[lentulusgracchus]

You are trying to make a lawyerly case for what was a matter of politics, power and passion.

Just because the affair was transacted in a disorderly and passionate manner by some people does not mean that the equities are not susceptible of reasoned analysis, which I have attempted to do, and which frankly Jefferson Davis did a better job of doing, in his inaugural address as the president of the still-provisional Confederate government, four weeks after he gave his valedictory address to the United States Senate. It's worth a read, if you haven't seen it already. It's posted somewhere here on Free Republic, as a matter of fact, in one of the other Civil War threads.

Your argument seems to involve the idea that the states are the people, the people are sovereign, therefore the states are sovereign, and the federal government is a government imposed on sovereign people and states.

Almost. I would agree with your precis, with the exception that the federal government is a government summoned into being by a Constitution agreed to by the Sovereign Peoples/States in conventions of ratification.

The other side of the coin is that the states are governments and impositions on the public as well, ....

Well, not exactly. We commonly make the mistake of confounding the States with their corresponding governments. They aren't those governments, they are those Peoples, those populi, poleis, or polities.

.....and the nation is a people as well, and "the people" that rights are reserved to under the Constitution is not "the people of the states", but simply "the people" which many would take as the people of the nation.

Unless I missed a post, that hasn't been argued here, except by you. I suggested it be bruited, but it hasn't. In my reductio ad absurdum, I tried to show that the Constitution does not contain explicit language that would establish that to be the case. If it was the intention of the Framers, I should think they would certainly have said so.

The deletion or addition of a word, in such circumstances, is very heavily loaded. For example, in the U.S. Senate's official discussion of the Tenth Amendment, which I linked to above, it is pointed out that much has been made of the omission of the word "expressly", between the writing of the Articles of Confederation in 1777 and that of the Tenth Amendment several years later, when referring to powers delegated to the United States, as opposed to those reserved to the People. The omission of the word "expressly" has been used to construct a legal argle-bargle to perfume wholesale invasions by Congress and the courts of areas of the law reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment, to the point that in the 20th century the amendment became very nearly a dead letter, as I showed. (It was my purpose to show what cavalier treatment of reserved rights and powers has looked like, as a triumphant "consolidation" movement launched by Lincoln has progressively invaded the People's rights.)

The Centrist Consolidators and imperialist Statists having made much over language, to argue that the failure to re-use the word "expressly" signals original intent to overthrow an entire theory of government, I reserve the same right, and I do not concede that I am less than they a citizen with the right to interpret the Constitution's plain language as the Framers intended everyone should have the right. Of course, that runs contrary to the new theory of government, under which attorneys on retainer to Money and Power do all the interpreting, and we have recourse only to their hired opinions, about what our rights in the law are.

Therefore I insist that the Constitution's reticence about a transfer of Sovereignty, or the creation of a new Populus and the subsumption of the extant Peoples who created the Union by a new populus or polity of the Union, is explicit and every bit as wilful and determining as the Framers' omission of the word "expressly" when referring to delegated powers. I conclude from the omission, that the intent to subsume and displace the People of the State in a People of the Nation was deliberate, and that the Unionists may not correctly infer such an intent, only because it is convenient to their larger purposes.

[x]

You seem to be arguing that the Constitution accepts the world of the ancient city with states as polises or peoples. Each state would then have it's own cult and culture and essence as a people. But this was precisely what Madison was afraid of. Such tight-little units were a breeding ground of faction. The larger nation allowed more free play for groups to combine and work for common goals. It also allows greater stability as divisive issues, powerful interests and the political ambitions of politicians and their followings are diluted in the larger sea of national life. The result is more freedom for the individual from those who would dragoon him or her into this or that local army or party.

To be sure, Sam Adams would approve of your picture, and maybe Patrick Henry, but not Washington, Hamilton or Madison. One can already see a national consciousness developing then. Washington certainly allowed states a free hand in the areas reserved to them, but I think the idea of a state as a tribe or city-state or absolute sovereign was something he disapproved of and wanted to get beyond.

I used to think Madison was wrong, and regretted the loss of smaller communities with their own traditions and culture. It certainly must have been more colorful when the different states had their own distinctive memories and practices and nice to actually meet people who worked in the distinctive industries we learned about as kids, rather than just people who worked at the same sort of jobs from one end of the country to the other. But looking at what's happened in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, and remembering what's happened throughout history makes me think that greater standardization wasn't the worst thing to happen.

The ancient city could be a terrifying place, as Platonists and anti-Platonists could both tell you. The weight of the city's cult and civic solidarity fell very hard on outsiders and non-conformists. A larger union allowed individuals greater freedom to live and work without having completely to accept the views of the local authorities on every question. This does open the door to greater power for the federal or union government, but I hope it's not an either-or exclusive choice between federal or state tyranny.

I don't have time to respond to the rest of your posts now, but I will make two comments. First, Rockwellites want us to believe that had the nation fragmented into smaller countries committed to laissez-faire policies it would have developed economically pretty much as it did in our reality. But it's not clear that such new countries would have been committed to laissez-faire, or that laissez-faire would have spurred development as fast as protectionism did. In the back of their minds the Rockwellites presume that the free trade conditions of the late 20th century would have prevailed in the 19th. In fact, dog-eat-dog was much more the rule in the late 19th century. One could expect trade wars, and those that weren't prepared to engage in them might sink into subordinate, neo-colonial status.

Secondly, the Republican party was in many ways a faction. But that was also true of the Breckenridge party and the secessionists. Factionalism was the essence of the age politically, and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil. I suppose one could say something similar about Southern radicals who saw themselves as organizing to defend their own "institutions." Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.