10 November: Largest Secessionist Conference in America

On June 20, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Crawford: “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in union, I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’” Jefferson thought secession can be a good thing. Lincoln in his first inaugural presented secession as something always bad: “Secession,” he said, “is the essence of anarchy.” In saying this, Lincoln and the Lincolnian legacy placed, in effect, a “Berlin Wall” around the American States.

Once in the Union, a State could never secede. The Civil War was a show of force to demonstrate that if a State tried, it would be shot. Less than fifty years later, Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance (1892) as a schoolhouse indoctrination to teach children the meaning of the Civil War which. He said it could be reduced to three words: “one nation indivisible.”[i]