Why the American Revolution Was an Act of Secession

Altering the government of Great Britain was not the colonists' objective. The aim was to dissolve their connection to it and establish independent states. In ordinary political terminology, a civil war is a violent conflict over control of the government within a state. A revolution ordinarily involves a fundamental alteration of a state's governing institutions.

The Americans attempted neither. They did not try to seize Parliament or depose the British government.

Crane Brinton, in The Anatomy of Revolution, treats the American Revolution as unusual because it never advanced as far down the path of radical centralization as the French or Russian Revolutions. In America, he writes, "a struggle between moderates and radicals had been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals." The fruit of that victory, he says, was the Declaration of Independence.

The signers openly challenged British authority by affixing their names to the document. They knew that failure would likely result in charges of treason, the loss of their property, imprisonment, or death.

Jefferson held to the secessionist reading long after 1776. His August 23, 1799, letter to James Madison put the condition in writing: "were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved." In his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801, he said that anyone who wished to dissolve the Union or change its republican form should "stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." He affirmed the right of secession in writing as late as 1816, and there is no evidence he ever abandoned the principle.

The language of the Declaration itself supports the secessionist reading, Mawhorter argues. The colonies declared themselves "Free and Independent States," with "full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce." Sovereign states hold such powers, as The Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms. In the founding era, he argues, the United States were not commonly understood as a single consolidated nation-state. They were a collection of distinct political societies that had united for common purposes while retaining their separate identities and, in many respects, their sovereignty. The name itself was plural, "the United States are" rather than "the United States is."

Plural usage faded. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in 1863 spoke of "a new nation." Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892, pledged loyalty to "one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Neither the Second Continental Congress nor the Declaration had the authority to create a nation, in Mawhorter's telling. The United States is a modern nation-state today, yet the Declaration did not produce that outcome. The path from British colonies to a modern nation-state ran through a decentralized confederacy of sovereign states. The Declaration itself was a joint act of secession by distinct colonies that declared themselves to be free and independent states.

Mawhorter describes an irony in the document's later career. A secessionist text championing natural rights and the consent of the governed was transmogrified into a legitimating document for a centralized American nation-state with almost unlimited power.

Bernard Bailyn, in "The Central Themes of the American Revolution," wrote that the revolutionary leaders infused American political culture with a belief that power is evil and infinitely corrupting, a necessity that must be controlled and limited in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written constitutions, the separation of powers, bills of rights, and restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war all expressed, in his words, "the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after."