I’ve always thought that the American South had every legal right to withdraw from the Union. There was nothing in the existing Constitution saying that those states who joined couldn’t leave whenever they wanted.<\/p>\n
After all, it had only been about three score and twelve years between the ratification of the Constitution and the election of Lincoln. Surely, any state that had so recently decided to join could decide to unjoin.<\/p>\n
Not so, according to America’s Constitution<\/a>, by Amar Akhil Reed. (I’m completely impressed by Reed, as I mentioned before<\/a> when talking about his book, The Bill of Rights<\/a>.) Reed goes through the Constitution practically phrase by phrase, explaining the context in which it was written, and giving his opinions (extremely well backed up by research) on what the authors were going for.<\/p>\n He believes that the Constitution was understood by all to imply that there could be no secession in the future. That’s what a “more perfect union” meant in the preamble. It didn’t mean a better version of the same kind of union. It meant uniting more perfectly, more completely. Uniting in a way to become a single entity, with a single government, that can’t be taken apart again.<\/p>\n [Incidentally, “more perfect” is one of those phrases that drive some people crazy. But if it’s good enough for Madison, et al., then it’s good enough for me.]<\/p>\n Reed gives tons of documentary evidence for this take on the union, and he’s convincing. Thankfully, the founders weren’t shy about stating their opinions and thoughts in writing, so we have a lot to go on. It now seems clear that when those states ratified the Constitution, they knew full well that they were making a permanent commitment.<\/p>\n So I’ve had to revise my long-held opinion. Luckily, no one I know cares AT ALL about this issue, so I haven’t spent a lot of time arguing the point.<\/p>\n [Incidentally, it gives my little internal history-geek a thrill when Reed quotes from a Federalist (or anti-Federalist) paper, ’cause I can then go pull the paper in question off my bookshelf and read it for myself.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve always thought that the American South had every legal right to withdraw from the Union. There was nothing in the existing Constitution saying that those states who joined couldn’t leave whenever they wanted. After all, it had only been about three score and twelve years between the ratification of the Constitution and the election […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}