April 9, 1865, the US Civil War Ends -- April 9, 2018, New Talk of Secession Is Rampant

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS 153 YEARS OLD. And, in many ways, it is one of the most important dates in the history of the United States. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, ending the American Civil War. The details of that encounter are so riveting in the significance for the Republic, so polite in contrast to today's crudely scurrulous attacks that pass for political discussion, and so American in its concern for all Americans, that they should be the study of every American child. And, today, when secession is being tossed around as a cure-all for the deep divisions in the fabric of America, reconsidering the Civil War -- the American experiment in secession -- is something all Americans need to do. • • • HOW THE SURRENDER TOOK PLACE. Eye Witness to History describes the surrender at Appomattox : "With his army surrounded, his men weak and exhausted, Robert E. Lee realized there was little choice but to consider the surrender of his Army to General Grant. After a series of notes between the two leaders, they agreed to meet on April 9, 1865, at the house of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Courthouse. The meeting lasted approximately two and one-half hours and at its conclusion the bloodliest conflict in the nation's history neared its end." • What had precipitated General Lee's decision was a series of events : "On April 3, Richmond fell to Union troops as General Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia in retreat to the West pursued by Grant and the Army of the Potomac. A running battle ensued as each Army moved farther to the west in an effort to out flank, or prevent being out flanked by the enemy. Finally, on April 7, General Grant initiated a series of dispatches leading to a meeting between the two commanders." • Here is General Grant's note to General Lee : "General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.: 5 P.M., April 7th, 1865. The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia. U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General" • The note was carried through Confederate lines to General Lee, who responded thus : "April 7th, 1865. General: I have received your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender. R.E. Lee, General." • General Grant received General Lee's message after midnight and replied early in the morning giving his terms for surrender : "April 8th, 1865. General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.: Your note of last evening in reply to mine of the same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just received. In reply I would say that, peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon, -- namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged. I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received. U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General" • The fighting continued as the two Generals exchanged notes. As General Lee retreated further to the west, he replied to Grant's message, noting that he would not surrender the entire Army of Noethern Virginia : "April 8th, 1865. General: I received at a late hour your note of to-day. In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this army, but, as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end. I cannot, therefore, meet you with a view to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia; but as far as your proposal may affect the Confederate States forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I should be pleased to meet you at 10 A.M. to-morrow on the old state road to Richmond, between the picket-lines of the two armies. R.E. Lee, General." • General Grant replied to Lee around 5 o'clock in the morning of April 9 : "April 9th, 1865. General: Your note of yesterday is received. I have not authority to treat on the subject of peace. The meeting proposed for 10 A.M. to-day could lead to no good. I will state, however, that I am equally desirous for peace with yourself, and the whole North entertains the same feeling. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms, they would hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed. Seriously hoping that all our difficulties may be settled without the loss of another life, I subscribe myself, etc., U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General" • Eye Witness to History describes the meeting at Appomattox : "General Grant approached the crossroads of Appomattox Court House where he was over taken by a messenger carrying Lee's reply. "April 9th, 1865. General: I received your note of this morning on the picket-line, whither I had come to meet you and ascertain definitely what terms were embraced in your proposal of yesterday with reference to the surrender of this army. I now ask an interview, in accordance with the offer contained in your letter of yesterday, for that purpose. R.E. Lee, General." Grant immediately dismounted, sat by the road and wrote the following reply to Lee : "April 9th, 1865. General R. E. Lee Commanding C. S. Army: Your note of this date is but this moment (11:50 A.M.) received, in consequence of my having passed from the Richmond and Lynchburg road to the Farmville and Lynchburg road. I am at this writing about four miles west of Walker's Church, and will push forward to the front for the purpose of meeting you. Notice sent to me on this road where you wish the interview to take place will meet me. U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General." The exchange of