Replies

Northern invasion
J.C.Calhoun started it with South Carolina’s nullification act.. >State Rights.
Nothing has changed from what J.C. said.
NOW we will see in our own time who is right. (see below)........

J.C. Calhoun S.C.
A state’s sovereignty within the federal compact is what gives it the legal standing to “nullify” a federal law in the first place. Nullification and secession are inextricably linked, according to Calhoun, and if that right does not exist, then “the character of the Government has been changed in consequence, from a federal republic, as it originally came from the hands of its framers, into a great national consolidated democracy.” [John C. Calhoun, Southern States May Be Forced to Leave the Union.

President Andrew Jackson S.C.
This logic was countered by President Andrew Jackson, who claimed that the inherent error in South Carolina’s reasoning was the mistaken belief that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states, when it was actually ratified by the American people via their respective state conventions. States thus lost their sovereignty, and the people’s allegiance was transferred to the government of the United States. [Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” The Journal of American History, Vol.65, No.1 (June, 1978): 31-32.]

President Abraham Lincoln Not from S.C.
“A dozen years before assuming the burdens of the presidency, the young politician Abraham Lincoln was willing to concede that: ‘Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, - a sacred right…Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” [Ibid. 110] Lincoln was a secessionist – at least for a while, anyway. Like many politicians, Mr. Lincoln was not immune from switching positions for reasons of political expediency.

(President Abraham Lincoln would be profoundly influenced by Jackson’s rationale in the ensuing decades.) However, Jackson’s line of reasoning distorts the philosophical premise of George Mason when he proposed the “state convention ratification” concept during the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Three decades later, South Carolina would, of course, refer to the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as evidence of the right to secede when creating its Declaration for the Causes of Secession in December of 1860.
Kenneth S. Imbriale