I know it seems rhetorically clever, in an age when racist jokes are considered worse than adultery, to try linking one evil which goes insufficiently recognized (abortion) with another universally condemned (slavery). But this tactic is counter-productive in even the medium term.

First of all, to be brutally candid, it trivializes abortion. Evil as slavery was in practice (especially in its American variety, which broke up marriages, sold off children, and discouraged religious preaching to blacks), it was never remotely as evil as abortion. It amounts, in essence, to the theft of labor--and theft isn't quite as evil as killing. Of course, one could rightly see it as "defrauding the laborer of his just wages," and thus a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, which would put it in the same category as voluntary murder. But it isn't as evil as murdering your child.

Secondly, the historical precedent isn't a pretty one, and invoking it hurts our case. Every other country in the world in the 19th century (from Russia to Brazil) that abolished slavery did so without a civil war. The radicalism of the abolitionist movement, and the responsive radicalism of the Southern secessionists, nearly tore the country apart. What is more, the justice of Lincoln fighting a war (as he admitted) to preserve the Union is still debatable, given the original theory on which the Union was founded--that of sovereign states. The decentralism implied in the (admittedly tainted) phrase "states' rights" comes much closer to Catholic social teaching (subsidiarity) than the centralist, Jacobin theory of the State that prevailed with the Union victory. The triumph of Washington, D.C., over the states is the reason that the mores of Greenwich Village and Hollywood are being stuffed down the throats of Alabamans and Iowans. Given the superior skills of urban elites at holding power and manipulating opinion, this seems likely to be the inevitable result of centralized power. In other words, if you agree that there shall be one law for the whole nation, it will always, in the end, be imposed by the social Left.

Furthermore, suggesting that a set of natural rights, discerned by intellectuals and imposed by judges, must trump the wishes of the population will equally result in the victory of leftist social activism. Who produces most of the lawyers, law professors, and judges? Does anyone really expect that the answer to this question will cease to be "Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton," that such institutions will yield to "Ave Maria, Regent, and Liberty universities"? If not, the victory of judicial power will always remain a tool of elites who wish to impose their prejudices upon a relucant population. If you want to see the outcome of such a theory, look at the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. I'd prefer that slightly bigoted Bretons, Catalans, Bavarians, Serbs, and Slovaks enacted socially conservative legislation in their regions... even if it meant that (for instance) they weren't especially kind to Gypsies, to a totalizing system that enforced "human rights"--which will ALWAYS end up including the right to abortion.

Social conservatism must rely on decentralism, populism, anti-elitism, and a certain degree of healthy, pre-rational "prejudice" (in Edmund Burke, not Archie Bunker's sense). We can't turn the pro-life movement into a Kantian, ideological monstrosity.

And an ineffective one at that. Does anybody really think that if 47 states were pro-life, that we could effectively enforce a ban on abortion in the other three--which would be, of course, California, New York, and Massachusetts? By comparing ourselves to the abolitionists, do we mean to say that we'd fight a civil war to keep those states in a pro-life Union? Then why don't we support John Browns who shoot up clinics? Is that what we're saying here?

The state-by-state approach to banning abortion, combined with a concerted attempt to make abortion disgraceful (you know, like smoking cigarettes or making racist jokes) offers much more promise than such political fantasies.

John,

You say a lot of things that rub me the wrong way, but this really takes it my friend:

"It amounts, in essence, to the theft of labor--and theft isn't quite as evil as killing."

Theft of labor? If anyone is trivializing anything here, it is you, once again.

To take a human being from his home, take away his family, his dignity, his name - and yes, the fruits of his labor - to lower him to the level of an ox or a cow, to whip and beat him, to completely strip him of his humanity; in many ways THIS is a fate worse than what is usually a quick if messy death in the uterus.

How anyone could fail to consider this is absolutely beyond my powers of reckoning. Go ahead now and call me "the PC thought police" or whatever label you need to affix to me to justify yourself this time. How fun it must be to always play the persecuted victim!

Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear: Slavery as practiced in America was profoundly evil, worse than the biblical slavery which St. Paul tolerated. (That scriptural precedent was the reason the Church didn't outright condemn slavery--something Cardinal Newman agonized over.) American slavery, as Eugene Genovese documented, allowed masters to kill slaves with impunity, which brings it closer, I should have made clear, to the practice of abortion today. In defining slavery as "theft of labor," I was abstracting from the American practice. What that means is that Americans took slavery, something already evil, and perverted to something far worse.

Nevertheless, comparing ourselves to abolitionists who helped provoke a civil war seems to me counterproductive to the pro-life cause.

While this article is somewhat dated by decisions of the intervening years, I find Mr. Lehrman's analogy legally precise and well-stated. These sorts of analogies are always difficult for non-lawyers who are often moved more by the emotions or religious significance attached to an issue rather than the issue's legal positioning. But since we look to the law to give application to many of our moral mandates, positioning those laws within precedent is both appropriate and critical. Since Mr. Lehrman wrote this legally excellent piece in 1996, the analogy between abortion and slavery has often been invoked - but not always consistent with Mr. Lehrman's analysis. In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsberg urged abandoning abortions rights as a privacy interest and positioning the right under anti-slavery protections, so that a female's autonomy is fully guaranteed (even against enslavement by a fetus), just as a person of African heritage is fully guaranteed autonomy, even against claims of ownership by another person. This is a stunning dehumanization of the unborn child, but reflects, as does Mr. Lehrman's fine piece, that American jurisprudence will always return to "the American doctrine of the inalienable right to life" to analyze the most fundamental values embedded in our laws.

Aren't you conceding a lot, though, by assigning the abolitionist movement of 19th century America entirely to the pro-Lincoln Unionist cause? This is exactly what centralizers want; they (neocons and the Left both) ignore historical figures like Lord Acton and Lysander Spooner precisely so that they can use Calhoun's regrettable defense of slavery as the only representation of opposition that there was to Lincoln and his war to "save the Union". The real problem, i think, is that even if those three states had majorities that disowned a "right" to abortion, they, irregardless of the 47 states of the rest of us, could and would do nothing about it unless they were willing to defy the state, or the "Union", as dictating the "law" from SCOTUS. Obviously, I agree with you and not Lehrmann on the Lincoln analogy, but I don't believe the pro-Lincoln side should be conceded, morally or historically, the cause and rightness of abolition. To the extent that analogizing the destruction of unborn children to slavery works politically in overturning Roe and recriminalizing this murderous practice, I'm all for it, even if Lehrmann's history is absurd to me. After what?( 45 million + killed? since'73) shouldn't we do whatever it takes to turn back the tide? The very fact that the analogy drives the Left so batty, all of whom defend abortion "rights" and wax poetically about our unatoned for(!!!) sin of slavery makes me think it's a useful tactic.

Without reaching the merits of your actual critique of Zmirak's (politically wise) response, one clarification: slaves brought to America were for the most part purchased as slaves. That is, they had already been "taken from their homes" by fellow Africans, as Muslims Africans continue doing today in Mauritania and Nigeria to supply their masters in Arabia. It was a "slave trade." Raids that captured random Africans were sometimes practiced during the first part of the slave trade, usually by the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not Americans in the nineteenth.

This does not in any manner mitigate the horrors of slavery generally or American slavery in particular which, as Tocqueville pointed out, was made all the worse than ancient slavery by being based on race and foreclosing eventual manumission.

Nevertheless, contrary to the facile understanding of the period offered by popular culture, Africa was not some Eden disrupted by evil white people. I think our very misunderstanding of the practice and our complete inability to blame anyone but evil white people for this trade points to the problems regarding centralized culture Zmirak is addressing. Africans had as much blood on their hands as Americans - if not more for the simple fact that slavery was never abolished and continues to this day on that continent.

I agree with Mr. Zmirak's overall criticism, while being profoundly frustrated - again - with the perennial conservative prediliction for self-torpedoing a perfectly good point, with a completely unnecessary lack of respect for, and insight into, the experiences of others outside one's own cultural fold.

I'm not at all suggesting there was any ill-intent. But it is simply not appropriate to compare the cruelly efficient, institutionalised barbarity of slavery - made all the more acute by it's contrast with a legal regime promoting "liberty" - with "theft of labour". Slavery as practiced was not the Internal Revenue Service; neither was it greedy capitalists exploiting the workers. To use such a phrase is to trivialise the experience of slaves.

The response above about Africa only further highlights this cultural blind spot: American slaves had families, communities and homes right in America that they were ripped away from - what African slavers had done to their ancestors could hardly be expected to lessen the barbarity of American slaves' actual experience of this cruelty, could it?

The destruction of an isolated human life-form still in the process of being formed in the uterus is horrendous; but I don't think many on the opposite side of the aisle (nor a lot on our side) will automatically buy into an argument, that it is obviously worse than the collective years of degradation suffered by already existing and fully-formed human beings - with their families - fully conscious of an entire lifetime of brutalisation of them and their loved ones. "Easy for you to say, Whitey" is probably an understandable and justified response.

I often wonder how nice liberals who are horrified at vivisection for science experiments, or at cruelty to animals in factory farms, can square this with an unquestioned right to rip apart humanoid organisms in the womb. I am deeply gratified to see some conservatives take cruelty to animals as a valid moral and social concern - and think that might make a far better platform on which to approach restriction of abortion: you wouldn't do this to a farm animal, would you?

