Hmmm. Well, in that case, up 'til now I've been laboring under the misapprehension that Booth thought, along with many of his fellows, that the participation of states in this Union of ours was on a voluntary basis, and could be withdrawn. That would have made Lincoln's forcible de-secession of the confederate states a usurpation of power; such a notion would be consistent with Booth's reported utterance upon completing the deed, which was "Sic semper tyrannus" if I remember correctly... meaning "Thus always to tyrants."
Of course, I'm not much of a student of the history of those times, so I'm eager to hear what you have to say on that point.
The Supreme Court said no, repeatedly and often, as early as 1793. The Militia Act of 1792, as I posted earlier today, requires that U.S. law operate in all the states.
When Lincoln gave his public address on April 11, 1865 in which he supported black voting rights, Booth urged one of his acomplices to shoot Lincoln on the spot, but he refused.
Booth shot Lincoln, of course, three days later.
Walt
Wrong. Booth was above all, a white supremacist. He had sympathy with the Confederacy, although not nearly enough to make him stop his lucrative acting career to wear a gray uniform. Above all, he feared and hated the idea of free blacks. His earlier bizarre conspiracy, which fell through, was a scheme to kidnap Lincoln. It was not until Lincoln called for voting rights for blacks in a speech in Washington on April 11, 1865 that Booth vowed to kill Lincoln. He kept his promise 2 days later.
This makes a lot of sense:
"The men at the [constitutional] convention, it is clear enough, assumed that the national government must have the power to throw down state laws that contradicted federal ones: it was obvious to them that the states could not be permitted to pass laws contravening federal ones...
It did not take long for the supremacy of the Supreme Court to become clear. Shortly after the new government was installed under the new Constitution, people realized that the final say had to be given to somebody, and the Connecticut Jurist and delegate to the Convention Oliver Ellsworth wrote the judicary act of 1789, which gave the Supreme Court the clear power of declaring state laws unconstitutional, and by implication allowing it to interpret the Constitution. The power to overturn laws passed by Congress was assumed by the Supreme Court in 1803 and became accepted practice duing the second half of the nineteenth century."
"The convention was slow to tackle the problem of an army, defense, and internal police. The Virginia Plan said nothing about a standing army, but it did say that the national government could 'call forth the force of the union against any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.' The delegates had expected to discuss something like this clause, for one of the great problems had been the inability of the old Congress to enforce its laws. Surely it should be able to march troops into states when necessary to get state governments to obey.
But in the days before the convention opened Madison had been thinking it over, and he had concluded that the idea was a mistake. You might well march your troops into Georgia or Connecticut, but then what? Could you really force a legislature to disgorge money at bayonet point? 'The use of force against a state,' Madison said, as the debate started on May 31, 'would be 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.'
Although he did not say so at the moment, he had another way of enforcing national law, which not only would be more effective, but also philosophically sounder. As the government was to derive its power from the people, it ought to act on the people directly. Instead of trying to punish a state, which was, after all, an abstraction, for failure to obey the law, the U.S. government could punish individuals directly. Some person -- a governor, a tax collector, a state treasurer -- would be held responsible for failure to deliver the taxes. Similarly, the national government would not punish a state government for allowing say, illegal deals with Indians over western lands, but would directly punish the people making the deals. All of this seemed eminently sensible to the convention and early in the debate on the Virginia Plan the power of the national government to 'call forth the power of the Union' was dropped. And so was the idea that the government should be able to compell the states disappeared from the convention. It is rather surprising, in view of the fact that the convention had been called mainly to curb the independence of the states, that the concept went out so easily. The explanation is, in part, that the states' righters were glad to see it go; and in part that Madison's logic was persuasive: it is hard to arrest an abstraction."
--"Decision in Philadelphia" by Collier and Collier