American Secessionist Movements

Secession has a long and controversial history in the United States because of its association with the Confederate States of America and the Civil War. Since the late twentieth century, however, interest in secession has increased both internationally and in the United States. Internationally, secession is the primary means by which new states are created. In the United States, in the early twenty-first century, there has been an increase in both counties wishing to secede from their states and states wishing to secede from the United States for political, economic, ideological, and sociocultural reasons. A 2014 Reuters poll found that 24 percent of respondents nationwide were in favor of the peaceful secession of their state from the United States. Prominent secessionist movements cut across the political spectrum and include movements in Alaska, California, Texas, Vermont, and the Pacific Northwest.

Understanding the Discussion

Libertarianism: A political ideology that places emphasis on individual liberty and responsibility and advocates a limited role for government, namely, to provide protection and security.

Partisanship: In politics, allegiance to a specific political party or ideology, often with uncompromising singleness of mind.

Secession: Geopolitically, the withdrawal of a territory from an existing state.

Self-determination: When a group or country determines its own governance.

History

Secession has a controversial reputation in the United States, specifically because of the secession of the southern states, which began in 1860, and the formation of the Confederate States of America, which lead to the Civil War. However, secession has a long history in the United States in addition to its most famous example, both in concept and practice. The original thirteen colonies seceded from the British Empire to form the United States of America in 1776. As the historian David Armitage pointed out, “The Declaration of Independence was the first formal secession proclamation in world history.”

Secession was quite common in the years between the Declaration of Independence and the end of the Civil War in 1865. As the legal scholar Sanford Levinson put it, “Someone reading post-Revolutionary American history might even believe that secession is as American as apple pie.” A number of states were created from the act of secession. Vermont, for example, came about in 1777 from land grants, on land claimed by the states of both New York and New Hampshire. It governed itself as an independent republic for fourteen years, until it joined the Union in 1791. Kentucky County petitioned for a separation from the state of Virginia after American independence, accepted terms of separation in 1790, and joined the United States in 1792 as the state of Kentucky. Tennessee was formed from counties in western North Carolina ceded to the federal government and was briefly known as the Southwestern Territory; the state of Tennessee joined the Union in 1796. Maine seceded from the state of Massachusetts in 1820, after long-standing disagreements over land speculation and settlement in the early nineteenth century, as well as over the War of 1812 with the British. New England Federalists proposed secession from the United States in the early nineteenth century, in part as an expression of their discontent with the growing power of the Jeffersonian Democrats, a concern that the influence of the northern states would be diminished by the Louisiana Purchase, and disagreement over the War of 1812. Secession, however, was not on the agenda during the Hartford Convention, a series of meetings held by the New England Federalists in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814--15 to discuss their grievances with the federal government. Texas declared its independence from Mexico in 1836 and governed itself as an independent republic (though not recognized by Mexico), until it joined the United States in 1845. West Virginia seceded from the state of Virginia in 1861, after the start of the Civil War, joining the Union two years later.

The most famous case of secession in US history occurred after the 1860 presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, when seven southern states formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861. Four more states joined the Confederacy after the start of hostilities, and Missouri and Kentucky later joined as members, though neither officially seceded from the Union. In his inaugural address in March 1861, President Lincoln asserted that secession was unconstitutional: “I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” As a result, “No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.” In his address to a special session of Congress in July 1861, Lincoln said that the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April had presented “to the whole family of man the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” He argued that the principle of secession was “one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure.” The Civil War was fought in part on this belief, that the Union was perpetual and indissoluble, and that there was no constitutional right of secession. It was an opinion seemingly confirmed by the Supreme Court in Texas v. White (1869), in which Justice Salmon Chase, writing the majority opinion, argued that “the union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and 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.”

Although there have been no successful attempts at secession since 1865, the concept still generates “intellectual challenges,” as Professor Levinson noted, “for anyone concerned not only with American politics but also with political possibilities around the world.” Secession has been the primary dynamic for the formation of states in the post–World War II world—from the decolonization movements in the 1960s and 1970s to the creation of new states following the end of the Cold War and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellite republics. Secession can be peaceful or violent, as the break-up of Yugoslavia demonstrated: Slovenia and Macedonia seceded relatively peacefully in 1991, but Bosnia-Herzegovina descended into a three-year civil war between Bosnian Serbs on one side and the Muslim Bosniak and the Croat populations on the other. A more recent example of successful secession is that of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011, following years of disagreement and struggle with the Sudanese government. In September 2014, Scotland held a referendum on independence, in which 55 percent of Scottish voters voted to remain in the United Kingdom. However, two years later, voters in the United Kingdom as a whole voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union—not strictly a secession, but a withdrawal from a close political association, and it reverberated around the world.

