In Defense of James Buchanan

James Buchanan's December 1860 State of the Union speech is notable for his opinion that, on the one hand, secession from the Union (which was imminent in many states) was unconstitutional, and on the other hand, the federal government had no constitutional authority to coerce seceded states back into the Union. William Seward mocked this by summing it up as saying that no state has the right to secede, unless it wants to. And, of course, it's pretty hard to defend James Buchanan's conduct of the early secession crisis. But I think it's worth pointing out that there's a strong argument that Buchanan's model of secession is a valid one, philosophically speaking. After all, the United States, and particularly liberals within the United States, often do support secessionist movements around the world. We recently masterminded the brokering of the secession of South Sudan.

The crucial point here is that, pre-secession, a given state is still bound by the Constitution. And the Constitution, of course, does not permit secession! But if a state declares its independence from that Constitution, does it really care any more what its rights would have been under that Constitution? Nope. At this point that state views itself as independent, and as having its relations with its former sovereign governed only by the laws of international relations. And if that new state is genuinely independent, then does its former sovereign have the right to coerce it back into the fold? Of course not! That's just ordinary imperialist conquest, which we generally frown upon. So no constitutional right to secede, but once you've seceded you don't care about constitutional rights anymore and there's no constitutional authority for your former sovereign to coerce you back into the fold. That's exactly what Buchanan was saying, and it's perfectly sensible as a general rule.

So why don't we think, in retrospect, that Buchanan was right? I think it's mainly because the Confederacy was wrong on the merits, i.e. they were seceding to protect a singularly wicked institution, slavery. But this is not a question of the law, of the constitutional order. It's a question of a higher moral law. South Sudan's secession was justified, though I'm sure the Sudanese Constitution didn't permit it, because they were being oppressed and planned to create a better state. So no, of course the federal Constitution did not permit secession. This does not settle the question of whether that secession was justified, though, or whether a Northern war to bring them back would be justified. Only the fact that the Confederacy existed for the sake of moral wrongness can settle that issue.

And, of course, Buchanan was wrong on that score.




This is basically part of the larger problem in modern democratic political theory about the lack of any way to answer questions about how to draw boundary-lines, how to answer the question of who ought to live under which state's rule. The pre-democratic regime had an easy answer: whoever can successfully conquer and defend the territory you live in ought to be your ruler. We won't really accept that anymore, but neither have we come up with a good alternative. So, should the eleven Confederate states have been their own nation or continued under the federal Union? There's no categorical way to answer that question, except by noting how evil the Confederacy's raison d'etre was.