Celebrate Secession? Just Say No

Some in the American South are planning, in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, to celebrate secession. What a horrible idea!

The very principle of states' rights that the secessionists of the mid-19th Century (and the nullificationists a few decades before them) is foreign to the ultimate success of a federal government, as was proved quite convincingly by the failure of the Articles of Confederation. And yet we have now, as we did then, people who are standing up in public and celebrating the idea that the much smaller state (or even a larger confederation of states) is (or are) better off without the umbrella of the federal government.

Surely this kind of thinking went out the window along about Appomattox Court House time!

First and foremost is the necessity of a united armed forces, as World War I and World War II proved. Had what is now the United States been two or more countries during either of these worldwide conflicts, the outcome could have been quite different, at the very least the same result achieved in a much longer timeframe and with a much higher death toll. It was precisely America's ability to marshal great amounts of manpower, womanpower, and dollar-power and apply all of it to the war effort that turned the tide in 1918 and again in 1945.

And, as was seen in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the nation was able to as a whole pay off its debts after the wars and, further, after World War II, offer vast sums of money to European countries to help rebuild the devastation wrought across the continent.

The economic powerhouse that the U.S. still is would be nigh on impossible if the country had been parceled up into two or more entities. The states that resulted from such a divorce would have been far less enlightened than the countries that currently make up the European Union; and communication, trade, and taxation between the various state-level entities would have been far more contentious than they are now, in the U.S. or in the EU.

Politically, the continent would be a much weaker force as well, with the presidents of the various countries vying for supremacy in their own back yard before they ever got out of the gate and onto the world stage. It is doubtful in the extreme that had the country been split in two, the president of either North or South would now be viewed as the "leader of the free world."

The one thing that binds all people who live in the United States of America is the idea of being American — whatever each person views that to be. The idea of being an American means different things to different people, but the overriding identity that Americans feel toward their country, their flag, their freedom, and their rights under the laws of the land unite them in a way that living in cities, states, commonwealths, townships, and counties can't approach.

Such honoring of the idea of splitting off from the American way of life and rejecting all of the benefits and protection that federalism allows is to remember a failed idea in the positive — a dangerous practice indeed.