Scalia vs. Thomas Jefferson on secession Contemporary opinions,
including those of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, say the
idea of a state’s right to secede died with the hundreds of
thousands of bloodied victims of the Civil War, and that the
sentiment behind the dozens of petitions on a White House
website seeking permission for most of the 50 individual
governments to leave the union will be fruitless. But historians
would note that even Thomas Jefferson, a “pole star among
political philosophers because he based his politics on the
eternal, self-evidence, fundamental truths that all men are
created free and equal and that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inherent and unalienable rights, among
which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” might be
remembered for his opinion about states leaving the U.S. It was
in a letter to William B. Giles on Dec. 26, 1825, when
Jefferson, who already had seen the fight over the states’
separation from England, the rise of a new nation and th