Perhaps this is where we part, Mr. Ross. The states are more powerful -ie. the people. I believe in soveriegnty, home-rule, and limited powers on the federal government (see ammendment X) just as the Founders intended.
But you don't quote the founders.
James Madison:
"The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, then the other or others have to hold them to it. And certainly there is nothing in the Virginia resolutions of --98, adverse to this principle, which is that of common sense and common justice. The fallacy which draws a different conclusion from them lies in confounding a single party, with the parties to the Constitutional compact of the United States. The latter having made the compact may do what they will with it. The former as one only of the parties, owes fidelity to it, till released by consent, or absolved by an intolerable abuse of the power created....
"It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by someone who understands the subject."
12/23/32
Oh, check this out:
...in 1842 a group of prominent southern slaveholding members of the House of Representatives crafted the following statement to condemn the idea that the Union was not permanent:
"Whereas, the Federal Constitution is a permanent form of Government and of perpetual obligation... and the dissolution of the Union necessarily implies the destruction of that instrument, the overthrow of the American Republic, and the extinction of our national existance... [To advocate breaking up the Union is thus] a high breach of privilege, a contempt offered to this House, ... and involves necessarily, in its execution and its consequences, the destruction of our country and the crime of high treason." [Source: Congressional Globe, Jan. 1842, pp. 169-170.]
You don't quote the record, because the record will not support your position.
Walt
Codeword alert: "the record" = Wlat's Marxist quote-box.
You fellers don't have a "record", so you don't know jack, and you aren't a Union triumphalist, neo-Marxist, or Lincolnian corporatist, so you don't have the character to comment on subjects beyond your purview. In other words, shut up, "boah", the Webmaster is talking.
Yeah, right. Keep raving, Wlat.
Sure would like to see the rest of that last sentence, Walt.
One of Madison's preoccupations in his later career was factionalism and the problem of avoiding a triumph of faction, which would introduce absolutism to government policy, and presumably the "intolerable abuse of ...power..." which he referred to in the bolded portion of the quote. Madison and the other Federalists had the cozy illusion -- I don't call it that lightly -- that the best men of the republic could always find a way to deflect their ambitious and unscrupulous inferiors. There are plenty of examples of the latter type who grasped for money or power, or both: Aaron Burr, Colonel House, Roscoe Conkling, Lyndon Johnson, and Huey Long. In the model contemplated by the framers, the best men -- men like John Quincy Adams, Webster and Calhoun, Sam Rayburn, and Mike Mansfield -- would continuously and effectively overmaster the plotting and scheming of the less scrupulous, so that their influence on policy would be minimized. Mind that in that era, policy flowed from Congress, rather than from the Executive and the Judiciary as it does now for the most part.
Your quote is a good one, but it doesn't explain everything that was on Madison's mind. Contextually, his reference to the Virginia Resolutions (which IIRC he co-authored) refers also to the nullification idea, which is exactly the opposition of a single State and its own interpretation of the Constitution to the interpretation all the other states have of it, and of the Supremacy Clause, and of the laws and policies flowing from the operation of the Constitution.
The last line you quote is a bridge to Madison's thinking about revolution in the face of an intolerable state of affairs. No Founder, as far as I know, ever posited that the States gave up the right to revolutionize their affairs, and I think you have insisted that you don't make that claim either.
Secession was revolution. That is the key. To you, it was just insurrection, whereas I think any fair person would conclude, from the power, strength, tenacity, and sheer valor of the resistance, that the South was indeed engaged in revolution. It wasn't just some rumpus over a tax on stills and whiskey.
[Resuming] "It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by someone who understands the subject."
"Secession at will" is a formulary, and would have described e.g. South Carolina's seceding in 1832 over nullification, or New England's seceding over tax policy after the War of 1812 (they threatened to).
"Seceding at will", if I understand Madison's intended use of it correctly, is just taking a walk on the Constitution, and it is not the same thing as what happened in 1860 and 1861. It is still a very serious Constitutional crisis, and "secession at will" would, if it followed the pattern of Virginia's and Texas's in 1861 (they both had constitutional conventions, and ratifying plebiscites), be sovereign acts of the People that would have to be taken very seriously, and which would still be binding on their Peoples.
Madison offers no guide about what should be done in a case of "secession at will", and I don't know, either, because sovereignty is involved. Legally the People who had seceded would have the right to leave the Union by resuming their powers, although Madison apparently didn't think so, or at least he said so in circumstances of a debate about nullification, which as the date on your quote shows, was in full cry. (And nullification, as I've stipulated before, did not rise to the level of secession, and failed constitutionally.)
Keep in mind, too, that Madison left the door open even in the case of "secession at will", in which he considered, in the highlighted text, that a State "seceding at will", so to speak, could be "absolved by an intolerable abuse of...power". Therefore, not even Madison considered all cases of "secession at will" to be invalid.
As to the level of provocation to test whether the South was under an "intolerable abuse of power" sufficient to justify secession at will, that is another discussion. But the question here is whether Madison's quote addresses the circumstances and secessions of 1860 and 1861, and it seems that it would not. The Civil War was very much more serious than "secession at will", and was in fact revolution.
"Whereas, the Federal Constitution is a permanent form of Government and of perpetual obligation... [To advocate breaking up the Union is thus] a high breach of privilege, a contempt offered to this House, ... and involves necessarily, in its execution and its consequences, the destruction of our country and the crime of high treason." [Source: Congressional Globe, Jan. 1842, pp. 169-170.]
Interesting quote, but who made this statement and why? Context, please. You say the people offering the statement were Southern congressmen.
You don't quote the record, because the record will not support your position.
They don't quote "the record", because it's all on your computer by definition.