HALEY by Yorktown

Hume proposed a large republic composed of 100 small republics. Laws passed by the national senate required ratification by a majority of the constituent republics. In essence, Hume thought, the advantages of small size could in this way be joined to the greater fighting power of a large state.

Hume's ideas, along with similar views by other writers, influenced the founders of the American republic; and here we arrive at the second of the two major contentions of this book. It is that America was founded not as a centralized Leviathan but as a federation of republics, each of which retains intact its sovereign power, except on matters delegated to the national government. Each state, on this view, retains the right to leave the federation, should it deem that the national government (or the other states) has sufficiently violated its rights. The 11 Southern states that seceded in 1861 thus acted legally, whether or not they were wise to do so.

Kent Masterton Brown, in his long and learned contribution to the book, very forcefully defends this position. As he points out,

The Constitution is an agreement "between the States so ratifying the same" [quoting the Constitution]. It has parties — the States. Each of the parties agreed to surrender some powers in exchange for receiving a "common defense" and some regulation of commerce between the States when it was necessary.… Each party retains the right to rescind its ratification of the Constitution if there is a material breach by other States or by the federal government created by the Constitution.… The framers and ratifiers of the Constitution unquestionably understood it to be a "compact." Not only did the document, in form, contain all the elements of a contract, but the prevailing political thought of revolutionary America underscored the fact that written constitutions were "compacts." (pp. 42–43)

Though Brown's argument is strong, I should like to have seen a response to an objection. If states could withdraw at will from the union, why did the anti-Federalists so much stress in the ratification debates the dangers of centralization? If a ready remedy existed for federal usurpation of power, why was such usurpation so perilous a prospect? Perhaps, though, they did not doubt the legal possibility of secession but rather feared that in practice it would prove difficult to carry out with success — as indeed proved to be the case in 1861.

If the Constitution established the United States as a decentralized federation, unfortunately federal aggrandizement of power in the long run prevailed. In an incisive essay, Thomas DiLorenzo explores the steps by which the old order was upset. As he makes clear, from the beginning of our national history, Alexander Hamilton, whom Cecelia Kenyon aptly termed the "Rousseau of the Right" (p. 72), and his followers, dissatisfied with the decentralized government of the Constitution, endeavored to substitute for it a regime of centralized power. In this endeavor, Hamilton had the very considerable help of Chief Justice John Marshall, whose nationalist opinions often echoed Hamilton's words.

Marshall also repeated Hamilton's bogus theory of the American founding, claiming that the "nation" somehow created the states. He amazingly argued that the federal government was somehow created by "the whole people."… In the name of "the people," Marshall said, the federal government claimed the right to "legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory." (p. 70)

Readers of DiLorenzo's outstanding books on Lincoln will not be surprised to learn that he assigns Lincoln a large measure of responsibility in the drive toward national consolidation.2 Marshall DeRosa is entirely in accord:

Lincoln rhetorically explained [at Gettysburg] that he launched the U.S. into a war of aggression against the C.S.A. in order to re-found America without the Southern defilement; this is what he meant by a "new birth of freedom." The physical evidence lay all around him in Gettysburg that Southerners were not to have a government of, by, and for the Southern people but a coercive government based in Washington, D.C. (p. 94)

For the contributors to this book, secession is not an issue confined to the past. They regard it as an essential remedy for the ills of today's overly large America. In this connection it is interesting to note that secession had the backing of the renowned American diplomat and historian George Kennan, who, in a manner that would have delighted Thomas Jefferson, called for America to be broken up into a number of regional commonwealths. "To begin the debate, and without being dogmatic, Kennan suggests that the Union could be divided into 'a dozen constituent republics'" (pp. 21–22)."

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