 Think Tech Away, Civil Engagement Lives Here. Welcome back to Think Tech. This is History Lens with our history professor of HPU, John David Ann. Welcome to your show, John. Thanks, Jay. I didn't know it was my show. It is your show, John. OK, I'm taking ownership. You're the one. You're the one. And history is so important. If we don't study history, we wind up reliving it. It's an unpleasant to do that, usually. And so this is very important for us to understand the world around us and how the world is evolving, to understand how it evolved to the point where we got where we are. And this is very important to Hawaii, too, because Hawaii is on the same kind of continuum. We need to know what happened before. So today, we're going to talk about C-session, S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N, as opposed to any other spelling you might be thinking about. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. What's that? What is it? Well, C-session, of course, we talked about this before the show, is when one unit breaks away from the rest of them. And of course, C-session has a very long and troubled history in our country, especially during the American Civil War. But even during the art, as we were talking about, even during the Articles of Confederation, there was some notion that various states were going to secede from it because it was so ineffective. So C-session has this tremendous resonance. And it's not just in the past. This is the interesting thing about C-session. And when I started doing research on this, I realized that we're living with the past of C-session, which definitely influences today. But we're also living with the present-day C-sessionists. So if we can pull up the list of those C-sessions, this is actually a list on the internet of all of the C-sessionist organizations in the country. And if we can scroll down that list, there's California, there's Hawaii, there's the Confederate States of America, Lakota, New England, New Hampshire, Northwest Republic, and Texas. There's a few more underneath that, but we didn't have room on the screen for so many. These organizations seek to have that jurisdiction withdrawn from the United States of America. That's correct. They want to become, what do they want to become? They want independent little units, independent countries. Dutchies, Dutchies. Yes, joined somewhere else, maybe. But they definitely, the established purpose of these organizations is to secede from the United States of America. What comes to mind is studying European history for a moment in the 19th century. We had the assimilation, I'm not sure that's the right word, of Germany, lots of little duchies all together now, and the same thing in Italy. That's true. Italy came together. Great leaders were doing this, and there wasn't that much bloodshed. Everybody seemed to agree to be a good idea to come together now. Yes, true in those cases. Well, there was a civil war in Italy, but Germany was relatively peaceful in its kind of new, the formation of this new nation. But so one of the issues is that, and this is a good example of this, language and culture are kind of buffers against these kind of nationalistic tendencies of both the Italians and the Germans in the 19th century. So even today in Germany, you go to the various regions of Germany. There are nine different dialects in Germany of the language, same as true in Italy. And so we have the situation where, even today, there are secessionist movements, and they're based upon the, it's complicated, but the history of the nation state is that these smaller units got together. They agreed to come together, but they never fully or wholly fused together. And so we have a federal system in this country, and the federal system that the states have certain powers, and the federal government has other powers. And so what's interesting is that is the number of secessionist organizations in the United States today. And I really think this is a product of the federal system, in which you have some power at the state level, and there's some idea that if you don't like what the federal government is doing, then let's succeed, let's just dump the whole thing, get out of it. Well, is there a kind of innate and co-ate right to do that in history? That if you don't like what the larger unit is doing, you reserve the right to leave it, is that something that is ingrained in the notion of sovereignty? Right, so this is a very important question, and it's a question, we actually have to go back into history to look at this question, because upon this question rests the union itself, the United States itself. Yes. If secession is legal, and sovereignty is dependent upon the will of a particular group here, a particular group there, then yes, indeed, then these, you know, these small little units could succeed from the United States, but it seems as though on the basis of history and kind of legal interpretation and secession, at least in the United States, is not legal. So, but we need to go back in time to look at it. So in 1861, when they declared separate Confederate States of America, the union, the North, could have said, okay, okay, you know, have a right to do that, go have a nice day, and we'll leave you alone, we'll trade, we'll have favored nation trading status with you, and we'll allow you to come and get residence, but they didn't do that. Why didn't they do that? And it was bloodshed, huge numbers of people were killed, but was it a good idea? Why don't you just let them go? Right, right, so in order to answer that question, we have to go back even further. So let's go back to the revolutionary period, and in the early national period, after the American Revolution, then you have the 13 states, right, and they're held together by this thing called the Articles of a Confederation. And this form of government, it's a very weak ineffectual form of government, and what happens is a lot of the states become very enchanted with it, because it's disorganized, there's no way of the states, the states are holding all this debt from the American Revolution, and there's no way for them to get rid of their debt. So it's a mess, actually, and a few of them actually threaten to secede. And in private conversations, they're quite serious about this, so one reason you actually