American Secessionist Movements Today

Interest in secession in the United States has grown for a variety of reasons, including disagreements over the political, economic, and sociocultural direction of the country. The 2012 presidential election, for example, led to a surge of petitions for states to secede. Following the election, the White House received sixty-nine petitions for secession, covering all fifty states and garnering more than 675,000 signatures. Petitions for seven states had more than 25,000 signatures, the threshold at which the White House had pledged a response (this has since been raised to 100,000 signatures); the petition for Texas had more than 125,000 signatures. A Reuters poll in September 2014 found that 24 percent of respondents strongly or provisionally supported the peaceful secession of their state. Although partisan and demographic patterns existed among supporters—more likely Republican than Democrat, younger than older, and from lower- than higher-income brackets—there was support for secession in every group and every region, from 19 percent support in New England (including Vermont) to 34 percent support in the Southwest (including Texas).

The Middlebury Institute, a nonprofit organization for “the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination,” maintains a list of current secessionist movements in the country, covering at least sixteen different states. The list includes ethnic groups advocating self-determination, such as the attempt by a group of Lakota Sioux to establish the Republic of Lakotah in territory currently in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, and religious or ideological groups, such as the Christian Exodus in South Carolina, founded in 2003 to encourage Christians to move to South Carolina, gradually take over provincial and state offices, and establish an “independent Christian nation.” The founder of Christian Exodus was inspired by the Free State Project, which encouraged libertarians to move to New Hampshire to take advantage of limited government intervention, relatively low taxes, and greater individual rights.

Among the more prominent or popular movements are those calling for greater self-governance, if not outright secession, such as the Alaska Independence Party, at one time the third-largest political party in the state; the Texas Nationalist Party; and the Second Vermont Republic. Secessionist movements in those states generally advocate greater independence from the federal government and believe in limited government, though from different ends of the political spectrum. The rise in secessionist sentiment in Texas, for example, according to the head of the Texas Nationalist Party, could be attributed to events such as the election of a Democratic president in 2012 and the rise of the Tea Party, as well as to the long-standing “political and cultural disconnect between Texas and the federal system.” On the other hand, the secessionist movement in Vermont, according to political scientist and Vermonter Frank Bryan, was born of a “decentralist commonality” between the “libertarian right,” which opposed big government, and the “libertarian left,” which opposed big business. The Vermont secessionist movement is also a response to what some see as the American imperial and economic empire, advocating in its place a withdrawal from foreign military ventures, greater emphasis on the local economy and environmental sustainability, and the devolution of political power to local communities. As Bryan put it, “It’s really about governing on a human scale.”

More recently, in 2015 a group called Yes California was formed, joining a long history of marginal secessionist movements in California; however, this one gained unexpected momentum following the upset victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. A Reuters poll whose results were released in January 2017 found that close to a third of Californians favored seceding from the Union, up from around 20 percent in 2014. Yes California, whose efforts came to be dubbed "Calexit," after "Brexit," the colloquial term for the British withdrawal from the European Union, began gathering signatures for a ballot measure on the issue of secession in 2018.

Secessionist movements may also be on behalf of a territory not defined by state boundaries, such as the movement to establish Cascadia, as a “bioregion” with a distinct geography (the Columbia River Watershed and the area around the Cascade Range, which covers territory in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, northern California, western Montana, and British Columbia, Canada), sociocultural identity (the Pacific Northwest), and political and economic ideology (not unlike that of Vermont, in advocating greater local autonomy, greater attention to environmental and economic issues, and more open governance).

Secessionist movements can also refer to groups looking to create a new state within the United States by "seceding" from a particular state; however, this is more accurately known as the partition of states, such as when West Virginia separated from Virginia during the Civil War. Such movements have continued in more recent times, as when, in November 2013, five out of eleven counties in northeastern Colorado voted in a nonbinding election in favor of seceding from the state. The magazine New Republic in 2013 created an electoral map of the “61 states of America” showing what the country would look like if all current secession movements succeeded, including the new state of North Colorado as well as the new states of Jefferson (from southern Oregon and northern California), South California, Upstate New York, Baja Arizona (a left-leaning state in southern Arizona), and Lincoln (the Panhandle of Idaho and Eastern Washington).

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