CHARLESTON, S.C. (Feb. 5) -- They could have been just another gaggle of tourists walking down Meeting Street, a typical enough sight among the cobblestone and historic homes of Charleston, S.C. But what they wanted to explore were not the guidebook-endorsed attractions of this old town -- the Market, the Battery, Rainbow Row, the nearby plantations. Instead, they had come to the heart of the pre-Civil War South, the former center of the American slave trade, to discuss an idea that had once been all the rage among Charleston's ruling class: the end of the United States as they knew it.

The 40 or so visitors, most of them men, all but one of them white, were attendees of the Eighth Abbeville Institute Scholar's Conference, a four-day gabfest on the resurgent topics of state nullification and secession. At the conference, which runs through Sunday, a collection of scholars and lay folk will discuss what they see as the decided downsides to living in an imperial-minded, centralized-power-mad American Empire, one in which state's rights, personal liberties and personal connections to the land and fellow man have all but vanished.

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