But in a similar way that animal rights lefties are way, way off when they start comparing mink farms to the Holocaust, the clinical ("Patriotically Correct"?) use of nice, polite philosophical terms like "theft of labour" when contrasting slavery to abortion, is a self-laid land-mine waiting to be stepped on in public discourse; and there's no point in blaming others if you wind up with the legs cut from under you as a result.

This perpetual antipathy towards "centralization" is yet another one of those cultural ticks that I don't think I will ever quite understand - especially when the real and documented horrors of chattel slavery are being downplayed to elevate the principle of decentralization.

I keep hearing from Zmirak and others that decentralization best aligns with the Catholic teaching of subsidiarity. What happened to solidarity? The common good? The rights of the worker?

I think throwing in the idea of subsidiarity, without ever referencing another Catholic idea or even the teachings of Christ, provides a fig-leaf of Catholicism for an otherwise pagan worship of an ideal political community. And I was sometimes guilty of this myself coming from the other side of the political spectrum.

Whatever the drawbacks or advantages of "centralization", as with any other secular political project, neither preventing or bringing it about it is worth the price of our souls. On the balance scales, the degradation of an entire race of human beings weighs more than what type of government they have. It is possible to be moral with any kind of government. It is not possible to do what this country did to the African slaves and remain moral, aligned with God's will. Never forget that Christ taught us to fear Him who could destroy both body and soul in Hell, rather than he (man) who could only destroy the body.

Finally, why are some people so worried about the image of the white man? Europeans did everything on a grand scale, whether it was art or slavery. Take the good with the bad, and stop complaining. My love of Shakespeare and Beethoven is not and never will be diminished by the historical fact that white people took slavery to levels of dehumanization and brutality. To reject one because of the other would be as wrong-headed as to enslave a race of human beings because they hadn't yet invented such things.

Most of us don't fetishize decentralism. If we COULD pass and enforce a national law outlawing abortion, we wouldn't refuse on decentralist principle. But we don't think it would work, any better than Prohibition worked in Boston and Chicago.

In pointing to the importance of localism, we're noting the fact that traditionalist social views are more quickly and easily liquidated (in the modern world at least) by centralized governments... which is precisely why in every Western country it is urban, centralizing elites that promote the toxic Kantian "rights" gospel that has liquidated Christendom.

Also, solidarity, the Common Good, and the rights of the worker are amply represented in the political sphere. Indeed, grossly exaggerated versions of these principles are completely dominant... while virtually no one is speaking up for the rights of local communities or the dangers of centralism. I think I made an excellent case about why centralism in America and Europe tends toward social radicalism. I notice that it remains unaddressed by my critics.

As to the "theft of labor" argument, I was abstracting from the particular depravity of American slavery to a more philosophical definition of slavery. I didn't mean to trivialize the additional abuses that arose in America, which rendered our form of slavery so hideous--and I'm sorry if anyone was inadvertently offended. (Indeed, I think that American slaves would have been justified in rising up and rebelling--while Medieval serfs mostly would NOT have been justified.)

However, I will say this: Move beyond gross abuses such as slavery, and the relentless focus on eliminating social inequality, at any cost in the destruction of local autonomy, is destructive. The egalitarian spirit gets out of control just as easily as the "will to dominate" of selfish elite groups. Communism in the 20th century was the caricature of the former, Nazism of the latter. In their milder forms in America, we came down to, in essence, an ugly choice between evils:

1) A progressive elite that rightly despised racial discrimination (not slavery--we're talking legal segregation and other unjust arrangements), NOT out of Christian justice, but because it wwas possessed by a spirit of radical critique that attacked indiscriminately EVERY form of discrimination, every perceived inequality. Hence, once it (happily) dismantled segregation, it was ready and willing to embrace "women's liberation," "gay liberation," "animal liberation," unmoored as it was from the philosophical framework that should guide Christians in making such distinctions. Hence, the progressives didn't skip a beat. They went from from eliminating genuinely unjust forms of inequality--of black and white--to trying to eliminate sex roles, to reduce the unequal impact of sexual inequality by giving women the same "freedom" to walk away from pregnancy that men were born with, to give same-sex couples the same "right" to marry as heterosexual couples. In 1964, at the same time the Civil Rights Act was passing, the Kennedys were gathering liberal theologians to prepare Catholics for legal abortion.

2) Blinkered, conservative local communities that clung to legitimate, sane distinctions between the sexes, inherited Christian social mores, and common sense views about family and marriage... AND ALSO clung to unjust, inherited institutions of racial inequality.

Continued...

In other words, in the impure realm of politics, you have to choose between imperfect allies. Do you pick the indiscriminate egalitarians, because they happen to be right about racism? Or the the indiscriminate social conservatives, who happen to be wrong about racism?

Catholic liberals like the Kennedys chose the egalitarians... and very few jumped ship when the social liberation movements jumped straight from integrating lunch counters to opening abortion clinics.

Catholic conservatives (like the parents in South Boston who fought desegregation) made the opposite choice.

Yes, we should stand above our allies, and be critical of their mistakes. We should try to educate social conservatives about racism--which offers a lot more hope than educating liberals about EVERYTHING else.

The unleashing of "liberation movements" that came after the Civil Rights movement imposed a very heavy cost.

Was it worth it? If you think so, then you should go cheer President Obama at Notre Dame.

John, I love your books and other writings but must respectfully disagree on this one from a historical perspective-


Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his book "Southern Honor" cites many instances from the historical record where slave masters whipped pregnant women until they miscarried, and where unwanted mixed race children of slave/master coupling were left to die from exposure. Since abortion and slavery proceed from the same attitude--ie the unborn child/black person is not human in the same way "we" are--such evils are to be expected.


Slavery in the American south was not like slavery anywhere else. Not only Calhoun, but protestant theologians such as Thornwell created theological arguments to prove that slavery wasn't just a problematic evil difficult to solve (as Jefferson thought) but a postive good!


I realize that it's popular in some circles to selectively quote Lincoln's first inaugural and his letter to Horace Greeley to argue that the Civil war was only about perserving the union, but if you read what the southern politicians themselves said (see http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html) were their reasons for seceeding in light of what was going on at the time, you'll decern that the real reason the confeds seceeded and fired Ft. Sumter was Lincoln's explicit refusal to enforce the Dred Scott decision. The poorly decided Dred Scott decision essentially said there is no such thing as free or slave territory. Blacks have no rights white people are bound to respect, and a slave master can take his slaves, as he can his cattle, anywhere he wants. Lincoln would compromise on anything else, but he knew that to stop the spread of slavery would put it on the course of gradual extinction in America. Also, early in his adminstration, he set the tone. Hadley Arkes, in " Natural Rights and the Right to Choose" tells how Lincoln refused to enforce Dred Scott. Two Boston residents, one seeking a passport to study abroad another seeking a patent, had been denied both by the Buchanan adminstration. Being blacks, they were not citizens and not entitled to these privledges of citizenship. The Lincoln adminstration held that Dred was binding only on the parties involved, reversed the previous decisions, and issued the passport and patent. Lincoln treated blacks as citizens even before the 15 amendment made them citizens in fact!

How anyone consider this is absolutely beyond my powers of reckoning.

Again, I was correcting the historical record, not endorsing this or that view of abortion. I only speak for myself. The only international organization I work with and donate to is an anti-slavery effort. If Americans knew that slavery had existed at all times and places and still does in Africa and Arabia, they may have a more balanced view regarding the peculiar evil they read into the actions of white Americans. I am being far from provincial here. "Slavery" today is widely understood as something whites invented to exploit blacks. This view is so entrenched that modern anti-slavery organizations have found it impossible to get any black Americans interested in the cause. No Oprah, Spike, Obama, Morrison...ever speaks on the issue; nothing that distracts from the white-on-black evil narrative that informs views like your own. Ask African Muslim apostate Hirsi Ali who among us has supported her efforts and who has ignored her. When have you seen black Americans use their considerable moral clout to raise awareness of contemporary African slavery?

A correction of the record is necessary to help black Americans understand they were not victims of some peculiar evil otherwise unknown in human history (the Jews in WWII were such victims), but that their ancestors suffered a terrible and cruel fate that countless millions, black, white and Asian, suffered before manumission took hold. One need only go back a few generations to find many whites had ancestors in chains. It may also let people remember that it was Christians who led the effort for emancipation, not atheist feminist bureaucrats or political demagogues.

I agree that Zmirak's formulation of stolen labor is weak and morally callous. The evils of slavery versus abortion is too philosophic a question, better for a Platonic dialogue than politics. As slavery entails ownership of a human being, I argue it is worse. I am not an absolutist on abortion - I am not a practicing Catholic (though I follow the literature). This is why I insist on addressing the racial question, for this is what prevents contemporary people from learning about the God-awful institution of slavery. What happened to the ancestors of black Americans is worse but also less exceptional than they have been led to believe. I suggest reading "Escape from Slavery" by Francis Bok, a contemporary African who survived but was never invited to share his experiences with Oprah or Ellen. Indeed, the only President to take note of him was George W. Bush. Or read "White Cargo" by Dan Jordan to learn of your own slave ancestors.

