Only a handful of abolitionists remained true to the principle of secession. The best known was Lysander Spooner, who defended this right in No Treason, published in three parts. Another was George W. Bassett, a twenty‐​year veteran of abolitionist agitation, who published two tracts: A Northern Plea for the Right of Secession and A Discourse on the Wickedness and Folly of the Present War. In the latter tract (originally delivered as a speech in August 1861) Bassett—described by one historian as “an old‐​line Jeffersonian radical”—stated: “The same principle that has always made me an uncompromising abolitionist, now makes me an uncompromising secessionist. It is the great and sacred right of self‐​government.” Although Bassett supported John Brown and slave uprisings, he noted that the North was not fighting for emancipation. Rather, the North was fighting “for the identical object of Lord North in his war on the American colonies.” The purpose of Lincoln’s war was “not the freedom of the black man, but the enthrallment of the white man” by attempting to maintain a highly centralized government. Although the major motive of southern secessionists was to preserve slavery, Bassett (like Spooner) regarded motives as irrelevant. The right of self‐​government and its logical corollary, the right of secession, was rooted in the “laws of nature and of nature’s God; and not on the sandy and mutable foundation of human motives.”

Another abolitionist who consistently upheld the right of secession was Joshua Blanchard, who was in his eighties when the Civil War erupted. A longtime member of the American Peace Society, Blanchard was distressed by how the vast majority of its members quickly supported the northern side when the fighting started, even though opposition to all war was a fundamental tenet of its constitution. Indeed, when Blanchard surveyed the original signatories to the constitution of another pacifist organization, the League of Universal Brotherhood, who had pledged their opposition to all wars, he asked if they opposed the Civil War. Only two replied in the affirmative. A common reason given for supporting the Civil War was that it was not a true war at all, but a rebellion, and that the suppression of a rebellion was a police action and therefore a legitimate function of government. As the journal the Advocate of Peace put it, if the use of armed force to suppress a rebellion were illegitimate, “then all real, effective government is wrong, and society must be abandoned to a remediless, everlasting anarchy.” As Peter Brock wrote in Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton, 1968):