Was Southern secession unconstitutional?

0:05People in the confederate states who attempted to secede from the union believed that they had an authorization to do so on the basis of what they would define as states' rights. They believed that as you looked at the Constitution, there were certain parts of government that were reserved to the authority of the states. They also believed that the Bill of Rights, certainly in the ninth and the 10th Amendments, gave some sanction to the idea that anything that wasn't forbidden in the Constitution was permitted. Well, the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid secession, so their conclusion was, well, therefore, we can secede. We're not told that we can't do it. Therefore, we must have the authority to do it. That might be looking at the glass half full. Lincoln had a better argument.

1:00Lincoln said, "First of all, let's look at the text of the Constitution, and let's look at it as what it is, a document of law." There's no secession clause in the Constitution. The Constitution does not tell you how to secede if you are a state. The Constitution does not contain what lawyers would call a reversion clause. That is, what do you do when something breaks up and you have to redistribute the property that's originally owned. There's nothing like that in the Constitution. Lincoln says, "That's because the assumption is that everyone who is going to be part of constitutional government or all of the states are going to be attached to it permanently. There's no backdoor. There's no way out provided in the Constitution, and you can't cite it." If that really was something which was permitted by the Constitution,

1:52there should be an explicit provision in the Constitution telling you how to do it. When the Constitution wants to, it can get very detailed. The process for electing a president through the electoral college, that takes up 10% of the text of the Constitution. It's very detailed. Well, electing presidents is important, but seceding from the union, that would be important too, and yet there's not a whisper of a word about how that process should be undertaken. Lincoln says because the assumption is that this is a permanent arrangement. Then Lincoln asks people to think, just look at this in the most general terms. "What government ever comes into being advertising provisions for how to destroy it? Does that make any kind of sense", Lincoln said? Then there's a practical argument. "What good would be accomplished," Lincoln asked, "By seceding,

2:47if the Southern states secede from the union and form their own confederate nation, what separates them from the United States the next day? The same Potomac River? The same Ohio River? You haven't gone out of each other's view. Do you suppose that relations between North and South would be improved if Southerners went off and became an independent nation? How would that make anything in any way any better?"

3:13It's a little bit he said like a divorce. At least in divorce, parties to a divorce can go out of each other's sight and out of each other's company. But you can't do that if the Confederate states declare themselves to be an independent nation. It makes no sense. But fundamentally Lincoln says what secession really undermines is the idea of democracy itself. What the session basically is saying is, we want to play the game by our rules, and if you don't agree to play by our rules, we're going to take our baton ball and we're going to go home. That's not baseball, and that's certainly not democracy. Democracy happens when majorities are understood to rule and minorities concede to that. Now majorities agree not to put the minorities up against a barn wall and shoot them. That's what happens in dictatorships.

4:00The assumption is that perhaps if the minority is right, its persuasive power in a democracy will one day make it the majority. You wait for that. Lincoln said, "That's how things happen in a democracy." What the Southern states are trying to do in succession is not democracy, it's anarchy. When you have anarchy, the ultimate solution to anarchy will always be dictatorship. There will always be the general on white horse, the Napoleon, who will offer the solution of orderliness to the anarchy.

4:34"Is that what Southern people really want?" Lincoln asks. All those are the arguments that Lincoln raise against secession. Lincoln always understood himself to be a national man. He spoke of himself in those terms. He said, " I'm born in the West," the West, in those days, being anything beyond the Appalachians. "I'm a man to the West, but I am a national man. When I speak, I want to be understood that at every point I'm speaking as a national man.

5:01I'm speaking as an American." There was nothing noble about that. I have lived and died over the years with the Philadelphia Phillies. I'm a Philadelphia boy. But I am an American fundamentally. If Philadelphia ever raised its hand against the United States of America, I know what side I would be on. I think that speaks not only for Lincoln, but it speaks for what so many other people in 1861 saw.

5:29They rallied around that. Four years of war were the test of it, but what triumphed was the nation itself. We can be happy that it did, because that nation that emerges out of the destruction and chaos of the Civil War is also the same nation that comes to the rescue of democracy in World War I, which saves us from the midnight of Nazism in World War II, which leads the free world in the triumph over Soviet communism, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and beyond that. Take that nation out of the algorithm of modern history. I don't like to think about the consequences. Lincoln was right. I see that what's important here is that we are, after all, fundamentally, Americans.