A Republic, If We Can Keep It
The Civil War's spark was the Nullification Crisis. Is Governor Gavin Newsom's defiance on immigration law its successor?
As spring came on in 1862, a Tennessee farmer and his two brothers set out from their homes along King’s Creek, going north toward the Kentucky line. The trip was likely treacherous, as Confederate-empowered home guards roamed the Cumberland Mountains to ambush volunteers headed to enlist in the Union Army.
When my great-great-great grandfather, Ben Hendrickson, made it to safety at Camp Dick Robinson, he was mustered into the 5th Tennessee Infantry, an outfit in Abe Lincoln’s army comprised entirely of traitors to their seceded state.
Civil wars do not cleave cleanly, and most people in Appalachian East Tennessee fell on the blue side of the knife. But not all.
Tennessee rejected the first call for a secession convention in February, 1861, due mainly to those Unionist sympathies in the mountains. After Fort Sumter fell, another statewide vote pulled Tennessee into the Confederacy, while my foothills county, and the 22 counties surrounding it, still resisted. Bloodshed had changed the minds of Tennesseans in lower elevations, but most hillbillies still wanted no part of the planters’ war.
Men like my ancestors were forced to pick between their nation and their state, and in some cases, their neighbors. Ben Hendrickson, my grandaddy’s namesake, got through three years of infantry, came home and lived into his 90s. One of his brothers was not so lucky.
The War Between the States had been brewing for a generation; historians flag the Nullification Crisis in 1832-33 as the first domino to fall. South Carolina defied a federal tariff law, unilaterally declaring unconstitutional, null and void inside its boundaries.
The theory that a state could nullify a federal law and ignore it had been percolating as regional tensions rose. President Andrew Jackson called South Carolina’s bluff and sent federal troops to enforce Washington’s will.
Sound familiar? The recent standoff between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Washington could be a successor to this controversy.
Newsom’s California refuses to accept the execution of the immigration laws passed by Congress. The Golden State has a sanctuary law, called the California Values Act, that forbids highway patrolmen, sheriffs and local cops from aiding federal border security police in law enforcement.
After riots flared last month, President Donald Trump dispatched the National Guard to protect the federal building in downtown L.A., mobilizing Marines in reserve, all while Newsom bellowed defiance.
Can California’s modern-day version of nullification one day lead to a full-blown secession in America?
The next time it flares, could the same protesters who set cars aflame and waved Mexican flags in June’s protests decide to launch a symbolic assault on the Marine barracks at Twentynine Palms, California? Remember, the first shots of the Civil War were from student cadets at the Citadel, a military college, fired on the U.S. Army post at Fort Sumter to ignite the ante-bellum powder keg.
Seem far-fetched? Our nation’s polarization is getting no narrower.
Trump is moving to use more levers to punish California and the state is suing the President. The lawsuits against the President, mostly filed by Attorneys General in blue states like California, have resulted in 187 court orders to pause executive action. California even sued Trump on tariffs, which are clearly an item of federal and not state purview – as the 1832 Nullification Crisis settled.
As thermostats rise, we should remember our disagreements do not neatly follow state lines. Red states are not purely red, blue states not all blue.
The San Joaquin Valley, a world away from the L.A. riots in pace and politics, went heavily for Trump. In fact, Trump carried more counties in California than Vice President Kamala Harris, a Golden Stater herself, did. Trump lost 23 counties in California in 2024, almost all on the coast, but he won 32 inland counties, some by margins exceeding 2:1.
If the wealthier, more powerful communities along the Pacific led a California secession from the United States, would the inland farmers turn against them like my ancestors drew their guns against their fellow Tennesseans?
As you read this column, you’re thinking it’s impossible. But a poll taken by the Independent California Institute just after Trump’s inauguration found 58 percent of Golden Staters agreed that their home would be better off if California seceded. That was before the recent ICE crackdown.
A California secession would take away 14 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product and deprive the nation of innovation, given that the Golden State has the second highest per-capita rate of patents issued. Eliminating California would hand more clout nationally to Republicans – pushing Texas to 45 electoral votes instead of the 40 it wields today, and Florida to 34 electoral votes instead of the 30 it has today. Without California’s lopsided Democratic delegation to the U.S. House, Republicans would have a 30-plus seat majority instead of the 3-seat cushion Speaker Mike Johnson manages.
Fissures of history crack open when minority sentiment, held zealously by people who deem the status quo intolerable, ignites into risky, irrational action. It could happen again.
This week, we celebrate Independence Day. Founding father John Adams estimated that no more than 40 to 45 percent of the free population of the colonies supported the rebellion against King George. Thankfully, that was enough.
Sometimes hot-headed zealots birth the United States of America. Sometimes they create the devastating carnage of the Civil War. As Ben Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, he was asked by a woman named Elizabeth Willing Powell: “Well doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” The most senior founding father reportedly answered her: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
As we celebrate this Independence Day, let’s toast the intentional, and unending, work to keep our fragile republic.