BPS, I don't think we actually disagree that much. I meant to convey that slavery in America was much worse than in (for instance) Latin American countries where slaves could not legally be killed with impunity, prevented from marrying, separated from spouses, sold away from spouses. But thanks for those additional, horrifying, details. Perhaps the comparison between American slavery and abortion isn't such a bad one. However, you should consider to what degree the radicalism of Abolitionists helped quelch what was once a strong sentiment favoring manumission among Southern elites. WHY did feelings like Jefferson's (once widespread) give way to a perverted, pro-slavery theology? American puritanism in the North, a capitalist, Cartesian perversion of aristocracy in the South.... Not a pretty picture.

Essentially, and I'll write about this elsewhere, I think the whole "rights" approach to abortion is mistaken. Secular rights language is a poor substitute for the Ten Commandments. It isn't so much that I have a "right to life" or "right to property" as that you or anyone else are forbidden to murder me or steal from me.

But really, abortion is a question of sexual ethics. We have to decide if we're willing to repeal the Sexual Revolution. If we aren't, no attempt to argue for the rights of the unborn will have any impact at all.

The idea that the states are sovereign is contained nowhere in either the US Constititution or the Federalist papers, and is flatly contradicted by both the words included in both of those documents. Please read Article VI, Article I, section 10 and Article IV section 4. The federalism envisioned in the constitution envisions each both central govt and state govt being soveriegn in it's particular sphere. But Article VI says the contitution trumps anything in a state constitution. And isn't that what subsidarity really about, each doing what it does best, at the level where it's best accomplished? I don't think you see Washington trampling on state perogatives until the progressives around the turn of the century--Wilson, the Rooosevelts. I think Krannawitter book "Vindicating Lincoln" does a good analysis in it's last chapter on that subject.




There's the problem. This country was really founded on the idea of natural rights. The Declaration is a natural rights document, recognizing rights as being God-given, not decerned by intellectuals and imposed by judges. The constitution actually recognized the Declaration as the founding document of the US in Article VII. But if leftist activist and judges and ideas have won (temporarily--for no issues is ever really settled in a democracy) is it not because people with the right ideas haven't done the work necessary to convince people that they're right?! As a Catholic, I think the truth always wins eventually, because of the Resurrection.




Respect for the law is paramount in a society, like ours, founded not on shared ethnicity, but on an idea. Civil disobediance and principalled refusal to obey an unjust law and accept the consequences of that refusal is one thing, and I think a noble thing. But what happened during prohibition was shameful. John Brown and the clinic bombers receive the consequences of breaking the law. But as a thought experiment (as Walker Percy like to say) if CA, MA, and NY seceed after abortion became illegal in all the other states, and the federal gov. attempted both to hold federal installations and peacefully resolve the issue while holding that secession is illegal. Then CA fires on say, Vandenburg AFB. I'd be up for a fight! I'd answer the call, and if necessary die defending the right.

Was it disgraceful to disobey Prohibition? Orestes Brownson would have agreed, but he also thought people needed to obey the Fugitive Slave Act. Various states spoke of seceding long before the South, and their threats were taken seriously. I wish that the constitutionality of secession had been settled by the Supreme Court, not force of arms.

And I don't think any country is really founded on an idea. (Leaving aside Jacobin France and Soviet Russia, which didn't last--did they?) Ideas are used as pretexts to justify and organize the government of a specific population with a given culture. (The ideas then do shape the people, but the people shape the ideas to suit their needs.) Change the population, and the government doesn't work. Samuel Huntington's "Who Are We" is the best book on this subject. And now I will retire from this conflict, since it violates my core principles to write for free.

Again I'm going to have to take issue with the narrative about centralization.

Let me begin by asking this: is it possible to have a Christian version of centralized authority? Or do atheism (or at least secular agnosticism) and centralization go hand in hand?

In other words, were the horrors of Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany primarily caused by centralization, or by their atheism and paganism, respectively? Or is it your contention that a Christian government would necessarily be a decentralized one and we'd never know anyway?

In my view centralization is not a philosophy. It's just what happens as technology becomes more complicated and costly. There are conservative and liberal localists, Christians who want home schooling and hippies that want to avoid major corporations and unhealthy mass produced foods. They say no to certain aspects of centralization. I respect that and agree in many cases. Self-sufficiency is good. Self-determination is good. We should all be free to opt out and structure our communities as we see fit. Especially as Christians!

What I have a hard time with is the idea that by destroying the Confederacy and freeing the slaves, Lincoln did some sort of huge disservice to the country. I don't see the "war of Northern Agression" - I see a slavocracy that instigated a war in order to postpone its inevitable and irrevocable political decline. They didn't want to leave the Union because of states rights - that is a convenient rationalization - but because it was inevitable that the North would outnumber the South in the House and the Senate, and truly abolish slavery by legal and peaceful means. They were losing the political game so they continued politics "by other means". The expansion of slavery was checked by the Missouri Compromise - free settlers would have always outnumbered slave and Kansas showed that only Pyrrhic victories could be expected in attempts to win elections through violence - and so the Confederacy decided to destroy the problem at the source. They started the war, they wanted the war, and they wanted it to keep their slaves.

You say we have to weigh things, that, "in the impure realm of politics, you have to choose between imperfect allies". Indeed! So I choose, in 1860, the federal government that will abolish slavery and carry out centralization upon victory, over the Confederacy, which will continue to spread and propagate the institution of slavery (this is indisputable and the point of the whole war) but remain somewhat decentralized. To me, decentralization alongside slavery would be about as appealing as a slice of pizza on my plate next to a mound of dog feces. I like the way pizza tastes, but there's no way in eternity I'm going to eat the other stuff. Sorry to be crude, but, there it is.

Thomas Dilorenzo wrote a great book several years back titled "The Real Lincoln". In it he documents, cites, and sources what Lincoln said and did, both leading up to, during and immediately following the War Between the States. http://tinyurl.com/dhvzhe

Overall the article was excellent and the comments interesting.

I really enjoy most of Zmirak's comments but I have one profound disagreement with them. The natural law is not our enemy. The natural law must not be feared. The natural law is the basis for our democratic institutions.

The natural law would not be a weapon of secular liberalism. Can you please show me ONE serious liberal legal scholar who utilizes the natural law to advance his ideology?

Can you please point me to a legal philosophy that has a more ancient, better analyzed, better tested history and a more universal origin than the natural law?

Can you show me a legal theory that has found greater favor with the Church and her Saints and Scholars?

Can you show me a legal theory of interpretation other than the natural law that appears in any founding document of the United States? (The Declaration of Independence directly cites to the natural law as not only the justification of our right to be independent from Britian but as the sole criterion for judging the legitimacy of any government. Additionally, the act of the people "establishing" the Constitution is in full conformity with the natural law principles found in the Consitution and discussed by both St. Augustine in his Dialogue on Free Will and St. Robert Bellarmine's writings on civil government).

If we, as Catholics, get caught up in the game of insuring we deserve the label "conservative" and ascribe to such silly notions that we must rely on newfangled modern theories such as positivism we are sunk. The left, without any moral authority, uses the language of right and wrong, this language is what the American electorate is hungry for. We will can gain no traction by discussing Burkean theories with them, we must also use the language of morality and we have the authority to use it becuase we do rely on the natural law and the belief that there is an objective moral order found in that natural law to which all men must adhere.

Without reliance on the natural law as a fundamental principle of legal interpretation and governance, we are left with an unconvincing and hollow call to arms to our fellow Americans, lamely requesting such abstractions as "limited Government," etc., which without a clear moral basis and philosophy rooted in the natural law is perceived to be more selfish and heartless in origin than the liberal desire to expand government, etc., to "help" our fellow man.

I'm with you - John bent the Burkean stick a little too far back this time. Americans have Locke burned into their brains via Jefferson as soon as they are old enough to speak and read.

Yes, most blacks living in this country today were brought here as a result of being taken in war by other black Africans for the purpose of being sold as slaves. Indeed, when the British government was considering, at the instigation of Wilberforce, outlawing slavery, delegations of native chieftans from the stronger African tribes came to London to appeal to the government not to do it--their economic well being depended too much on the slave trade.

But these men were pagans. And I disagree with John Z's assertion that Paul tolerated slavery. While he did not outright call for abolishing it, he said "There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, but all are one in Jesus Christ". When he sent Onesimus back to Philemon, he admonished Philemon to treat him as a brother. How does a Christian enslave a brother?
More is to be expected of a Christian.

You're right about the progressive elites co-opting a civil rights movement started by Christians and born from Christian ideals to give ligitimacy to all sorts of nefarious things. That's why I strongly and vocally disagree with anyone who equates the civil rights movement to the homosexual agenda, a common practice these days. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in his bio, said one of the things that inspired him to activity in the movement was the idea that his father, a deacon in his church and a prosperous farmer, would finally be addressed as 'Mister' Abernathy.