have a constitutional convention in 1787 is because the Articles of a Confederation and the states are actually falling apart. So if you didn't have that constitutional convention, the United States might look very different today. There might be three or four different countries on the North American continent where the United States is today, yes. So that's the first thing, is that secessionism seems to have been built into the very marrow of this country. Now, because this is a very important issue, then during the constitutional writing process, you know, 1787 to 1791, and the passing of the constitution by the various states, the states had to approve the new constitution, then what happens is, there are states who are unhappy with various parts of it and say, well, we should have more power, states should have more power, not enough and all of this. So one of the amendments to the constitution, the 10th amendment says, and this is why it's in there, is because you had states who wanted more power, it says that the power is not delegated to the federal government will be given to the states, right, that's a paraphrase, but so you have this in the constitution that there's actually these divisions of power. So that's the next thing to remember about secessionism, the way to get out of secessionism, the United States established the 10th amendment, which actually gave some forms of sovereignty to the states. Now, did that mean that secession was still legal for those states or other states, right, because now they have these forms of sovereignty given to them in the American constitution? Well, this is actually tested pretty quickly in the 1790s, when John Adams is the president, Adams and the federalists are very interested in their accumulating more power to the central government. The French Revolution is going on, we're being pitted between the French and the British, and Adams believes that there are real evil forces in the country, so he has, in the Congress past, the Alien and Sedition Acts, these are acts which make it against the law to criticize the government. Very serious. I mean, it's clearly unconstitutional in today's context. This is before the First Amendment, before the current constitution. No, this was after. After. This was after. How could they do the Alien and Sedition out of making it illegal to criticize the government in the face of the First Amendment? Right, but there was no judicial review at that point, and it hadn't been reviewed. And when it is reviewed, eventually Congress overturns the law, actually. But so when that happens, you have the so-called Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. And this is when secessionism becomes kind of at least a theoretical issue again. Jefferson writes the Kentucky resolutions, and Jefferson thinks, you know what, I really do not like this guy, Adams, and I don't like these, the Aliens and Sedition Acts are absolutely abominable to me, and so therefore, I'm arguing that we should, the state should be able to nullify that law. The states should be able to nullify that law at the state level, not at the federal level. And in addition, if they don't have the chance to do this, then they should be able to fight and shed blood and proclaim more revolution. It was really Jefferson's, he's proposing this very radical approach. It's not one big secession, it's a lot of little secessions on separate issues. Yeah, it could be that under Jefferson's proposal to the Kentucky legislature. How different is that from the lawsuit that Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently filed against California on Sanctuary? Yeah, there's really no difference there. I mean, California is asserting a state's right to not follow a law if it's unjust. Jefferson was saying, hell yes, you can fight this and you can go to war to fight this. Scary stuff. Scary, that still lives. What's also true is that the Kentucky legislature did not like the extremism of Jefferson's solution. So they took some of that language actually out of it before they passed it. Now you have the Virginia resolutions that were passed by the Virginia legislature written by James Madison. Madison's a more moderate guy. And so he was proposing that if you have a law that is unjust, that you think is unconstitutional or unjust, then you should petition the government. You don't need to start a revolution. You should actually petition the government to stop it. Say, you know, you can hold protests outside the capital. You can sign petitions and send them to the national capital. So Madison had a much more moderate approach on this. It's not practical, though. Petitions are not in the Constitution. They have no legal effect. Well, okay. No, that's true. That's true. There's a political effect there. All those kids out there on the Second Amendment on weapons and all this, they can stand in the street all day and file all the petitions they want. Government has no obligation, yeah. Well, I mean, there's certainly some truth in it. But the interesting thing is that Madison was also one of the authors of the Federalist papers. Now if we could bring up the picture of the... This is actually an advertisement for the Federalist papers at the time that the Constitution was being negotiated and at the time when the states were passing this new Constitution, then Madison and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were very concerned that the states would reject this Constitution. All their work would go down the drain. So they created the Federalist papers to make arguments about why this was a good Constitution. Madison takes in Federalist paper number 39. He takes on the issue of state versus federal rights. And Madison argues that actually what we have is a federal system where the states have certain powers, the federal government has certain powers. And as long as these powers are well understood, then this is a better union than a system where the federal government has all the power or as in the articles of Confederacy, the states have all the power but they can't really do anything in unison. So James Madison actually has a very big impact upon how we interpret the legality of secessionism. Madison would say, no, no, you can petition but we have a federal system that's already in place and secessionism is off the table. It's illegal. This is so interesting in our time. In our time with the rise of presidents for life and dictators in so many countries where there were no dictators a few years ago, it makes my head hurt actually, John. When my head hurts, I'd like to take a short break. We're gonna take one minute break, we'll be back with John David and talking about secessionism, we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of A Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for A Likeable Science where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and the light of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope to join me for A Likeable Science. