Secession in the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Secession in the United States has been a live political question almost since the nation's founding. On the 20th of December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to formally declare its departure from the Union, setting off a chain of events that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives. But the story of American secession does not begin with South Carolina, and it does not end with Appomattox. It runs from Thomas Jefferson secretly drafting the Kentucky Resolutions while serving as Vice President, to Timothy Pickering dreaming of a pro-British New England nation, to a 1993 Staten Island referendum in which 65 percent of voters chose to leave New York City. What makes secession so persistently American? What legal arguments have sustained it, what Supreme Court rulings have crushed it, and why, as of polls taken between 2024 and 2026, is support for breaking up the country still rising in a handful of states? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Revolutionary Foundation

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  The Declaration of Independence planted the seed from which every American secession argument has since grown. Its authors declared that when a government becomes destructive of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. Historian Pauline Maier argues this language asserted the right of revolution, which was, after all, the right Americans were exercising in 1776. The reasoning drew on a long intellectual lineage: John Milton, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and other writers in the British Whig tradition. The same logic appeared in Locke's Two Treatises of Government of 1690, in the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, and in Thomas Paine's Common Sense of 1776, which warned that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, but that when a long train of abuses and usurpations drove a people toward absolute despotism, it was their right and their duty to throw off that government.

  President John Adams, as quoted by historian Gordon S. Wood, put a tight condition on that right: only repeated, multiplied oppressions placing it beyond all doubt that rulers had formed settled plans to deprive the people of their liberties could warrant concerted resistance. That caveat would later become the central dividing line in debates about secession. Was a grievance severe enough to count as intolerable oppression, or was it merely a political frustration that fell short of the revolutionary threshold? That question haunted American politics for nearly a century, and the answer was ultimately settled not by argument but by war.

• 3. Articles to Constitution

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  In late 1777, the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia approved the Articles of Confederation, a document that described the union of states as perpetual. By 1786, historian John Ferling writes, that union was falling apart. Delegates from five states gathered at what became known as the Annapolis Convention and called for a broader meeting in Philadelphia to amend the Articles. The delegates who convened from May to September 1787 went further: they drafted an entirely new Constitution and proposed that just nine of the thirteen states needed to ratify it for the new government to take effect, sidelining the states that refused.

  James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York were the most vigorous advocates for the new framework, publishing the Federalist Papers to make their case. Influential jurist St. George Tucker later argued that the unanimous dissolution of the Articles of Confederation in 1789 by Act of Congress was legal precedent for future secessions from the Constitution one state at a time. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing in 1824, saw it differently. When allied sovereigns converted their league into a government, Marshall wrote, the whole character in which the states appear underwent a change. Patrick Henry, who adamantly opposed ratification, had seen this coming. He challenged the framers on the phrase "We the people" rather than "We the states": it was, he argued, a consolidated government, not a compact between sovereign equals. Hamilton and John Jay told the New York ratifying convention that reserving a right to withdraw was inconsistent with the Constitution, and was no ratification. The New York convention ratified without inserting that right.

• 4. Federalists and New England Dissent

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  The first serious secessionist agitation after ratification came not from the South but from New England Federalists. Thomas Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory struck Federalists as a violation of the foundational agreements between the original thirteen states; Jefferson had transacted the purchase in secret and refused to seek congressional approval. By 1804, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts and a few allies were imagining a separate New England confederation that might combine with lower Canada to form a new pro-British nation. Historian Richard Buell Jr. assessed that movement as more of a confession of despair about the future than a realistic proposal for action.

  The Hartford Convention convened on the 15th of December 1814. Twenty-six delegates attended: Massachusetts sent twelve, Connecticut seven, and Rhode Island four. Despite pleas in the New England press for secession and a separate peace with Britain, historian Donald R. Hickey notes that most delegates were determined to pursue a moderate course. Only Timothy Bigelow of Massachusetts apparently favored extreme measures. The convention's final report recommended several constitutional amendments and addressed wartime grievances. Massachusetts and Connecticut endorsed it. Then the war ended before the delegates returned to Washington, and the Jeffersonians branded the Hartford Convention a synonym for disloyalty and treason. It became a major factor in the sharp decline of the Federalist Party, effectively ending Northern Federalist secessionism as an organized political force.

