From my comments here and here:

Of course, there is a right to secede. Of course, Sandefur is dead wrong in harping on this allegedly significant distinction without a difference. The CSA had a right to secede and to revolt, just as did the USA in seceding from Britain. (This pettifogging by thelibertarian centralists reminds me of the hairsplitting involved in the claim that there is a difference between alienating and forfeiting a right–often made to justify the latter while pretending to still be in favor of “inalienable” rights; rights are not inalienable. They are (proportionatley) forfeited, or alienated, by committing crime).

The states of the US obviously have a constitutional right to secede, since the federal government is merely an agent of limited powers created by compact of the original 13 state-parties, and that compact (a) never denied the right of states to leave the union; (b) the states never gave up this right; and (c) the feds were never granted the power or authority to stop the states from leaving. It is quite obvious that there is a constitutional right to secede.

As Kevin Gutzman discusses in ch. 3 of Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840 (as well as in his 2004 Review of Politics article “Edmund Randolph and Virginia Constitutionalism,” Virginia (in addition to two other states) retained the right to reclaim the powers they were delegating to the Federal Government (that is, to secede) in case those rights were perverted to their oppression (which has to be a matter that is for them alone to decide). See ch. 3 of Virginia’s American Revolution and the aforementioned article. In fact, the two leading Federalist spokesmen in the ratification convention told the convention that they were to be “as one of thirteen parties to a compact,” that the Federal Government would have only the powers it was “expressly delegated,” and that they could reclaim the powers they were granting it (that is, secede) if those powers were perverted to their (that is, Virginians’) oppression. (Obviously, only Virginians could be the judge of that.)

Further, the Supreme Court has long had what it calls the Equal Footing Doctrine (2), which holds, after the manner of Virginia’s Northwest Cession of 1781, that all states have the same rights. If Virginia (and NY and RI) reserved the right to secede, then all states have that right. This doctrine requires all states to be treated alike, and reflects the universal understanding of the ratifiers, that means any state can secede if it wants to.

Incidentally, the two VA Ratification Convention delegates mentioned above were the governor, Edmund Randolph (also a prominent Framer) and George Nicholas, who often spoke for Madison. They were two of the five members (along with John Marshall and James Madison) of the all-Federalist committee to draft the instrument of ratification.

(For more on this, see the two above-noted works by Gutzman, plus his Gutzman’s Mr. Franck, Meet Mr. Randolph and Neocons vs. the Real Constitution.)

Now, of course, it could be that the president, in the mode of Lincoln, would ignore Texas’s right. That’s a separate issue.

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So why does Sandefur nitpick on the difference between “secession” and “revolution”? Because you see, he wants to argue that since there is no legal right to secede (contra reality), then all that’s left is the right to revolt. But then those nasty Southern racist slaveholders had no right to revolt–why? Because (as I explain in
Sandefur and Federal Supremacy), in Sandefur’s view, “the Southern states could not legitimately claim a right to revolt in defense of slavery”. (Nevermind that he views the American revolution from Britain as legitmate, even though colonial America had slavery!)

But this is sleight of hand on his part. He pretends like his reason to oppose the CSA’s revolution was that they had slavery (again, nevermind the fact that the US did in 1776, too). But note, he writes: “revolution is justified only as a form of self-defense against rulers who have engaged in a train of abuses and usurpations against those individual rights which just governments protect. This alone distinguishes an act of revolution from a mere criminal conspiracy.”

Sandefur is of the opinion that there was no train of abuses justifying revolution (despite the fact that the federal taxes, impositions, tariffs, etc. were more onerous in 1861 than those King George imposed in 1776; and certainly today’s federal mandates, taxes, and regulations are orders of magnitude beyond either, thus making the case for revolution stronger today than ever!). This means, however, that slavery has nothing to do with Sandefur’s arguments against the right to revolution. For under this theory, even if none of the United States had had slavery in 1861, it would still have been a “mere criminal conspiracy” for the South to secede, without permission from Congress. This is because the South, according to Sandefur, would not have been “able to point to a long train of abuses pursuing the design of reducing them to despotism”. In other words, even if slavery had already been abolished, the Union would be justified in using armed force to subdue a seceding State, unless the State was engaged in “revolution” in response to acts of “despotism” by the Union.

Sandefur’s real position is that, barring acts of despotism by the central government, it may legitimately use armed force to prevent the secession of its States.

So, according to our centralist “libertarian” “allies,” states cannot secede, since they have no right to (despite the fact that Virginia and other states explicitly retained this right, which was recognized by the ratifying convention; and the Equal Footing Doctrine, which requires all other states to also have this right); and they can’t revolt, since there has been no long train of abuses (despite the current unprecedented world financial crisis foisted on the states by the feds, imposing cripling million-dollar future obligations on the citizens of the States; despite the fact that Sandefur et al. recognize the puny abuses of King George as justifying the 1776 American Revolution (please, please give me back King George)).

