From Little Acorns: The American Secession Movement Today

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Here's a simple truth. For those who can't stand the increasingly ugly and corrupt U.S. empire but don't want to leave the home and place they love, the only possible solution – we have to face it – is secession. And that's just what more and more citizens are thinking about these days.

The latest evidence for the appeal of the secessionist alternative comes from a just-released poll taken by the University of Vermont in February of this year that found that 13 per cent of the state's residents came right out and said “it would be a good idea for Vermont to secede from the United States and become once again an independent republic as it was from 1777 to 1791.” Thirteen percent. That may not seem a lot at first, but it translates to 64,400 people of voting age in the population at large.

Vermont has had a secession movement for the last four years, made up of what is now a think-tank called the Second Vermont Republic, a newspaper called Vermont Commons, and various groups, most recently www.FreeVermont.Net, hoping to put the question of secession on the agenda of the state's 230 town meetings by the year 2010. But only recently has it begun to get media notice, with articles in the Burlington Free Press, Los Angeles Times, and Philadelphia Enquirer, among others, and interviews on Vermont and New Hampshire public radio.

And another question from the UVM poll indicates that there is more fertile ground for it. When asked, “Has the United States government lost its moral authority,” a surprising 74.3 per cent said yes, an indication that attachment to the government is clearly eroding. It was the loss of moral authority that played a large part in the downfall of the apartheid government in South Africa, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself. When the center cannot hold – allegiance, loyalty, moral authority – things fall apart.

Some other indications that the idea of secession now is being taken seriously:

• The Washington Post in early April carried an op-ed article by Ian Baldwin, publisher of Vermont Commons, and Frank Bryan, a professor at UVM, entitled “The Once and Future Republic of Vermont.” According to an editor there, it was the second-most read piece in the entire Sunday paper (12,000 hits on-line) and garnered more than 200 emails, considered a high rate of response. It was syndicated cross-country and exploded with 21,000 entries on the internet.

• A Daily Kos poll on April 2 asked, “Should states be allowed to secede from the union peaceably?” and 65 percent answered affirmatively – which is interesting especially because it is conventional liberals, of the kind that this blog mostly attracts, who usually believe in working within the system and are not often fans of secession. A previous poll in 2005 showed only 53 percent in favor of secession.

• A secessionist convention – the first ever for North America – was held at a downtown hotel in Burlington last November and attracted more than 40 representatives from 16 secessionist organizations in 18 states (including particularly strong showings from Hawai'i, Alaska, Cascadia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont, and New Hampshire). The sponsor was the Middlebury Institute, the first American think-tank devoted to “the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination,” begun in November 2003. That such an event was held at all is pretty remarkable, and the fact that it drew serious people from across the land indicates that there is something that can fairly be called a secessionist movement. A second convention is planned for this October.

• An online petition recently posted on its website by the League of the South, one of the oldest secessionist groups, asks support for “the South's right to secede from the current regime and form its own government.” It had been signed by 2,259 people as of April 18.

There are a number of other active secessionist organizations in North America.

The Alaska Independence Party has swung in electoral support from 5 per cent when it began in 1986, up to 38.8 percent in 1990 (when Walter Hickel was on the ticket and won the governorship), down to 13 percent in 1994, and it has hovered around 1-2 per cent in elections since then. (Still, 2 percent is nearly 10,000 voting-age people, a real constituency.) It recently installed new leadership, and a strong effort is being made to field serious candidates statewide next year.

The Puerto Rico Independence Party has varied from 1 percent in referendums for statehood vs. independence in 1967, to 4.4 percent in 1993, 2.5 percent in 1998, and 2.4 percent in 2004. (But even that represents a 648,000 voting-age population.) It recently got a boost from an endorsement by a “Panama Proclamation” passed unanimously at the Latin American and Caribbean Congress meeting last November urging that Puerto Rico “become a free and independent nation.”

Hawai'i is a special case. Several votes and polls have shown wide support for sovereignty: 73 percent in an election in 1996, 63 percent in a Honolulu Advertiser poll in July 2006. (Percentages like these amount to roughly 900,000 people.) The trouble with the campaign there is that it is divided into a half-dozen different groups with different agendas and tactics, and it hasn't yet been able to translate what is obviously popular support into a coherent movement.

One other interesting area is the South, where professional polls seem to suggest support, as one leading pollster put it, only “in the high single or low double digits.” A poll said to be fairly typical, by the University of North Carolina in 1992, found that 8.4 percent agreed that “if it could be done without war, the South would be better off as a separate country today,” and 16.8 percent said that “the South would be a lot better off if it had won the War Between the States.” The League of the South, the strongest secession group in the South, boasts chapters in 16 states and a dues-paying membership said to be close to 4,000. A new secessionist organization, the Southern National Congress, was started last year and plans an inaugural convention for later this year.

The other strong secession movement in North America is the Parti Quebecois in Montreal, which has come within a hair (in 1995) of winning a referendum on separation from Canada. Its latest showing in this spring's election was third, but only 11 seats behind the leading Liberals, with 28 percent of the vote, which represents something like 2.2 million people, so it still plays an important role in Quebec politics.

Putting the Vermont vote in perspective, it appears to have one of the largest percentages in favor of secession of all the states that have been measured. As such, it is in a position to lead New England in recapturing its role as the home of American secession – as in the first secession, of 1776, as in its republic of 1777-91, as in the movement in 1804 to oppose the Louisiana Purchase and establish “a new confederacy,” as in 1814-1815 in the Hartford Convention that advocated “some new form of confederacy” among the New England states.

Vermont secessionists would like to start to do to the U.S. Empire, in a nonviolent fashion, what Lexington and Concord started to do to the British. It is not fanciful to think that, 64,000 strong, they just might have a go at it.