ON DECEMBER 24th 1860 the government of South Carolina issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina.” The proclamation stated that the “ends for which [America’s] government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them.” Six southern states followed suit in the ensuing six weeks. On March 11th 1861 representatives from those seven states ratified the constitution of the Confederate states of America, and a month and a day later troops from the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, a United States sea fort off the South Carolina coast. Thus began America’s civil war. On November 7th 2012—the day after Barack Obama was re-elected—a petition appeared on the “We the People” White House website, which is a means for citizens to engage in their first-amendment right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. It asked the federal government to allow Louisiana to secede from the United States. Since then, petitioners from all the other 49 states have requested that their states be granted permission to secede. The White House promises that any petition that gathers more than 25,000 signatures within 30 days will receive an official response. As of November 27th, petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas had all crossed that threshold. Larry Scott Kilgore is preparing not just to run for governor of Texas on a secessionist platform in 2014, but to change his name to Larry SECEDE Kilgore. So, should the north start dusting off those blue Union uniforms? Should New Orleanians prudently prepare to bring their passports when they head to Chicago? They need not. For one thing, secession is illegal. It was arguably so when the southern states did it the first time, but the Supreme Court established it beyond a doubt in Texas v White, decided in 1869. Americans dissatisfied with their government do of course have the right to emigrate, but they do not have the right to sunder the union in a fit of pique.

Second, there are far more loyalists than secessionists. Take Texas: its petition leads the pack with over 117,000 signatories. Not all of them are from Texas but, even if they were, that would amount to roughly less than half of 1% of the state’s total population or, to put it another way, roughly 1/28 as many Texans as voted for Mr Obama (he may have lost Texas decisively, but he still won more votes there than he did in Illinois, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts). Louisiana’s signatory-to-population ratio is closer, but it still falls well below 1%. Even Rick Perry, governor of Texas and no fan of the federal government, has opposed the drive for secession. As for Mr Kilgore, he ran for governor as a secessionist in 2006 and 2010 and failed dismally; there is no reason to suspect he will do any better this time.

Besides, if push truly ever came to shove, one suspects that most of those paper secessionists would grudgingly accept that they and their states are far better off inside than outside the United States. They benefit from a common defence, interstate commerce and America’s fiscal union—particularly the latter, as most of the states that have crossed the 25,000-signature threshold receive more in federal funds than they pay in taxes. Their citizens have paid into Social Security. Many of them receive Medicare. Besides, without the federal government to complain about, southern Republicans would have to come up with a whole new platform.

(Picture credit: Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, via Wikimedia)