In reality, the proper libertarian view is that of course there is a right to secession, both constitutional and natural; and there is a right to revolution, since our federal government is criminal, unlibertarian, unconstitutional, and tyrannical (little Timmy can’t acknowledge that–wouldn’t be a polite position to take while kissing ass at some DC cocktail party).

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The truth is that right to secede is anathema to the centralist libertarian and Randroid mindset, which is obsessed with the idea of having a nice, neat, legal, “final” deciding authority…. even if it’s the criminal state itself–which is why they distort and lie, to justify their disgusting worship of the unconstitutional, unlibertarian 14th Amendment, federal judges, and federal power.

Further, Sandefur disparages libertarians who hold views similar to Paul’s as “paleoconservatives.” A better term might be anti-centralist libertarians. The truth is, the centralism and naive federal judiciary worship of Sandefur and his statist-centralist pals is hardly compatible with libertarianism, which is anarchist, anti-state, and decentralist.

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A final point. So what if there is no right to secede in the Constitution? The Constitution was an immoral, unlibertarian, criminal coup d’etat. In any event, agreements entered into by previous generations do not bind us.

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One other comment: it’s sad that an ostensibly libertarian site, one that trumpets the Declaration of Independence, is accepting the Lincolnian state’s “logic” in denying to States the right to secede (or revolt). Extremely disappointing.

But then, I guess that’s what you get from a soi-disant libertarian who has “distanced myself from the more extreme elements of the libertarian movement.” Wow, I guess even Barry Goldwater would be too much for him! Only respectable types around here, move along, move along.

To those watching from the sidelines, whose side would you rather be on: that of the brave Ron Paul; that of principled, anti-centralist, anti-war libertarians; that of Jefferson and Madison (of Kentucky and Virginia Resolves fame — 1, 2) — or that of a self-admitted “pro-war libertarian” who says “the evidence is clear that Western Civilization is in a fight for its own survival right now. Following the naive foreign policy advocated by the Libertarian Party and its pacifist allies is, quite frankly, a prescription for suicide.”

Hey, buddy, we are committing suicide right now–you see the financial implosion going on around you? Hmm, I wonder if it might have something to do with the military spending of this federal beast, and its authority and capacity to decide whether or not and how to wage war–which you support?

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Another point about the “respectable,” non-extremist, cocktail-party libertarians yammering about slavery as if this was some unique taint of the CSA’s secession (yes yes, we’re all anti-slavery now–well, we anarcho-libertarians are anti-slavery, of course–against slavery of all kinds; the statist, I mean, minarchist, cocktail-party centralist libertarians favor taxation, which is a type of slavery, and the state’s right to exist, and hence its ability to inevitably kill and kidnap and jail innocent people as it enacts one unjust positive law after another) — but how they can maintain that slavery taints the CSA’s case but not the USA’s requires a mental compartmentalization and disingenuous mental gymnastics that is almost admirable, in a twisted sort of way: After all, during the American Revolution, the British offered freedom and a bounty to any slave who fought for them, so it was the anti-slavery cause, and the colonists’ the pro-slavery one, as Dr. Johnson loved to point out. And, of course, during Recent Unpleasantness (which DiLorenzo appropriately refers to as The War To Prevent Southern Independence), the Union also contained slave states throughout the war, and in fact, before Lincoln’s invasion of the South, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy. So how do the slave-owning USA during the Civil War, and the slave-owning USA during the Revolutionary War, garner the centralists’ favor, when this fact condemns the CSA’s botched effort? Why, because without the US gaining independence from Britain, and defeating the secessionist CSA, we wouldn’t have the 14th Amendment authorizing federal judges to supervise the hicks and peon lawmakers of the southern and rural states! And we wouldn’t have “American entry into WWI, to the punitive Treaty of Versailles, [] the rise of German nationalism and Hitler and WWII, tens of millions dead and the Holocaust, nuclear bombings of Japan, the Cold War, etc.” We wouldn’t have American Greatness!

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Did you know, the last slave state to enter the union was West Virginia, which entered the union via an unconstitutional act by the Lincoln regime. So Sandefor’s favorite tyrant, Abe Lincoln, 1) violated the Constituton, to 2) bring another slave state into the union.

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Readers should realize that the “right of revolution” crap is a complete fabrication of Harry Jaffa’s demented mind, and is parroted by all of his sychophants like li’l Tim Sandefur. It’s all made up. The founders never engaged in any such discussion. If they did, why doesn’t Jaffa or Sandefur quote them?

This is what Straussianism is: reinterpreting historical documents in a way that rewrites history to fit neocon policy agendas. How is this different from Soviet propaganda practices?

The truth is that the states were always sovereign, which means they could secede whenever they damn well wanted to for any reason. But this is all a diversion the REAL question is: Why was there a war?

Everyone knows that Lincoln did not invade in 1861 to free any slaves. Why, then, did he invade his own country and micromanage the murder of 350,000 American citizens?

These naive, dishonest, dishonorable, faux-libertarian apologists for statism, centralization, and war should have to answer this, and answer for their treason.