messages initated the historic meeting in the home of Wilmer McLean. Arriving at the home first, General Lee sat in a large sitting room on the first floor. General Grant arrived shortly and entered the room alone while his staff respectfully waited on the front lawn." • Generals Grant and Lee met privately before others entered the room. Eye Witness goes on : "After a short period, the staff was summoned to the room. General Horace Porter described the scene : "We entered, and found General Grant sitting at a marble-topped table in the center of the room, and Lee sitting beside a small oval table near the front window, in the corner opposite to the door by which we entered, and facing General Grant. We walked in softly and ranged ourselves quietly about the sides of the room, very much as people enter a sick-chamber when they expect to find the patient dangerously ill. The contrast between the two commanders was striking, and could not fail to attract marked attention they sat ten feet apart facing each other. General Grant, then nearly forty-three years of age, was five feet eight inches in height, with shoulders slightly stooped. His hair and full beard were a nut-brown, without a trace of gray in them. He had on a single-breasted blouse, made of dark-blue flannel, unbuttoned in front, and showing a waistcoat underneath. He wore an ordinary pair of top-boots, with his trousers inside, and was without spurs. The boots and portions of his clothes were spattered with mud. He had no sword, and a pair of shoulder-straps was all there was about him to designate his rank. In fact, aside from these, his uniform was that of a private soldier. Lee, on the other hand, was fully six feet in height, and quite erect for one of his age, for he was Grant's senior by sixteen years. His hair and full beard were silver-gray, and quite thick, except that the hair had become a little thin in the front. He wore a new uniform of Confederate gray, buttoned up to the throat, and at his side he carried a long sword of exceedingly fine workmanship, the hilt studded with jewels. His top-boots were comparatively new, and seemed to have on them some ornamental stitching of red silk. Like his uniform, they were singularly clean, and but little travel-stained. On the boots were handsome spurs, with large rowels. A felt hat, which in color matched pretty closely that of his uniform, and a pair of long buckskin gauntlets lay beside him on the table." • The discussion began : "General Grant began the conversation by saying 'I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico, when you came over from General Scott's headquarters to visit Garland's brigade, to which I then belonged. I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognized you anywhere.' 'Yes,' replied General Lee, 'I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked, but I have never been able to recall a single feature.' The two generals talked a bit more about Mexico and moved on to a discussion of the terms of the surrender when Lee asked Grant to commit the terms to paper : 'Very well,' replied General Grant, 'I will write them out.' And calling for his manifold order-book, he opened it on the table before him and proceeded to write the terms. The leaves had been so prepared that three impressions of the writing were made. He wrote very rapidly, and did not pause until he had finished the sentence ending with 'officers appointed by me to receive them.' Then he looked toward Lee, and his eyes seemed to be resting on the handsome sword that hung at that officer's side. He said afterward that this set him to thinking that it would be an unnecessary humiliation to require officers to surrender their swords, and a great hardship to deprive them of their personal baggage and horses, and after a short pause he wrote the sentence: 'This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage.' Grant handed the document to Lee. After reviewing it, Lee informed Grant that the Cavalry men and Artillery men in the Confederate Army owned their horses and asked that they keep them. Grant agreed and Lee wrote a letter formally accepting the surrender. Lee then made his exit." • A contemporary sketch of the departure of the Generals describes it this way : "At a little before 4 o'clock General Lee shook hands with General Grant, bowed to the other officers, and with Colonel Marshall left the room. One after another we followed, and passed out to the porch. Lee signaled to his orderly to bring up his horse, and while the animal was being bridled the general stood on the lowest step and gazed sadly in the direction of the valley beyond where his army lay -- now an army of prisoners. He smote his hands together a number of times in an absent sort of way; seemed not to see the group of Union officers in the yard who rose respectfully at his approach, and appeared unconscious of everything about him. All appreciated the sadness that overwhelmed him, and he had the personal sympathy of every one who beheld him at this supreme moment of trial. The approach of his horse seemed to recall him from his reverie, and he at once mounted. General Grant now stepped down from the porch, and, moving toward him, saluted him by raising his hat. He was followed in this act of courtesy by all our officers present; Lee raised his hat respectfully, and rode off to break the sad news to the brave fellows whom he had so long commanded." • • • WHY DID THE SECESSIONIST SOUTH LOSE THE CIVIL WAR? More books have been written about the Civil War than about any other period in US history. This is natural because the Civil War was not only