< 'Break It Up' Examines The History Of Secession Movements In The U.S.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

You ever had a moment when you said, if that person wins the presidency, I'm leaving this country? When Barack Obama was president, the governor of Texas talked vaguely about the state's right to leave the union - which it doesn't have. After Donald Trump's election, people talked of California's possible exit from the union, Calexit. This is mostly fantasy, but Americans have had such ideas for a long, long time, and they are sometimes very serious about it. In his new book, "Break It Up," Richard Kreitner explores the history of secession movements in the United States. They are as old as the country itself.

RICHARD KREITNER: The first people who tried to conquer the country after the Declaration of Independence were Westerners, really, in the Appalachian, you know, settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee who doubted that they really wanted to remain united with their brethren back east, who they had already bothered to leave behind when they crossed the mountains. It all depended on which way the rivers ran, basically, because they needed to trade in order to survive. So they wanted to send it down the rivers to the Mississippi, to New Orleans and then out to the world. But Spain controlled New Orleans, and they used that as a sort of lever to undermine the unity of the American states and to attract the Western settlers away from their loyalty to the new Union. So there were separatist movements in Kentucky and in Tennessee, and this was all going on right when the Constitutional Convention was meeting.

INSKEEP: I guess we should mention this is a theme that's going to happen again and again, where people's patriotic instincts or nationalistic instincts are tied up, really, with their economic interests. And sometimes the economic interests are what reigned supreme.

KREITNER: Right, absolutely. And that can undermine the ideals or the patriotism that people think that they have to the union. They can really change on a dime. You know, to skip ahead, the Confederates were ardent patriots right up until they weren't. You know? And then we could see a similar thing happen today.

INSKEEP: So there were all of these different secessionist movements. They have in common that they failed. Then came the Civil War in which the South seceded and also failed. And you write about the effort to unify the country after the Civil War, which, to us, sounds like a great idea. But what was the downside of unity as it was practiced in the years after 1865?

KREITNER: Great question. I think reunifying the country after the Civil War would have been wonderful, and there were a lot of visions for how to do it in a just and truly united way - Frederick Douglass, you know people like that. But the way that it actually happened was that the country reunited on the basis of the very principles and philosophies that the Confederacy had rebelled on behalf of in the first place. So the Compromise of 1877, which ended a contested presidential election that looked close to tipping over into political violence - you know, perhaps a case study for the present moment - the only way that they ended that was with a compromise that essentially said to the South - OK, you can - the white South, of course - you can arrange your domestic institutions, as they euphemistically called segregation, however you want. And we of the North are not willing to go to war again for the sake of meddling in your affairs, which is the way it was spoken of. And that's essentially the compromise that held until, you know, the 1950s, 1960s, when the civil rights movement broke it apart and in a way that our politics have never really recovered from.

INSKEEP: Don't secessionists all have something in common? Throughout your history here, in every case, they're defeated. In virtually every case, they're also humiliated and ridiculed. It's a completely ridiculous idea, it turns out to be, every single time somebody tries it.

KREITNER: Well, they're defeated. The country has survived up to now. I don't think that's any guarantee that it's going to survive to this point. I suppose the Confederacy was humiliated. We still have people marching around holding their flags, however. And again, you know, the American Revolution was itself a secessionist movement, which we celebrate only because it succeeded. And in other ways, you know, I think secessionists have gotten what they wanted over the years, even if they didn't go through with their threats. Certainly, the Federalists, the New Englanders in the War of 1812, were humiliated and rejected, and the party disappeared. But at other times, if you make a secessionist threat and it's plausible, you tend to often get what you want even without having to go through with it.

INSKEEP: Do you think that there may be occasions where unifying the country just is not worth it?

KREITNER: Yeah. I think this is - what I'm basically trying to argue here is that the costs of holding the country together may not be worth it, and perhaps we would do better breaking apart. And I wanted to do a study of all the people throughout American history who have had that idea and to really investigate whether any had done so for noble purposes. You know, of course we've all heard about the Confederacy. I have no sympathy for that, of course. But my heroes of the book, really, are the abolitionists before the Civil War who wanted the North to secede from the Union as a way to protest and ultimately undermine slavery and eventually lead to its, you know, evaporation from the continent.

And I think that in a sense, they were right. The Union had to break apart in order for slavery to end. And I wonder, you know, what injustices we tolerate today, what evils are perpetrated today for the sake of national unity.

INSKEEP: Well, help me draw a dividing line and see what that would look like other than total chaos. Like, who do you imagine seceding from whom, and what does the country look like afterward?

KREITNER: Well, I think the obvious one would be California, our largest states. They have the same two senators that Wyoming has even though they have 68 times the population. I don't see why that is a tolerable or a long-lasting arrangement. So it might be the case that California - at some point in the future, in a country, you know, even more divided than today, wracked by climate change - issues an ultimatum and says, abolish the Senate or redistribute power proportionately to population, or we're going to secede.

INSKEEP: Where do you live?

KREITNER: Brooklyn, N.Y.

INSKEEP: Brooklyn, N.Y. - could you imagine a world in which New York seceded and you became part of some other country? And would you like that idea?

KREITNER: I would not like that idea. Thank you for asking that because this is, you know, a thought experiment. I didn't enter - I didn't start writing this book as a prescription for what I wanted to see about the country. I wrote it as unearthing this idea that I saw had shaped all of American history and that had not yet really been accounted for. And people had sort of limited it to the Civil War era, when I think it was actually there from the beginning and is still there today. So I did not start this book trying to write a program for disunion. I hope not to see that. I love this country. I've traveled all it - 49 states. And I do see people in other parts of the country who vote for different presidents as my fellow countrymen, and I don't want to wave goodbye to them.

But I do think that this needs to be an option available to us in the future. You know, a lot of people are throwing around pretty weighty terminology these days - fascism, authoritarianism. You know, Trump's moves with the election in November are extremely worrisome. And it seems to me that if we are talking about, you know, the end of democracy in America and the permanent establishment of minority rule in this country, I think we need to have all options on the table.

INSKEEP: Richard Kreitner is the author of "Break It Up: Secession, Division, And The Secret History Of America's Imperfect Union."

Thanks so much.

KREITNER: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF ...OF SINKING SHIPS' "IT'S EASIER WITH NO DESTINATION")

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