Mutuality and perpetual Union were peculiarities of The Articles of Confederation, which were replaced by the U.S. Constitution, so ignoring the 10th Amendment was a violation of Lincoln’s oath and an unlawful act. Lincoln was a lawyer, he knew that. It didn’t matter to him, he saw his loyalties as lying elsewhere.
Since further discussion will most certainly be circular, I will withdraw. It’s old history and hardly worth beating to death further.
I bid you a good day.
Except that he didn’t ignore it. The slavers had no right to quit the union in the method they chose and Lincoln held them to their commitments.
Have a nice evening.
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. Jamees Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, rejected it, saying: “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look 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.”
On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that said, “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”
Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here’s my no-brainer question: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?