Alexis de Tocqueville, the noted French observer of life and politics in America, wrote in 1830 concerning the relationship between the American states and their federal government: "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people.  If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right to do so".  What Alex de Tocqueville noted is what was considered common knowledge at the time of the formation of the United States.  The founding fathers saw their new country as a compact between separate, sovereign republics, who were just as free to leave the compact at any time as to join it.  It was King George III himself who, acquiescing to the victory of the American colonies, gave recognition to each of the 13 former colonies as separate, sovereign, independent states.  He never gave recognition to the United States in the aggregate.  Great Britain founded and governed for almost two centuries the 13 original North American colonies, each colony independent from the other with its own colonial government, and the King of Great Britain, George III, had the legal authority to bequeath to each of the separate colonies the status of sovereignty and independence. Only in this new status as sovereign and independent states, aquired through secession and legal treaty with the former mother country, could they be able to seek other treaties and compacts with which to institute new guards for their freedom and security.  Therefore, the colonies, in establishing the United States of America, entered into a new confederation in the condition of separate, soveriegn states and, in so joining this compact, never relinquished to any degree their sovereignty.  The government of the USA, as established by the Articles of Confederation and then by the Constitution, was given by the states certain limited delineated powers.  The states declared that those powers not specifically stated and given to the US government were retained by those individual states.  Simply stated, the original states designed this governmental body of their new nation to act as their servant.  They gave it a very limited job to do, with very limited powers.  The individual states were the boss in this new country.

Sadly, between the time of the drafting of the US Constitution and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the concept of the government as the servant of the states had been turned on its ear.  Certain conspirators had been scheming since the early days of the republic to turn the US government into a strong, central power.  It started with Alexander Hamilton, went through Henry Clay and the Whig Party and turned into full dictatorship under Lincoln and the Republican party.  The Northern states gravitated to this centralization of power, whilst the Southern states remained true to the original American republic and the intent of the Founding Fathers.  By 1860 the US goverment was threatening to turn the states back into the condition of colonies.  This was in its very nature revolutionist, since the states existed in their lawful condition of sovereingty not by decree from the US government, but by lawful treaty with the King of Great Britain, George III.

The colonists in forming the United States unquestionably drew on the many concepts of rights and freedoms having originated from Great Britain, such as the Magna Carta.  The colonists felt justified to separate from the mother country as "the right of a free people, when a government proves destructive of the ends for which it was established, to recur to original principles, and to institute new guards for their security".  In 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Southern states were faced again with a government hostile to their sovereignty and their way of life.  In his essay, "Secession:  The Last, Best Bulwark of Our Liberties", Clyde Wilson reminds us that the Founding Fathers of the United States had designed a government of checks and balances.  They hoped that the three branches of government - judicial, legislative and executive, would function in a manner to always keep each other "in check", that is, function in conflict with each other.  This would serve as a safe-guard to any one branch assuming unconstitutional powers.  Wilson contends that neither the federal government nor its branches would on its own check itself.  On the contrary, these branchs were acting in unison to check the sovereignty of the states.  Wilson also contends that the final resort to holding the federal government in check rested on the states and this power inherent to the states had to be backed up with the right of secession.  Wilson also lays out that it was the belief of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Calhoun that "the people of the states have a right to protect themselves against an out-of-bounds federal government, and to determine when the proper bounds have been passed-or to interpose their sovereignty". 

In the years 1860 - 1861 thirteen southern states recurred to their original rights and sovereignty and passed ordinances of secession from the United States of America.  These free and sovereign states then set about to safeguard their liberties and rights in the form of a new compact.  On February 22, 1862, these 13 states formed the permanant government of the Confederate States of America.  In his essay, "The Secession Tradition in America", Donald W. Livingston writes, "With the orderly, legal secession of the southern states, the American genius of self-government reached its highest moral expression.  Here was something unprecendented in history;  a vast continental empire of republics torn by sectional, economic, and moral conflicts seeking to settle its differences not by war, but by peaceful secession of eleven [sic] contiguous republics, legitimated by the consent of the people".  The new "Confederates"  considered themselves "orthodox" Americans, seeking through secession and the formation of a new country to maintain the American republic started in 1776.  Donald Livingston goes on to maintain that the Confederate Constitution was the "highest expression of the adventure in self-government begun by the American colonists in 1776".  Livingston characterises that adventure as "an assertion of the right of substantial moral and political societies to self-government, and this right was secured by an act of secession".  The Confederacy was the continuation of the United States in the form of culturally homogenous southern states, but also an excercise in perfecting the original American republic.  As Livingston states, "eleven [sic] contiguous southern states sought to form a more perfect union, one grounded in the preservation of independent moral and political communities, their union by consent, and the right of secession".

Secession is no phenomenom unique to the American experience.  The world has witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other eastern European countries through acts of secession.  In other parts of the world and Europe today, this process of devolution appears to be gaining strength.  In these modern times, processes of devolution and consolidation of empire seem to be simultaneously grappling with each other.  Free peoples wish to absolve themselves from the bondage of empire, whilst these empires appear willing to pull out all the stops to maintain all vestiges of power.  As Clyde Wilson states about empires in the above mentioned essay, "An empire contains not free citizens, but subjects, interchangeable persons having no intrinsic value except as taxpayers and cannon fodder... A people's culture may be changed by imperial edict to reflect a trumped-up multiculturalism (a sure sign of an empire)...".  Wilson continues, "The republican right of self-governement and the right of self-determination both necessarily incorporate the right of secession-that a people may withdraw from an imperial power to defend its liberty, property, culture, and faith..."  Globalism and the imperial powers seated in New York City, Washington and Brussels seek to destroy Western Civilization and its numerous peoples and cultures.  But it appears that the peoples of North America and Europe are waking up and are returning to the original principles of liberty and state sovereignty.  Patriotism and nationalism are continuously gaining in strength and popularity as the Western world decides more and more as Wilson says, "against consolidation, (and) in favor of regionalism, devolution, secession, break-up of unnatural states, and the return to historic identities..."