Shredding the Constitution to Plunder the South
LINCOLN’S TYRANNICAL GAMBIT
Abraham Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, address to Congress is a document steeped in Constitutional violations and a thinly veiled justification for waging war on the Sovereign Southern States, driven not by a noble quest to preserve the Union but by an insatiable desire to control federal revenue through Southern forts.
From a staunchly Southern and Constitutional perspective, this address reveals Lincoln’s disregard for the principles of federalism, State Sovereignty, and individual liberty enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. His actions and rhetoric expose a calculated effort to centralize power in the federal government, subvert the voluntary Compact of the Union, and provoke conflict to maintain economic dominance over the South, particularly through the collection of tariffs at key Southern ports.
Below, I elaborate on the Constitutional violations embedded in Lincoln’s address and argue that his obsession with retaining control of Southern forts, especially Fort Sumter, was rooted in the federal government’s dependence on Southern revenue, which was the true catalyst for the War Between the States.
Lincoln’s address begins with a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s core principle of federalism by denying the Right of Southern States to Secede.
The Constitution, as a compact among Sovereign States, nowhere prohibits Secession; rather, the Tenth Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the States or the People. The Southern States—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and later others, exercised this reserved power when they adopted Ordinances of Secession, acting through Conventions of their People, the very mechanism by which they ratified the Constitution.
Lincoln’s claim that Secession is “rebellion” and Unconstitutional ignores the historical reality that…
Reasonably, if a state voluntarily enters the union it should just as voluntarily be able to secede from it. If memory serves, when the Chief Justice rendered such an opinion Lincoln swore out a warrant for his arrest. He arrested 20,000 newspaper reporters and editors for the duration of the war because they wrote articles criticizing him or the war effort. He arrested basically the entire Maryland legislature for the duration of the war because he feared they’d vote to secede. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to southern states that he didn’t control in an attempt to foment a slave rebellion in the south; slavery continued in northern and border states till after the war. He also wanted to return all the slaves to Africa. His initial war aim was to preserve the Union by force; when he later changed it to freeing the slaves a lot of Union soldiers deserted. Etc. Sounds like “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
So essentially Lincoln set the standard for how the Republican Party commits acts of war. Mind you most wars were started by Democrats. You do it by going above congress and taking clear decisive action. For example George W. Bush's war on terror or Trump's most recent actions that have us teetering on the edge WW3.