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To: BroJoeK
Indeed, far from supporting "states' rights", secessionists used Northern states' rights in fugitive slaves as their legal basis for declaring secession!

"States Rights" cannot be extended to something explicitly prohibited by the US Constitution. The states voluntarily gave up that particular right by ratifying the Constitution as it was written.

You seem to have a cognitive dissonance on this point.

305 posted on 04/20/2018 2:56:04 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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To: DiogenesLamp; x; SoCal Pubbie
DiogenesLamp: " 'States Rights' cannot be extended to something explicitly prohibited by the US Constitution.
The states voluntarily gave up that particular right by ratifying the Constitution as it was written.
You seem to have a cognitive dissonance on this point."

No "cognitive dissonance" here, since Southern states agreed in the 1850 Compromise to move responsibility for fugitive slaves from state to Federal government.
And since Southerners ran the Federal government throughout the 1850s, it was their responsibility to override any particular state laws they disliked.

The apparent fact that they didn't tells us fugitive slaves were not really the major issue they were purported in 1861 to have been.
Indeed the very states which howled loudest about it in their "Reasons for Secession" were, in fact, least troubled by it, since their own fugitives must travel through several slave-catching states before reaching any kind of safety in the North or Canada.

364 posted on 04/21/2018 2:22:01 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective...)
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