The Secession of 1786-1788

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Article used Our Unconventional Founding" by Bruce Ackerman
Bruce Ackerman is considered an authoritative author.

Alternative and clashing views can be found at.
Was the Constitution Illegally Adopted? - Grove City College
and
The Consent of the Governed: Constitutional. Amendment Outside Article V. Akhil Reed Amar. Yale Law School.
Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution Outside Article V Akhil Reed Amar.

The short of it is that in the article, Professor Ackerman views the Constitution as revolutionary not evolutionary. It is a successful secession unlike the unsuccessful secession of 1860-61 and while this work does not address the latter secession, we can see the seeds of secession success vs the seeds of secession failure in this article.

P476
The Founding was a process, not merely an outcome. And yet lawyers have given this fact short shrift. Over the last decade, they have explored every detail of the original text with renewed zeal; but the process that brought us the text remains virtually unknown.
Our main task, however, is to confront the problem raised by the Federalists' flagrant illegalities. Movements that indulge in systematic contempt for the law risk a violent backlash. Rather than establish a new and stable regime, revolutionary acts of illegality can catalyze an escalating cycle of incivility, violence, and civil war. How did the Federalists avoid this dismal cycle? More positively: How did the Founders manage to win acceptance of their claim to speak for the People at the same moment that they were breaking the rules of the game?
First difference between the secessions to be discussed is:
Our answer distinguishes the Federalists' challenge to the preexisting rules from a broader attack upon an entire constitutional tradition.
The 1860-61 secessionists attacked the entire constitutional tradition and lost.
But this is not what happened in the America of the 1780s. The Federalists fought for a radical reorganization of existing principles and institutions; but they were not longing for total revolution.' It is this distinctive aspiration to revolutionary re- form that set the stage for a unique approach to constitutional revision. Although they did not play by the established rules for amendment, the reformers tried to compensate for their legal deficiencies through a remarkable bootstrapping process.' They constructed new lawmaking processes out of older ideas and institutions, seeking to infuse them with new meanings:
P478
Granted, we did not play by the old rules. But we did some- thing just as good. We have beaten our opponents time after time in an arduous series of electoral struggles within a large number of familiar lawmaking institutions. True, our repeated victories don't add up to a formal constitutional amendment under the existing rules. But we never would have emerged victorious in election after election without the considered support of a mobilized majority of the American People. Moreover, the premises underlying the old rules for constitutional amendment are deeply defective, inconsistent with a better understanding of the nature of democratic popular rule. We therefore claim that our repeated legislative and electoral victories have already provided us with a legitimate mandate from the People to make new constitutional law. Forcing us to play by the old rules would only allow a minority to stifle the living voice of the People by manipulating legalisms that have lost their underlying functions.
And the Game is afoot.
 
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