You’ve probably heard of Critical Race Theory. You may know that various groups in these parts are once again talking about secession. Get this: CRT supporters and the CSA founders have basically the same view of America.
Huh?
OK – no worries, I’ll get back to that. But let’s first spend a little with secession and why people sometimes want to break up their country. It’s not new. In fact, centuries ago there were already references to “secessionist civil wars” – to distinguish them from conflicts where people were fighting for control of the whole country. I’ve seen a bunch in my lifetime, including Biafra (1967-70), Bangladesh (1971), and Timor-Leste (1975-99); there have been more, but those stick in my mind because they resulted in shocking loss of life. (Trust me: the Confederacy got off relatively easy.) Biafra failed, but the other two succeeded. Then there are the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia, which have not yet led to new countries being formed.
What causes secessionist movements? It could be oppression, or dissatisfaction with a central government in which a rival region or people are in charge. Oppression certainly triggered the conflicts in Bangladesh and Timor, but that alone was not the cause. A region that contains a different ethnic group or a different culture may want its own country, and if you throw in some other factors such as discrimination or outright oppression, you can have a great secessionist civil war.
In some cases, secession has nothing to do with oppression, although policy differences can help. Take Scotland; long recognized as a country with the United Kingdom, it now enjoys more rights and freedoms than at any time since 1603, when Scotland and England came under a single ruler. By the way, here’s an interesting question: if Scotland separates, would the former Jacobite rulers of Scotland have a right to reclaim it as their domain?
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But the fact that the UK as a whole is dominated by two political parties who hold only seven of Scotland’s 59 parliamentary seats is telling. The regional political establishment is splitting from the national one. The same thing happened in America, albeit for different reasons.
When the Republicans won the White House in 1860, that party was not even on the ballot in the South, and many Southern states seceded before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. As the Democratic Party had split into two or three factions (depending on how you count), there was no national political party at all. At the moment, the same thing is happening in the U.K., and in Britain now, as in America over half a century ago, there was a “big issue”: Brexit, which the Scots opposed, and the English favored.
Could the Founding Fathers not have anticipated the danger of secession? They did – James Madison feared that divisions in the United States would be along regional lines – but apparently the fear was not initially that great. The Articles of Confederation were so “loose” that any state could have walked away at any moment of its choosing. None did, and interestingly, none did a decade later when the new U.S. Constitution removed state sovereignty. The Patriots who had formed the country were so committed to their handiwork that not only did they not secede, they viewed it as immoral to even think about it. One reason that the Federalists–our oldest political party–disappeared, is that it was suspected of possibly harboring thoughts of New England seceding.
Perhaps the fear should have been greater. The different Atlantic regions had been formed for very different reasons–God in the case of New England, Mammon in the South–and the distances covered by the new country were unprecedented in western history. And then again, there was the slavery issue. But at the time of the Confederation and Constitution writing, many assumed that slavery would disappear on its own. It had, after all, in many civilizations. But the year after the Constitution was ratified, the cotton gin appeared. The economics of slavery changed completely.
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Did the Founding Fathers’ writing of the Constitution, with its far more centralized country, have anything to do with a fear of secession? My answer: a very firm Maybe. They were privy, being informed about events, of something happening in eastern Europe. In 1772-73, the partition of Poland began, and within decades that enormous country was complete gobbled up by Russia, Prussia and Austria. The reason was simple: Poland had the weakest central government in Europe. Every noble had the right to veto decisions. The Founding Fathers obviously abhorred absolute monarchy, but after the Confederation experiment, they realized a more secure state had to be build.
Whether this was because of a fear of secession is something I continue to hem and haw about. For one thing, secession–permitted or not–is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Arguments about what this meant have continued ever since 1860, although most people accept that Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman pretty much settled the question. But if the Founding Fathers were concerned about their Union, why did they not explicitly discuss it? Actually, in a sense, they did. The states CAN dissolve the Union, via a constitutional amendment. Given that every state had voluntarily ratified its membership in the United States, no one thought it could be dissolved without the approval of the requisite number of states (today, that would be 38).
So how did the Confederates get around this seemingly insuperable logical barrier? (This will get us closer to the relationship between the Confederacy and Critical Racial Theory.)
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The Confederate secession of 1860-61 were unusual. The Confederacy did not claim to be leaving America. Rather, the Confederacy claimed that it was carrying forward the “true” America. This is why the name of the new country was so similar. This is why its Constitution reads so much like the U.S. Constitution. This is why the Great Seal of the Confederacy contains an image of George Washington on horseback. In other words, the Confederacy was NOT saying that it was creating a NEW country; it was saying that it was recreating the OLD country.
Much of that old country had practiced or at least accepted slavery. Not just the South. In Article 4 section 3 of the Confederate Constitution, the Confederates made clear what they thought about all the attempts to compromise in the western territories regarding where slavery could exist and where it could not. The institution had become a part of every aspect of life in the Southern and border states, and the Confederates felt that that represented the proper way of life in traditional America.
MORE: Opinion: Were Confederates Traitors?
Critical Race Theory supporters argue that race has infiltrated every aspect of American society since the beginning. They want that taught in order for amends to be made for racial inequality. It all begins, of course, with the alleged ubiquity of slavery.
In other words, the Confederates believed that American society, from the beginning, was based on race, through slavery. CRT advocates believe that American society from the beginning was based on race, through slavery.
Where they disagree, obviously, is whether this was a good thing.
Footnote: The publisher has suggested that columnists not respond to comments. Feel free to write whatever you wish, but it’s his newspaper so I’m going to follow his suggestion. (I will read your comments, however.)
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