Since 1892, we’ve been making our schoolchildren say these eloquently simple words: “one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” (The “under God” phrase was added in 1954.)
But in the wake of last week’s election, the seemingly sacrosanct Pledge of Allegiance has been shunted aside in a small tsunami of calls for secession –negating the Pledge and dividing the nation.
Secession petitions from a score of states, including one from Texas signed by some 23,000 people, have attracted national attention –even from the White House. Some Americans, unhappy over the election results, want out of the Union. Social media and the press have been filled with stories about the allure of secession.
While these entreaties are perfectly constitutional under the First Amendment’s “right to petition,” this storm surge of secessionist sentiment begs a simple question: Can they do it?
A war fought 150 years ago, and leading to the deaths of approximately 2% of the American population, was thought to have settled that question.
Before that war began, Abraham Lincoln addressed secession in his first inaugural address in March 1861:
“Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.”
But the thread of an “indivisible” Union stretches back farther. During the “nullification” crisis in 1832, Andrew Jackson once said if a state could leave the Union, the Constitution was a “rope of sand.” Jackson’s Proclamation Concerning Nullification, written by Secretary of Sate Edward Livingston, stated:
“Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure.”
And when the very ratification of the Constitution was being debated 225 years ago, and with it the “right to withdraw,” Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 6 that disunion was impractical and historically disastrous.
“A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”
But the simple answer to the question of “Can states secede?” is, constitutionally speaking, “No.”
In 1869, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Texas v White, a case related to bonds issued by Texas during the Civil War. In the majority decision, Salmon Chase, who had been Lincoln’s wartime Treasury Secretary, wrote:
“Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union.” (Emphasis added)
The Constitution, to oversimplify, is like any contract. Or marriage. One party can’t opt out without the consent of the other party or parties.
No, not even Texas – where some claim a legendary “right” to secede—has a Constitutional leg to stand on. Other commentators throughout history have argued that there is only one way out for “dissatisfied countrymen” –in Lincoln’s phrase—and that is revolution.
So for those seeking to leave the Union, there is the “Romney option” –self-deportation. Or as patriotic Americans often said during the Vietnam era, “Love it or leave it.”
Read more about the secession crisis in America before the Civil War in 
Don’t Know Much About® the Civil War and the response of Jackson and Lincoln in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
