Could Vermont secede from U.S.?

On April Fool's Day, the Sunday Washington Post published an unusually wild and colorful article headlined: "The once and future republic of Vermont."

Ha ha! I thought, and immediately imagined that my great friends – those enormously colorful and imaginative talk show hosts, Charlie and Ernie, on Vermont's dominant talk station, WVMT – had pulled off another hilarious coup, to which the Washington Post devoted more than half a page.

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Then, I looked at the authors' ID. This revealed that Ian Baldwin is publisher of Vermont Commons, while Frank Bryan is a political science professor at the University of Vermont.

"Ha ha!" I chortled again. "Hilarity in high places!" After all, those gorgeous Green Mountains sent unto the rest of the United States that undeniably colorful howler Howard Dean.

So what is the substance of what has been entitled – (are you sitting down?) – no, this has nothing to do with sitting at all! It is "The Second Vermont Republic," if you please.

And let me recall in this connection that the Confederate prisoners of war who captured St. Albans, Vt., in 1864 and made off back to Canada with the contents of its three banks appear to have sewn the seeds of secession!

Secessionists Baldwin and Bryan note among other things the following:

• "Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now." (Which compels me to ask: Is there a Green Mountain version of "Dixie"?)

• "Today, Vermont no longer controls even its own National Guard, a domestic emergency force that is employed in an imperial war 6,000 miles away. …"

• George Washington's Farewell Address warned against a permanent, large standing army.

• Vermont seceded from the British Empire in 1777. No other state, not even Texas, governed itself more thoroughly, or longer, before giving up its nationhood and joining the Union.

• "The present movement for secession has been gathering steam for a decade and a half. In preparation for Vermont's bicentennial in 1991, public debates – moderated by then Lt. Gov. Howard Dean – were held in seven towns. At the end of each, Dean asked all those in favor of Vermont's seceding from the Union to stand and be counted. In town after town, solid majorities stood."

By way of dissent, Gannon Sugimura of Springfield, Va., wrote the Post that Baldwin and Bryan of Vermont are wrong in their claim that Vermont was a nation longer than any other state, "not even Texas." Hawaii was an independent country for 88 years: 1810 to 1898, having been inhabited for 1,500 years before that.

In Northfield, Vt., Nate Freeman wrote the Post of Baldwin and Bryan's "divisive and ludicrous notion of Vermont's secession."

"Since the 1980s, Bryan has been separating people as if wheat from chaff, all in good fun of course, but with the taint of real-life-exclusion manifest in the also humorless organization he praises, The Second Vermont Republic.

"That the SVR survived its own recent public relations fiasco because of an apparent association with a Southern hate group is surprising enough. Mounting that dead elephant with his own fake history lesson of Vermont and our alleged 'seeds of disunion' isn't a declaration of independent pride in the Green Mountains. It's a taunt from a schoolyard bully busily already running away."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, indicates that both history and blood can get hot in that beautiful Green Mountain state – which state I, as a Virginian, would never want the United States to lose in secession – which movement began in New England with the Hartford Convention – and when actually enacted by the South led to bloody disaster, however heroically fought for.