Jeff Frenkiewich is a Milford Middle School social studies teacher and a UNH adjunct professor
In recent years, the idea of secession as a solution for America’s political divide has gained increased popularity, particularly on the Right. After Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, for example, Ohio congressional candidate J.R. Majewski called for Republican-leaning states to secede from the Union; Mississippi state representative Price Wallace similarly called for his state to secede. In 2021, the Texas Republican party endorsed legislation that called for a referendum on state secession, and Sen. Ted Cruz told Texas A&M students that he would support the measure if “things become hopeless” under President Biden.
This March, right here in New Hampshire, 13 Republican State Representatives voted in support of a state constitutional amendment to read that New Hampshire “peaceably declares independence from the United States and immediately proceeds as a sovereign nation.”
Thankfully, more than 300 lawmakers voted down the measure.
Polling conducted in 2021 found that 66 percent of Republicans in Southern states favored seceding from the Union, but sentiment in favor of secession has growing support among Democrats. The same poll found that 47 percent of Democrats in the Pacific coast states and 43 percent of Democrats in the Northeastern states also favored secession. National media outlets have also fueled this narrative by publishing stories with titles like “The Case for Blue-State Secession.”
Most recently, retired New Hampshire Chief Justice John Broderick contemplated the growing political divide in this country and asked, “Is America headed toward a two-state solution?”
Citing our nations’ seeming inability to work out solutions for the many problems that challenge this country, Broderick is left with the “nagging belief that we have already become ‘two nations under God’ and that without a shot being fired we might need to make that a physical reality: one nation blue and the other red….that a two-state solution may be the only answer to America’s woes.”
As calls for secession grow more powerful, and contemplations of a “two-state solution” have reached the lips of our most respected public servants, I urge readers to pause and consider a question posed by New Hampshire’s native son, Daniel Webster. In a March 7, 1850 speech on the floor of the Senate, as Americans then contemplated secession over the issue of slavery, Webster asked those who called for secession, “Where is the line to be drawn?”
Webster asked a serious of other pragmatic questions such as, “What states are to secede? What is to remain American?…Where is the flag of the Republic to remain?…What is to become of the army?…What is to become of the public lands?…” But I wish to consider here Webster’s first question: “Where is the line to be drawn?”
While America looks divisible by its Blue State / Red State regions, when we look closer, we see that each of the states are themselves divided between Blue and Red counties, each county has towns on either side of the political spectrum, and each town has families on each side. In fact, even the deepest Red states have urban centers with Democratic majorities and the deepest Blue states have rural areas with Republican majorities. Secession would not just divide the country, it would divide states, towns and families.
Furthermore, when we consider a historical view, comparing the last three presidential elections (2012, 2016, 2020), for example, we see that these artificial lines of division sway with the political winds. Majority support for Democrats or Republicans switched at least once in half of New Hampshire’s counties over the course of those three elections, and even Belknap County, a Republican stronghold in the past three elections, voted for Barack Obama in 2008. “Where is the line to be drawn?”
New Hampshire, along with the rest of the nation, is a “purple” fabric of communities interlinked by our economy, culture, and our kindred ties, and I think Webster’s questions should prompt all Americans to pause and consider the consequences of modern declarations of secession, as it will do more to tear us apart than to answer any of the nation’s problems.
I’m not here to argue against pursuing the truth and doing what is right, as there are clear moral lines in the issues that divide us today (just as there was a clear moral line in the issue of slavery), but artificial Blue/Red state divisions and this narrative of secession as a solution to any of our problems distract from finding workable solutions to those problems. Webster makes clear in his speech that democratic governance is hard when extremist voices, on both sides of the political spectrum, drown out civil discourse, but it is our duty as Americans to push through the noise and find solutions to these problems without tearing the fabric of our nation apart.
Instead of looking to divide, we must search for the causes of that division and find answers that can bring us together.
Webster says in his closing lines, “Let us make our generation one of the strongest, and the brightest link, in that golden chain which is destined, I fully believe, to grapple the people of all the states to this Constitution for ages to come.” That generation failed – let us not repeat their mistakes.
The views expressed here represent those of the author, not UNH or Milford School District.