 We're very pleased to have Brian McClanahan with us. Brian has a PhD from the University of South Carolina. At least one of his books is for sale outside. I'm sure he'd be happy to sign it to you. But I would say that he's right up there with Tom Woods in terms of someone who really understands the Constitution with all of its good and bad, and really understands our founding period, and really understands the nonsense that surrounds that founding period and that still permeates our society today. So Brian, thanks so much for being with us today. So I'm going to start today actually applying this to Texas, or in Texas. So I'm going to start with a letter that everyone in Texas should know. If you don't know it, you should leave. To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world. Fellow citizens and compatriots, I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans understand Tana. I have sustained a continued bombardment in cannon a for 24 hours and I'm not lost to man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion. Otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I've answered that demand with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then I call on you in the name of liberty, a patriotism and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is retrieving and receiving reinforcements daily, and we will no doubt increase to three or 4,000 in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country. I'm sure everybody knows what the last line is. Anyone want to mention what it is? Victory or death. Alabamian William Barrett Travis. I had to throw that in there since I'm living in Alabama. Now, I begin with this letter not because of the situation and the violence at the Alamo, but because there's two parts of the letter that speak to this topic today. First, to all Americans in the world. He's not talking just to Texas. He's talking speaking to all Americans in the world, and what was the issue? Independence, the American tradition, and thus it should be supported by Americans everywhere, whether you're in Texas or somewhere else in the United States at the time. Americans have a distinctive history. There are, of course, our examples of secession and classical history, mainly Greece in relation to the Persian and Athenian empires, and again in the 16th century in regard to religion, the secession of the Protestant churches from the Catholic church. But in the modern age, America really has established the method and set the example for others to follow. Remember Jefferson's call on the Declaration of Independence? He said, we have a right and a duty as a free people to be able to alter or abolish our system of government, and this was based on traditional English liberties. But no one really had tried to do it until that point, until the American cause for independence in 1775. This is often incorrectly labeled an act of revolution or rebellion, but Jefferson himself called it an act of secession later in his life, and he was correct. For in reality, the American war for independence was a constitutional crisis in relation to the powers of the British central government. This was to prevent a revolution rather than have a revolution. The revolution was coming from the British center. They were trying to alter the constitution. Americans had exercised almost exclusive jurisdiction over the local affairs since the founding of the first permanent colony in 1607. So when the central authority parliament clamped down on the colonies after the French and Indian War, colonial leaders rejected parliamentary overreach and instead declared their independence and as in seceded from the British constitution to preserve their liberty and right to self-determination and most importantly, self-government. So that's the first point. Americans everywhere should embrace this. Second, there's Travis's request in the name of liberty of patriotism and everything dear to the American character. What does that mean? Certainly, Texas believe it had a legal right to declare its independence in 1836. It was a ceding from the Mexican empire. Someone called this an act of revolution again but the Texans asserted that it was the government in Mexico City that had caused a revolution. And I'll quote you from the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people from whom its legitimate powers are derived and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inescible and inalienable rights becomes an instrument in the hands of the evil rulers for their oppression. When the federal Republican constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed without their consent from a restricted federated republic composed of sovereign states to a consolidated central military despotism in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the ever ready minions of power and the usual instruments of tyrants, it thus became the right of their people to alter or to abolish that government and institute a new government. So the American character Travis refers to is this opposition to these transgressions and the right is self-determination. We would call that liberty. Texas then gained its independence in 1836, claiming it had a right to do so because of the American origin of its inhabitants. It was an independent political entity for nine years. It agreed to enter the union in 1845 on equal footing with the other states. At least that had been the American tradition. But the people of Texas never relinquished their sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be divided or surrendered. Either have it or you don't. Sovereignty can be delegated, but a delegation