Not true. You are pro-Confederacy and anti-Framers.
ml/nj: "It certainly is true that there have been many additional Federal Power Grabs since Lincoln, but even you would have to admit that he started it, and he did so in a big and violent way."
What Lincoln did as emergency measures during time of war ended when the war was over.
What Progressive Liberal Democrats, strongly supported by Southerners, began to do 100 years ago was use some of the Federal government's emergency war-time actions during peace-time.
Republican Lincoln is not to blame for the actions of Southern supported Progressive Democrats 50 years after Lincoln's death.
disHonest Abe is totally to blame for the de facto repeal of the 10th Amendment and the slide towards a centralized, totalitarian government.
What Lincoln did was forever change the relationship between the people and those who represent them. After Lincoln blew the ideals of federalism all to hell - the only so-called sovereign left in the room was the agent for the "mutual benefit" of the several States.
Lincoln July 4, 1861:
Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union . The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas; and even Texas, in its temporary independence, was never designated a State. The new ones only took the designation of States on coming into the Union, while that name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the Declaration of Independence . . . . Having never been States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of "State rights," asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself? Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the States, but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions. What is a "sovereignty" in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it "a political community without a political superior"? Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas , ever was a sovereignty. . .
James Madison:
Give me leave to say something of the nature of the government. . . . Who are the parties to it? The people--not the people as composing one great body, but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties.
Were it, as the gentleman asserts, a consolidated government, the assent of a majority of the people would be sufficient for its establishment: and as a majority have adopted it already, the remaining States would be bound by the act of the majority, even if they unanimously reprobated it.
A Constitutional History of Secession, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2002, p. 287:
It is an historical fact that, on two occasions during their deliberations, the framers in the Philadelphia Convention voted to deny Congress the power of calling forth military forces of the Union to compel obedience of a state, and on two further occasions they voted to deny Congress the power of sending the Federal army or navy into the territory of any state, except as allowed under Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution--to repel a foreign invasion or at the request of its legislature or governor to deal with domestic violence.
Federalist #39:
Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act.
I guess one could say the same of Obama and Depression II. And you would sort of be correct as Lincoln caused the war and Obama is responsible for Depression II.
State sovereignty was ended by Lincoln. It didn't return at all after the war. If you do not think State sovereignty was an important part of what Jefferson, Madison, et al., had in mind then there is no point in continuing the discussion.
ML/NJ