Its been argued here that Amendment X of the US consitution is the legal mechanism for secession. Do you disagree?
Jefferson Davis put no store in the 10th amendment.
He said the federal government had no right to coerce the states, but said he had the power as president of the so-called CSA to coerce Georgia based on language identical to that of the U.S. Constitution.
Look:
"In reply Jefferson Davis donned the mantle of Hamilton. The Confederate Constitution, he pointed out to [Governor]Brown, gave Congress the power "to raise and support armies" and to "provide for the common defense." It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Brown had denied the constitutionality of conscription because the Constitution did not specifically authorize it. This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, sanctified by generations of southern strict constructionists. But in Hamiltonian language, Davis insisted that the "necessary and proper" clause legitimized conscription. No one could doubt the necessity "when our very existance is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers." Therefore "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended and calculated to carry out the object...if the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional."
--Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson P.433
Now, amazingly -- although it is not hard to get a deer in headlights look from neo-rebs, Davis' stand was -very similar- to language in the majority opinion in McCullough v Maryland from 1819.
"The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of a nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, as far as human prudence could insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done by confining their choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of Congress to adopt any which might be appropriate, and which were conducive to the end...to have prescribed the means by which the government, should, in all future times, execute its powers, would have been to change, entirely, the character of the instrument, and give it the properties of a legal code...To have declared, that the best means shal not be used, but those alone, without which the power given would be nugatory...if we apply this principle of construction to any of the powers of the government, we shall find it so pernicious in its operation that we shall be compelled to discard it..."
From McCullough v. Maryland, quoted in "American Constittutional Law" A.T. Mason, et al. ed. 1983 p. 165.
Davis is making the same point Chief Justice Marshall made 40 years before. But Davis ignored the concept --while he was under oath to the U.S. Constitution -- and enforced it once he donned his traitor's garb.
Walt