The Civil War and the One and the Many

The philosophical problem of the one and the many is one that is pervasive throughout western thought. Cornelius Van Til and R.J. Rushdoony have both given us excellent ways of resolving this problem within a Christian world and life view. It is interesting to me how often the problem comes up in history and literature. It is as pervasive a problem in real affairs as it is in philosophy classes. Some of my students have heard me speak of the way it affects the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century before Christ. Recently I became aware of just how important it is in understanding the war between the states (commonly called the Civil War).
One aspect of the causes of the Civil War was the constitutional issue of secession. Could states, once joined to the Union, separate themselves from the Union? Were the states a national union or were they a diversity of independent states? The One (National Union) and the Many (Independent states). The answer to this question, fought over during the Civil War, has been answered by default. A national union was forged in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Ideas have consequences...

Lincoln on Revolutions

There is no way I am the first person to see the irony of this. While reading Abraham Lincoln's speech to the US House of Representatives in 1848, I came across these comments by Lincoln:
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor it this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they inhabit."
I am, of course, wondering where this sentiment went thirteen years later when secession broke out among the Southern States? According to George Grant, and I think he is right, one of most fundamental planks of the revolutionary faith (as developed by Karl Marx) is that all further revolutionary action must be put down. There can be no revolution against the revolution. So long as Lincoln is speaking of Texas becoming a country or state everything is fine. However, when the issue becomes part of the United States wanting to leave, to disrupt the normal flow of the revolution in favor of a more conservative government well, we must put a stop to that.
This little tidbit just helps me understand the constitutional basis of secession a little better.