I think southern political figures such as Calhoun and theologian such as Thornwell embraced Hegelianism and Darwinism, with their idea that human nature evolves, as opposed to the founders idea that it was a fixed, God-given thing. Calhoun said freedom is something God-given, but something won. And Kranwitter has a whole section in his book call "Pro-slavery Christian Theology". In his book on Alexander Hamilton, Chernow discusses Hamilton's close friend John Laurens, son of the largest slaveholder in S.C. He proposed freeing all the slaves, making the men soldiers and then full citizens (unlike confed plans of emancipation) of the new republic. His proposals weren't acted on by the S.C. govt and he was killed in one of the last actions of the Revolution. Washington, great Christian gentleman that he was, always longed to be a good example to his countryman and after the revolution never sold a slave and wrote Hamilton that he'd like to end slavery by legislation if he could without breaking up the country. He freed all his slaves, provided pensions for the old who couldn't work, and funds to train those without a trade in one.
I think their good intentions were thwarted, unintentionally, by the invention of the cotton gin. After that, southern slaveholders need a philosophy that reconciled Christianity and democracy with 'the peculiar institution' which had suddenly become wildly more profitable.

And I can't see, judging from what I've read, that leading abolitionist like Wendell Phillips and Fredrick Douglass were motivited by anything other than Christian morality. Undoubtly, some abolitionist had mixed or bad motives.


I think the natural rights argument is very strong. I strongly recomment Hadley Arkes book "Natural Rights and the Right to Choose" for a full discussion.


Well we agree completely on that. But I think it will be impossible without massive religious conversions to Catholicism. Church, get rolling!

Misa, I've read parts of all of the DiLorenzo books. I found them full of misstatements of facts, misquotes, and shallow analysis. It seems he started with a pre-concieved idea that he wanted to prove and selected only those quotes (or pieces of quotes) and facts which support his idea, and discusses not at all any facts, even those well know and widely acknowledged, which call that idea into question.

That idea: "Lincoln was a Monster".

John Z-Maybe you're gone, but, again, aren't you giving short shrift to many of those conservatives during the civil rights era, just as to anti-slavery pro-secessionists? I have no desire to defend those who defended racial separation segregation and discrimination, but, Goldwater for example was not one of them! He opposed the Civil Rights bill for instance not because he was defending racism but because he was defending freedom of association as a principle and opposing unconstitutional centralization. The fact that so many conservatives today don't remember this is part of the Right's problem. It distorts the history just as the Civil War era is distorted into opposing sides of white hats and black hats and leads us to accept all the more today that centralization is acceptable as a solution to our problems when it achieves the desired results, like ending established discrimination.

BPS-I doubt we would ever agree on this, but I'm just curious, your hypothetical is a too easy one as we are all (presumably) opposed to abortion. What about a more morally ambiguous controversy? Would any reason for state secession be justified? And if not, then how is the "supremacy" of the U.S. Constitution not somewhat totalitarian? It should be obeyed even if, to argue in the extreme, 100% of a state's population wanted out? Even the Hamiltonians who might have believed that certainly didn't say so out loud at the Founding.

Joe H.-Yes, many slaveholders tried to use states rights as a justification for racism and slavery. And many more since Lincoln himself have used the excuse of preserving the Union and freeing the slaves as a justification for centralization. Most of the great conflicts in all of human history have individuals with both good and bad motives on both sides of the conflict.

And, I have to say I feel exactly the same way about Krannawitter's book as you do about DiLorenzo's. Don't know what inaccuracies you're referring to in DiLorenzo's, but he addressed many of them himself in the paperback afterword. See David Gordon at the Von Mises website book review for some of Krannawitter's errors. His idea, by the way, seems to be: "Lincoln was and is a secular saint and political messiah" Both ideas are rather silly and antagonistic to a proper understaning of history. The difference is that Krannawitter's idea is shared by so much of the historical profession and is peddled far too often to students of history.

A point of historical order: Lincoln was not an abolitionist in the sense the term was used in the 19th century. He disliked slavery but his political aim was only to confine it to those states in which it already existed, where it could then die a natural death. The abolitionists were by-and-large political extemists who used harsh rhetoric and often endorsed violence in the anti-slavery cause. Lincoln deplored their tactics and cited the old maxim that one attracts more flies with honey than gall.

RE, Andrew: Thanks for pointing out that there was plenty of principled opposition to federal micromanagement, which was stuck in uneasy alliance with genuine racism. One can never tease out all the motives of people involved. How many Civil Rights activists were Commies? How many were obnoxious Yankees who enjoyed messing with Southerners? How many DIDN'T go on to support abortion and feminism? Once you whittle out all those people, and get down to the core of pro-life, pro-family, Christian antiracists, I suspect the numbers (especially among activists and leaders) get pretty scant. Probably no larger than the number of principled localists (like Goldwater, Russell Kirk, Buckley) who opposed heavy-handed federal action, without any racist motives. Thanks for raising this point.

You made an earlier ref. to Lysander Spooner, who was an, um, interesting person. Read the wikipedia entry on this anarchist. As for Goldwater, he had a strange hierarchy of freedom in that he could be so strong in supporting free association against civil rights for blacks, but completely against any limits on abortion on demand!. I don't think he's a good example for conservative principles at all.



Article IV section 3 of the Constitution deals with admitting states to the Union. I presume if 100% of states wanted to leave, congress would so vote and it would be legal. But resorting to violence as the confeds did is illegal. There is no resort to bullets when you have ballots.


Andrew, what proof do you offer that Lincoln in anyway engaged in changing the structure of the government via centralization to anything other than what it was in Washington's time?

It strikes me that no one -- not even Mr. Lehrman who, writing in 1996 may not have needed to -- actually mentions the content of the Casey decision:

This is where Janet Smith (rightly) points out in her talk, Contraception, Why Not?, that the Supreme Court agrees with the Pope (the latter writing in Humanae Vitae 17, http://tinyurl.com/9km3):

Thus, contraception is the conditio sine qua non of abortion. Get rid of abortion and contraception may remain. If it does, then abortion will return. The Church has taught this for two thousand years: Extreme grave evil (e.g. abortion) is always a consequence of less grave evil (e.g. contraception). That is why the moral teachings of the Church have always identified the need to get to the root of evil even when that root is a lesser sin and even if it is no more than a venial sin.

The conditio sine qua non of contraception, however, is the complicity of the people of the United States with the coercive, contraceptive dictates of their government. In this sense, both the executive and legislative powers concur not only with the judicial power (which legalized contraception in the GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT case, http://tinyurl.com/5kcdn), but also with the express will of the people. People are comfortable with contraception, often viewing it as good even if they condemn abortion. But the two are linked. The two have always been linked. The ancients had Silphium (http://tinyurl.com/f4hre). The potions made with Silphium were likely the target of St. Paul's condemnation of sorcery (sometimes translated as potions) in Galatians 5:19-21. And of course, the ancients did not stop with abortion of the unborn. Roman law explicitly granted Roman fathers the power to grant or deny citizenship to their children. If the father withheld citizenship, then the born child could be slain with no recourse.

But Roman practice is nothing if not confirmation of the general thrust of Mr. Lehrman's article: deny personhood to a person, and eventually the social power (usually the State) will deny him of liberty and, eventually, of life.

It is commonly thus. A sovereign -- in this case the people of the United States -- approves something which appears good on the surface even though there is a deep moral problem with the apparent good. That apparent good is initially used for good, but with the passage of time, it is corrupted into an obvious evil. And the obvious evil, perhaps after a few years or a few generations, is subsequently turned back against the sovereign, to its own detriment.

But once the evil has gotten a good grip on the society, I fear it cannot be rolled back. Instead, it must be undermined. In the case of abortion, that means exactly what Mr. Zmirak has stated: the Sexual Revolution must be undone. But doing so is not easy. Even ardent pro-lifers will often insist that contraception is good. But as long as we have contraception, we will have abortion, either coerced, allowed, or hanging in the background....

This battle cannot be deemed any easy one. The city of Cyrene based its entire economy on the Silphium trade and was one of the wealthiest cities of all antiquity while that trade endured. And the trade did not die out because of any moral epiphany of the ancients; it died out because Silphium became extinct in its native habitat and could not be successfully transplanted to another clime. Arguably, this was divine intervention, smacking down a grave evil, but this intervention did not occur until after several centuries of contraception, abortion, and infanticide had completely corrupted the culture of the ancients.

How many will have died from abortion several centuries hence?

Read the Gordon book review on the Von Mises website. Instead of "throw the book accross the room", he could have went to wikipedia under "Charles Darwin - political intrepretations". He would have learned that Darwin's idea of natural selection was used as early as 1851 in Herbert Spencer's book "Social Statistics" in order to justify ideas that human nature develops, and essays to that effect came out even earlier. Social Darwinism was not dependent on publication of "Descent of Man" in 1871. Darwin was famous and much discussed in the 1840s and 1850s. And his ideas were more acceptable to Christian folks, because his ideas which conflicted with Christianity didn't make their appearance until his later work.

That is a bad presumption. It explicitly contradicts the Constitution as written.

The Constitution, via the 10th Amendment, explicitly says that any powers not reserved to the federal government or denied to the states belong to the states and the people therein. Neither Article IV section 3, nor any other part of the Constitution, reserves the power to remove a state from the Union to the US Congress or denies it to the states. Thus, according to the Constitution, the right to remove a state from the Union is reserved to the states and their citizens.

If a state holds a vote on seceding from the Union and its citizens duly decide to so secede, then the state has every right to leave without the approval of Congress, since nowhere does the Constitution require said approval. Any other position is, quite literally, simply making things up.