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's research in Munna and at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance, not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's research in Munna and see you then. History lands with Professor John David Ann of HPU talking about history and we really need to understand it, especially in our time, there are so many cross-references to current events and in the period between the negotiation of the Constitution in lieu of the Articles of Confederation back in the 18th century until the Civil War, we really hadn't worked it out and some people say, we haven't worked it out yet. That's an argument that can be made, although I honestly think we have worked out most of it. I think the Civil War worked out most of it and the military forces on the ground decided this issue in a way that the legal experts of the time couldn't decide it. But anyway, so at the time of the Civil War, then this question of secession is still there. The reason why it's there, well we kind of went some way towards solving this issue in the nullification crisis of 1828 and this is when of course the legislature of South Carolina rejects the national tariff and they are threatening to secede, Jackson sends, he's going to send in troops, they back down. Jackson and President Andrew Jackson wins this fight and kind of asserts the priority of the national government over the state governments. But you still have live issues about secessionism at the time of the Civil War. So the first thing that happens is that in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected president. So if we can bring that up, this is interesting because, so what you see in this slide is that there were a lot of candidates. There were four candidates, two in the North, two in the South and Neri Shell, the two meet actually. Lincoln was not on the ballot in the South and these Southern candidates were not on the ballot in the North. Oh, it's a telltale sign. So it was a telltale sign actually that the possibility of secession was arising. Really, the nation was beginning to kind of fall apart. So Lincoln is elected president and if we could bring up the slide, the Bell Boyd slide. Well, this is a great slide. This is actually the South Carolina secessionist convention celebrating after they voted to secede from the union. They voted in December 1860 to secede from the union. And then we have another slide which is of, yeah, this is Bell Boyd who is a, she's a Southern Bell. She's a Southern, the mistress of a plantation owner. She's also, she's a spy in the Civil War. She stays in Washington DC but she actually moves back and forth and then is able to get information from DC and hand it back to the government in Richmond. But she makes it very clear that the reason for secession was Abraham Lincoln's election. And everyone knew that if he was elected, there would be secession. This was the threat. And after he was elected, then South Carolina follows through on this threat. They move, South Carolina moves very quickly to secession. Was it very nearly unanimous? In other words, when you took a vote in those days, you're finding like 90%, 95% or was it more like if you're 60%? Right, right. South Carolina, it was unanimous. Really? Yes. It was a unanimous vote for secession. Shows you how the pressures had been building up. Exactly. And so when you look at the various arguments that were being made, South Carolina secedes and their argument is that the union is actually a voluntary compact of states. Right? Shades of the Confederate states. Yes. The confederation. The, the, the, the articles of confederation earlier. Right. It's a voluntary compact of states and that means if a particular state is unhappy about the situation, they can actually leave. It's interesting that the Confederate states of America use the same term as the articles of confederation. That they were going after the same concept, voluntary departure. Yeah. So, and, and they were also interested in, in a state centered nation. Like the articles of confederation, they were interested in a situation where the states had a lot of power and the federal, the, the, the national government in Richmond was quite weak. So I think that's part of why they named themselves that. But so you look at what, how the North and Lincoln, who was now elected, but hasn't actually taken office yet, how does he respond to South Carolina's secession and then boom, boom, boom. You have the first eight states going into secession by February 1861. Well, Lincoln says, look, these, these secessions are null and void. They mean nothing at the moment. And his interpretation was based upon the idea of the union. When he looks at the constitution of the United States, what he sees is a union that's inviolable. And it's a pace, it's based on, so you, when you look at the preamble of the American constitution, the preamble says we the people, right? In order to form a more perfect union. So it's not about any particular state. It's actually about all of the people of the country getting together to agree to a union. You know, that one thought galvanized the whole thing and it had a huge effect on where we were and are. Yeah. Another president, another human being might have taken a different view of that language because it's not so explicit. Who does that aim? They wanna go, they can go. Yeah. I mean, there were many Northerners who actually said this. William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist said, good riddance, we're done with them. They're slaveholders. We don't want to have anything to do with them. So he wanted to