assumes the ability to rescind that power. And I often use an analogy with my students. Say I gave them the ability to grade their own tests and they're all gonna come back A's. So then I could override those grades because I have the power to do so. I delegated that authority. John C. Calhoun said the divided sovereignty was like half a triangle or half a square. They don't exist. Half sovereignty is the same. So when Texas acceded to the union and thus by logical deduction, they could secede from the union by popular will. And they did so in 1861, which brings me to another important part of Texas history, the famous or infamous case, Supreme Court decision of Texas v. White in 1869. This case is almost universally used as an argument against the legality of secession. And in fact, this was brought up several years ago, I was at another conference in Florida. And somebody stood up at the Q&A and said, well, Dr. McClanahan, you say all these things, but you know, the Supreme Court decided in 1869 that secession was illegal. And my response was, so what? I wasn't trying to be flippin'. But of course the Supreme Court was gonna argue against secession. They're gonna say it's unconstitutional. Why wouldn't they? This is 1869, the United States had just waged a war for four years to prevent it. So to do otherwise, we'll be saying, whoops. Sorry, South, you were right, you lost, but you were right to begin with. They're not gonna do that. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time, Salman P. Chase, who was a Lincoln appointee, said in the decision, the union between Texas and the other states was as complete, as perpetual, as indissoluble as the union between the original states. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation except through revolution or through consent of the states. So he bases reasoning on the one people nationalist argument made famous by Joseph Story and his commentaries on the Constitution, but advanced by every nationalist from 1787 forward. There's a great political theorist named Albert Taylor Bledsoe who humorously called this the great political discovery of Abraham Lincoln. He just was searching and he discovered this out of thin air. So is secession legal? I've argued extensively that it is. There are several ways to approach the argument and to refute the Hamilton-Marshall story Lincoln nationalists lie that secession is illegal in treason. Secession as accomplished by the southern states in 1816, 61 and as discussed over and over again in the north, in fact first in the north is an independent act by the people of the states and accomplished in the same fashion as the several conventions that occurred throughout early American history. The United States would never be a party to a lawsuit on the issue because secession, both the facto and du jour is an act of self-determination. And once the states have seceded from the union the Constitution is no longer enforced in regard to the seceded political body. The same rule applies to article one, section 10, argument against secession. Article one, section 10 says the states can't form confederations. Well, the Constitution is longer in force. The states have separated and resumed their independent status and the Supreme Court would not have jurisdiction and therefore could not determine the legality of the move. The union then of course could declare war or could attempt to force the seceded states to remain but even victorious this has not solved the philosophical issue it never has. War and violence do not and cannot crush the natural right of self-determination. They can muddle the picture and force the vanquished into submission so long as the boot is firmly planted on their collective throats but a bloody nose and a prostrate people settles nothing. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut said in 1788 that he feared a coercion of arms in relation to a delinquent state. He said this, this Constitution does not attempt to coerce sovereign bodies, states in their political capacity. No coercion is applicable to such bodies but that of armed force. If we should attempt to execute the laws of the union by sending an armed force against a delinquent state it would involve the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty in the same calamity. So Ellsworth recognized as the majority of the founding generation that force did not destroy sovereignty. It created artificial supremacy but sovereignty, the basic tenant of the founding could not be surrendered in such a manner. And of course what we must also emphasize is that an act of war also destroys Republican government. Maryland said as much in 1861. They formed a committee and issued a report about the crisis of 1861. And this is what the report said. Subjugated provinces could not be sister states and a federal government, professedly Republican, maintaining the authority by armies could not be other than the worst and most unprincipled and uncontrollable of despotisms. The South is a trench itself upon the principle of self-government is offered to negotiate peaceably and honorably upon all matters of common property and divided interests claiming only that three millions of people had a right to throw off a government by which they no longer desired to be ruled and to live under government of their own choosing. Unless the American revolution was a crime, the declaration of penance is falsehood and every patriot and hero of 1776 a traitor, the South was right and the North was wrong upon that issue. And the Texas v. White decision, Justice Chase implicitly recognized that the union was indissoluble contract between