Of course. The
slave states could not only
secede from the
Union by the Union's own
laws, but they were completely
justified in doing so.
The Laws
The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution is famous for being used by secession supporters. Just so you know, this writeup will not be an exception.
Let us consider what makes something legal or illegal. I hold that laws, and only laws determing legality. These laws only restrict; they forbid rights, so that people, in excercising certain harmful rights, will not harm others. The venerable Webster1913 itself states that 'anything is legal which the laws do not forbid'
Thus, we have a concrete set of documents that can let us decide if something is legal or not. And furthermore, since the Constitution is a 'supreme law of the land', overruling laws made by Congress in event of a conflict, if we find that the Constitution supports secession, we will have essentially proven our point.
The 10th Amendment to the US Constitution states that 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' Basically, what this amendment is saying is that all rights not surrendered by the states still belong to them. Secession is not mentioned in the Constitution, thus, the States return it. And there you have the single greatest argument for secession.
The Responses
Several protests are usually put up by the opposition at this point. One of them is that this is a 'loose interpretation' of the 10th amendment. This is simply not true. A 'loose interpretation' is an interpretation based on the implied meaning of a statement. Indeed, it is those who state that 'the 10th amendment was not made to support secession' who use a loose interpretation, based on the belief that the founding fathers implied that the states could not assume the massive powers granted to them by this amendment.
Furthermore, the very argument that the founding fathers did not create the Constitution to be broken has serious flaws. There are two in particular that I will address. Firstly, the founding fathers are (and were at the time of the Civil War long dead. Their former opinions carry no legal weight -- and cannot be known to us. While we may guess at what they would have though, our guesses are simply speculation. All we have left to decide by is a Constitution. Secondly, the Constitution was not ratified by the states with the understanding that said states would also be endorsing the opinions of the founding fathers. Thus, the constitution that was adopted by the Union was adopted on the understanding that what was in it would be the supreme law of the land, no more, no less.
Justification
I hold that the South was both economically and politically justified in seceding. At the time of secession, the South owed huge amounts of money to the North, and this debt was getting larger every year. Another point is that a mercantilist and agrarian economy are not compatible. For example, on the issue of Tariffs you have a win-lose situation. Either the North wins and the South loses or vice versa. And in the pre-Civil war days, the flow of the money was north. And perhaps worst of all, the agrarian South, significantly poorer than the North, was paying 82% of federal expenses. If that isn't economic oppression, I don't know what is.
So why didn't the South stop this persecution? For the simple reason that the North had a majority in both houses of Congress. Things did not get any better for the South when Abraham Lincoln, a Kentuckian who openly declared that he was for limiting slavery was elected president. While not hurting the South directly, this would only increase the congressional advantage the North enjoyed.
So what about compromise? Well, if past experience was to be any judge, compromise did not work. There had been three compromises passed since before the Civil War: The Missouri Compromise, The Compromise of 1850 and The Kansas-Nebraska Act. What did this lead to? The South was a minority in Congress. The territory gained during The Mexican War was to become free, thus increasing the chokehold of the North when these territories would become states. And The Fugitive Slave Act, consolation to the South from the Compromise of 1850 was effectively nullified in the North by 'personal liberty laws', despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that stated that the first Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional.
To recap, the 10th Amendment provides, without doubt, a permit for secession. Furthermore, the South, always on the losing end of the bargain throughout the ages, had good reason to secede, or else be dominated by the North. Thus, it was both legal and justified for the South to secede from the Union.
Response (2001-3-14) I believe
Gorgonzola has very skillfully misunderstood my post. A quick search would show you that I do not mention the word "
moral" in my
writeup. Instead, the writeup deals wholly with the
political and
economic aspects of
Southern secession.
To start out with, some flaws must be pointed out. While Gorgonzola evokes sympathy with images of Legreean plantation owners who worked thousands of slaves to death, the fact is the South was never the domain of aristocratic farmers (as is a popular misconception). Rather, the small farmer always made up a large majority. (Of course, this does not lessen the moral wrongs of that time and society, but it's always good to know exactly what the facts are).
Furthermore, I don't see how my claiming that the South was justified in seceding means that the South was justified in slavery. Keep in mind that had the South not seceded, the end of slavery would have come much later (perhaps not at all, who can tell?)
When Gorgonzola writes "The idea of Southern slaveholder as a victim of "economic oppression" is particularly laughable.", it almost seems like a deliberate misunderstanding. It seems as though Gorgonzola is taking my statement to the fact that the South was economically oppressed by the North and converting it into saying that the wealthy plantation families were being economically oppressed. Let me rectify this immediately. According to http://web.hist.uib.no/delfag-h98/bondevik/table2.htm , 22% of adult white males in Virginia in 1860 were slaveholders. Of these, an extremely small number ("the best families") were the wealthy plantation owners that Gorgonzola apparently believes constituted the whole south. Why is it so scandalous to suppose that the large non-slave majority (or even most of the slave owners -- they were quite poor as well) were economically oppressed by Northern merchants who controlled trade?
In closing, Gorgonzola's writeup addressed such a different topic from my own that it deserves its own node (was he arguing that the South could not morally secede from the Union? He stated that slavery is immoral, which we both agree on, but the conclusion drawn from that is that secession is immoral? Why would secession be immoral just because slavery is? But I digress). The US Constitution gave the south to secede from the union. Indeed, their doing so probably brought about the end of the peculiar institution more quickly. I fail to see how I am a horrible trollish person by attempting to conduct an objective analysis of whether the South was committing an illegal act in seceding from the union. (Just for the record, I'm neither black nor white, though I can't see how it would matter -- though the friend who informed me about this response to my writeup said (his exact words) "someone seems to think you're a white supremacist" :) Incedentally, this is the first time anyone has posted a writeup in response to one of mine, so I feel rather proud.)