The Union...Perpetual and Indissoluble

After having looked at three of the leading founders, their views on the issue of secession are brought to the front. Now, this is in no way a comprehensive look at their attitudes, for to do that, one would have to write a book, and one has to look at the other men who were involved in the debate as well.

But, having looked at their views, we can see that they saw that the Union was essential to the survival of the United States, and they formed it with the intention of it to be perpetual and indissoluble. The Articles of Confederation, which were the basis of government prior to the Constitutional era make this ideal quite clear. The Articles, in closing said that the "Articles thereof shall be inviolably observed by the States we respectively represent, and the Union shall be perpetual." The Union that they had created was to be perpetual, not to be broken up.

Now, after several years, the Revolutionary generation realized that the Articles were not working. They did not make for a cohesive system of government and did nothing to bind the states together as a unified country, but rather kept them as a loose confederation with only a weak central government barely holding them together. Men such as Washington, Madison and others realized that something had to be done, that they government had to go through a restructuring in order for the United States to successfully continue.

That was the original intention of the Constitutional Convention; to restructure the Articles of Confederation and stabilize the government. They liked the Articles, but realized that they needed to be fixed in order to success. However, as the debate over how to do this went on, the delegates began to realize that maybe a new way of government needed to be formed in order to further solidify the United States. So, they began to draft the Constitution, which created a federal republic with a strong central government, a great divergence from the weak central government under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional debate raged, and compromises were made and hammered out to create the document that is now the basis of the government of the United States today.

Those who try and justify secession do their best to say that the Union under the Constitution was never meant to be perpetual, that a state could leave at any time that they wished. This is about as fallacious an argument that anyone looking at the era and the decades following can make. They base this argument on the assumption that the United States under the Constitution is a completely new country, and that the country under the Articles of Confederation ceased to exist. But that was not the intention of the Constitutional Convention. They met to make a better government, not a different nation. That much is stated in the preamble, when it states that "in order to form a more perfect Union" they did "ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The Constitution was just a new method of government, not the formation of an entirely new country. The Union that had been formed for the defense of the United States against the British still existed. However, they were trying to perfect their system of goverment, in order to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity..." These were things that the Articles of Confederation were not doing for the United States, so they formed a new system of governing the United States. But, they did not in any way alter the country. They only altered the system that ran it. If they were going to alter the Union, there would have been a clear repudiation of it in the document. But they wrote the Constitution with a perfected Union in mind. And a Union which can be broken on a whim is not more perfect.