Secession 2.0

Why an American Breakup Beckons, and How We Can Prevent It

F.H. Buckley

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• eBook ISBN: 9781641770811

PART I

A CURE FOR A DIVIDED PEOPLE?

We’ve hit rock bottom.

—Senator John Kennedy (R-LA)

1

ONE NATION, DIVISIBLE

Meet Don Livingston. He’s a South Carolina native who taught philosophy at Emory University. A respected academic, he’s the author of two well-regarded books on David Hume and “an exceptional presence in Hume studies” according to a reviewer in a leading philosophical journal.¹ He is courtly, ironic and bearded, the very picture of an academic philosopher. He’s also a secessionist.

Livingston isn’t just a secessionist, mind you. He’s also a southern partisan. The first time I met him, in Montreal, he was sporting Stars and Bars suspenders and wanted to talk about the Quebec independence movement. In 2003 he founded the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of John C. Calhoun in South Carolina. The Abbeville Institute explores “what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition,” its writers, customs and songs. The institute hosts a summer school for college and graduate students on the constitutional right of secession and on all the things that are wrong with Massachusetts.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as cranky tomfoolery. Since the Civil War, the idea of secession has been consigned to the political loony bin. But that’s about to change, and not just in the South. Among philosophers, secession is increasingly respectable.² Before long, we’ll hear our politicians take it up too.

The Eternal South

Because of the Civil War, we see secession through the prism of differences between the North and the South, and especially the original sin of American slavery. After the war, slavery was abolished and the Union was preserved. And yet the South has always been different, and always will be. It’s an indigestible part of the Union, with traditions and institutions unlike those of the rest of the country. Southerners are more likely to serve in the military, as Robert E. Lee Prewitt did in From Here to Eternity. Their accent is different, the food is different, the music is different and the manners are very different. They’ll smile at strangers and tip their hats to ladies. When their mothers ask if they want a piece of pie, they’ll say “Yes, Ma’am.” And if you thank them, they’re apt to say “You’re welcome,” not merely “un-huh.”

For southern whites, every home is Tara and every ancestor a Confederate general and the descendant of laughing cavaliers, in a prelapsarian past they cling to all the more fiercely because it is so irretrievably lost. They must live with the knowledge that they, alone among Americans, are a defeated people and have been justifiably scorned for the institution of slavery before the Civil War and their treatment of African Americans thereafter. What that has given their best fiction writers is a darkness and sense of guilt called Southern Gothic.

In Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, a recent college graduate lives in a decayed southern town with his mother, who embarrasses him with her absurd family pride, her racism and her boundless love for him. One day a black woman, outraged by the mother’s condescension, strikes at her and she collapses on the sidewalk. Her son lectures her contemptuously on her need to come to terms with the new racial realities, but the blow will kill her and she dies of a stroke. Her racism is unconscious, while his supercilious liberalism is conscious, heartless and inexcusable. Both are self-deceived and live in a fallen world of inescapable sin. Compare this with the rest of American literature, where go-ahead individuals get ahead, where justice triumphs over evil and tragedy is unknown, and it’s hard to imagine anything more foreign to northern sensibilities than Southern Gothic.

That distinctiveness has made a literary and sociological genre out of southern culture, as described by writers such as Edmund Wilson and James Cobb.³ It has also given us the delicious satire of Florence King, with her tales of bubbas and good old boys, of Scarletts and Melanies.⁴ From the North, Chuck Thompson hilariously describes everything that’s wrong about southerners and concludes we’d be better off without ’em.⁵ Back in 1860, James Pettigru famously described his own state of South Carolina as too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.

Since Pettigru’s time, the South has steadily grown in population, as people have moved there from other parts of the country. Now there are urban pockets that don’t look anything like the surrounding counties. Voters in my own city of Alexandria, Virginia, are very progressive, as are voters in Austin, Texas, and in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. And can anyone explain Florida to me?