the bloodiest American conflict, it was also the war that settled who Americans are as a nation, a war whose outcome and rhetoric have defined us forever. This makes the Civil War one to be studied and understood, not -- as the rabid Know-Nothing Progressive movement is now trying to do by hiding Confederate statues and changing place-names -- erased from America's memory. • It is a truth that has become trite from overuse, but those who do not understand history ARE doomed to repeat it. And, the secession dialogue of 2018 is in some ways a result of knowing very little about what happened after the Confederate States seceded, except that the North won. It is a mystery to me that while people talk glibly of secession being the only solution, they have shown no plan about to make secession work -- how will borders be controlled; who will be able to move and how to be in the part of the divided America they prefer; what about natural resources sharing; what will be the commercial and industrial relationship between the seceded and Union parts of America; who will control and create currencies and what central banks will exist; how will the national debt be divided among the two parts; how ill seceded states pay social security and Medicare / Medicaid now in the hands of the federal govenrment; what will the military become and who will it represent, both internally and in the world. I could write questions all day. The point is -- to secede sounds like a panacea, but in reality it would open up a long period of confusion and economic and security weakness and vulnerability exposing the US to all sorts of domestic and foreign enemies. • So, why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War. The most succinct answer came from Confederate General George Pickett who led Pickett's charge at Gettysburg : "I always thought the north had something to do with it." • Carl Zebrowski, of Civil War Times Illustrated, wrote a piece in the American History Magazine published on August 19, 1999, that tried to answer this question. He noted that General Grant said : " 'The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.' Put that way, the business of fighting and winning wars sounds simple enough. And perhaps it was simple in the mind of the man who so concisely described the complex art : General Ulysses S. Grant. After assuming command of all Union armies in March 1864, Grant crushed the Confederacy in about one year. But the American Civil War, like any war, was not simple. The North and South engaged each other for four long years. More than half a million people were killed. Families were torn apart, towns destroyed. And in the end, the South lost. For the past 130 years Americans have argued over the reasons for the Confederacy’s downfall. Diverse opinions have appeared in hundreds of books, but the numerous possibilities have never adequately been summarized and gathered together in one place. So we decided to ask ten of the country’s most respected Civil War historians: “Why did the South lose the Civil War?” Here (edited for length) are their answers." • Here is a sampling of the answers. • WILLIAM C. DAVIS, former editor of Civil War Times Illustrated and author of more than thirty books about the war, including the recent A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy said this : "Why did the South lose? When the question is asked that way, it kind of presupposes that the South lost the war all by itself and that it really could have won it. One answer is that the North won it. The South lost because the North outmanned and outclassed it at almost every point, militarily. Despite the long-held notion that the South had all of the better generals, it really had only one good army commander and that was Lee. The rest were second-raters, at best. The North, on the other hand, had the good fortune of bringing along and nurturing people like Grant, William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George H. Thomas, and others. The South was way outclassed industrially. There was probably never any chance of it winning without European recognition and military aid. And we can now see in retrospect what some, like Jefferson Davis, even saw at the time, which was that there was never any real hope of Europe intervening. It just never was in England or France’s interests to get involved in a North American war that would inevitably have wound up doing great damage, especially to England’s maritime trade. Industrially the South couldn’t keep up in output and in manpower. By the end of the war, the South had, more or less, plenty of weaponry still, but it just didn’t have enough men to use the guns. I don’t agree with the theories that say the South lost because it lost its will to win....We can’t fault the Southerners for thinking at the time that they could win when we can see in retrospect that there probably never was a time when they could have. The most important things they couldn’t see was the determination of Abraham Lincoln to win, and the incredible staying power of the people of the North, who stuck by Lincoln and stuck by the war in spite of the first two years of almost unrelenting defeat. The only way the South could have won would have been for Lincoln to decide to lose. As long as Lincoln was determined to prosecute the war and as long as the North was behind him, inevitably superior manpower and resources just had to win out. The miracle is that the South held out as long as it did. That’s an incredible testament to the courage and self-sacrifice of the people of the South -- both the men in the armies and the