let them go. Lincoln, of course, was, Lincoln felt bound by the constitution. Once he's elected, then he is the president. And of course, once he goes into office, then he has, he puts his hand on the Bible and says, you know, I swear that I'm gonna uphold the constitution. I mean it, I mean it, I mean it. That's right. So he really didn't have a, he didn't feel that he had any wiggle room. What's interesting is that his advisors who didn't have the same level of kind of, oh, I have to uphold the constitution, did try to take advantage of wiggle room. So there's this period between February and April, 1861, pardon me. And in that time period, people are trying to solve this crisis. The first attempt to solve the crisis is called the Crittenden Compromise. It's the brainchild of Charles Crittenden who's a congressman from Missouri. And Crittenden argues, you know what we should do is we should go back to the Missouri Compromise line and just draw it across the rest of the country and then above the line, free, below the line, slavery, and let's live with that. And the interesting, the other interesting thing about it is that it was quite popular, this idea, because most Americans were quite nervous about secession, saw the country falling apart, maybe war, and thought, oh, well, this is an escape valve, let's jump on this. But Republicans in Congress refuse to consider it. Republicans in Congress said, look, we will not touch slavery where it exists, but we will not allow for slavery in the West, for the expansion of slavery into the Western part of the country, which the Crittenden Compromise would have done. So the Republicans stand pretty strong against this. Now, the other thing that happens is that Lincoln's advisors start kind of, well, how can we solve this situation? So let's take William Seward. Seward is a very powerful politician. He wanted to be president himself. And he had aspirations. He believed Lincoln was kind of, he was a country lawyer, not very smart, somebody who could be managed by none other than Seward himself. And so Seward goes to Lincoln and says, you know what, I can solve this for you, but what I need to do is I need to go talk with some peace commissioners in the South and then I've got some proposals here I want you to approve. And then one of the proposals was actually to start a war against Europe. Seriously. Distraction. Yeah. Yeah. The tried and true kind of wag the dog strategy for saving a nation or a presidency or whatever. Start a war, start a foreign war, unify the people, right? So Seward gets in touch with these peace commissioners and says he gives indication to them that he is willing to give up federal installations in the South, that the compromise would be that the Confederacy will get these federal installations, the Union's not gonna defend the federal installations because under the terms of the Constitution, the federal installations are to be defended at all costs because this is a part of the Union. The federal installations still belong to the Union. If you consider the Confederacy to be not a legitimate of secession, but rather an insurrection, then you're defending federal installations against an insurrection, right? So Seward goes off and does and then he comes back to Lincoln and says, here, I can solve this for you. And Lincoln says, fine, you do whatever you want as long as you get the approval of Jefferson Davis. Lincoln knew that Jefferson Davis would never approve of the proposals that Seward had made. And so Seward had to withdraw his proposals. He was very embarrassed by this. So there were those, I mean, Seward was more willing to compromise and recognize secessionism. If you recognize that the federal installations are gonna belong to the new nation, then essentially you've recognized the new nation. Yes. Lincoln holds the line and says there is no new nation. There's an insurrection in the southern part of the United States. And eventually, of course, this issue of federal installations becomes terribly important. Lincoln decides you have a federal installation actually right off the coast of South Carolina, it's called Fort Sumter. Charleston, right off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. So Fort Sumter is sitting there and the Confederacy has moved big guns into pointing right at Fort Sumter. The problem is Fort Sumter's running out of supplies. And so Lincoln has to decide, are you gonna resupply this facility? Are you gonna send in more troops to defend it? Send in more weapons? What are you gonna do? So Lincoln decides, you know what? I'm gonna resupply, but not rearm it. It's a trying middle position that allows Lincoln to send in new supplies, not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Confederacy, but not start a shooting war, right? He's just resupplying, he's not sending in weapons. So Lincoln sends in the supplies and before the supplies ever reach Fort Sumter, the Confederacy sees that he's resupplying, they begin to fire on Fort Sumter. They started it. They started it, and it's the beginning of the Civil War. Wow, you know, this makes me have all the more regard. I hold Lincoln in awe anyway, but it's not just that he made a few pronouncements and did the Gettysburg address. He had to work day by day to keep the cabinet in place and to keep the Congress in place. It wasn't easy in many ways. He was alone working against so many people who wanted to go the other way. He was, he put rivals into his cabinet and then he had to work with them. And a guy like Seward, he eventually got Seward to work very well for him as Secretary of State. But yeah, so that's how the war actually starts. And importantly, it starts because the Confederacy fires the first shot that Lincoln can say, look, we have been attacked by this insurrection. Therefore, as Commander-in-Chief, I'm calling for a 90-day volunteer Union Army to fight this insurrection. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's like he knew how the chess pieces were gonna be played. I can hardly wait for our next installation. This is one of the most interesting stories that you tell us so well, John. Thank you. John, David, and HPU talking about the Civil War and secessionism and bringing it current. So many things have happened we need to know. Thank you so much, John. You bet, Jay. Aloha.