Topic: Happy Secession Day

[Ultra]

Happy Secession Day

Perhaps the best evidence of how American history was rewritten, Soviet style, in the post-1865 era is the fact that most Americans seem to be unaware that "Independence Day" was originally intended to be a celebration of the colonists’ secession from the British empire. Indeed, the word secession is not even a part of the vocabulary of most Americans, who more often than not confuse it with "succession." The Revolutionary War was America’s first war of secession.

America’s most prominent secessionist, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, was very clear about what he was saying: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and whenever that consent is withdrawn, it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish" that government and "to institute a new government." The word "secession" was not a part of the American language at that time, so Jefferson used the word "separation" instead to describe the intentions of the American colonial secessionists.

The Declaration is also a states’ rights document (not surprisingly, since Jefferson was the intellectual inspiration for the American states’ rights political tradition). This, too, is foreign to most Americans. But read the final paragraph of the Declaration which states:

    That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other things which independent states may of right do (emphasis in original).

Each colony was considered to be a free and independent state, or nation, in and of itself. There was no such thing as "the United States of America" in the minds of the founders. The independent colonies were simply united for a particular cause: seceding from the British empire. Each individual state was assumed to possess all the rights that any state possesses, even to wage war and conclude peace. Indeed, when King George III finally signed a peace treaty he signed it with all the individual American states, named one by one, and not something called "The United States of America." The "United States" as a consolidated, monopolistic government is a fiction invented by Lincoln and instituted as a matter of policy at gunpoint and at the expense of some 600,000 American lives during 1861–1865.

Jefferson defended the right of secession in his first inaugural address by declaring, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it." (In sharp contrast, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln promised an "invasion" with massive "bloodshed" (his words) of any state that failed to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff rate by seceding from the union).

Jefferson made numerous statements in defense of the defining principal of the American Revolution: the right of secession. In a January 29, 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly he wrote:

    Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation [i.e., secession] at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.

In an August 12, 1803 letter to John C. Breckinridge Jefferson addressed the same issue, in light of the New England Federalists’ secession movement in response to his Louisiana Purchase. If there were a "separation" into two confederacies, he wrote, "God bless them both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better."

So on July 4 stoke up the grill, enjoy your barbecue, and drink a toast to Mr. Jefferson and his fellow secessionists. (And beware of any Straussian nonsense about how it was really Lincoln, the greatest enemy of states’ rights, including the right of secession, who taught us to "revere" the Declaration of Independence. Nothing could be further from the truth.)

[Ultra]

AnthonyGregory.com

The writings and interests of a paleoliberal (libertarian) in Berkeley.
I research, write and do music. Welcome.


Conservatives particularly love those holidays that they view as the best opportunities to display their patriotism. On the Fourth of July, they will predictably be among the loudest to cheer on the symbols of the day – the waving flags, the fireworks, the parades – as a show of their devotion to America.

But what is it that they are cheering on this year? Which America is the subject of their admiration, the inspiration for their barbecues and red-white-and-blue–decorated homes?

As many of them would describe it, they are celebrating the America that freed itself from British rule in the late 18th century, the America whose birth as a nation was the origin of Independence Day observances ever since, the America that has fought wars for freedom all over the world for the last century and is currently entrenched in a war on terror in the Middle East.

There is a contradiction here, however. If we are going to look at the meaning of the American Revolution in its purest, most admirable sense, what we are considering is a group of colonies that fought a war against empire and for local governance, a group of colonies seceding from a central state and its oppressive taxing, spying, regulating and attacks on due process. The America that was embodied in the struggle for independence against Great Britain, while imperfect, was fighting for self-determination and independence from the grand empire of the world. The America that exists today, on the other hand, is the grand empire of the world – in fact, the most powerful and expansive empire in world history.

The Bush administration has continued all the tyrannical policies of the Clinton administration and so many of those before it – socialist health care policies, nationalist education policies, Social Security, income taxation, the War on Drugs, gun control, maintaining military bases and foreign aid throughout the world, and central banking. Any one of these represents an attack on liberty that matches or far exceeds the typical egregious measure of which King George was guilty.

In addition, the Bush administration has propelled America into a nightmarish foreign and domestic war on terror. On the foreign front, Bush has rained destruction on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and led thousands of Americans to a premature death. He has propped up brutal puppet regimes in the Middle East, imposed an imperial occupation in Iraq, and conducted a military counterinsurgency campaign all so he could fulfill his advisors’ crazed plans for reshaping the Middle East to the presumed benefit of foreign interests, religious zealots at home and abroad, and corporate profits.

On the domestic front, Bush has obliterated the Fourth Amendment with his assertions of the power to limitlessly spy on the American people in their homes and telecommunications without anything resembling true judicial due process or Congressional oversight. Even more outrageously, he has killed Habeas Corpus at home and in his faraway dungeons, where terror suspects have been detained indefinitely without trial or hearing. The whole while, the current administration has draped over its actions one of the most frightening shrouds of secrecy ever to obscure government activity in US history.

Outside the war on terror, the administration has accelerated the nationalization and corporatization of the American economy, launched the largest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson, exploded federal spending, and sent its officers into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to enforce martial law and confiscate weapons from peaceful Americans.

And yet this is the America that so many Americans will celebrate on the Fourth of July. Not only has it become a parody of what the American Revolution promised it could become – that is, a nation born in a struggle against empire that widened the sphere of liberty continuously until it became a free country for all. Not only has the America of the Founding Fathers been abandoned. What we see today is a terrifying empire at times much more oppressive and belligerent than that regime against which the colonies rebelled. At least compared to what average Americans have to endure under George Bush II, what they had to suffer under King George III now seems trivial.

So how do we explain this extreme disconnect? Are Americans, especially conservatives, conscious of the great chasm between the anti-imperial America symbolized by Independence Day and the imperial America we have today?

The best possible explanation is nationalism. What most rightwingers celebrate on the modern Fourth of July is simply the nation-state of America, which was in a way born as soon as independence was gained from Britain, although not truly molded into a cohesive regime until the Constitution’s ratification, and made much more of a nationalist state and expansive empire with each of the big wars – especially the Mexican War, Lincoln’s War, the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, and the Cold War.

Approached in this way, we can perhaps grasp the new nationalist understanding of the Fourth of July: In 1776, the American people revolted against the British Empire, thus enabling the development of their own empire, which would far exceed the relatively meager global power obtained by the British state.

And so the American nationalists will have their fireworks and sing songs about conquering other peoples. They will pray for the success of the newest imperial project even as they give lip service to the concepts of independence and freedom. They will be glad that Bush is doing all he can to protect their security, for which they have gladly traded their liberty, and the liberty of others. They will see no irony in it because for them the American Revolution is not about an imperfect life of liberty outside the state; it’s rather about the stability and confidence that come with living under the most powerful government in the world, one that can wage war on any other country without anyone’s permission, one that can hold the entire planet hostage with its awesome nuclear arsenal.

One problem with this mindset is it is dependent on the unreliable. Empires fall. The American empire will not always have the credit and global power it now has. It is in fact losing them with each day. It is thus much better on the Fourth to celebrate liberty, the idea of independence from the state, and hope and work for its rebirth, rather than be among those celebrating such a transient cause as the American nation-state with its current surplus of power and deficits in liberty and reason. If you celebrate that America, your cause may one day prove as lost as that of the few Brits who wish America had stuck it out under the yoke of England.