by Ryan McMaken
February 7, 2024 - Some modern opponents of a right to secession or self-determination invent a variety of reasons why secession was acceptable for Amerikans in the 1770s, but not in the 1860s. For example, historian Brooks Simpson splits many hairs attempting to explain (unconvincingly) that the Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with secession. At the core of many of these claims is the idea that since some Amerikans in the eighteenth century endorsed the current Constitution, then all Amerikans, centuries later, who did not sign or vote for the document are now held to some invisible “social contract”.