Gordon was quoting Krannawitter's quoting of Darwin and Hegel, not Herbert Spencer, but it's a distraction I don't want to quibble about. Obviously, people should read DiLorenzo and Krannawitter (and anyone else) for themselves and form their own opinions. My objection to that passage and much of Krannawitter's argument (as much of Jaffa's arguments have always been as well) is the false notion that supporters of secession were equivalent to defenders of slavery. That is simply historically false. Spooner, for example. Yes, he was an eccentric anarchist among other things. And? I didn't claim to endorse every position held by Spooner or Barry Goldwater; the point is that Spooner was a prominent abolitionist who did not support slavery OR the attempt to crush constitutional secession. And Goldwater, to my knowledge, did not speak of his belief in a woman's right to choose in 1964, but it was nowhere near the issue it later became after Roe in 1973. Obviously, I don't agree with his later support of a right to abortion, or of the normalization of homosexuality for that matter. Saying he supported free association "against the civil rights of blacks", however, seems to me grossly unfair to Goldwater and grossly nonchalant about the right of freedom of association. Do you recognize a difference in support of a right and criticism of the purpose to which some may exercise that right? Goldwater supported the '57 and '60 acts, but did not believe the federal government had any authority to order non-interstate entities like private businesses to behave in a colorblind fashion towards their customers. To imply that this means that Goldwater, and many others, did not support the goal of colorblind justice or of reducing and eliminating discrimination based on race is just flat false. Yes, lots and lots of "GOOD" things can be acquired when you have the coercive power of the federal state in your hands. But achieving them quickly that way will tend to pervert liberty in the long run. Hasn't this been shown in BOTH the Civil War era and the civil rights era? After the disastrous consequences of the war and enforced reconstruction on the south, the cynical and political agreement of the aftermath of the 1876 election was hardly surprising. And the result was a canned or paper freedom for millions of American blacks that was, yes, obviously better than chains, but hardly freedom as it is properly understood for another 100 years. And what of today, 40-50 years after the civil rights era? What has black America's almost exclusive wedding to the Democratic party machine ever since Goldwater gotten it, especially among working class blacks in urban areas? Yes, they have freedom they didn't have, and all thanks for that. They also have, because of their reliance on one political party, the much greater destruction of their nuclear families in their population, and the belief among far too many of their population that civil rights era "conservatives" of both parties (though the myth persists that Dems were all good guys and GOP the bad guys, even though the party breakdown of the '64 vote was more the opposite) were nothing but racists who opposed federal government action then and now purely on malevolent motives.

Now, with regards to the Constitution and secession, I agree with Brendon's straightforward interpretation of the tenth amendment. Of course, this is why one can say today that 90-99% of what Congress does is technically unconstitutional! Historically, however, I will concede it has certainly been disputed and arguable,- a right to secede. Where do you get your justification for the Jaffaite view that ONLY if all the states seceded at once would it then be constitutional? Certainly not from Article IV, section 3. Even the phrase, "nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress" does not explicitly imply that we are speaking of States once and after they have left the Union. An obvious concern was sectionalism and fractionalism among different areas and states of the Union, forming blocs with each other WHILE REMAINING in the U.S.

To imply that this phrase prevents a single state from seceding is, contradicted by much of the historical evidence of many of the Founders, contradicted by the beliefs of many who routinely used the phrase "these United States" prior to the war, contradicted by the lack of debate on such a "controversial" right during the time the New England Federalists pushed for it, contradicted by what was taught to military officers at West Point about constitutional interpretation (!), even plausibly contradicted by Lincoln himself during the late 1840s! (Lincoln's life had lots of contradictions to be sure). At the very least, ANY reasonable student of history TODAY should admit to the topic's debatability; the fact that Jaffa and his acolytes don't is telling. But, more importantly, isn't it contradicted by basic logical and moral reasoning as well? Why should any union, even the American union, which we both presumably revere, be forever permanent and undisolvable (if that's the word) ? Seems like a perfect recipe for the potentiality of tyranny. It's BECAUSE of the great moral conundrum of historical slavery that arguing over this right of secession led to the war. How anyone can argue (or WHY anyone would WANT to argue to be more accurate) that the Union is forever NO MATTER WHAT it consists of is puzzling to me. And, to say that it is a way of AVOIDING violence is even more puzzling. Choosing "non-legal" civil disobedience and potentially revolution WITHIN the existing political structure is a recipe FOR violence.

Subsidiarity is implied and part of natural law. Reason would dictate what is a local matter and what is a national matter. What to do about Marijuana is mostly local (But I would note that Bush & Co. would enforce the federal drug laws against CA and even OR in the form of its assisted suicide law - if they can do that and appear to be succeeding in their repression, it could be done with Abortion - not that it ought to be done, but you can accomplish a lot for good or evil if you are willing to play Stalin).

Perhaps there would have been a way to end slavery without the ultimate violence of war, but perhaps not. We were not those other countries where slaves were just another economic bit, like closing a factory, it was tied up with the culture and lifestyle in the south. I think it would have ended of its own weight eventually, but not quickly. The question would be if such violence was worth it to end slavery quickly and completely. But in a way to insure racial hatred and an internal resentment for many generations.

There are fewer abortion clinics than there are prisoners at Gitmo. Were there a war to be declared against abortion and I think we would just need a nation to meet every one of the "just war" criteria, abortion would end in two weeks, albeit with a lot of violence.

If you compare the length of time in negotiations, the total number actually (instead of potentially) killed, the gravity, no military action the US has taken since Roe v. Wade can be thought of as being just on any proportional measure. It does say it is left to the prudential judgment, but that means reason (and natural law), not whims, anger, or fear over perception. Jose Padilla was denied habeas corpus for years and subjected to touchless torture and eventually convicted of talking to someone who might have known about some conspiracy or something. George Tiller still walks free. So does Osama bin Laden. Which is why I'm an ultrapacifist - unless something will kill more innocents that the holocaust we tolerate, nothing else can be considered just.

And what exactly would you do with an abortionist in a state which had the right to ban abortion and exercised it? You would find someone with a badge and have them pray for the abortionist or talk nice and try to convince him to stop? Or pull out a gun, imprison him, and possibly execute him? It is the conservatives who say that the badges matter. There have been people who have shot abortionists and labeled as murderers. No, to assassinate an abortionist it must be done by proxy using the police, courts, and the prison system.

The reason you need an occasional central authority is to define universal dogma.

Bishops have much authority in their own diocese, but they can't individually decide whether the Immaculate Conception or the bodily Assumption is dogmatically true or merely an option to make ecumenism easier.

How to handle different circumstances of murder might be the individual state, or who may or may not vote. But it cannot do so based on race or religion. There are fundamental rights.

There are also fundamental definitions. What is one dollar (it used to be a fixed amount of gold and silver)? What is a pound, inch, or quart? That can't vary between states.

The federal government can define personhood to begin at conception and add a term saying state governments cannot discriminate (in law) based on gestation no more than race.

Then positive law would coincide with the moral teaching from the throne of Peter.

Brendon that's not the way the any of the founders or writers of the constitution envisioned it. Even before our current constitution, in the days of the Articles of Confederation, the founders envisioned a perpetual union (it was call "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union). In the preamble, "We the People" (not we the States) formed a "more perfect union" than the Articles formed. That's the reason provisions for adding states are included, but states leaving are not. Article VII of the Constitution give it effect for ALL the states, if only 9 states ratify. It has been understood from the earliest days of US jurisprudence, that the 10th amendment does NOT modify the "necessary and proper" clause in Article I. Because the word "expressly", though much debated, was not added to the amendment, I did not deny implied powers.

That is the way the people who ratified the Constitution envisioned it, i.e. the people of the 13 free and independent states. That is documented in the various speeches at the constitutional conventions. Laws must be interpreted according to the intention of the legislator. But in the case of the ratification of the Constitution, the legislators were not primarily those who wrote it, but rather those who made it law, i.e. the people of the states.



The Articles were superseded by the Constitution. The Constitution says nothing of a perpetual union. Therefore the Union is no longer considered perpetual. One cannot read into the Constitution principles from the Articles that were left out of the Constitution because the very purpose of the Constitution was to replace the Articles. If there were changes, such as no longer referring to the Union as perpetual, then these must be seen as purposeful changes.



The 10th Amendment gives all power not explicitly given to the Federal government to "to the States respectively, or to the people." (You do no secession was carried out through state conventions with delegates elected by the people, right? The people were not uninvolved in the secession of the South.)

I deny the premise that a "more perfect union" means a perpetual union. Indeed, all evidence points to the fact that the more perfect union envisioned was not a perpetual one, as I argued above.



The argument is not proved and goes against both the textural evidence of the document and the historical evidence of the Constitutional conventions held by the states.



No, it does not. I quote, with my emphasis: "The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same."

The Constitution would go into effect between the states that ratified it after at least nine states had done so.



Not relevant. The "necessary and proper" clause deals with a preceding specific list of powers, none which include either adding or removing states from the Unions. It also deals with "all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States," none of which include the power to remove states from the Union. Thus, once again, the plain meaning of the Constitution, born out by both textual and historic evidence, leaves the power to remove states from the Union in the hands of the states or the people.

