For someone with supposedly six degrees your reading comprehension sucks. What Pickney is referring to here when he says state( singular) is a nation.
State-a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government.
I mean the sentence prior he says “in every government”. Not every government had states(plural) like America did. He is making the distinction that unlike all other governments(a state) that sovereignty of our country resides in the people. When he says people he means we the people as in the people of America as it declares in the constitution. No subset of the people i.e. people in one state.
If he meant what you incorrectly thinks he means his last sentence would have been “With us the sovereignty of the Union resides in the states(plural).”
Your citing ability is by far eclipsed by your cherry picking and twisting ability’s. Your like Bill Clinton with his “depends on what the word is means.”
For someone who claims to support and defend the Constitution, and took an oath to do so, you appear to have nothing but disdain for original intent.
How you interpret Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's statement, which was made in the South Carolina legislature (not in Convention) is irrevelent. That little tidbit you keep trying to push on us as something of great significance, can never overcome the last argument of Pinckney's during the debate, in which he said:
"With regard to the liberty of the press, the discussion of that matter was not forgotten by the members of the Convention. It was fully debated, and the impropriety of saying any thing about it in the Constitution clearly evinced. The general government has no powers but what are expressly granted to it; it therefore has no power to take away the liberty of the press. That invaluable blessing, which deserves all the encomiums the gentleman has justly bestowed upon it is secured by all our state constitutions; and to have mentioned it in our general Constitution would perhaps furnish an argument, hereafter, that the general government had a right to exercise powers not expressly delegated to it. For the same reason, we had no bill of rights inserted in our Constitution; for, as we might perhaps have omitted the enumeration of some of our rights, it might hereafter be said we had delegated to the general government a power to take away such of our rights as we had not enumerated: but by delegating express powers, we certainly reserve to ourselves every power and right not mentioned in the Constitution."
[Charles Coteworth Pinckney, in,"Debates In The Legislature And In Convention Of The State Of South Carolina, On The Adoption Of The Federal Constitution." Constitution Society, Jan 16, 1788]
Pinckney is crystal clear that the federal government has NO power whatsoever, except for those powers that are expressly mentioned in the Constitution.
So, please show us an expressed power given to the federal government to "preserve the union," or to "prevent secession," then please drop the notion that Pinckney did not believe in state sovereignty, and the notion that Lincoln acted lawfully.
BTW, it was Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story that took Pinckney's statement out of context in his Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol I, 1833, pp. 199-200, in his deceptive attempt to trick the people into believing state sovereignty was was not an issue in the debates. Story was a Hamiltonian mercantilist, as was his mentor, John Marshall, as well as Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln's hero. The truth was not in them.
This is my last conversation on Pinckney's statements to the S.C. Legislature.
Mr. Kalamata