Secession, grasped in its political sense, is typically defined as a formal withdrawal of one body, qua political state or qua a nascent political state, from another political state of which it is a member. The reason for withdrawal is customarily that what bound the lesser body to the larger political state is no longer binding or that the relationship has become parasitic or toxic. The paradigmatic illustration is the secession of 11 Southern states from the US confederation after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Was Thomas Jefferson a secessionist?
Scholars typically answer affirmatively and they cite both Jefferson’s embrace of nullificationism in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions—”whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party”—as a response to John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts and his fiery language, years earlier, both in his Summary View of the Rights of British America and in the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is important to add that Jefferson only infrequently uses “secede” or “secession” or other variants in his corpus though his usage is consistent with the political definition with which I have begun this essay.
In Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), he asserts that all men have a right of expatriation: viz., “a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.” He asserts also “from the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.” What applies morally to individuals applies to societies. In Opinion on French Treaties (1793), Jefferson says, “The Moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society”—hence, an early commitment to secession, if only by implication. Moreover, human nature itself “revolts against a state so situated as that it may not in any emergency provide against dangers which perhaps threaten immediate ruin.”
Two years later in his Declaration of Independence, Jefferson includes, among truths self-evident, the “inalienable rights” of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When a government intrudes a “long train of abuses & usurpations,” over time and aiming toward despotism, on a member state, that member state has not merely a right, but a duty, “to throw off such government” and to institute another adjudged better suited to the happiness of its member citizens.
What those two documents show is a firm commitment to political secession. While the Declaration deems it justified to expiscate reasons why one government as a member state of another leaves that other, the Summary View merely implies the right of political secession, given consent of its member citizens, without any reason needed to be given.
Although Jefferson was always committed, at least theoretically, to the rights to revolt and secede, the concern of disunion, of undoing all that the American Revolutionists had fought valiantly to gain, was always pressing, and to him anathema. Jefferson wrote in the first draft of a letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797),
I would rather even join my brethren in European wars if that alone can save us from disunion among ourselves.
Why should the unity of the fledgling nation be so crucial to Jefferson? Why should the vision of secession be such an irksome fear?
Jefferson viewed his republicanism—which entailed bottom-up governing, of the people and for themselves, through dividing and again dividing (states into counties, and counties into wards)—as an experiment to be confirmed or disconfirmed via praxis. The benefit of a large nation is that it will be politically unharmed by parochial tumults. The drawback of a large nation is that it will be impotent concerning parochial interests, best addressed by parochial governmental entities: states, counties, wards. Jefferson writes to Archibald Stuart (25 Jan. 1786):
Our present federal limits are not too large for good government, nor will the increase of votes in Congress produce any ill effect. On the contrary it will drown the little divisions at present existing there. Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled.
The key for Jefferson is that the federal government is not to be considered an overarching, politically superior entity to the states, but merely as an agency working for and answerable to the confederated states. An ever-enlarging nation, considered essentially as a confederation of states, can thrive so long as newly formed states are treated as equal members and the federal government assumes no powers not enumerated in the Constitution.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Jefferson argues on behalf of the purchase of the Louisiana territories. In the third of three main arguments, he asks rhetorically whether it is best for a republic to expand into the whole of the land into which it is situated so its citizens will be bounded on all sides by “[one’s] own brethren and children,” instead of potentially hostile non-republicans. In Europe, this problem was managed by the relative balance of military power. Jefferson, like Immanuel Kant in “Perpetual Peace” thought that any such balance, dictated by military might, was the reason for Europe’s perpetual warring, not a prompt for peaceful coexistence. As Kant noted, the prospect of an enduring peace “brought about by a so-called balance of power in Europe is a mere figment of imagination, like Swift’s house, whose architect built it so perfectly in accord with all the laws of equilibrium that as soon as a sparrow lit on it, it fell in.” Thus, consistent with Kant, Jefferson hoped the United States could offer something better than Swift’s house.
Jefferson, a resolute optimist, envisaged a nation, mostly agrarian, spread across the continent, and separated neatly into square, self-sufficient states according to a Cartesian, two-dimensional grid. Westerly expansion was a way to test his hypothesis that republican government thrives in a large territory. He knew that other nations had their eyes on the lands to the west of the 13 newformed states. To George Rogers Clark (4 Dec. 1783), Jefferson expresses concern about British interest in land west of the Mississippi.
I find they have subscribed a very large sum of money in England for exploring the country from the Missisipi to California. They pretend it is only to promote knolege. I am afraid they have thoughts of colonising into that quarter.
To John Jay (14 Aug. 1785), Jefferson writes concerning French intentions to colonize the western parts of North America,
If they would desire a colony on the Western side of America, I should not be quite satisfied that they would refuse one which should offer itself on the eastern side.
In sum, though Jefferson was theoretically committed to secessionism for any political entity (e.g., one state from the confederation), even if the thought of that occurring he found revolting. One colossal concern was that if the confederation of states did not expand into the western territories of North America, non- or quasi-republican nations, like Britain or France, might annex those lands and present a threat to the American republican experiment. The scenario, thus, in North America would be similar to that in Europe. The nascent US would be continually involved in the broils of Europe.
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