In mid August of last year, as authorities combed through disgraced former IRS executive Lois Lerner’s emails, they came across a message she had sent to a subordinate who had complained about a Texas Tea Party group. In Lerner’s views, “Lincoln was our worst president…He should have let the south go. We really do seem to have different minds sets.” This was just a reiteration of her views from 2012 when she said that the U.S. really needed to split in two because polarization dampened the government’s ability to get anything done. (Translation: Conservatives are cramping our style!)
Can’t say I don’t agree. If we could just deed California to Mexico and redraw the United States so that the split would leave the liberal counties of Virginia with the north, life might improve for a majority of Conservatives. Secession was, after all, originally a Northern idea. As early as 1794 two members of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 cornered John Taylor in the Capitol cloak room to press their case for Northern secession only six years after the Constitution was ratified.
And it wouldn’t be the last time the North pushed secession. In 1801 several Federalists threatened secession over Thomas Jefferson’s election. James A. Bayard of Delaware who cast the tie-breaking vote to place Jefferson in the executive office privately wrote that he did so to prevent such a move. Just two years later, the “Essex Junto” led by former Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, wanted out after the acquisition of Louisiana by the Jefferson administration. After all, warned Picking, those future farmers would naturally upset the balance of power in Congress and render the North a permanent political minority.
Jefferson remarked in his First Inaugural Address that if anyone should pursue secession, it was the duty of all Americans to recognize the error of the message but to peacefully let them go if necessary because everyone understood that the Union was a voluntary compact of States.
During the War of 1812 the North again dusted off secession as a possible remedy to oppose “Mr. Madison’s War,” because it threatened their shipping interests. Daniel Webster even suggested that a separation would be preferable to an unjust bondage with States that held widely differing views of political economy. In 1840 abolitionists called the Constitution a “compact with the devil” and considered the Union an unholy alliance with sin. In 1848, the militant abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison fervently pushed for Northern secession.
Sounds strange, especially when you consider that by 1861, the North considered secession treason, possibly because it was a Southern idea. Perhaps instead of secession for themselves, the South should have demanded the North move out. Southerners were not the oddity in antebellum America. That honor went to the “Deep North” and their breed of malcontent reformers.
The South had, after all, up to this time led the Union. Five of the first seven presidents were Southern. Her people had acquired the vast territories of the West, led the U.S. to independence both on the battlefield and with the pen, provided the manly vigor necessary to preserve that independence for decades and given Congress the leading statesmen of the day.
Some modern leftist like Lerner still insisted that the South should go. “We’re better off without them,” they say. But maybe it is time for the North to take the lead. The South tried it once and now their symbols of self-determination are being furled and their heroes vilified. And, most Southerners would agree that we would be much better off without the likes of Lois Lerner, Nancy Pelosi, the Kennedys, Obama, Barbara Boxer, ‘Dirty’ Harry Reid, Bernie Sanders, et. al.
Secession for the North and Lois Lerner for President! Has a nice ring, especially if you’re Southern.
Source: Abbeville Institute, Dr. Brian McClanahan, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Funding Fathers; The Funding Fathers Guide to the Constitution; Forgotten Conservatives in American history; and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heros.