Northerners call this the New South, and diehard southerners call it the “No South.” At the same time, southern culture has migrated to the heartland. The NASCAR circuit, which began in Daytona Beach and Charlotte, with ex-bootleggers from the Thunder Roads of Tennessee and North Carolina, now has racetracks in Illinois and Arizona. As for southern music, it’s gone global. There are jazz clubs in Russia, country and western radio stations in Sweden, rock groups everywhere. We’re all a little southern now, waiting on the levee for the Robert E. Lee.

Nevertheless, the South is still distinctive, after all these years. A recent study of how people feel about Don Livingston’s Stars and Bars flag or Confederate military heroes reveals that many southerners, particularly conservatives and Protestants, still embrace their southern identity.⁶ For liberals in the North too, the South remains another country, a darker one. It’s the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, the land of the White Citizens Councils and Senator Jim Eastland (D-MS). It’s where people cling to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama said. It’s the place you brand as alien in order to feel good about yourself.

So the differences remain. Even when not at war, North and South have been divided and this has led to three different compacts between them. The first, beginning with our founding and continuing to the Civil War, tolerated slavery as a legal matter. That ended with the war and Reconstruction, and a second compact followed, which suppressed the rights of African Americans and lasted until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. The third compact brought an anomalous period of good feelings, which seems now to have ended, and with it the willingness to tolerate any differences between the North and the South.

In the first compact, the country accepted southern slavery at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention which gave us our Constitution, and thereafter lived with it until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished it in 1865. Before the Civil War, slavery was well protected. Fugitive Slave laws permitted slaveowners to seek out and capture escaped slaves in the North, and the Supreme Court in its Dred Scott decision held that Congress could not ban slavery in any of the territories. Even if emancipated, an African American descendant of slaves could never become a U.S. citizen, the Court ruled.⁷ As James Buchanan reminded the southerners in 1860, if all that they wanted was to preserve slavery, they had no reason to secede.

The second compact began with the end of Reconstruction in 1876, and lasted until the 1960s. Slavery was abolished, but the former Confederate states were permitted to suppress black votes, enact Jim Crow laws and even tolerate lynchings. In 1912, the country overlooked Woodrow Wilson’s racism to elect him president. He had been the president of Princeton and the governor of New Jersey, but he never forgot his southern roots. His History of the American People cast a honeyed eye on slavery: far from being Simon Legrees, most slaveowners were kind and humane men, he wrote, and “domestic slaves were treated with affection and indulgence, cared for by the mistress of the household.”⁸ Once in office as president, he promptly resegregated the civil service.

What southerners called the War of Northern Aggression was never forgotten. In the Spanish-American War, a Rough Rider who had been a Confederate officer saw the Spaniards retreat and called out, “Let’s go, boys! We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!” Still, northerners and southerners made a conscious decision to mend the wounds of war, an effort in which Robert E. Lee took a leading part. Two months after the surrender he applied to the U.S. government for a pardon, and then asked his fellow southerners to abandon their animosities and come to terms with their defeat. He wrote to a magazine editor that “it should be the object of all to avoid controversy, to allay passion, give full scope to reason and to every kindly feeling.”⁹

Lee’s endeavor to reconcile southerners with the North was greatly appreciated, and he became a national hero. President Grant invited him to the White House in 1869. President Eisenhower said that he admired Lee extravagantly and hung a portrait of him in his office.¹⁰ Lee was depicted on four U.S. postage stamps, and The Dukes of Hazzard remembered him with the General Lee muscle car. Writing in 1962, Edmund Wilson saw Lee as America’s last eighteenth-century hero: “The classical antique virtue, at once aristocratic and republican, had become a national legend, and its late incarnation in Lee was to command a certain awed admiration among Northerners as well as Southerners.”¹¹

The effort at reconciliation was an enormous success. When the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac reenacted Pickett’s Charge on its fiftieth anniversary in 1913, they met at the crest of Cemetery Ridge, clasped hands and buried their faces in each other’s shoulders. The next morning, President Wilson said to the veterans, “we have found one another again as brothers and comrades, … enemies no longer, generous friends rather.”¹² Had any doubt remained, the Pledge of Allegiance that children recited each morning at school affirmed that we were “one nation, indivisible.” Some southerners invited people to say “one nation, divisible,” but that never caught on.

