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An intriguing discussion erupted after a recent post by Connor. I was soon asking what history would have looked like if the South had been allowed to secede rather than fight the Civil War. Later another commenter asked an even better question:
By allowing the South to secede, wouldn’t that be setting up a dangerous precedent? If any state decided to leave just because Congress passed a law they didn’t like, what would have happened to the nation?
Under such an interpretation, what security did the nation have beyond what the Articles of Confederation provided? The Articles weren’t working. That’s why they created a Constitution that gave more expanded powers to a central government.
Considering recent comments regarding Texas choosing to secede and polls that a surprising number of Texans seem open to the concept I’d like to take a crack at answering what might have happened in those circumstances and I would be very interested to know what others think of the question or of my answer. For the sake of this supposition let’s assume that we are talking about an alternate history where the people of the United States accepted the premise that secession was a legal option and not a cause for war. We are also not talking specifically about secession by the southern states – just about a nation in which any state could decide to leave just because Congress passed a law they didn’t like and that the remaining states would not resort to violence to keep them in the union. In other words there might be arguments against secession in general or in specific cases, but no military action. With that background, here is what I believe would happen.
Any state that chose to secede would immediately relegate themselves to a position with all the disadvantages they had faced under the Articles of Confederation as well as the disadvantage of not having between 12 and 49 (depending on when in history this happened) other states upon which to lean for support. They would be required to provide for their own protections (economic and military) without assistance from their neighbor states. In all likelyhood they would very quickly be looking to form alliances with other states and other nations. In some cases they would likely begin very soon to consider the possibility of rejoining the United States. In such cases they would find themselves facing the requirements for joining the union. Having antagonized the other states in the union they would have to convince the congress to allow them back into membership within the United States. That and their experience under the Articles of Confederation would act as a deterrent to states that wanted to secede for light or transient reasons.
Assuming that there are no major holes in my reasoning above I think it is safe to say that there would be few if any cases of individual states seceding. That leaves us to consider the potential of blocks of states seceding such as the southern states in 1860. In this case we can easily see that a block of states seceding together would be inclined to form a union not unlike the one they were leaving. If two similarly structured nations composed of soverign states were to exist in close proximity to each other and to unsettled land waiting for expansion I think it is safe to assume that the two nations would be driven to compete with each other to become more politically and economically powerful and attractive to the settlers of new lands so that new political entities would chose them over their counterpart when they decided to become a member of a larger political entity. I don’t suppose that the nations would exist entirely without animosity, but they could peacefully coexist as the United States and Canada have done for nearly two centuries.
If legal secession were a political reality any number of possibilities might exist. A single state residing outside any other union would be highly unlikely, but North America could be divided into any number of unions made of sovereign states. In fact a policy allowing for legal secession could leave the door open for Canadian provinces or Mexican states joining a union as sovereign states. I believe that eventually legally accepted secession would have resulted in one or two strong unions of states in which the central government was limited more closely to what our Constitution outlined – focusing on foreign relations, military defense, and interstate issues and leaving states to independently tackle other issues and learn from each other. In the case of two stable unions existing I would give better that 50% odds that their relations with each other would be fundamentally peaceful.
The short answer is that I do not believe allowing the secession of the south would have been setting a dangerous precedent (at least from the angle of how viable the central government would remain). That leaves the question – have I missed something?
5 replies on “Considering Secession”
Interesting discussion. Please note that succession != secession. 🙂
I knew there was something nagging in the back of my mind about that. It’s fixed.
While two democratic nations similarly composed and living side by side may eventually achieve some kind of non-aggression pact, as I stated on Connor’s post, I refuse to believe that taking no action against the Confederacy would have resulted in a peaceful situation.
The whole issue at hand was not whether the various states could continue to practice slavery, but whether new states AND existing free states would be forced to accept slavery. The South insisted, with the agreement of the Supreme Court, that states and territories could not legally refuse to permit slavery within their borders. The South knew that if slavery could be restricted to only those states where it was then permitted, their entire culture and way of life would be threatened. Only by expanding slavery could this culture be preserved. They knew this, and so did everyone else.
Seceding from the Union would not have stopped the South from competing for the West. Given the militancy with which the extension of the culture of slavery was being promoted, it would have been only a matter of time before the North and the South ended up in a war over disputed lands. The North could not allow the South to capture the west coast.
Those that favor a laissez-faire approach to secession will argue that if any fighting ensued, it would have been a mere skirmish rather than the horrid debacle the Civil War turned out to be. I do not believe this at all. The incentives for the South to seek to crush the North would have been even stronger at that point and the South would have been better prepared. It likely would have been able to overcome the North’s effective blockades. Slavery would have been prolonged and you could be pledging allegiance today to the Stars and Bars.
On the other hand, if the two nations eventually fought to a stalemate, they might have eventually learned to live peacefully, as the U.S. and Canada eventually did after the War of 1812. Even in this case, however, it is also likely that the North would have ended up amending its Constitution to prohibit secession (as the Confederate Constitution did.)
I am not arguing that the Civil War was a wonderful thing. I am merely saying that many ignore the real costs that would have been involved in allowing the South to secede. Would the benefits desired by libertarian minded people have materialized and would those benefits outweigh the costs? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. No one can say for sure. Complex matters are rarely cut and dried. It unfortunately usually takes a war to get something decisive.
As for a modern secession movement; it seems to lack many of the dynamics that drove Southern secession. It may have more in common with earlier secessionist sentiments in the New England states that ended up driving those states into pariah status for a time. A large portion of a state’s population would have to favor secession, as would its political leaders. Most states are currently too fiscally reliant on Washington DC to even think about it. I doubt any state would try it without first courting and getting agreements from other states, as occurred in the South. While people bluster about secession, few will get serious about it when they start thinking about the real costs of going down that path.
I absolutely agree that secession would not have been bloodless or even significantly less bloody than the Civil War. We can never know that for sure. I also agree that the South would have been aggressively competing for the lands to the west of the United States as it existed then.
My point in insisting on a non-aggressive secession scenario was not that I believed that it would be non-aggressive, but to show that secession in and of itself was not necessarily dangerous, and that secession of individual states was necessarily unlikely for the same reasons that you are saying it is unlikely today.
Sucession is a matter of will. Call it whatever you will, however if there is a will there is a way.