The Tenth Amendment explicitly states the Constitution's principle of federalism by providing that powers not granted to the federal government nor prohibited to the states by the Constitution of the United States are reserved to the states or the people.
beyond the Tenth Amendment, the Founding Fathers were attempting to create a “perpetual,” “more perfect union,” and not just some voluntary contract between states. Mackubin Thomas Owens writes for the Claremont Institute:
That the American Republic was both federal and national was the dominant view among statesmen of the antebellum period. For instance, in his reply to Calhoun on Feb. 16, 1833, Daniel Webster observed that the state conventions, including that of South Carolina, did not accede to a league or association when they approved the Constitution, but ratified and confirmed that Constitution as a form of government.
Andrew Jackson made the same point in his “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” during the nullification crisis. The Constitution, said Jackson, derives its whole authority from the people, not the States. The States “retained all the power they did not grant. But each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation, can not, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation.” And Madison, who presumably knew something about the constitutional theory of the American Founding, was horrified by the idea that the coordinate sovereignty retained by the States, as stated in the Tenth Amendment, implied the power of nullification, interposition, or secession.
Lincoln argued that the Union created the States, not the other way around and that the States had no other legal status than that which held in the Union. Harry V. Jaffa has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Revolutionary generation universally understood the separation of 13 colonies from Great Britain and the union among them to have been accomplished simultaneously. Colonial resolutions called for both independence and union. According to Jefferson and Madison in 1825, the Declaration of Independence constituted an “act of Union of the States.”
The Articles of Confederation (a document that begins and ends with the assertion that the Union is perpetual) was an unsuccessful attempt to govern the Union created by the Declaration of Independence. It failed because the central government lacked the necessary power to carry out its obligations. The Constitution was intended to rectify the problems of the Articles — to create “a more perfect Union.” As George Washington wrote in his letter transmitting the Constitution to Congress, “In all our deliberations we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, perhaps our national existence.”
beyond the Tenth Amendment, the Founding Fathers were attempting to create a “perpetual,” “more perfect union,” and not just some voluntary contract between states. Mackubin Thomas Owens writes for the Claremont Institute:
That the American Republic was both federal and national was the dominant view among statesmen of the antebellum period. For instance, in his reply to Calhoun on Feb. 16, 1833, Daniel Webster observed that the state conventions, including that of South Carolina, did not accede to a league or association when they approved the Constitution, but ratified and confirmed that Constitution as a form of government.
Andrew Jackson made the same point in his “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” during the nullification crisis. The Constitution, said Jackson, derives its whole authority from the people, not the States. The States “retained all the power they did not grant. But each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation, can not, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation.” And Madison, who presumably knew something about the constitutional theory of the American Founding, was horrified by the idea that the coordinate sovereignty retained by the States, as stated in the Tenth Amendment, implied the power of nullification, interposition, or secession.
Lincoln argued that the Union created the States, not the other way around and that the States had no other legal status than that which held in the Union. Harry V. Jaffa has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Revolutionary generation universally understood the separation of 13 colonies from Great Britain and the union among them to have been accomplished simultaneously. Colonial resolutions called for both independence and union. According to Jefferson and Madison in 1825, the Declaration of Independence constituted an “act of Union of the States.”
The Articles of Confederation (a document that begins and ends with the assertion that the Union is perpetual) was an unsuccessful attempt to govern the Union created by the Declaration of Independence. It failed because the central government lacked the necessary power to carry out its obligations. The Constitution was intended to rectify the problems of the Articles — to create “a more perfect Union.” As George Washington wrote in his letter transmitting the Constitution to Congress, “In all our deliberations we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, perhaps our national existence.”
United States Constitution
Article I
Section 10 - Powers prohibited of States
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or CONFEDERATION; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
As soon as the Constitution was drafted and put into place, the very people who helped draft it began to disagree over its meaning. Both [Alexander] Hamilton and [James] Madison were on the drafting committee, and these two guys were at loggerheads for years over what exactly the document meant.
Certainly, there is nothing in the Constitution that in any way explicitly sanctifies secession. I call secession a constructed right. You have to interpret the Constitution in very specific ways to come up with that. In fact, you have to engage in the very sort of Constitutional activism that neo-Confederates would otherwise abhor in interpreting the Constitution.
It's not really much of an argument. It's flatly asserted and opinions to the contrary are simply dismissed.
The notion of the Constitution as a contract between states, which has to be the basis of the secessionist argument, falls apart because it only covers the initial 13 signers.
After the original 13, the only thing that came close to an independent contracting agent was Texas, which was a republic before it became a state. But Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi were not states until they joined the United States. They were territories. So how does this argument apply to states that joined the Union after ratification of the original document?
The Court ruled that in Texas; Tx vs WhiteSTATE OF TEXAS v. WHITE, 74 U.S. 700 (1868)
74 U.S. 700 (Wall.)
74 U.S. 700 (Wall.)
transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union. If this were otherwise, the State must have become foreign, and her citizens foreigners. The war must have ceased to be a war for the suppression of rebellion, and must have become a war for conquest and subjugation.
There is a minority of folks who never really understood the Union, never really understood what The United States of America meant. It took a Civil War, the suppression of a rebellion, and even then, even today actually, many still do not understand, or we wouldn’t be talking about it. While on the other hand many think
that the Constitution has the clear and precise language and structure of the Constitution, along with the ratification provisions of several States, and most importantly, the Tenth Amendment, leave no doubt whatsoever that the States have an unfettered constitutional right to withdraw from the Union without cause or interference.
that the Constitution has the clear and precise language and structure of the Constitution, along with the ratification provisions of several States, and most importantly, the Tenth Amendment, leave no doubt whatsoever that the States have an unfettered constitutional right to withdraw from the Union without cause or interference.
