a married couple with irreconcilable differences.” By Bob Zadek;

-medium.com, “Six ways to secede without war.” By George McKee;

-npr.org, “Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state.” By Ron Elving;

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