Jim Epperson posted a query about whether the Supreme Court ever ruled
on the legality of secession. It did in 1869 in Texas v. White,
7 Wallace 700 (1869). Texas's reconstruction government attempted to
recover U.S. bonds sold by Texas's Confederate government during the war.
A majority of the Court concurred in Chief Justice Chase's statement that
Texas entered into "an indissoluble relation" with the United States upon
its entry; the Constitution "looks to an indestructable Union, composed
of indestructable States." (Had secession been legal, Texas would have no
standing to sue, Chase argued.) However, Chase continued, Texas's rights as
a state had been suspended by the war. The case involved Reconstruction as
much as it did secession, addressing as it did the status of the former
Confederate states at the end of the war.
Chase's argument against secession rested upon the statement made in
the Articles of Confederation that its members were forming a perpetual
union, and the 1787 statement that the Constitution sought to improve on
this by forming a "more perfect union." Abraham Lincoln had employed the
same argument.
Kenneth Stampp offered his observations on this in "The Concept of a
Perpetual Union," in THE IMPERILED UNION: ESSAYS ON THE BACKGROUND
OF THE CIVIL WAR (1980). He points out that this argument's roots
go back to Andrew Jackson and Joseph Story.
Brooks D. Simpson ATBDS@ASUACAD
Department of History 602-965-5778
Arizona State University