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Joe Sobran is writing a book about Lincoln in which he will “argue that if there is a right of secession it follows that Lincoln had no authority to suppress secession by force.” That is the one point upon which Sobran and I agree. If secession was a lawful right, then certainly Lincoln’s action against the Confederacy was wrong. But if secession was not lawful, not authorized by the Constitution itself, then secession was indistinguishable from rebellion, and Lincoln, having taken an oath that the laws be faithfully executed, had both a right and a duty to suppress it.

In our dispute, everything turns upon whether or not secession, as a right to withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other state, really can be considered a constitutional right. Whether or not secession can be considered a lawful right, depends in its turn upon whether the states can be considered individually sovereign. That in turn depends a priori upon whether, as Sobran asserts (following John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Willmoore Kendall, Mel Bradford, and Garry Wills) the thirteen states that declared their Independence from Great Britain, on July 4, 1776, at the same time and by the same act, declared their independence from each other. This contention, that the original states were as separately sovereign from each other as from any foreign state, is the fundamental premise of the secessionist argument. Without it, everything else they say falls to the ground.

Sobran, following the long tradition going back to Calhoun, makes much of the fact that the Declaration ends by saying “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states…” A free and independent state, says Sobran, means one that can either join or withdraw (i.e. secede) from a confederacy with other states. But Sobran does not quote the following, from the same sentence, viz., “that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” In a review of Garry Wills’ Inventing America,[1] in which Wills makes the same point as Sobran, Edmund Morgan, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale, after quoting the foregoing passage of the Declaration, asks:

Which of these free and independent states undertook to do the acts and

things that Jefferson specified as characteristics of a state? It was the

Congress that levied war through the Continental Army; it was Congress

that concluded peace through its appointed commissioners; and it was

Congress that contracted the alliance with France. Congress may not have

established commerce, but in the Association it had disestablished it, and

in a resolution of the preceding April 6, it had opened American ports to all

the world except England.

I think it is utterly absurd to think that the states that declared their independence from Great Britain imagined for a moment that they were declaring their independence from each other. As Benjamin Franklin remarked, if they didn’t hang together they would hang separately. They had no chance of independence except by union, and they never thought that they were sovereign except by means of union. They were indeed sovereign, but only as joint and several participants in the sovereignty of the union they had formed.