| Abstract |
"In 1869, in Texas v White, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the unilateral secession of a state from the Union was unconstitutional because the Constitution created "an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states." This meant that once a state became part of the Union, "[t]here was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the states." In this iconoclastic work, Peter Radan demonstrates why the court's ruling was wrong and why, on the basis of American constitutional law in 1860-1861, the unilateral secessions of the Confederate States were lawful on the grounds that the United States was forged as a "Slaveholders' Union." Creating a more perfect Slaveholders' Union deals with two constitutional issues: first, whether the states in 1860 had a right to secede from the Union, and second, what significance slavery had in defining the constitutional Union. The two matters came together when the states seceded on the grounds that the system of government the Confederate States had agreed to-namely, a system of human enslavement-had been violated by the incoming Republican administration. The legitimacy of this secession was anchored, as Radan shows, in the compact theory of the Constitution, which held that, because the Constitution was a compact between the member states of the Union, breaches of its fundamental provisions gave affected states the right to unilaterally secede from the Union. In so doing the Confederate States sought to preserve and protect their peculiar institution by forming a more perfect Slaveholders' Union"-- Provided by publisher. |