All this happened at the same time that the country struggled with the task of assimilation, of making Americans out of the millions of immigrants who flocked to our shores. Generations of Irish, Italian and eastern European children were taught of our country’s heroes and recited the Pledge of Allegiance at school. Bing Crosby treated Protestants to a look at an all-American Catholic school run by Sister Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s, and Christians laughed at Marx Brothers comedies and whistled the songs of Irving Berlin. But one group was left behind and relegated to second-class status, and that was African Americans. There was a tradeoff for the reconciliation between the North and white southerners, and it was the abandonment of Reconstruction and the goal of racial justice.

The second compact came to an end in the 1960s, with the outrage over the murder of civil rights workers, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the enforcement of the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. A generation of Americans came of age seeing pictures of police dogs attacking protesters and of U.S. marshals escorting little black girls to school. Then the South abandoned its Jim Crow laws and looked much less racist, or at least not much more racist than the North. While southern states had suppressed African American votes in the 1960s, fifty years later things had completely turned around. In places like Alabama and Mississippi, black turnout now exceeded white turnout and minority candidates held office in record numbers.¹³ The Great Migration of African Americans northward had ended, and their children were returning to the South.

In the third compact, state-sponsored forms of discrimination were banned, but expressions of southern pride would be tolerated. The historian Shelby Foote called it the Great Compromise. Southerners would admit that it was good that the Union had won, while northerners would concede that the Confederates had fought bravely. The Sons of Confederate Veterans could hold their marches, the reenactors could gather at the old campground, the Confederate statues would stay up. If one had to specify a date when this compact began, it was 1969, the year that Bob Dylan released Nashville Skyline and The Band sang “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Back then the singers were the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It was the year that Nixon became president.

When the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War aired in 1990, it was so generous to the Confederacy that Burns felt obliged to tell viewers that he was happy the North won. In 1995, George F. Will offered an affectionate look at a southerner’s unreconstructed adherence to an antimodern culture and the goofball secessionist movement of Don Livingston and his friends.¹⁴ As recently as 2015, the Washington Post ran stories commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, paying tribute to both sides. From their defeat, white southerners were permitted to retain some measure of dignity in the memory of their battlefield heroes.

But now the third compact has ended. The Confederate statues are coming down, the Stars and Bars flag is a provocation and expressions of white southern pride are deemed racist. In Alexandria, Virginia, Christ Church took down the portrait of Robert E. Lee, and for good measure that of slaveholder George Washington. Both had worshipped at the church, and Washington had helped pay for it. The highly partisan Southern Poverty Law Center links Don Livingston to racism, saying that while he purports to study secession from a philosophical perspective, it all comes down to a defense of the slaveholding antebellum South. Philosophical or not, southern secessionists are presumed to be acting in bad faith.

That doesn’t sound anything like the Don Livingston I know, notwithstanding those suspenders. He’s the gentlest of people, and quite without a trace of racism. But what about his defense of a right of secession? Constitutionally, it might look like a dead letter ever since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865. All the same, the demise of the third compact is going to fray the sense of national unity that has stilled secessionist sentiments. If millions of people in one section of the country are told that they’re presumptively evil, and that the presumption really can’t be rebutted, they’re going to wonder if they belong somewhere else. “Some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America,” said Hillary Clinton. Yet if they’re not Americans, they might reasonably ask themselves to what country they belong, or should belong.

The Crack-Up

Some northerners would be just as happy to see the South become another country. Here’s one of them, the New Yorker’s Dan Piepenbring, writing in 2018 about his visit to Chick-fil-A, a southern chain restaurant that is expanding int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: A Cure for a Divided People?
• Part II: A Cure for Bigness?
• Part III: Lesser Cures
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index