As much as I might occasionally joke that I’d like Texas to secede from the union, they’re not allowed to do that. That’s a principle the North fought for in the Civil War, and the North was victorious. Now, do you remember which state started the Civil War? Yes, kids, it was South Carolina, the home of 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley. You may have heard of a place there called Fort Sumter. Here’s a reminder.

When Abraham Lincoln took office, the nation was breaking apart. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had already seceded. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asserted that secession was unconstitutional, that the Union of the states was perpetual, and states could not leave it at will.

As the first states seceded, they seized most forts, arsenals, and federal property inside their borders. On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, in command of the provisional Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded the surrender of the U.S. garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Garrison commander Major Robert Anderson refused.

On April 12, the Confederate batteries opened fire on the fort, which was unable to reply effectively. At 2:30 p.m., April 13, Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter, evacuating the garrison on the following day. The battle had started at 4:30 a.m. and ended 34 hours later.

As an aside, President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General was named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III in honor of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard.  He turned to be too committed to the rule of law for Trump’s taste.

This Civil War history shouldn’t be too difficult for people to understand, but to fill out the picture, there was an 1869 Supreme Court case that clarified things.

However, in 1869, in the Texas v. White case in the immediate wake of the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the United States is “an indestructible union.”

“…The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible states,” the majority wrote.

“When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation,” the justices wrote.

Of course, we don’t have to consider all this stuff settled. Why should we honor the sacrifice of 1.5 million casualties and over 600,000 American deaths?  We could just decide for a do-over. Maybe this time we’ll be better prepared:

Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never returned home.  At the outset of the war, neither army had mechanisms in place to handle the amount of death that the nation was about to experience.  There were no national cemeteries, no burial details, and no messengers of loss.  The largest human catastrophe in American history, the Civil War forced the young nation to confront death and destruction in a way that has not been equaled before or since.

Too easily people forget, or they rewrite history to make themselves look less stupid and evil. I am not sure quite how to define Nikki Haley.

Texas has the right to secede from the U.S. if its citizens decide to do so, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley argued on Wednesday — a controversial view that contradicts centuries of established history and precedent. Similar secession efforts infamously led to the Civil War.

But “if Texas decides they want to do that, they can do that,” Haley said in an interview with the radio show “The Breakfast Club.”

“If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make,” Haley said, though she also noted, “Let’s talk about what’s reality. Texas isn’t going to secede.”

Asked if she still believes that states generally have the right to secede, a sentiment she expressed on camera during her initial run for governor of South Carolina, Haley said that “states have the right to make the decisions that their people want to make.”

“I believe in state’s rights, I believe that everything should be as close to the people to decide,” she said.

Maybe Haley believes this, but maybe she’s just saying it because the Republican Party long ago stopped being the entity that destroyed the Confederacy and is now the party that represents the Confederacy’s values. Either way, it’s obnoxious and disrespectful to all the people who died and suffered in the Civil War, and all those who accepted the outcome and helped put the country back together when it was over.

I hope we don’t have to reanimate William Tecumseh Sherman for another March to the Sea, but it does seem like some hard lessons need to be reapplied.