people at home who sustained them, with nothing but continuing and expanding destruction all around them. The South lost the war because the North and Abraham Lincoln were determined to win it." • ROBERT KRICK, historian and author of ten books about the war, said this : "The South lost because it had inferior resources in every aspect of military personnel and equipment. That’s an old-fashioned answer. Lots of people will be scornful of it. But a ratio of twenty-one million to seven million in population comes out the same any way you look at it....Give Abraham Lincoln seven million men and give Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee twenty-one million, and cognitive dissonance doesn’t matter, European recognition doesn’t matter, the Emancipation Proclamation and its ripple effect don’t matter. Twenty-one to seven is a very different thing than seven to twenty-one." • BRIAN POHANKA, consultant for the weekly series “Civil War Journal” on the Arts and Entertainment network, on-set history advisor for the movie Gettysburg, a staff writer and researcher for Time-Life Books’ The Civil War series, and a founder of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, said : "The South certainly did not lose for any lack of idealism, or dedication to its cause or beliefs, or bravery and skill on the battlefield. In those virtues the Confederate soldier was unexcelled, and it’s my belief that man-for-man there was no finer army in the history of America than the Army of Northern Virginia. But of course the factors that enter into the South’s ultimate defeat are those things that you hear time and time again, and with a great amount of validity : the North’s industrial base; the North’s manpower resources; the fact that foreign recognition was denied the Confederacy. In time these things would tell on the battlefield....The North was able to bring its industry and its manpower to bear in such a way that eventually, through sheer numerical and material advantage, it gained and maintained the upper hand. That’s when you get into the whole truly tragic sense of the Lost Cause, because those men knew their cause was lost, they knew there was really no way they could possibly win, and yet they fought on with tremendous bravery and dedication. And that’s, I think, one of the reasons why the Civil War was such a poignant and even heart-wrenching time. Whether or not you agree with the Confederacy or with the justness of its cause, there’s no way that you can question the idealism and the courage, the bravery, the dedication, the devotion of its soldiers -- that they believed what they were fighting for was right. Even while it was happening, men like Union officer Joshua Chamberlain -- who did all that he could to defeat the Confederacy -- could not help but admire the dedication of those soldiers." • NOAH ANDRE TRUDEAU, author of three books about the war’s final year, including Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War (April-June 1865), wrote : "One main reason why the South lost (and this may seem offbeat because it flies in the face of the common wisdom) is that the South lacked the moral center that the North had in this conflict. Robert Kirby in his book on Florida’s Edward Kirby Smith and the Trans-Mississippi suggests that the South’s morale began to disintegrate in the Trans-Mississippi in about 1862. The North had a fairly simple message that was binding it together, and that message was that the Union, the idea of Union, was important, and probably after 1863 you could add the crusade against slavery to that. Ask the question, “What was the South fighting for; what was the Southern way of life that they were trying to protect?” and you will find that Southerners in Arkansas had a very different answer from Southerners in Georgia or Southerners in Virginia. And what you increasingly find as the war continued is that the dialogue got more and more confused. And you actually had state governors such as Joe Brown in Georgia identifying the needs of Georgia as being paramount and starting to withhold resources from the Confederacy and just protecting the basic infrastructure of the Georgia state government over the Confederacy. In the North you certainly had dialogue and debate on the war aims, but losing the Union was never really a part of that discussion. Preserving the Union was always the constant. So, one key reason the South lost is that as time went on and the war got serious, Southerners began losing faith in the cause because it really did not speak to them directly." • JAMES M. MCPHERSON, professor of history at Princeton University and author of nine books about the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, wrote : "Historians have offered several explanations for the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. First, the North had a superiority in numbers and resource -- but superiority did not bring victory to the British Empire in its war against the American colonies that were fighting for their independence in 1776, nor did it bring victory to the United States in its war against North Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. While Northern superiority in numbers and resources was a necessary condition for Union victory, it is not a sufficient explanation for that victory. Neither are the internal divisions within the Confederacy sufficient explanation for its defeat, because the North also suffered sharp internal divisions between those who supported a war for the abolition of slavery and those who resisted it, between Republicans and Democrats, between Unionists and