John Taylor is right, Joseph Story is not. Truth is not decided by the barrel of a gun, and so the fact that force of arms caused Story's reading of the Constitution to prevail over Taylor's does nothing to change who is right and who is wrong.

There are some atrocious spelling and grammar errors in my last post. I apologize for not editing it better before submitting it.

Ok then, cite one of the people who voted to ratify it at the convention who agrees with your intrepretation and provide quotes and if possible, a website to check.

PS-- Don't worry about grammer and spelling.

From " A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union" (see website in earlier post)adopted by State convention Jan 1861

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.




He supported those civil rights acts after they had been made ineffectual by amendments by southern senators. See the wikipedia entry on both. And both promoted federal authortity at the expense of state perogatives. On what principle could he support those early, ineffectual acts, but not the more effective one?


Depends on what one's definition of "perversion of liberty" is doesn't it.

Well, you may be right that neither the Civil War nor the Civil Rights acts realized prefect freedom for millions of blacks, what was the alternative? I suggest that there was really none! While I may deplore the aftermath of both the Civil War and the '60s, show me any alternative offered at the time?


Not what I meant. A majority of states in the union vote to accept the petition of an organized territory for statehood and it becomes a state. By the principle of implied powers, a majority vote would be necessary for a state to leave the union.
And if the confeds were so sure they had the legal right to leave the union, why not take it to the supreme court, instead of firing on Ft. Sumter?

I don't know if Kranawitter is one of Jaffe's acolyte, but his book "Vindicating Lincoln" addresses all these points

Seriatim-
(1)Can you provide a quote from a founder justifying the legal right of a state to seceed under the constitution? Madison explicitly rejects it in Federalist 58 and in an 1830 letter to Edward Everett about the Virginia Resolutions.
(2)There was much controversy during the NE secession crisis. J.Q. Adams wrote the longest and central letter in the book DiLorenzo cites to support his contention, but he stangely doesn't cite the Adams letter. That's because the Adams letter disputes the constitutionality of secession. Adams left the Federalist party over the issue.
(3) The plural use of U.S. was a grammatical convention, and was used after the Civil war, and by those who fought to perserve the union.
(4) William Rawle wrote the textbook used to teach law at West Point. He equated secession with revolution.
(5) Which brings me to my last point--Lincoln never defended secession, but always defend the natural human right to revolution. Many neo-confeds confuse the right to revolution (found in natural law) with the right to secession (NOT found in the constitution). Revolution is the bulwark against tyranny, and is a fundamental right of the people, but only morally right if in defense of a serious threat to other natural rights. It is always a last resort.

How about the final understanding of the Constitution as it was ratified by a state convention?



Or another?



Ratifying the Constitution under these express conditions was considered a true and legal ratification. Thus the understanding that the states and the people therein can take back the power they ceded to the federal government under the Constitution and once again becoming a free and independent state not only has historical support, but it appears to have been accepted by the other states, since otherwise Virginia and Rhode Island could not have been considered to have truly ratified that Constitution. Now, since secession is nothing more and nothing less than a state and the people therein taking back the power they ceded to the federal government and once again becoming a free and independent state, this is both historical and legal support for the right of a state and the people therein to secede.

The texts I citied are primary sources, and they can be found on numerous websites by simply searching for the titles under which I quoted them.

These don't talk about the rights of the state to seceed, but about the rights of the PEOPLE. Their natural human right to revolution, as discussed in the Declaration of Independence. Don't confuse revolution with secession. Revolution is a natural human right, secession is a legal right.

BPS
Both Jaffa and his student Krannawitter are Lincoln sychophants and for that reason adopt his false nationalism. Lincoln held that the USA was a nation with a national government, his opponents held the USA to be a confederation of States with a federal government. You say there is nothing in the Federalist about state sovereignty. Reread #39 and 40. In # 39 Madison tells us "the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only , and leaves to the several states a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects".The fact that we are known as the United STATES of America clinches it. Do not be fooled by the demagoguery of the nationalists! That Lincoln's war was unjustified is clear even though its result ended slavery. Slavery could have been ended peacefully.

BPS,
The States are the People of several political communities which make up the USA.

You are drawing a distinction without a difference as far as representative government is concerned. In a representative government the people act through their duly elected representatives. The people of the Southern states answered the question of secession by duly electing representatives to state conventions. These representatives voted to secede from the United States. Thus the secession of the Southern states was both simultaneously an act of the states and of the people therein.

I will also note that both the quoted text from Virginia, in the bold sentence, and the the quoted text from Rhode Island, in the next sentence in the paragraph beginning "3d" - one which I unfortunately had to cut for length, but which you can look up - state that powers not "clearly delegated" - to quote the Rhode Island convention - to the federal government "remain to the people of the several states, or their respective State Governments to whom they may have granted the same..." And this further answers any contention you might have that the right to take back the powers ceded to the federal government belongs not to the states but only to the people, since the people can grant said powers to their states, say as part of a state wide convention on the question of secession.

Nor does such quoted text allow you to argue that the powers reserved to the people belong to the people only insofar as they are people of the Union as a whole but not insofar as they are people of their respective states. For Rhode Island is explicit - as I have just quoted - that such powers "remain to the people of the several states," i.e. the powers are reserved to the people insofar as the are the people of their respective states rather than insofar as they are the people of the Union.

The right of a state and the people therein to secede from the Union, if that is the will of the people, is a legal right under the Constitution. It is a right they have under the plain textual meaning of the 10th Amendment. It is a right they have under the plain textual meaning of the conditions under which Virginia and Rhode Island ratifed the Constitution. And since Virginia and Rhode Island's ratifications of the Constitution were considered true and legal ratifications with said conditions, it is the meaning of the Constitution that was historically accepted from the beginning.

Thanks for doing your homework brendon! This Lincoln character must be dethroned. It is sad to see so many Catholics defend him since he has become the patron saint of unjustified war. I will never understand the Nationalist mindset which believes that the States which made up the American union handed off their rights and liberties to a foreign government! Nothing could be further from the minds of our Founders, who delegated to the federal government powers that were "few and defined".

Perhaps I should have said the "false notion that ALL supporters of secession were equivalent to defenders of slavery". I never denied that their were some supporters of slavery in the South (AND the North, certainly to the extent that they denied a right existed to invade the South and conquer it to eliminate slavery. After Ft. Sumter, they simply rallied around the flag, as Lincoln knew they would) Lee was against slavery long before Lincoln was, and he fought for the South for heaven's sake!

The idea, at least as popularized among the Right, that violent revolution is the constitutional substitution for peaceful state secession is, so far as I can tell, an invention of Harry Jaffa's. It's hardly one that was shared before the war. "Secession was the last peaceful means of local self-government. It no longer exists." Where's that from? A southern pro-slavery newspaper? No. It's the New York Times in 1882.

Lastly, just as a side note, you sure put more faith in a known-to-be-biased online encyclopedia like Wikipedia than I ever would.

In addition to what has been said, why did Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin and three congressmen in the House earlier all propose a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to BAN a state from seceding in 1861, after 7 southern states had already left? Pretty unnecessary if it was "already unconstitutional". And aside from what he told Everett, Madison explicitly rejected a proposal at the Convention in 1787 that would allow a suppresion of a state's secession, saying, "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."

Gunnar, you are RIGHT! However the confed governments relied on the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a politician and senator from South Carolina, who explicitly attached the natural law based founding of our country. See "Union & Liberty: The Political Philosopy of John C. Calhoun".

He especially hated "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal".

Sorry it took me so long to respond. Had to find my copy of the Federalist. From #39, last Paragraph:
"The proposed constitution,therefore, is, in strictness neither a national nor a federal constitution, but a composition of BOTH."
Madison responding to Calhoun during the nullification crisis wrote-"But is not the constitution itself necessarily the offspring of a soverign authority? And where does the sovereignty which makes such a constitution reside? It resides not in a single state but in the people of each of the several states, uniting with those of the others in express and solemn compact which forms the constitution. To the extent of that compact or constitution, therefore, the people of the several states must be a sovereign as they are a UNITED people".

The US was never envisioned as a confederacy, but a new kind of federal republic, with limited soverignity for the states and the federal govt, but ultimate soverignty in the hands of the people.


There is no evidence at all that slavery in the south would have ended peacefully. See the Encyclopedia of So. Culture for antebellum industry and their use of hired slaves, esp. in the upper south. Also, review the provisions in the confed constitution which explicitly say no laws which limit "negro slavery" can ever be considered. And it was not "Lincoln's War". The south started it when they fired on Ft. Sumter without provocation. Lincoln warned the gov. of SC in advance that the ship being sent brought only provisions and water, and no attempt to bring men or guns would be attempted without explict notice. See David Donald's bio.

Notice that nowhere does "seceed, secession, leaving the union" any words to that effect that could reasonable be construed as recognizing that the state having the LEGAL right to leave the union appear. And please read my response to Dave K from Madison on how the founders saw soverignity.

And if the states had a legal right, and were convinced they had a legal right, why didn't the confeds just sue in a federal court?

