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In 2012, a number of state petitions to allow state secession were set up using the White House's petitioning system. The petitions, which had no legal standing, were set up after President Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election. Ultimately, six petitions crossed the threshold of 25,000 e-signatures necessary to trigger a response from an Obama administration official.
The petitions prompted responses from various state governors and other elected officials, most of whom rejected the notion. In January 2013, a White House staffer officially responded to the various petitions, noting that secession was inconsistent with the United States Constitution.
In 2012, a series of online petitions were launched on the WhiteHouse.gov "We the People" electronic petitioning system, asking for secession for various states; the petition for Texas garnered the most signatures, quickly garnering the 25,000 necessary to trigger a response from an Obama administration official. [1] The petitions were largely in response to President Obama's reelection in the 2012 presidential election. [1]
There were eventually secession petitions set up for all fifty states, with six (Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas) reaching the 25,000 threshold. [2] The Texas secession e-petition ultimately received the most e-signatures, almost 126,000. [3]
The petitions prompted others visitors to launch "counter-petitions, asking that the president stop states from seceding" [4] or to deport secessionists. [5] The petitions were started by individual citizens, not by the states themselves, and have no legal standing. [6]
The petitions prompted responses from several state governors who rejected the idea. A spokeswoman for Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama said "Governor Bentley believes in one nation under God" and "We can disagree on philosophy, but we should work together to make this country the best it can be." [7] Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee said: "I don't think that's a valid option for Tennessee...I don't think we’ll be seceding.” [8] The press secretary to Governor Rick Perry of Texas released a statement saying Perry "believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it" but "also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government." [9]
Conversely, a spokeswoman for Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas said that Paul "feels the same now" as he did in 2009, when he said "It’s very American to talk about secession -- that’s how we came into being." [10]
A number of conservative media figures devoted time to discussing the petitions, such as Phil Valentine [11] and Sean Hannity. [12]
In January 2013, the "secession petitions filed by residents of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and five other states, as well as one counterpetition seeking the deportation of everyone who signed a secession petition," received an official response from White House Office of Public Engagement director Jon Carson. [3] Carson rejected the secession notion, writing that open debate was positive for democracy but that the Founders had established a "perpetual union" and that the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White (1869) that individual states had no right to secede. [3] [13]
The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confederacy comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession and warred against the United States during the American Civil War. The states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Jones County is in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 67,246. Its county seats are Laurel and Ellisville.
The Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) is an Alaskan nationalist political party in the United States that advocates for an in-state referendum which would include the option of Alaska becoming an independent country. The party also advocates positions similar to those of the Constitution Party, Republican Party and Libertarian Party, supporting gun rights, anti-abortion policies, privatization, homeschooling, and limited government.
In the context of the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states were slave states that did not secede from the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia. To their north they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware bordered slave states of the Confederacy to their south.
The League of the South (LS) is an American white nationalist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist organization that says its goal is "a free and independent Southern republic".
The 1860–61 United States House of Representatives elections were held on various dates in various states between August 6, 1860, and October 24, 1861, before or after the first session of the 37th United States Congress convened on July 4, 1861. The number of House seats initially increased to 239 when California was apportioned an extra one, but these elections were affected by the outbreak of the American Civil War and resulted in over 56 vacancies.
An Ordinance of Secession was the name given to multiple resolutions drafted and ratified in 1860 and 1861, at or near the beginning of the Civil War, by which each seceding Southern state or territory formally declared secession from the United States of America. South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas also issued separate documents purporting to justify secession.
Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson was an American attorney, politician, and judge, active primarily in East Tennessee during the mid-19th century. He represented Tennessee's 1st Congressional District in the 36th U.S. Congress (1859–1861), where he gained a reputation as a staunch pro-Union southerner. He was elected to a second term in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War, but was arrested by Confederate authorities before he could take his seat.
Thomas Herbert Naylor was an American economist and professor. From Jackson, Mississippi, he was a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University, the author of thirty books, and a founder of the Second Vermont Republic (2003). Naylor authored ten academic books and three books advocating secession.
In the context of the United States, secession primarily refers to the voluntary withdrawal of one or more states from the Union that constitutes the United States; but may loosely refer to leaving a state or territory to form a separate territory or new state, or to the severing of an area from a city or county within a state. Advocates for secession are called disunionists by their contemporaries in various historical documents.
The East Tennessee Convention was an assembly of Southern Unionist delegates primarily from East Tennessee that met on three occasions during the Civil War. The Convention most notably declared the secessionist actions taken by the Tennessee state government on the eve of the war unconstitutional, and requested that East Tennessee, where Union support remained strong, be allowed to form a separate state that would remain part of the United States split from the rest of Confederate Tennessee. The state legislature denied this request, and the Confederate Army occupied the region in late 1861.
Texas secession movements, also known as the Texas independence movement or Texit, refers to both the secession of Texas during the American Civil War as well as activities of modern organizations supporting such efforts to secede from the United States and become an independent sovereign state.
Events from the year 1861 in the United States. This year marked the beginning of the American Civil War.
The State of Scott was a Southern Unionist movement in Scott County, Tennessee, in which the county declared itself a "Free and Independent State" following Tennessee's decision to secede from the United States and align the state with the Confederacy on the eve of the American Civil War in 1861. Like much of East Tennessee, Scott became an enclave community of the Union during the war. Although its edict had never been officially recognized, the county did not officially rescind its act of secession until 1986.
We the People, launched by the Obama administration on September 22, 2011, is a defunct section of the whitehouse.gov website used for petitioning the administration's policy experts. Petitions that reached a certain threshold of signatures were reviewed by Administration officials who in most instances would subsequently provide an official response. Legal proceedings in the United States were not subject to petitions, rather, the site served as a public relations mechanism for the presidential administration to provide a venue for citizens to express themselves. On August 23, 2012, the White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips released the source code for the platform. The source code is available on GitHub, and lists both public domain status as a work of the United States federal government and licensing under the GPL v2.
Larry SECEDE Kilgore is a political activist in the Texas Secessionist Movement. He is a perennial Republican candidate who has run in multiple Texas statewide elections. He is one of the most prominent supporters of Texas secession. Kilgore received his most widespread attention during his advocacy for U.S. state secession petitions following the 2012 presidential election.
The Cooperationists were a group formed in the United States in the 1860s after the Election of 1860. After South Carolina's secession from the Union, the Cooperationists believed that the remaining slave states should secede at once and at the same time, rather than one at a time, to impress the federal government with seriousness of the states' resolve. The proposal was rejected, but the South seceded in rapid succession. The following is a list of the states that seceded, including the date on which each state seceded:
John Netherland was an American attorney and politician, active primarily in mid-19th century Tennessee. A leader of the state's Whigs, he served in both the Tennessee Senate and Tennessee House of Representatives, and was an unsuccessful candidate for governor on the Opposition ticket in 1859. During the Civil War, he supported the Union, and was a delegate to the 1861 East Tennessee Convention.
The Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 was called in the state capital of Richmond to determine whether Virginia would secede from the United States, govern the state during a state of emergency, and write a new Constitution for Virginia, which was subsequently voted down in a referendum under the Confederate Government.