Let me tell you a story. (1/x) https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1340866796786741250

Timothy Pickering had a resume that any modern politician would envy – war hero, postmaster general, secretary of war, secretary of state – but conspicuously absent from this list is another title: secessionist. (2/x)

In 1803, Pickering tried to convince Federalists to secede from the Union because of his opposition to the Jefferson Administration and, in particular, the Louisiana Purchase, but he would fail just like his southern brethren when they tried to secede a generation later. (3/x)

The fact that there were efforts to secede in 1803-1804, as documented by the important work of @TheTattooedProf, shows how throughout our history many have regarded American democracy as an experiment, dissoluble when some party decides it is no longer worth it.

I am always fascinated by the tension between those who assume that American democracy is inevitable—as if letting the President’s worst impulses play out in courts of law and public opinion aren’t harmful because we will survive it—(5/x)

while simultaneously threatening to leave this democracy (as if these threats also have no effect). (6/x)

Yet Pickering’s failed attempt at secession in 1803 is important because it helped lay the theoretical foundation for southern secession a generation later, leading to a war that killed 750k Americans. (7/x)

Jefferson once referred to the states as a “creature of the Compact,” something that Pickering would latch on to in urging secession since it suggested that states were free to leave the Union, “the compact,” at will. (8/x)

The view that the union was, in essence, voluntary is a view that never really left – just ask the South Carolina nullifiers of the 1830s. Invoking their right to alter or abolish government, southern secessionists would similarly latch on to this reasoning in 1860. (9/x)

So what does Pickering and the Northeastern secessionists teach us? (10/x)

Many things happening now (spurious litigation, secession chatter, “Stop the Steal,” etc) might be a reach and fanciful and unlikely to happen…but sometimes the things we disregard as folly lay the groundwork for something much bigger later on. Democracy is fragile. (11/x)

Fini! (12/12)