Copperheads. And, in fact, the North probably suffered from greater internal disunity than the Confederacy. Superior leadership is a possible explanation for Union victory....By the latter half of the war, Northern military leadership had evolved a coherent strategy for victory which involved the destruction of Confederate armies but went beyond that to the destruction of Confederate resources to wage war, including the resource of slavery, the South’s labor power. By the time Grant had become general-in-chief and Sherman his chief subordinate and Sheridan one of his hardest-hitting field commanders, the North had evolved a strategy that in the end completely destroyed the Confederacy’s ability to wage war. And that combination of strategic leadership–both at the political level with Lincoln and the military level with Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan–is what in the end explains Northern victory." • RICHARD MCMURRY, historian and author of Two Great Rebel Armies, which examines the Confederacy’s defeat, wrote : "If I had to pin the South’s defeat down to one sentence, I would have to say it was due to very bad military commanders: Albert Sidney Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, John C. Pemberton, Joseph E. Johnston, and John Bell Hood (and if you want to go down a notch or two in the command structure, Leonidas Polk, William J. Hardee, and Joseph Wheeler)....Let me point out that every one of those generals was in the West. Any explanation that does not account for the West is irrelevant to your question. The war was lost by the Confederates in the West and won by the Federals in the West. I don’t see how you could even question that. In the crucial theater of the war, the Confederacy did not have a competent commanding general." • HERMAN HATTAWAY, professor of history at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and coauthor of Why the South Lost the Civil War, wrote : "My collaborators and I, in our book Why the South Lost the Civil War, laid out our theory, which is that the South lost the Civil War because it didn’t really want to win badly enough. Defeat was ultimately due to a loss of collective will. But in other discussions with various learned groups, I’ve been induced to admit that in order for the Southern people to have a sufficient degree of will to win the war, they would have had to be a different people than they were. And so, in that sense, victory for the South was ultimately an impossibility. Now certainly the course of the war, the military events, had a lot to do with the loss of will. The Southerners hoped that they would win spectacular victories on Northern soil, and they didn’t. They hoped that they would be able to exhaust the will of the Northern people, and they didn’t. And I don’t know that all of the Southern people put a great deal of stock in their hopes that Abraham Lincoln would not be reelected, but certainly the key Southern leaders did, and this was their great hope and great strategy toward the end. With regard to military turning points, I’m not a fan of those, and I certainly don’t think that Gettysburg and Vicksburg dictated the inevitable outcome of the war. We tend in Why the South Lost to imply that there was really still hope until March of 1865, but really I think the outcome of the war became inevitable in November 1864 with the reelection of Lincoln and that utter determination to see the thing through, and, of course, the finding of U.S. Grant by Lincoln and company. Grant was certainly the man to provide the leadership that the North needed." • EDWIN C. BEARSS, former chief historian of the National Park Service and author of several books about the war, wrote : "The South lost the Civil War because of a number of factors. First, it was inherently weaker in the various essentials to win a military victory than the North. The North had a population of more than twenty-two million people to the South’s nine-and-a-half million, of whom three-and-a-half million were slaves. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations and in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent. So if the South were to win, it had to win a short war by striking swiftly -- in modern parlance, by an offensive blitzkrieg strategy. But the Confederates had established their military goals as fighting in defense of their homeland. In 1861, when enthusiasm was high in the South, it lacked the wherewithal and the resolution to follow up on its early victories, such as First Manassas in the East and at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington in the West. Despite the South’s failure to capitalize on its successes in 1861, it came close to reversing the tide that ran against it beginning in February 1862. In the period between the fourth week of June 1862 and the last days of September and early days of October, the South did reverse the tide, sweeping forward on a broad front from the tidewater of Virginia to the Plains Indian territory. And abroad, the British were preparing to offer to mediate the conflict and, if the North refused, to recognize the Confederacy. But beginning at Antietam and ending at Perryville, all this unraveled, and the Confederates’ true high water mark had passed. In 1864, with the approach of the presidential election in the North, the Confederates had another opportunity to win the war. If the Confederate armies in Virginia, Georgia, and on the Gulf Coast could successfully resist the North and the war of attrition inaugurated by General Grant (with its particularly high casualties in Virginia), there was a good probability, as