Organized Crime

Most Americans seem unaware of the fact that one of their favorite holidays, the Fourth of July, is properly construed as a celebration of an act of violent secession. “Independence Day” is a celebration of the colonists’ secession from the British Empire, America’s first war of secession.

America’s most prominent secessionist, Thomas Jefferson, was very clear about what he was saying when he authored the nation’s declaration of secession, known to most as the Declaration of Independence: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, he wrote, and whenever that consent is withdrawn, it is the right and duty of the people to “alter or abolish” that government and to “institute a new government.”

In his first inaugural address President Jefferson further defended the right of secession by declaring: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it.” Debating the issue of secession is acceptable; using violent, governmental force to stop it was not in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. (Contrast this with Abraham Lincoln’s threats of “invasion” and “bloodshed” in any state that attempted to secede in his first inaugural address).

As time wore on, Jefferson never changed his opinion of the importance of the right of secession as an instrument of freedom. He considered all Americans, regardless of geographical location, to be part of the same “family,” and would never have contemplated violent opposition to any state or region that wanted to secede from the union. In a January 29, 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly he wrote:

Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family . . .

In an August 12, 1803 letter to John C. Breckenridge, Jefferson addressed the same issue in the context of the New England Federalists’ attempt to secede and create their own confederacy in response to the Louisiana Purchase, which they vehemently opposed. If there were to be a “separation,” Jefferson wrote, then “God bless them both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.”

The original American union of the founding fathers was a voluntary union based on the consent of the people of the free, independent, and sovereign states. It was not a union held together by violence, intimidation, censorship, and military invasion. That is what the Soviet Union was, and what the American union became in the post-1865 era.