“It is a very significant fact that the adversaries of
the trend toward more government control describe their opposition as a fight
against Washington and against Berne, i.e., against centralization. It
is conceived as a contest of states’ rights versus the central power.”
“I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of
the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the
destruction but as the redemption of Democracy.”
- Letter from Lord Acton to General Robert E.Lee, Nov. 4,
1866
Do Silicon Valley entrepreneurs want to bring back slavery, perhaps using
the newly enslaved to assemble computers and other electronics? One
Anand Giridharadas, writing in the October 28 New York Times, would
have you think so. His opening sentences are: “First the slave
South, now this. Is Silicon trying to secede from America?
Giridharadas is apparently horrified that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur
named Balaji Srinivasan gave a speech at Stanford University recently in
which he advocated “seceding from [American] society” and its looting and
over-bloated welfare/warfare state.
As is typical of all statists, inside and outside of government, whenever
the “S” word is mentioned Giridharadas, like all the rest, attempts to
effectively censor all discussion of secession by insinuating that taking the
idea seriously reveals that one must secretly condone slavery. Or at
least be an apologist for the Confederacy, an institution that has been
demonized by the American state like no other for the past 160 years.
(The same American state that condoned and enforced slavery with
Fugitive Slave Clauses and Acts from the end of the Revolutionary War (1783)
until 1866).
In addition to this silly censorship game, your typical worshipper of the
centralized bureaucratic empire either lies about history or repeats
nonsensical and incorrect slogans about it. That’s what Giridharadas
does when he writes “First the slave South, now this.” Well, no, the
“slave South” wasn’t the first to secede. The American colonists
seceded from the British Empire to create the confederacy known as the United
States. America was born of secession. The Declaration of
Independence was a declaration of secession in which the individual states
are called “free and independent.”
The first Americans to plot secession after the Revolution were the New
England Federalists, who hated Jefferson and his limited-government ideas;
fiercely opposed the trade embargo that he imposed as president as an
alternative to another war with England; and were especially opposed to the
War of 1812. New Englanders effectively seceded when their country was
at war by not participating in the War of 1812.
Josiah Quincy was so upset over so many non-English immigrants that would
be allowed into the country after the Louisiana Purchase that he declared
that “the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved” and that “it will be
the right of all . . . to prepare definitely for a separation . . .”
That is, for secession. (See Daniel Wait Howe, Political
History of Secession, p. 135). Then came a decade-long crusade
for New England secession, led by Massachusetts Senaor Timothy Pickering, who
also served as secretary of state and secretary of war under George
Washington. After denouncing Jefferson’s “depravity” in a letter to
George Cabot, Pickering said that “the principles of our Revolution point to
the remedy – a separation.”
The New Englanders discussed (and threatened) secession for an entire
decade, culminating in the 1814 Hartford Secession Convention. At that
convention they decided to try to take over the national government rather
than secede from it, but there were few voices who did not believe that
individual states had a right to secede. It was widely understood that the
“free and independent” states were sovereign, hence were free to participate
or not participate in the union. Indeed, as a condition of ratifying
the Constitution New York, Rhode Island and Virginia issued proclamations to
the effect that they reserved the right to withdraw from the union at some
future date if it ever became destructive of their liberties. Since all
states (including all of those that came after the original thirteen) have
equal rights under the Constitution, it was assumed that not just those three
states had a right of secession, but all of them did.
Lincoln literally threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” in any state that
attempted to secede in his first inaugural address, sounding a more like a
twentieth century communist dictator than an American founder. In sharp
conrast, in his first inaugural address Thomas Jefferson stated
that “if there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change
its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety
with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to
combat it.”
In a January 29 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly, Jefferson wrote that
“whether we remain in one confederacy or form into Atlantic and Mississippi
confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either
part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children
& descendants as those of the eastern . . . and did I now foresee a
separation at some future day, yet I should feel the
duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the
eastern.”
When asked by John C. Breckenridge what he thought of the New England
secession movement, Jefferson responded on August 12, 1803 by saying that if
there were a “separation,” then “God bless them both, & keep them in the
union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.”
There was a powerful secession movement in the “middle states” (New York,
New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware) in the 1850s, as documented by
William C. Wright in his book, The
Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States. All of
this is why, on the eve of the War to Prevent Southern Independence, the
great majority of Northern newspapers editorialized in favor of
peaceful secession of the Southern states, as documented in Howard C. Perkins,
Northern
Editorials on Secession. In general, the right of a state to
secede “was not disputed” in most Northern newspapers in 1860-61, writes
Perkins. Typical of these newspaper editorials was one in the
Cincinnati Daily press on November 21, 1860: “We believe that the right
of any member of this Confederacy to dissolve its political relations with
the others and assume an independent position is absolute – that, in
other words, if South Carolina wants to go out of the Union, she has the
right to do so, and no party or power may justly say her nay.”
On December 17, 1860 the New York Daily Tribune wrote that if tyranny and
despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then “we do not see why it would
not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal
Union in 1861.” The New York Journal of Commerce warned on January 12,
1861, that by opposing secession Northerners would be changing the very
nature of their government “from a voluntary one, in which the people are
sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves.” This
is not entirely correct, however; under a coerced union held together with
the threat of Lincolnian “invasion” and “bloodshed,” all the people
are slaves to the state, not just “one part” of them.
All hail Balaji Srinivasan and the Silicon Valley libertarian secessionists!
