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.

Washington, Jefferson and Madison, Part III

The final member of the Founders that I will exam for this three part series is James Madison, the Father of the Constitution. He is important to look at on the argument of the importance of the Union because he was so instrumental in the construction of it.

Madison was, along with Jefferson, a strong supporter of states rights, and was of the opinion that the Constitution only gave to the federal government the powers explicitly stated in the document itself. Everything else not delegated to the federal government, in his opinion, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment, belonged to the states. He made this quite clear in his draft of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 when he said that "the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid [than] they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact..." However, this belief in states rights does not in any way imply that Madison was not attached to the Union and did not believe in the importance of it as a mainstay of the United States existence.

Madison was a firm believer in the importance of the Union to hold the country together and to control the forces that would tend to tear it asunder. Madison made it perfectly clear in the Preamble of the Constitution that its goal was to "form a more perfect Union." (emphasis added) He understood that the Articles of Confederation, while intended to govern the Union of the states and to ensure that the "Union shall be perpetual," did not do enough to keep the country effectively unified. Therefore, something had to be done to cement the Union together, to solidify it. The solution that the men of the Constitutional Convention arrived at was to completely toss aside the government as under the Articles and create a more centralized federal government with certain delegated powers.

Not only did Madison realize that this more centralized government would further stabilize the union of the thirteen states, but it would also do a great deal to control factions that would tend to tear apart rather than unify, and therefore end the experiment before it was even fairly on its way. He makes this patently clear in Federalist 10 when he states that one of the many advantages of a union of the states was its ability to "break and control the violence of faction." To clarify a little bit, what Madison means by a faction is a group of citizens, whether a minority or majority, who were united or motivated by a common goal that may be deemed as "adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." The best way to control these factions, as Madison saw it, was a republican form of government, and the only way to make that work was a union of the states under a centralized federal government.

Since union was so important in Madison's view of controlling faction and perpetuating unity of the states, what of the idea of secession? Did a state have the right, in his view, to leave the union if it so desired, for any reason? Madison saw two secession movements in his lifetime. Once was during his presidency, when the New England states proposed at the Hartford Convention to leave the Union, and then during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33. Of the first of these, Madison is strangely silent. With the states of New England threatening to secede in the midst of the second war with England, one would assume that he would make a move to head off this movement towards dissolution, but he says very little about it, though he was very critical of their refusal to aid in the defense of the country, keeping their troops in their respective states, and not sending them to aid the others.

It was not until late in his life, as the elder statesmen, that his view of secession came out. With the Nullification Crisis embroiling the United States and South Carolina threatening secession, he spoke out and let his views on the issue be known. In a letter to William C. Rives, Madison makes his pointed statement on nullification of laws and secession. He says: "One thing at least seems [too] clear to be questioned, that whilst a State remains in the Union, it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution and the laws of the Union." He follows this with his opinion that the only way that a state can withdraw itself from the Union is by a vote of the states as a whole to give consent to the departure of the state and/or states. But it is up to the states as a whole, and one state cannot just unilaterally up and withdraw itself from the Union and its laws.

In his final days, Madison wrote a short letter which he titled Advice to My Country. This was a short work of only two paragraphs, but it speaks volumes to his wish to see the perpetuity of the Union that he helped to create. In his letter, Madison says that the "advice nearest to my heart is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy of it by regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise." This statement of enmity toward any person or persons who would attempt to destroy the United States makes it clear his wish to see the Union carry on for years. He did not mean to see it eventually break apart into city-states, or separate countries, but as one country, forever united. For Madison, secession was not an option. For Madison, it was the Union forever.