28th Amendment: A right to secede

Despite what you may have been taught, the Civil War’s causes were almost entirely unrelated to the issue of slavery. Slavery wasn’t an issue until the end of the war, when using the North used it to its advantage.

The war was fought primarily over whether states have a right to secede from the Union.

The inclusion of a right to secede in our constitution, which would lay out specific situations in which a state or states had the right to leave and what specific steps and benchmarks have to be met to go about doing so, might have helped us avoid one of our nation’s most tragic armed conflicts.

This issue is not merely an academic one. Multiple nations are grappling with the issue of secession today.

This, notably, includes our neighbor to the north. Canada has been mired in a half-century-long political conflict over whether the French-speaking province of Quebec has a constitutional right to secede from the federation.

If Canada and other nations that have had conflicts with separatist groups had the foresight to embed a conditional right of secession in their constitutions it is much less likely the issue of secession would have had such an enormous impact on the political environment and culture of nations like Canada and others (many of which have experienced severe violence in attempting to decide whether this right exists).
 
Perhaps most importantly, if the United States and other nations would willingly choose to embed a constitutional right to secede within their legal frameworks, the potential millions of people who may die in future conflicts regarding this fundamental legal question may be spared.


Email: zammerma@indiana.edu