The New England Secession Tradition
(Part One of a Three-Part Series)

By Donald W. Livingston

The Vermont independence effort is guided by a peaceful group of thoughtful citizens who believe that Vermont would be better off as a small independent country like Iceland, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Luxembourg, or Switzerland than to remain under the domination of an overly centralized and increasingly out-of-control central federal government. To some, the idea of an independent Vermont is preposterous but harmless, more theater than serious policy. To others it smacks of treason. Did not the Civil War settle forever the question of whether a state within the United States can secede?

It did not. Timeless moral and constitutional questions cannot be settled by the contingencies of war.

That secession is a policy option available to any state within the United States today is admittedly unfashionable, but it is neither silly nor treasonous. It is an option rooted in the origin and foundations of the U.S. political tradition. George Washington and John Adams proved secessionists. The Declaration of Independence is a legal brief in international law justifying the secession of 13 self-proclaimed states from the British Empire. Vermont was not one of these states, but seceded from Britain on her own in 1777, and remained an independent republic before joining the Union in 1791. Vermont and Texas came into the Union as independent states from prior secessions.

Secession is an ever-present possibility in any large political union created out of formerly independent political societies such as the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the European Union, or the United States. Since each political society pre-existed the union, the political society is primary (an end in itself), while the union is secondary (an instrument). When an instrument (like the union) no longer serves its purpose, it should be discarded for a better one.

Of course, every large scale union will try to make itself the end, and the political units that are its constituent parts the means. Great Britain did this during its imperial period. But a recent poll shows that 52 percent of Scots want to secede and restore their own country, and 58 percent of the English approve of their leaving! The Soviet Union claimed to be a revolutionary end in itself, and the republics instruments for a global Marxist revolution. But this most centralized Union in history dissolved after only 70 years when 15 states peacefully seceded.

To view the notion of a Second Vermont Republic in the proper light, we need to keep in mind the great political changes that have occurred internationally since World War II. For 350 years, the disposition of European states (and those created by their empires, including the United States) has been centralization of power. Thousands of independent and quasi-independent political societies were crushed into larger and fewer states through wars of unification and nation-building. Eighteenth century absolute Monarchists, 19th century Liberals and Socialists, 20th century Communists, Nazis, and Fascists all agreed at least on one thing: smaller polities had to give way to vast, centralized, modern states ruling over millions. It was thought that prosperity and moral progress (however defined), depended on such Leviathans.

But experience has shown this to be an illusion. From the French Revolution of 1789 through the Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, the massive power concentrated in modern states has issued in wars of unprecedented scale and intensity. And wars have not been the worst. R. J. Rummel in Death by Government has argued that modern states have killed nearly four times as many of their own people as have been killed in all the wars, foreign and domestic, fought around the globe in the 20th century. The modern unitary state has proven itself to be a weapon of mass destruction. What prosperity and progress we have appears to have gone on in spite of the Leviathan, and not because of it.

Historical tension

Smallness is no barrier to prosperity. Most of the 10 states in the world having the highest per-capita income are small. One of them, Iceland, has a population under 300,000. More than half the countries in the world today are under 5 million, and the number is growing. Vermont's population is around 600,000. If it were independent, it would join 66 other countries with populations of 600,000 or less.

Everywhere the vast nation-states created since the French Revolution are fracturing. Allegiances are shifting to supranational or sub-national organizations. The Second Vermont Republic is possible because we live in interesting times. George Kennan, one of the 20th century's great geopolitical strategists and architect of the United States' Cold War containment policy, argued in his autobiography, Around the Cragged Hill, that the public corporation known as the United States has become simply too large for the purposes of self government. When any corporation becomes so large that it is on the verge of collapsing under its own unwieldy bulk, the only remedy, Kennan concluded, is to downsize it. And he suggested that we begin a public debate on how to divide the U.S. empire into a number of independent unions of states associated under a commonwealth model. George Kennan, who ended his career at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, endorsed the idea of a Second Vermont Republic a few years before his death as a worthy effort to begin a debate about how such division should proceed.

Yet for many, secession still appears alien – outside the boundaries of the U.S. political tradition. But this view springs from attending to only one part of our political tradition. From the formation of the United States, with the Articles of Confederation, on down to 1860, secession proved a policy option considered in every section of the federation by major political leaders. It was only after the so-called Civil War that Americans began to adopt the language of the French Revolution, language that absolutely prohibits secession. The French Republic was the first to declare itself a republic – one and indivisible – creating the paradigm of all modern states.

But this language of indivisibility was entirely alien to the republican principles of the American Revolution under which the United States created a voluntary federation of states, not an aggregate of individuals ruled from the center. It was not until the 1920s (at the high noon of the Western obsession with centralization) that the U.S. Congress approved the Pledge of Allegiance, verbally transforming a federation of states into the French Revolutionary slogan: “one nation indivisible.”

The result is that Americans have inherited a deeply fractured political tradition. On one side of the fracture is what we may call a Jeffersonian Americanism, beginning with the Declaration of Independence (a secession document) and running down to 1860. On the other side is a post-Lincolnian Americanism. The former is rooted in state sovereignty, privileges small polities, and is open to secession. The latter is rooted in national sovereignty, views the individual states (like Vermont) mainly as administrative units of the center, and absolutely prohibits secession. Every American has inherited both these contrary Americanisms, and no citizen who understands both can fail to feel the tension they generate.