• 5. Slavery and Southern Secession

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  South Carolina was the pivot around which the history of Southern secession turned. During Andrew Jackson's presidency, the state threatened to leave over the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Jackson threatened to send federal troops and to hang the leader of the secessionists from the highest tree in South Carolina. His vice president, John C. Calhoun, who supported the movement and authored the essay "The South Carolina Exposition and Protest", became the first U.S. vice president to resign from office. On the 1st of May 1833, Jackson wrote that the tariff was only a pretext, and that disunion and a Southern confederacy was the real object. The next pretext, he predicted, would be the negro, or slavery question.

  Jackson's prediction proved accurate. Support for secession shifted decisively southward after 1846, when the Wilmot Proviso entered the public debate. It would have barred slavery from the territories acquired from Mexico. The Nashville Convention of June 3-11, 1850, brought delegates from nine slave states to consider secession if Congress banned slavery in new territories. The compromises worked out there led to the Compromise of 1850 and, for a time, preserved the union. By 1860 that time had run out. South Carolina voted to secede on the 20th of December 1860. Ten states followed in rapid succession, and the eleven together formed the Confederate States of America. Texas was the last to join, declaring secession on the 1st of February 1861. The Union government refused to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation at any point, treating the conflict as a rebellion by individuals rather than a war between states. The movement collapsed in 1865 with the military defeat of Confederate forces.

• 6. The Court's Verdict

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  Texas v. White was argued before the United States Supreme Court during the December 1868 term. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase read the decision on the 15th of April 1869. The ruling found that the Confederate state government in Texas had no legal existence, because Texas's secession had been illegal to begin with. Chase held that Texas had become part of an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States when it was admitted in 1845. In practical terms, this meant that Texas had never legally left. The Court did, however, leave a door open: Chase recognized that a state could cease to be part of the union through revolution, or through consent of the States.

  The 1877 Williams v. Bruffy decision added a related principle: the validity of acts by an entity seeking independence depends entirely on its ultimate success. If it fails to establish itself permanently, all such acts perish with it; if it succeeds and becomes recognized, its acts from the commencement of its existence are upheld as those of an independent nation. Some scholars have taken this to mean that the illegality of Confederate secession was not firmly established in fact until the Union won at Appomattox, just as the undisputed illegality of the American rebellion under British law of 1775 was rendered irrelevant by the Revolution's success. Historian Maury Klein put the stakes plainly: no result of the Civil War was more important than the destruction, once and for all, of the idea of secession as a constitutional option.

• 7. Modern Movements

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  Secession has never fully disappeared from American political life. The Libertarian Party, formed in 1971, included in its national platform the right of states to secede, provided secession was supported by a majority within the political unit, the majority did not suppress the dissenting minority, and the new entity's government was at least as compatible with human freedom as the one it left. City-level secession attempts have been numerous and mostly unsuccessful. The island of Nantucket tried to leave Massachusetts three times in the twentieth century: in 1937 over public utility rates, in 1957 over state ownership of ferry boats, and in 1977 over redistricting. Staten Island held a 1993 referendum in which 65 percent voted to secede from New York City, but the State Assembly blocked implementation. The town of Rough and Ready, California, declared itself the Great Republic of Rough and Ready on the 7th of April 1850 to avoid mining taxes, then voted to rejoin the Union less than three months later on the 4th of July.

  State-level movements have proliferated in the twenty-first century. In Alaska, the Supreme Court held in the 2006 case Kohlhaas v. State that secession was illegal and refused to allow a vote. Walter Hickel, a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, had served as Governor from 1990 to 1994. After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the hashtag #calexit trended on Twitter, and a March 2017 poll found 32 percent of Californians and 44 percent of California Democrats favored secession. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry raised the issue at a 2009 Tea Party protest; since 2020, the Republican Party of Texas platform has included a call for a referendum on secession. A 2021 poll found that 52 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Biden voters supported partitioning the United States along party lines. Polls from 2024 to 2026 found that support for one's own state becoming independent rose sharply in nine states, with Minnesota at the epicenter.