And please provide one quote from one of the founders that the 10th amendment was intrepreted as you intrepret it?
Anti-federalist like Robert Yates of NY opposed ratification because "it will not be a compact entered into by the states, in their corporate capacities, but an agreement of the people of the US as one great body politic. It is to be observed, it is not a union of states or bodies corporate"

All of the above are from Kranwitter's book "Vindicating Lincoln". Now, I don't know if he's a "Jaffa syncophant", but he does discuss, in very great detail whether A legal right to secession exist or not. He acknowledges that if a legal right to seceed exists, then Lincoln was wrong. I know you said in an earlier post that they didn't discuss it. I suggest you read Chapter 5 in detail.

SOME supporters of slavery in the south?! Only some....(LOL)
As for Lee, I suggest you read "Lee Considered" by Alan Nolan and a recent article in Civil War Times by E.B. Pryor. Lee talked a good game of self-justification after the war and before the war to his anti-slavery wife (the Custis's were a long-line ambivilent about slavery). Lee...wasn't. He tried to get his father-in-law's will reversed in court so he could keep his slaves. He had slaves who found out they were to be freed and ran away whipped by the sheriff and, according to some accounts, whipped some himself. He only freed them when the court ruled against him. After the war, in a letter to his son, he counciled him not to hire any blacks. He counciled a northern friend who wanted to donate money to educate blacks not to do so. He protected students at Wash. College who engaged in violence against blacks. If anyone needs to be exposed, it's Lee.



None of the founders shared such a view. The Federalist (I've had to re-read a lot of it lately) is full of the idea the revolution is a natural right of human beings. Give me one quote where a founder says words to the effect "A state can legally and peacefully leave the union". BTW, 1882 is after the war. And it is the NY Times afterall...(LOL)


Can you point to anything I've quoted from it that's not factual? I know I got Constitution Article VII wrong, but that was me misreading (my apologies). I've not found bias even when I've not agreed with it. If you want bias read anything by DiLorenzo...and I CAN cite factual errors.

Well the fact that no such amendment ever passed is answer enough. After much discussion, it was decided it wasn't need.




I've not seen the quote before. Do you have a citation? And it is unlike things he wrote in the Federalist and later during the Nullification crisis, in response to Calhoun. Perhaps he never envisions people proposing to leave the union for such frivolous reasons...

I think the WAY folks disobeyed Prohibition was wrong. If everyone made their own bathtub gin, wine, or had their own still. In other words, if they engaged in open civil disobedence, that would have been noble and would have resulted in the law being changed. But to support gangsters...ugh! As for secession crisies before the war, they were taken seriously! But both in 1814 and the 1830s, J.Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson strongly denied any right to seceed existed and cooler heads prevailed. And no Civil War would have taken place if the confeds hadn't gotten trigger happy and went to court instead. And after the attack, as I've written elsewhere Lincoln was in keeping with just law doctrine in his response (though not being Catholic, I doubt he gave it any thought). I'll copy the analysis if you'd like.



I think we are, and in a good way. While most folks in the original 13 were English (or Irish or Scot), a significant part were not--Dutch in NY, French in SC and other areas, German in PA. These didn't have the same tradition of "rights of Englishmen", which animated most of the founders, such as the Adamses. But Jefferson found the natural law reasoning in Locke: "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights". This idea, a secular restatement of Paul's "There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, but all are one in Jesus Christ" is an idea any 'idiot' from any of the four corners of the world can affirm.

You're really grasping at straws. Everybody (especially Brendon) keeps pointing out nonfactual points of yours, and you just keep going! And for all the whining about DiLorenzo, you have yet to point out a single error in his book. Neither did any of the Lincoln-worshippers, though, and they're professionals.

The Confeds should have gone to federal court, and only, presumably, if they "won" would secession have been legal? Well, the Court had "declared" slavery legal in 1857! What, is the court sometimes in tune, sometimes not to the "genuine" constitutional understanding? If it helps the Lincoln cause you like it. If not, you don't.

The Madison remark is well known. It's recorded in the first volume of the Records of Federal Convention.

There is loads of evidence that slavery was a dying institution; it was dying all over the West because of the moral opprobrium of Christianity. There is no evidence that any of the Framers believed violent revolution was preferred over secession as any kind of "natural right" in the weird way Jaffa and Krannawitter (and you, obviously) say that was preferable to assumed state soverignty. Your snickering assumption that all southerners supported slavery just reveals your ignorance. 75% of white southern families didn't even own any slaves! In fact some black southerners owned slaves of their own, especially among the 2-3% of free blacks in the deep south. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens defended slavery; Davis did as well but believed it was a dying institution.

Thanks for proving BOTH the biases of wikipedia and yourself over your ill-informed remarks about Lee. Alan Nolan's book is a joke by a leftist labor lawyer, Michael Fellman's book is also awful, written in a style, ironically, that is similar to the way all the Jaffaites and left-wing historians write about Lincoln, talk about his speeches and "intent", not what he actually did. Full of endless pychoanalyzing of how Lee really meant "whippings" when he used words like "firmness" and how he was constantly thinking "racially" if he had a word or two that wasn't uniformly positive about a black person. Naturally, the main relevant wiki paragraph relies on Fellman's book, while probably the most reliable and reliably objective book on Lee is the Emory Thomas bio, which isn't footnoted at all on the page. This is true of subject after subject on wiki, since all the high-level editors are left-wingers. Lee freed the slaves from his father in law within the 5 years of paying off Custis's debt, as the will mandated. He also called for their freedom in South, before Lincoln did. He ALSO never had a racist idea as crazy as Lincoln's, ie, to ship all the blacks off to the Caribbean or Africa. Yeah, Lee must've been a real jerk who was hated in the North; that's why the New York Herald encouraged him to run for prez. after the war. But Lincoln went to war to free the slaves, right? Not to suppress constitutional secession? Funny how he supported Texas's right to secede from Mexico, if it was such a principle he abhored, huh?

There's really no point in arguing over the same ground when Brendon has repeatedly pointed out to you the numerous evidence of how the states, Va, NY, RI, in particular, regarded the federal compact, and has shown where to find the evidence for such.

"Well the fact that no such amendment ever passed is answer enough. After much discussion it was decided it wasn't needed." Huh? LOL Yeah, O.K. This is so lame it doesn't make sense. I think we're done.

BPS
I don't think you are reading your source materials carefully. Federalist # 39 and 40 have references to the states being sovereign. Sovereignty cannot be divided. Sovereign POWERS can be divided (hence, divided sovereignty). The People of the States are the sovereigns in the American system. They delegated most governmental powers to their state governments and a few to the federal government. If you read the Constitution and the debates about its composition you will find that all references to it being a national government were stricken. The "United States" was substituted where ever there was a reference to a national government. It is a little dishonest for Madison to use this terminology in the Federalist since he knew of this fact. His purpose was to describe how the new government would operate rather than its source of authority. By using the term "United States" our Founders make clear the kind of union they intended, a union of states. The Constitution itself refers to the United States as "them", not as a single entity or nation. Since the People of the individual states are the sovereigns in our system they can withdraw(secede) their delegated powers from the federal government whenever they see fit. This is what self-government is all about...see Declaration of Independence. All this was lost on Lincoln who had a very poor understanding of American history. He denied that any state was independent or sovereign outside the Union! So, Abe, how did the ratification process work?

Also, your above quote from Madison to Calhoun doesn't disprove the states rights doctrine. Madison confirms that it is the people of the several states who are the sovereigns who created the compact (Constitution) which united them as one people for federal purposes. This in no way implies that individual states could never leave a union of their own making, they would have had to lose their individual sovereignty for that to happen.
You also say that the US was never envisioned as a confederacy, but a new kind of federal republic. Ever hear of the Articles of Confederation? What is the difference between a confederacy and a federal republic?

Your refusal to see the connection between the explicit claim that, "the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will," and the right of a state and the people therein to resume said power through the act of secession is irrational. If the people can take back the power they ceded to the federal government, then they can choose to take all of that power back and give it to their state government instead. This can only be viewed as something different than secession if we redefine the what words such as "resume," "power," and "secession" mean.



Because the moment they successfully chose to take back the power they ceded to the federal government by seceding they were no longer under the authority of the federal government or its courts, and thus did not have to defer to its rulings.



I don't have to. Laws are to be interpreted according to the intention of the legislator, i.e. the person or persons who have the authority to promulgate binding laws. If you would like a natural law authority for that I would point you to St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 96, a. 6.

Those who wrote the Constitution are not, however, the legislators who made it law. The Constitution was made law by the actions of the people through their state governments. The means used to accomplish this were the election of representatives to state conventions for the purpose of ratifying the Constitution and making it law. I have quoted two such conventions, both of which support the right of the people to take back the power they ceded to the federal government. That such an action can be done through the vehicle of the states, specifically through state conventions, follows from the fact that this is the same means by which the Constitution was made law. Thus I have given explicit evidence that the intentions of the legislators who made the Constitution law include the understanding of the 10th Amendment I am defending. This is the very reason why the 10th Amendment was later ratified. I have given explicit evidence that the intentions of the legislators who made the Constitution law include the right of the people to take back the power they have ceded to the federal government, which is nothing more or less than what secession is.

