The Grande Experiment

I was watching the making-of Special Feature of the movie Gettysburg. The narrator said, “This grande experiment of the United States of America was on the brink of complete and desperate failure that summer of 1863.” I've heard that expressed before, but something never occurred to me until now. The right to secede, as we have seen, was established and provided for in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. According to common accounts, the “experiment” would have been deemed a failure had the south won independence. I put it to you: the experiment was a failure because the south did not win independence. The intent of the founding fathers was plain in the design of the new government: that it never become a tyrant's yoke upon the shoulders of the unwilling. From its birth in the minds of its architects it derived its authority from the consent of the governed, and should that consent ever be withdrawn, they (the governed) were charged with the duty to separate and form a new government. Had the southern states been allowed to do that peacefully and without obstruction from Mr. Lincoln and his Federal army, then we could have termed the grande experiment a success.