Divided We Stand, United We Fall: The First North American Secession Convention:

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Well, it happened. The Middlebury Institute pulled off the First North American Secessionist Convention in Burlington last November, and it was as successful as any first-time effort in this ticklish political territory could be.

More than forty people attended the event, including journalists and camera crews, and, in an all-day roundtable discussion, portrayed the current strength of the secessionist movement, its strategies, its outreach, its potential. Delegates came from 16 secessionist organizations in 18 states, including Hawaii, Alaska, Cascadia (along the Cascades in the West), Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Though all the presentations proved engaging, illuminating a community of colleagues whom had not known each other before, the most striking thing about the event was—that it was held at all.

That people came from so many distant parts to join forces.

That people took the idea of secession seriously and were willing to get together with like-minded souls.

That people were willing to take time off to declare their belief in secession as a practical political activity for this day and age.

That we started a movement.

“Secession is every American's birthright,” is how Second Vermont Republic co-chair Rob Williams put it. “We have to make it a viable option, as it was in the first seventy years of the United States' history. We need to make it contemporary and sophisticated and—I don't mind saying—sexy.”
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The politics of the delegates proved about as diverse as you could find in a single room. A good number were libertarians, like the New State Project people, who want to get 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire and then slowly take over the state government and make it a libertarian oasis. Several were primarily Christians, like the Christian Exodus people who have a similar scheme to take over South Carolina (“We're a warm-weather knock-off of FSP,” CE president Cory Burnell commented). Their goal? Working from county level to state, pass laws with a conservative religious ideology (against abortion and same-sex marriage, for school prayer and unregulated home schooling). Some were simply anarchist-minded activists from groups that want to reduce political power to a manageable state level, as with the Alaska Independence Party and Cascadia Now. And then there was the representative from Hawaii who wasn't for secession so much as liberation, to return the islands to the rightful nation it was before United States gun ships and sugar planters conquered it in 1893.

A diverse lot, indeed, but as Ian Baldwin, Vermont Commons publisher, told the meeting: “It isn't a left and right thing. The point is we are decentralists, all of us, and we're up against a monster.”

And that indeed was one of the three basic points upon which everyone in the room agreed: the empire that is the United States has become is a monster. “Through oppression, greed, corruption, incompetence, and folly, the state is forfeiting its moral authority,” said one statement from the Southern National Congress Committee. “The empire is rotten,” said one delegate from Virginia, “and it can't be fixed.” “The American system cares nothing for people,” said a representative of the League of the South. “It provides no security for anyone.”

The second point of agreement was on the legitimacy of secession. As the convention put it, in issuing a “Burlington Declaration” at the end of the session: “Any political entity has the right to separate itself from a larger body of which it is a part and peaceably to establish its independence as a free and legitimate state in the eyes of the world.” It took Donald Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emery University and a scholar of secession for many years, to point out that this legitimacy rests on U.S. history itself. Not only were the Founding Fathers seeking secession instead of revolution—they had no interest in taking over Whitehall—but secession has been done, peacefully, several times in U.S. history, as with Kentucky's secession from Virginia, Tennessee's from North Carolina, and Maine's from Massachusetts.

“This is a thoroughly American idea,” Livingston said. “We're not a bunch of fringe kooks.”

And the third point of agreement, which emerged only as the discussion went on, was the understanding that secession in a sense is only a means toward the objective of liberty. As one delegate from Louisiana put it: “Secession is not the end, but the means to the end—liberty.” After the day long conversation, another delegate added: “A new paradigm is emerging and it was exciting beyond measure to be a small part of its birth. The new—or renewed—paradigm is liberty, freedom from unlimited, unaccountable, despotic, state-corporate power.”

Ultimately, it didn't matter that diverse groups had many different issues and causes in their quivers. What mattered most was the sense that they were united in seeing that citizens had the right to be free to live in their locales as they see fit.
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So we came together to start a movement, and it looks as if it can only grow stronger through continued networking, organizing, and meetings. Two groups have tentatively offered to host a second convention next year, and the Christian Exodus people are proposing to start a discussion group among the convention attendees.

With the first North American Secession convention under our belt, what can we say about the strength of this movement?

First, that there are 16 real and active secessionist organizations, some new but some (like the League of the South and the Alaska Independence Party) in existence for decades. They have meetings, they send out newsletters, they have websites, and they travel around talking up their cause.

Here are a few:

The Confederate Legion, based in Tennessee but with chapters as far away as Cairo, Illinois, has a youth contingent and a female auxiliary. Its delegate, “chief of staff” David Towery, said that the best places to recruit followers were the churches (since they were basically opposed to mainstream—insufficiently Christian — U.S. society anyway) and the bars. He claimed that they had 4,000 followers—people willing to sign statements in support of the new Confederate cause—and representatives in 16 states.

The League of the South also has chapters in 16 states and members in 11 others, and it has an active website (Dixienet.org), a bimonthly newspaper, and an annual conference attended by upwards of 300 people. They've been doing this for 12 years now, and say that every year they are winning new recruits.

The Second Vermont Republic may be one of the most active organizations, with a website and a newspaper, and in a statewide survey last winter garnered the support of 8 per cent of Vermont's population, a remarkable achievement for a group just three years old.

And the New State Project has some 3,000 people from all 50 states already signed up, and 200 have moved into the state, including the convention delegate, NSP Secretary Sandy Pierre, who has just moved from California. Pretty good for a movement also only three years old.

There are two other think-tanks in addition to the Middlebury Institute. The League of the South has an institute for the study of Southern culture, and Donald Livingston has an Abbeville Institute, with 40 active academic fellows, trying to “challenge the assumption that the Union should be preserved at all costs.” (Its motto: “Divided we stand, united we fall.”)

And remember, there are at least two dozen more groups out there that have claimed they support secession, though for one reason or another did not send representatives to the convention. My feeling is that we will hear from them shortly when they see that there's a movement goin' on and will want to be part of it.

A good start. I'll keep you posted.