recognized by President Lincoln himself in the summer, that his administration would go down to defeat in November. But the success of Admiral David G. Farragut in Mobile Bay, the capture of Atlanta on the second of September by General Sherman, and the smashing success scored by General Sheridan at the expense of General Jubal A. Early at Cedar Creek, Virginia on October 19 shattered this hope, and Lincoln was reelected by a landslide in the electoral vote. With Lincoln’s reelection, the road to Southern defeat grew shorter." • Believe it or not, the comments on this 20-year-old article are still arriving today. here are some recent comments. §§ The South failed to unite all the slave states against the North. They would have fared much better with Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware in the Confederacy. §§ The South made a big mistake in firing on Fort Sumter. I believe the North was nearly ready to give it up with no battle when they fired. Doing that stirred up a hornets nest similar to Pearl Harbor in WWII. §§ The South fought well in the South. Having good intelligence was a big factor in that. It was different when they invaded the North. For example, discovering Lee's battle plan used as wrapping of a handful of cigars spoiled Lee's first invasion of Maryland and brought on Antietam. §§ The North's artillery was very good and the South's was very bad. §§ The South lost a lot of generals in battle, about 80, most notably Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sydney Johnston. Many have criticized the leadership of the Southern army but it's tough to win a losing hand. §§ Another reason why the South lost the war is that the very principles upon which the Confederacy was founded prohibited their nationalization of a singular fighting force. To put it another way, the basis of secession for the south was to escape "Federalism" and promote the rights of states and individuals. This ideal by its nature prohibits things like conscription or pooling of resources by the several states for a "national" war. In other words, the Civil War pitted one united nation against a bunch of states under a loosely organized agreement. When the Confederacy instituted a single currency and a draft (out of necessity to prosecute the war), they abandoned the principles upon which they were founded, resulting in public backlash. This combined with a currency that was nearly worthless, made this fight unsustainable without significant help from other countries. In the South, citizens struggled with worthless currency, their land being razed, and a limited population base to use as soldiers, and extreme sacrifice to the war effort. In the North, daily life continued without much interruption for many citizens. • • • DEAR READERS, that last comment is extremely applicable to today's talk of secession. Those in leadership positions in rogue Progressive Democrat states like California and Oregon do not talk of seceding -- their goal is to force all of America to agree with them, or at least give up the fight and let them do what they want -- the Constitution be damned. Has Governor Jerry Brown ever mentioned "states rights" or secession as a defense for his actions? Not that I know of. The national ProgDem leadership is hellbent on crushing states rights. This is important, because it illustrates that those who call for secession are those who support states rights. They would, after secession, become a lot like the Confederacy -- "the basis of secession for the south was to escape 'Federalism' and promote the rights of states and individuals. This ideal by its nature prohibits things like conscription or pooling of resources by the several states for a 'national' war. In other words, the Civil War pitted one united nation against a bunch of states under a loosely organized agreement." • My questions about currency, the military, and commercial and industrial relations apply. Secessionist "states rights" states would risk becoming a country organized under an Articles of Confederation theory that leads to little unity. • Now, that may be what those talking about secession want. But, they are also Americans, expecting to be powerful and wealthy. • I am not arguing against secession, per se. I am only saying that a lot of planning needs to be done, and a lot of agreement needs to be reached about the hows, whats, who's, and results of secession. • In his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, President Lincoln said : "On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war -- seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came." • Today, America is poised, as she was in 1861, at the brink of momentous decisions. The Progressive destruction of the Constitution cannot continue. The effort to unseat a legitimate President cannot continue. The 'madman' work of Deep State bureaucrats and special counsel cannot continue. We agree on these critical problems. But, if I had to choose, I would choose fighting to save the Union. I would not sulk away into secession, destroying the Republic. I would stand with Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, Reagan -- and Trump. For, we must remember that if some states secede, President Trump will still be President of the United States. I would not want to separate from or fight against President Trump, not while he is fighting mightily, himself, to save the Union. Why give up and let the Progressive cabal win. Why let it destroy the Constitution, even for some Americans. Better to stand and fight for Union and the Republic than to slink away into no-man's-land.