Independence

I recently stumbled on an odd book at a fine used bookstore in town entitled The South Was Right. This led me to the discovery, on the web, of a longstanding movement to defend the idea that the secession of the southern states and the creation of the Confederate States of America was a just act on the part of those states. Such was at issue, of course, in the U.S. Civil War. I had known, from skimming a book about current southern confederate sympathizers that my wife Marsha recommends highly (Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz) that there are still thousands upon tens of thousands of people who believe that the “South” had a right to secede from the U.S. -- indeed that any state has a right to secede. But I did not know how many web sites and books have been devoted to the topic.

I’ll admit I have long had sympathies with the South. [The photo is a shot of the far north, along some U.P. highway some years ago. What it has to do with the topic at hand is little, except that the fellow who lives on this plot of land seems to have trying to create some kind of idyllic independent kingdom, with his faux windill and his plastic deer.] Any American, I suppose, should feel sympathy for independence. But under what conditions independence is just and good is a matter of endless, raucous, and sometimes underground debate. It turns out that the subject is germane at this very moment. For this past weekend, the state called Kosovo declared itself a nation through independence from Serbia, an act which Serbia, Russian, and China quickly questioned, and quite strongly (Serbia because of its economic stake and the Serbian minority in Kosovo; Russia presumably because of the difficulties it has had with the independence conflict in Chechnya and other regions within its current borders; and China presumably because of Taiwan). So the principles of the right of secession, or independence, remain central in the world of politics and morals.

The authors of the book I ran across, some fanatic fellow named Walter D. Kennedy, has written other books, some with his brother, about better democratic government and so-called “States’ Rights,” which suggests that his view of the right of the South to secede is inspired in part by his larger desire to justify certain forms of government that he approves of and to restrict certain forms of government that he does not approve of (which means the current federal government of the United States). Funny to me, and often astonishing, how history -- or the myths of the past that we create, as the case usually is -- plays such a large role in the present. For example, the intellectual question of the causes and purpose of the Civil War stirs up considerable and often quite heated debate. Did the North make war to end slavery, the South to preserve it? Or did the North make war to preserve union, the South to withdraw from it? Such questions still at times arouse white-hot passions. Many consider it slightly (or strongly) racist and fully idiotic to suggest that the principal cause of the Civil War was NOT slavery. But I have seen good reasons to think it might NOT have been. It’s hard to step back from the debate of specific historical issues and simply consider them as intellectual issues. For as soon as one takes some positions, even tentatively, such as a position perceived to be in favor of the Confederacy, one is suspected of being a racist or even a supporter of slavery. The Kennedy brothers say, take it or leave it, that they do not support or approve slavery, past or present, in any sense.

This broad, woolly subject is nothing new to me. I’ve been my thinking about it for more than 30 years. What I can say now is that it seems rationally possible to defend almost any moral position on Southern secession, regardless of the harshness with which the two sides often dismiss each other. That is, a thinker could well defend by reason that the South had the right to secede; and that a thinker could also reasonably defend that the South had no such right. Further, what follows from the decision on whether the South was right or wrong is also highly variable and complex. I realize that though each of us wants independence for his state, his county, his township, his family, and himself, none of us has much “independence,” all in all. We are all heavily restricted in many, many ways by our federal government, by our state governments, by our counties, townships, cities, even our families and cultures and societies. Life is so complicated that we seem wholly unable to determine how the specific historical question of the South’s right to independence might apply in each segment of the life of each American, of each person who lives anywhere or will come to live.

The recent defenders of the South’s right to independence have been irritated by the hypocritical application of moral and political principles that have expressed by many American thinkers and leaders of the "North," such as the people of New Hampshire at its founding. The men who established NH’s constitution 200 years ago declared that they have the right to “establish a new government” on their own volition: “... whenever the ends of government are perverted, or public redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to, reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” According to the people of New Hampshire in 1792, it seems, not resisting arbitrary power is absurd. That which was true in 1792, defenders of the Confederacy claim, was equally true in 1861 -- and remains true today (what are they proposing?). It is absurd, they reason, to think that a free people would not resist arbitrary power. This seems a good argument and perfectly in tune with American moral, cultural, and political principles. But the current leaders of and thinkers in the State of New Hampshire might argue, quite easily and reasonably, that the men of the NH past didn’t quite mean what the defenders of the South take them to mean by those 200-year-old words. In principle and in the specific application of principle, they would surely argue, the defenders of the South have got it wrong. It usually depends on what one means by the adjective “arbitrary.” For one mans “arbitrary” is another’s “sensible.” One man’s tyranny is another’s justice. One man’s oppression is another’s necessary social order.

The idea of the South’s being right is an oddball belief. Those who hold it are fighting for credibility, but their views appear to be mostly dismissed or denigrated, probably because of fears of what might follow from the principle that the South had the right to secede. What the implications of the issue are -- how much independence the states of the U.S.A. have a right to -- is beyond the scope of the issue, no matter how one might decide the historical issue. The whole issue is moot as well. For regardless of how one views the justice of Southern secession, we all still live with this federal behemoth that controls so much of our lives. Is someone proposing that some state or set of states start a new civil war against federal “tyranny”? I haven’t heard that one yet. Though that oddball belief, too, is probably out there.

The justice of the South’s secession will be on my mind for a long time to come, probably to the end of my life. Perhaps I will offer another excogitation on the matter some time. Meanwhile, the legality, justice, and morality of national independence will be playing a significant role in world politics.