The American Spectator

p> CIVIL DISAGREEMENT br> Re: Christopher Orlet’s King Abe at 199 : /p>

Lincoln surely knew succession was constitutional and that the document never would have been signed with any other understanding. It was mostly Northern states that made that clear at the very signing.

But he also knew the Federalist Papers. And those papers convinced, barely, a majority of Americans to risk the new State because they were convinced by the Papers that, separated, it was natural for men to eventually become enemies as Europe constantly illuminated.

p>So a separation would not have resulted in peace; anything but. And by no means only North and South. Snap out of it, people. br> — James Wilson /p>

In his review of T. L. Krannawitter’s book Vindicating Lincoln, Orlet says, “The issue, then, was the natural right of a people to withdraw from a voluntary union versus the importance of keeping the great democratic experiment alive. Lincoln chose the latter, thereby preserving the union and ending the peculiar institution of slavery.”

In fact, this was not the issue. A “voluntary” union no longer existed once the States ratified the Constitution. Orlet and neo-confederates may deny this, but it is nonetheless true. Long before Southern secessionists raised the issue, a group called the “anti-Federalists” complained that the Constitution failed to preserve the “federal” form of government, in which the Union is regarded as a confederation of sovereign states. Instead, these anti-Federalists argued, the Convention created a “national” government where the Union is regarded as a consolidation of the states. If the Constitution were a confederation of sovereign States, as neo-confederates claim, what were the anti-Federalists complaining about? As against the anti-Federalists, Madison said, “The proposed Constitution, therefore, even when tested by the rules laid down by its antagonists, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.”

Thus, Orlet does not understand the nature of American government (I mean as it existed before the Supreme Court began its usurpations under the incorporation fantasy).