the American people and federal government or in this case, the people of Texas and the federal government. All contracts are intended to be perpetual. But if this was the case, how could nine states ratify a new constitution while four states remain part of another union in clear violation of the language of the Articles of Confederation? Changes to the articles required the consent of all 13 states, not nine, and thus the constitution can be viewed in part as an act of secession. Moreover, James Madison argued that the union was a different type of contract. He said, I quote, we are not to consider the federal union as analogous to the social compact of individuals. For if it were, a majority would have the right to bind the rest and even to form a new constitution for the whole. The constitution was framed by the unanimous consent of the state's present in the convention assembled in Philadelphia, but had no teeth until the states and convention ratified it. Even at that point, Madison suggested the states could not bind the rest to accepting the document or remaining in the union. The constitution does not have a coercive principle, as Ellsworth called it. An indissoluble union would suggest that it does and it doesn't. Waging war against them, the states, which is from the constitution is an act of treason as, so a state can be protected by the central government on the application of the legislature of the executive in case of invasion, but Lincoln had neither. Lincoln violated both the constitutional safeguards against coercion by the central government in 1861. Of course, only if the states remained in the union as he insisted they did. So if he didn't have that authority, then war would have been required from Congress, which something Lincoln did not have either. He didn't have a declaration of war. And if he did have a declaration of war, then Congress would have to recognize the Confederate states as a legitimate government. Either way, Lincoln violated the constitution, thus rendering the bloody nose argument again against the session void. Now this one people argument against the session was dissected by John Taylor of Carolina, a great political philosopher from Virginia in his new views on the constitution of the United States. Taylor contended that continuity between the articles of confederation and the constitution reinforced the sovereignty of the states. This is an interesting argument. So because the articles of confederation was there and we had this constitution, it's just a more perfect union, a union of what, states. And he said this, this is a wonderful quote. There are many states in America, but no state of America, nor any people of an American state. A constitution for America or Americans would there have been similar to a constitution for utopia or utopians. This is in sharp contrast to Chase. He argued that continuity maintained perpetual union. Taylor said that this construction bestows the same meaning upon the same words as it are three constituent or elemental instruments and exhibits the reason why the whole language of the constitution is a finance to the idea of a league between sovereign states and hostile to that of a consolidated nation. The text of the constitution itself clearly states it is an agreement or a compact between the states so ratifying the saying, not the people in the federal government. That idea is a fabricated distortion of the constitution and pure fiction. So a few parting words on the issue of secession as the American tradition. That is after all the title of my talk. Secession and liberty are synonymous. Secession is the greatest act of liberty. It is the right of self-determination and self-government. And I think we should always realize that and put it in those terms. It is not easy. Not everyone wants this type of liberty. For most of human history, it's been violently opposed by the central authority. But there is hope. In 1991, several states seceded from the Soviet Union and no tanks were sent in. So I think as young people look at this, they're starting to say, wow, the emperor has no clothes in Washington, DC. They're starting to realize this. And so therefore people are waking up to the idea of peaceful secession. But there's also individual acts of secession as Jeff just related to. And they're happening every day in America from homeschooling to community farming. It is a natural inclination for independent people to have control over their own lives. This type of secession is important for political reasons though. The founding generation were independent people as were Texans in 1836. Independent thinkers who led independent lives are naturally drawn to political independence. They can't be bought or controlled. But we must not follow Thoreau's type of secession, simple removal from society. But John Randolph of Roanoke's insistence on saying no from a position of strength. Now why could he do this? Because he could simply go back to his farm. We must lead independent lives but remain politically involved with the sole intent of saying no. And of course the best example will be the last speaker today, Dr. No. We can say this in the general government that would be helpful, but we have to say it from state and local communities because that is the hedge against tyranny. If enough Americans make this choice, the choice to abide by Travis's call for all Americans in the world to action in the name of liberty, patriotism and everything dear to the American character, we can and will achieve peaceful success. Secession is the American tradition and libertarians should and must help lead the way. Thank you very much.