Secession...Destructive to the Entire Nation.

Many have tried to justify secession and claimed aggression on the Union for bringing about the Civil War. They say that Lincoln should have just let the South go and then 600,000+ men would not have died in four years of bloody fighting. What they do not realize is that if Lincoln had accepted secession, then he would have destroyed everything that the Founders had created and basically would have destroyed the United States. The Constitution would have had to be rewritten and the nation practically remade.

Think of it this way. If Lincoln had accepted secession, it would be a concession that a state has more power than the Federal government, and that the states could basically do whatever they wanted to, and if the Federal government said that they could not, then they could just threaten secession, as South Carolina had done during the Nullification Crisis. If the Congress or President did not then meet their demands, they could just leave. In their view, the states held all the power, and had ceded very little to the Federal government when the Constitution was signed and ratified by the states. This is in no way true. When the Constitution formed a new government out of the states that had been originally governed by the Articles of Confederation, which had been heavily states over federal, it reversed the government and put a strong federal government with an executive head over the states. The states did in turn retain some rights, but secession was not one of those rights.

For Lincoln to have allowed the secession of the southern states would have been to show the world that the United States was weak. The government had no power to control the states which were still loyal. The governors of the remaining states in theory become equal to or even more powerful than the President. The government would have no power to collect revenue or taxes to keep the nation. The Constitution would have about as much power as the defunct Articles of Confederation. The United States that the Founding Fathers had fought to form would be a failure.

And yet so many do not realize this. They still try to justify secession as legitimate and that the Southerners were carrying on the memory of the Revolutionary generation. Yet, in reality, they besmirch that memory of the Founders if they think that men just as Madison and Washington would have accepted secession. James Madison himself said in a short letter before he died, that if he could given any advice to the nation, that it would be "that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated," and that the "open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise." (James Madison,Advice to My Country.) None of the Founders wanted secession, because they realized that it would be destructive to the entire nation, and that if one state went, the United States would quite possibly cease to exist. So Lincoln could not accept the secession of the Southern states. He knew what was at stake, and he did the right thing by not accepting any alternative but Union.