YOU:Please show me the Constitutional Article that gave him the authority to promote someone from 'property' to 'citizen'.
I wasn't referring to emancipation of slaves. I was talking about Lincoln's desire to extend Constitutional protection to all citizens, be they northern or southern. Lincoln hated slavery and the efforts to subvert the precedent of the Northwest Ordinance, but he also loved the Constitution and the rights it granted to all Americans.
LOL! Extend is a word used if your offering something, not if you will force something on them, will-they, nil-they.
His protection was neither required nor desired. Slavery was an institution when the states were formed, the Revolution was fought and the Constitution was signed.
Those that wished to live in a slave free state were welcome to go to the single State that never allowed slavery....which, I believe, was Massachusetts.
That state was the ONLY non-slave state at the signing of the Constitution. The Founders felt it was up to the State, not the newly formed federal government, to make that decision.
Lincoln ran roughshod over almost a hundred years of the established legal FACT of States abiding by their own choices on the issue. This is in adherence to the Constitutional compact. The document Lincoln swore to uphold.
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and the rights it granted to all Americans.
Please show me the Constitutional authority that grants the ability to define the following terms-
Person
Property
American
Jurisdiction
The federal government was given a specific area in which to operate. Lincoln released the genie from the bottle, and God help us, we'll never get it back in there again.
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However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.
James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions