I'll take your word for it. It doesn't change the fact the the north was the invader, nor that the north committed many atrocities, beginning with the constitutional atrocity of suspension of the writ of Habeus Corpus, and violation of the revolutionary war principles of "VOLUNTARY UNION." I haven't seen any historian make a good case yet that the southern states could not legally secede from the union. Might made it right, eh. PC history classes like to focuse on the evil south but conveniently ignore nothern evils.
The actual quotation, from which your garbled version springs, from has a much different meaning.
"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might , and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." -- Abraham Lincoln Feb 27, 1860 Cooper Union
The Supremacy Clause makes the laws of the United States the supreme law of the land.
One of those laws is the Militia Act of 1792, as amended in 1795.
That act gives the power to the president to put down rebellion or insurrection.
The act is referenced by the Supreme Court as having that function in its Prize Cases ruling in the 1862 term.
Now --Jefferson Davis-- saw the power elsewhere.
Here is how Davis was interpreting the General Welfare Clause:
"Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a "dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the states...at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution."
In reply Jefferson Davis donned the mantle of Hamilton. The Confederate Constitution, he pointed out to 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
Note that quote from J. Davis: "provide for the common defense"? Ouch. Surely if Jefferson Davis could raise troops on this basis, Abraham Lincoln could. The relevant language in the Constitution and the rebel constitution is identical.
After all, the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
Confederate apologists strain at the gnat and swallow the camel:
"The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of the nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done, by confining the 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 conclusive to the end. "
--John Marshall, Chief Justice, writing in McCullough v. Maryland, 1819
In fact, ol' J. Davis sounds like he had acopy of McCullough in his back pocket when he wrote Governor Brown of Georgia.
Guess he lost it after the war.
To call these people heroes (not that -you- did) is grotesque.
Walt