What Madison said or thought is not relevant. What any particular framer of the Constitution or father of these United States thought or said, what any particular Federalist or Anti-Federalist thought or said, is not relevant. What is relevant is the intentions of the legislators who ratified the Constitution as demonstrated by the conventions through which it was ratified. I have quoted two such conventions. They explicitly state that, 1) that the federal government only has those powers specifically given to it, and 2) that the people may resume the powers they have ceded to the federal government, which, when done in its totality, is nothing more or less than secession.

I have supported my position with the authority of the legislators who made the Constitution law. You have not. That is why my interpretation - and that of John Taylor and Jefferson Davis - is correct, while your interpretation - and that of Joseph Story and Abraham Lincoln - is not.

My apologies for taking so long to get back to this. I took Holy Week off, and had to do some actual work.

I’ll deal with Brendon’s points in a later post. And except for a misquote of part of a line from the Constitution, he’s pointed out NO factual errors.


OK how about a few-
(1) He leaves out, WITHOUT ellipses, the portion of Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley where he says “If I could save the Union by freeing all the Slaves, I would do it”. He puts the letter in context of being after the 1st draft of the Emancipation having been written, nor that Lincoln ends the letter by saying “I wish all men, everywhere to be free”. This is common with the neo-confeds. They do it because it give the worst possible meaning to the quote.
(2) He wrote “Neither Jefferson not his successor, Madison, believed they had any authority to use military force to compel a state to abide by their dictates”. But Jefferson did use military force to enforce compliance with his embargo policies. From Levy’s “Jefferson and Civil Liberties”: “Jefferson inclined to attaint and blockade a whole locality, because some of its citizens dared speak against his embargo policies. Shortly after accepting the doctrine that the ends justify the means, he ordered out the regular army as a normal enforcement agency, without formality of public proclamation, and without lawful authority. He permitted his Attorney General to experiment with treason prosecution as another means of enforcement. He deliberately and lawlessly ordered collectors of the customs to ignore a decision by a Supreme Court justice who ruled the President had acted without authority.”
(3) He said “No one questioned the right of the New England states to secede” and quotes “Documents Related to New-England Federalism 1800-1815”, edited by Henry Adams (grandson of J.Q. Adams). But he never quotes the longest and central document in the book, an essay by John Quincy himself, in which he not only questioned the right of states to secede, but left the Federalist party because of the attempt.
(4) He writes “Lincoln’s cause…was centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” According to DiLorenzo “he said this over and over again”. But he provides not quotes. Perhaps because Lincoln never said anything of the sort. You’d think he’d have something if Lincoln said it, “over and over”.



Article 3, section 2 of the Constitution gives the judiciary the power to determine what the Constitution means in law. So yes, a judicial ruling in the confeds favor would have determined legality of secession, since it is not stated anywhere, either in law or the reasoning of the people who wrote and approve it that such a right exist. And I presume when you write “the Court had "declared" slavery legal in 1857” you mean the Dred Scott decision. You are wrong in your facts. Slavery was a state determined issue before the Dred decision. Dred declared slavery could be extended anywhere in the US and that blacks (not just slaves, but free blacks as well) were not citizens and had no rights whites were bound to respect. Justice Curtis, who wrote the dissenting opinion, provided the best refutation when he wrote that at the time the Constitution was approved, free blacks voted in 5 states. Taney was wrong, but not because of any “liking” of mine but wrong on the facts and matters of law.


Still looking for the Madison quote. I want to see it in context, because it doesn’t fit other things he said, both in the Federalist Papers and later. What the framers MEANT, is very important, wouldn’t you agree?

First, I never snicker. There is no evidence at all that slavery was dying in the American south. You refuse to deal with the FACT that southern theologians such as Thornwell and Ross were writing “Christian” justifications for slavery as a ‘positive good’, which were widely read and accepted in the South. You refuse to deal with the FACT that border state slaveholders were making a great deal of money by leasing out their slaves to industrial concerns. You refuse to deal with the FACT that the vast majority of white southerners supported slavery, even if they didn’t own any, because even the poorest white maintained a measure of ‘southern honor’ simply because of the fact that he had white skin. You refuse to deal with the FACT that the confed constitution explicitly protects “negro slavery” and prohibits any laws restricting it. And provide one quote, from BEFORE the war, from Davis that he believed it was a dying institution! The fact that some blacks owned slaves before the war proves nothing. Even the richest free Black in the south had less rights than the poorest white. Do you deny that FACT?! You think just because they didn’t own slaves, most white southerners didn’t support slavery?!
As for the framers and revolution, read the Declaration of Independence. They understood themselves to be breaking the laws of Britain. They knew they were revolutionaries under natural law. It is in no way a secession document. They knew they were committing treason in the eyes of Britain by ‘abolishing’ and ‘throwing off” British administration. The confeds thought they were legally right under the US constitution. They should have taken their case to court instead of start a war by firing on a Federal installation.

Whatever Nolan’s profession is, he quotes Lee’s letters. I can assure you there is no psychoanalyzing in the book, only quotes from letters and other documents followed to their logical conclusion from the evidence presented. I have no idea who Fellman is. But the Pryor article in Civil War Times and the book it promotes also quotes a new stock of letters, previously unreleased from the Lee family, and stored at Burke and Herbert Bank, here in Alexandria. She also quotes court documents and local newpapers. There is NO doubt at all that Lee tried to get his father-in-laws will reversed in order to keep the slaves as is attested by both local and VA state appellate court documents. There is NO doubt at all that Lee had his slaves whipped, as are attested by local sheriffs records. There is some doubt if he doled out any slave whippings himself. Accounts by the slaves themselves and local newspapers say yes, and the FACT that he had no qualms about ordering whipping of cadets when he was West Point commendant suggest yes. And Lee never “called” for freedom for slaves in the south, unless you’re talking about the one letter he wrote to his wife (whose whole family didn’t much care for slavery) where he “wished” it to be so. Even in 1865, when writing to Andrew Hunter, a VA politican, he said he considered the relationship of “Master and slave…to be the best that can exist between the white and black races”. As for Lee never having called for shipping the freed slaves out of the country, Ms. Pryor quotes a local VA newpaper interview where Lee recommends just that. As for Lincoln supporting slave deportation, he did early on. However, as early as 1854 he had misgivings. He said in a speech in Peoria “ My 1st impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia…but a moment’s reflection would convince me it’s sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days”. He never formulated a clear policy for colonization. The only attempt he actually sponsored was an 1863 expedition to the Caribbean in which black participated voluntarily and which congress fully funded. It was a debacle, and Lincoln sent a ship to bring the colonist back to the US. By the end of the war, in his last speech, he called for full citizenship and voting rights for educated blacks and those who fought in the Union Army.
BTW, Texas didn’t secede from Mexico. It declared it’s independence and revolted, just like the original 13 colonies.

You’re not reading YOUR source material carefully, if your only real objection is that you think Madison is dishonest. You make a distinction without a difference if you think sovereignty and powers are different things. Who says sovereignity can’t be divided? A divided sovereignity is exactly what the founders intended, a new kind of federalism. As the Framers understood it, States would be sovereign in things local and internal. The national Federal government would be sovereign in international and interstate matters. Notice that according to the US Constitution, 2 states cannot make agreements AMONG THEMSELVES, without a vote in congress. Ultimate sovereignty rest with the people, not the state legislatures. You don’t deal with any of the FACTS regarding how the Framers, even the ones, such as Yates of NY who was antifederalist ,or Madison regarded the character of state and national Federal govt. Read the last paragraph of Federalist 22. Your only recourse is to call Madison dishonest. I’d prefer to believe him about what the constitution meant, instead of some neo-confed.

You’re not reading your source material carefully. First, US being a plural is simply a convention of speech. It was even used after the Civil War. The people are sovereign as a whole, as Madison said and as quoted earlier (though you think him dishonest). They live in States, through which they express their will on State matters and Federal matters. Only a majority of them, expressed thru their congressmen, can admit a state to the union. Only a majority vote, done in the same way, can let a state leave the union. Much argument was expended over the 10th amendment. The Articles of Confederation confined congresses powers to those, “expressly delegated”. Anti-Federalist lobbied hard to have the 10th confine national powers to those “expressly” enumerated. Madison insisted some powers had to be “admitted by implication”.
As to the Declaration, why does legitimate government rest on the consent of the governed? Is it not, as the declaration says, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their created with rights, among which are life, liberity and the pursuit of happiness? Isn’t that why governments are instituted among men, to secure this rights? What does that say about the legitimacy of a government which says explicitly that some men, black men, are “born saddled to be ridden, and others [whitemen] are born booted and spurred to ride them” to paraphrase Jefferson?

And Lincoln was absolutely right. No state was ever sovereign or independent (except maybe Texas—and it government was a separate republic, not a state as the states are inside the purview of the constitution) outside the Union. John Adams, and John Hancock call the Declaration “the fundamental act of union”.

Neo-confed arguments are ridiculous and cannot be defended from the perspective of the men who founded this nation.

BPS,
Can you come to grips with what the term "state" means? In the Declaration it is applied individually to each of the former colonies, and to Great Britain. The word has a definite meaning you don't seem to grasp. There is a difference between sovereignty and sovereign powers. The People are the sovereigns in the American system. They delegate sovereign powers to their government to be used for their well being. If the government messes things up or becomes inadequate to its purpose the people can change it. The People of the States never gave the federal government ultimate control of their rights and liberties. They would have been fools to do so!