Long live secession!

Which brings us back to zealous Thomas Naylor and the modern-day secessionists. Unfortunately, they face a Supreme Court decision barring the path to disunion -- the 1868 case of Texas vs. White, in which Lincoln's ex-treasurer and court appointee Salmon P. Chase, who wrote the legislation that financed the Civil War, issued the judicial coup de grâce to secession. Chase's justification in the highest court was fundamentally the same as Lincoln's on the brink of war, and almost identical in language. Chase said that despite Texas' having been an independent republic before joining the union in 1845, it had no right to secede. "The Constitution," Chase wrote, "in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States."

Some observers question Chase's objectivity, given that he was a war appointee and the war's public financier. "There must have been an overwhelming fatefulness in Chase's mind," writes John Remington Graham, the author of "Constitutional History of Secession," and an amicus lawyer in the failed Quebec secession movement in Canada during the 1990s. "The country [had] suffered a million casualties in combat, and had probably lost another four hundred thousand from starvation. This enormous conflict had cost something like three-fourths of the assessed value of all taxable property in the United States in 1860, and had multiplied the national debt fifty-three times in only four years." Under the circumstances, Graham claims, "[Chase] could not write the truth, so he wrote something else." Graham's book is cited by Naylor in his "Vermont Manifesto," and, it should be noted, endorsed by such Confederacy apologist groups as League of the South and Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The secession issue, however, was collateral to the issue at law in Texas vs. White, which at bottom concerned the legitimacy of state bond sales during the secessionist period of 1861-65. The secession question would have been directly considered in providing Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, a fair and speedy trial to answer the treason charge leveled in federal court following his arrest in May 1865. (It was a treason, wrote Harper's Weekly, "so towering, so sanguinary, so causeless" that the magazine, and many others, called for Davis' death.)

But Davis was not tried. He was held for two years in prison and then released in 1867 on a $100,000 bond -- paid for, in part, by none other than abolitionist Horace Greeley. Today, Davis apologists -- he was the first "president," they say, to appoint a Jew to his cabinet, and the only one to adopt a black child -- assert that he was never tried because federal prosecutors feared losing the case.

In any case, Texas vs. White, as penned by Salmon Chase, serves as established law. However, Columbia law professor Dorf suggests that a loophole exists in the Chase decision: Texas vs. White may have made unilateral secession illegal but the door remains open to secession "through consent of the states," as Chase wrote -- what Dorf calls secession by mutual agreement.

Although the Constitution provides no method on how to effect this friendly goodbye, Dorf suggests the process of constitutional amendment, meaning a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures, which ensures that a majority of the federalized states agrees to the departure of the seceding state. Whether this is doable depends on the graces of polities and politicians who fully realize that if one state goes, all could go -- and the United States would then be well on its way to collapse. And, clearly, it's not doable.

"Secession is not possible today without violence," exclaims MIT's Maier, the author of the acclaimed "American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence." "To assume something different is mad. It's to follow the example of the Southern secessionists who thought that they could just leave the union peacefully -- and, nuttier still, get a part of the unsettled territory as a parting gift. It's almost as crazy as the idea that once you topple a dictator, democracy happens, much as weeds appear on a plowed field. Isn't it time that Americans began learning something from history? Or must we again bleed ourselves into wisdom?"

Naylor is undeterred. He offers that no state is more historically prepared for going it alone than Vermont, which he calls "the most radical state in the Union" in terms of town meetings and direct democracy. Vermont, Naylor says, was the first state to outlaw slavery in its constitution of 1777, the first to mandate "universal manhood suffrage," and is currently one of only two states that allows incarcerated felons to vote. It has no death penalty and virtually no gun-control laws, yet remains one of the least violent jurisdictions in America. It has no military bases, no strategic resources, few military contractors. All three members of its congressional delegation voted against the Iraq war resolution.

Vermont is rural and wild, with the highest percentage of unpaved roads in the nation, the highest percentage of residents living in the countryside; it was the first state to ban billboards alongside highways. It is rebellious: It fathered Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys and 200 years later elected Howard Dean. With its vigorous environmental-impact laws, Vermont fended off the depredations of Wal-Mart superstores longer than any other state; Montpelier is the only state capital in America without a McDonald's restaurant. Following mock secession debates in seven Vermont towns in 1990, all seven voted for secession.

As it happens, Naylor in his fringe venture has found a rare advocate in the figure of George F. Kennan, the venerated former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and architect of Cold War containment, who envisioned in disenchanted old age just such a dismembering of the United States as Naylor espouses. Kennan as early as 1993 observed that the country might be broken into nine republics whose boundaries serendipitously align with the likes of Atlantica, Cascadia, and the free republics of Alaska and Vermont. "There is a real question," Kennan observed, "as to whether bigness in a body politic is not an evil in itself."

When Naylor wrote Kennan outlining a map of New England that united Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Kennan responded with a thunderous letter dictated from his sick bed: "I write to say that in the idea of the three American states' ultimate independence, whether separately or in union, I see nothing fanciful ... I see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will not only be endangered but eventually destroyed by an endlessly prolonged association [with] the remainder of what is now the U.S.A."

And should the "remainder" refuse Vermont's peaceable request to separate -- and the nation will -- what could Vermont do in answer?

Naylor is a pacifist and will not take up arms, though he admits that Vermont, with its mountains and forests, and high gun ownership among an historically contrarian people, is ideal ground for a guerrilla insurgency. "This is a call for nonviolent revolt against the world's global superpower by 608,000 people," he says. "What will the superpower do? Will it burn off the sugar maple trees? Will it destroy all the black-and-white Holstein cows? Just imagine trying to enslave independent-minded Vermonters."

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