The
United States Constitution provides that States cannot be forced,
invaded, or their republican form of government changed; and the
Constitution itself cannot be amended unless three-fourths of the States
freely ratify the change or changes. The three wartime amendments were
forced upon defeated States whose citizen militias had been overwhelmed
by the superior military force of the federal agent which they had
helped grant limited power to in 1787.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Trophies of the Victor:
“Time
had indeed shown – a mere decade of it, from 1858 to 1868 – a Civil War
and an attempted overturn of the American form of government. The South
had been charged, she would “rule or ruin”; but it is shown the North,
“taking over the government,” as [South Carolina Senator Hammond]
stated, did “rule and ruin” nigh half a great nation.
As
the truths of 1861-65 emerge, we see but a barren Pyrrhic victory won
on false pretenses, and memorialized on labored perversions and
obscurities, a Lincoln of fabulous creation and facultative dimensions, a
false god of idolatrous devotees, and “Olympian” that never was!
In
his last address Washington had cautioned against “any spirit of
innovation upon the principles of the Constitution, however specious the
pretexts….Facility in changes upon the credit of mere hypothesis and
opinion exposes to perpetual change from the endless variety of
hypothesis and opinion; and, in any event, should a modification of the
Constitutional powers be necessary, it is to be made in the way the
Constitution designates….but no change by usurpation.”
What
but “usurpation” of the rights of three fourths of the States by making
such changes were those three postwar amendments? Eleven States had no
say whatever, except the raw pretenses of seizure of power, about their
own ratifications; and these States were those most intimately and
immediately affected. It would seem as if efforts to abolish republican
forms of government or to destroy equality (e.g., in the Senate) should
not be subject to deliberation.
Three
unconstitutional amendments, incorporating the final results of the
so-called “Rebellion,” are in summary the treaty between the
belligerents – a duress. In them are the trophies of the victors, but no
mention of the cause, the real cause, of the conflict – States’
rights. One observer commented that “….of the war waged ostensibly to
maintain the integrity of the Union, and in denial of the dogma of State
sovereignty, the future historian will not fail to note that the three
amendments are silent on this subject….
What
was to be the government and who were to comprise the constituency –
hence the sovereignty – in 1866, of eleven American States? Was it
proposed to take these endowments away and to install the tyrant’s whim
and rule? No wonder chaos reigned in all departments of the federal
government in 1865! Nothing was said then about the right of secession;
if that right existed, it exists now, so far as any declaration in the
organic law is concerned. It has not been renounced, and the supremacy
of the “nation” has not been affirmed in the Constitution. Truth crushed
to earth will rise again…..
Determination
of such a constitutional question as the permanence of the Union can
never be decided by four justices [Texas vs White, 1869] of the Supreme
Court, leaving unheard about forty million citizens. By the
Constitution, seven men could not abolish the States of the Union, but
three-fourths of those States could abolish that court and all its
judges. And, along with it, all the Lincolns that ever sat in the White
House and all the Sumner’s and Stevens that ever sat in the House or
Senate.”
(The
Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, A Historical and
Biographical Study in Contrasts, Russell Hoover Quynn, Exposition Press,
1959, pp. 45-49)
