Are (American) Secessionists Necessarily Revolutionaries?

Sanford Levinson

I begin with a difference of opinion and nomenclature with my very close friend and pervasive intellectual influence, Mark Graber. We were teaching a course together by Zoom during the spring semester of 2021 at the University of Texas Law School on constitutional issues related to the great events of 1860–18__?, i.e., Secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction. The question I want to address is how exactly we describe secession in terms of the overall topic of this year’s schmooze: constitutional revolutions. Our answer may also have implications for exactly how we respond to statues of Robert E. Lee or even, perhaps, exactly how we respond to the image of the Confederate Battle Flag being brought into the United States Capitol. To put it mildly, the topic could easily support a full-fledged book; instead, my contribution here will be little more than a slightly long op-ed, designed far more to raise the issue than to come close to providing a fully-argued resolution.

Before turning to the events of 1860–61, though, I want to specify the argument that Mark and I are having concerning an earlier event in American history. Most people refer to the period of 1776–83 as “the American Revolution.” Inspired by Harvard historian David Armitage, who has written an authoritative study of the Declaration of Independence as a world- historical document, I increasingly refer to the actions justified by the Declaration as “the American secession from the British Empire.” Unlike, say, the political theorist Danielle Allen, who emphasizes the Declaration’s theme of “equality” (which surely is there), I read it primarily as setting out the argument that “one people” can, when dissatisfied, simply “alter [and] . . . abolish” their terms of governance, which includes withdrawal from an existing polity. That is the meaning of government by “consent of the governed.” That announcement of a desire for what might be called a political divorce is certainly disappointing to the existing political regime; it will, no doubt, castigate the would-be seceders as “traitors,” “terrorists,” or “revolutionaries.” Supporters of the secessionists will certainly have a different perspective. One issue, therefore, is whether these terms have any genuine analytic meaning or are instead merely terms of political invective that should not, perhaps for that reason, be taken entirely seriously by academics.