Yet they are incommensurable. Post-Lincolnian historiography has pushed Jeffersonian Americanism to the margin by either ignoring it or by presenting it as an outdated political engagement. But no part of a tradition is ever lost. Indeed, what we call a reformation or a renaissance is usually a swerving back to recover and make topical again a part of tradition that had been neglected or misunderstood. At a time when the 350-year adventure of the large unitary state has turned sour and the resources of post-Lincolnian centralization seem to be exhausted, it is perhaps time to recover and explore the Jeffersonian inheritance.

A New England tradition

The first thing to appreciate is that it was not until the post-Lincolnian era that the U.S. Constitution began to be seen as the sacred document of an organic American civil religion. In the Jeffersonian era, the Constitution was thought of as a secular compact between sovereign states. It was also a compromise that few were happy with. Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a British style unitary state, called it a “worthless fabric.”

The region of the United States that first tested the Union for its viability was New England. Its leaders seriously considered secession in 1804 over President Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase; in 1808 over Jefferson's Embargo of their trade; and most seriously in 1814, over issues surrounding “Mr. Madison's War of 1812.” Secession was advocated by New England abolitionists from the 1830s on to 1860; and by John Quincy Adams and other New England leaders over the Mexican war and the annexation of Texas. In this essay (and the next installments), an effort will be made to make this New England secession tradition better known and to explore its intimations for our time.

The Union created by the Constitution of 1789 was hotly debated and passed only by a small margin. As early as 1794, Senators Rufus King of New York (formerly from Massachusetts) and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut told Senator John Taylor of Virginia that “it was utterly impossible for the union to continue,” that North and South would never agree on public policy, and that it would be better to renegotiate the Union than to have a forced separation later. Both King and Ellsworth were Founding Fathers who had helped draft the U.S. Constitution, and both were political allies of Federalist leaders who would later lead serious secession movements in New England.

Nothing came of this move. But 10 years later a more serious effort at secession arose in response to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States. Since the Constitution had no provision for acquiring new territory, Jefferson's acquisition was thought to be unconstitutional. Moreover, New England had a commercial and maritime economy; consequently, its face was set to the East. The agricultural South meanwhile, looked to cultivate land in the West. Acquiring the Louisiana Territory meant more states in the West, greatly expanding the power of the Southern agrarian interest at the expense of New England's commercial interests.

Further, the new states would contain Spanish and French populations that had no feel for the American inheritance of British liberty which New Englanders thought was best exemplified in their own region of the nation. As one cleric put it: “we derive all that is valuable in religion and morals, the common law, the habeas corpus, the trial by jury, and that spirit and those principles of freedom, which led to . . . our independence. Had we been the sons of Frenchmen, we could have inherited none of these blessings.”

These ethnic, cultural, commercial and other dislocations anticipated by the Louisiana Purchase gave rise, in 1804, to a secession movement led by New England Federalists in Congress of whom Timothy Pickering, Uriah Tracy, and Roger Griswold were leaders. Their vision was of “a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South.” Its nucleus would be New England, “to which New York would be added later,” and with a hand of friendship extended to the British provinces in Canada. Aaron Burr supported the vision, and it was hoped that, upon being elected governor of New York, he would lead a secession movement in that state. Though secession was considered desirable by many Federalist leaders in New England, they did not think there was sufficient popular support to hazard their careers. Burr's electoral defeat and the scandal over killing Hamilton in a duel ended, for the moment, the project of a New England federation.

This first secession movement, which counted among its leaders Founding Fathers who had drafted the U.S. Constitution, may seem surprising only because of the dominance of post-Lincolnian historiography which views U.S. history as the story of the inevitable unfolding of a unitary American State, one and indivisible. But in the Jeffersonian era, the Union was not considered organic and indivisible but an experiment, as Washington famously called it in his 1796 Farewell Address.

An experiment that fails should be called off. And in the case of a federal union of states, each of which could be a viable country in the world, that can only mean secession. A distinguished historian of this period writes: “secession, even in 1804 was no new and unheard-of remedy for oppressed sectional minorities....most political thinkers of the first half-century of constitutional government had very little faith in the duration of the Union, and the statement that such-and-such a measure would ‘inevitably produce a dissolution of the Union' was a familiar figure of speech in politics.”

It is not familiar now. But what faith can we rationally have in an over-centralized, post-Lincolnian empire that no longer knows how to stop growing? What faith did George Kennan have in it? Would it really have been so bad if the New England states had formed a Northeastern federation with special ties to Canadian Britain?

For more than a century, questions of this sort have not been asked. But given the great changes in the world today, they can no longer be suppressed; and indeed appear to us now in a fresh light. The secession movement of 1804 – being a top-down affair – was aborted. But only four years later, another secession movement in New England would erupt. This time from the bottom up.

Part Two of Donald W. Livingston's article on New England's tradition of secession will appear in the Summer 2007 issue of Vermont Commons.