SECESSION, a term used in political science to signify the withdrawal of a State from a confederacy or composite State, of which it had previously been a part; and the resumption of all powers formerly delegated by it to the Federal Government, and of its status as an independent State. To secede is a sovereign right ; secession, therefore, is based on the theory that the sover eignty of the individual States forming a confederacy or Federal union has not been absorbed into a single new sovereignty. Seces sion is a right claimed or exercised by weaker States of a union whose rights are threatened by the stronger States, which seldom acknowledge such a principle. War generally follows the secession of a member of a union, and the seceding State, being weaker, is usually conquered and the union more firmly consolidated.
Secession in theory and practice is best exhibited in the history of the United States. Most of the original States, and many of the later ones, at some period when rights were in jeopardy proclaimed that their sovereignty might be exercised in secession. The right to secede was based, the secessionists claimed, upon the fact that each State was sovereign, becoming so by successful revolution against England; there had been no political connection between the Colo nies; the treaty of 1783 recognized them "as free, sovereign and independent States"; this sovereignty was recognized in the Articles of Confederation, and not surrendered, they asserted, under the Constitution; the Union of 1787 was really formed by a secession from the Union of 1776-87. New States claimed all the rights of the old ones, having been admitted to equal standing. Assertions of the right and necessity of secession were frequent from the beginning; separatist conspiracies were rife in the West until 1812; various leaders in New England made threats of secession in 1790-96 and 1800-15—especially in 1803 on account of the purchase of Louisiana, in 1811 on account of the proposed admission of Louisiana as a State, and during the troubles ending in the War of 1812. Voluntary separation was
frequently talked of before 1815. In 1832-33 the "Union" Party of South Carolina was composed of those who rejected nullification, holding to secession as the only remedy; and from 1830 to 1860 certain radical abolitionists advocated a division of the Union. But as the North grew stronger and the South in comparison grew weaker, as slavery came to be more and more the dominant political issue, and as the South made demands concerning that "peculiar institution" to which the North was unwilling to accede, less was heard of secession in the North and more in the South. Between 1845 and 1860 secession came to be generally accepted by the South as the only means of pre serving her institutions from the interference of the North. The first general movement toward secession was in 1850. In 186o 61, when the Federal Government passed into the control of the stronger section, the Southern States, individually, seceded and then formed the Confederate States, but in the war that fol lowed they were conquered and forced back into the Union.
See Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government 0880 ; A. H. Stephens, Constitutional View of the War between the States (Philadelphia, 1868-70) ; J. Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy (Mobile, 1876) ; B. Samuel, Secession and Constitutional Liberty (1920) ; B. J. Sage, Republic of (Boston, 1876) ; Woodrow Wilson, The State (Boston, 190o) ; A. L. Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe (Boston, 1896) ; J. W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (1895), and C. E. Merriam, American Political Theories (1902). See also STATE RIGHTS ; NULLIFICATION ; and CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA. (W. L. F.)