Does the Tenth Amendment scare you? War changes sentiments, and the Civil War, and the passions it ignited, still exist today, as your intemperant post makes clear.
Stop for one moment and consider the facts, which are not distorted. The North could have allowed for a Confederacy. It COULD HAVE done that. No great schism in the cosmic fabric would have taken place. Do you disagree with that statement? Do you consider it to be an impossibility? One man could have made that happen... A. Lincoln. Just an unassailable fact my friend.
Rather, the war was made by the men who ordered cannon fire on US forces performing their duty at Ft. Sumter.
The 10th amendment does not reserve secession to the states. Rather it reserves powers to the states or to the people.
Secession could be legal, certainly by amendment, probably by legislation of the federal legislature, or by successful supreme court case, or by successful rebellion followed by treaty. The first three were not attempted by the slave owners of 1860, and they didn’t meet the high standard of the 4th.
It could have been possible to split up the country through a bill in Congress or a Constitutional amendment. But for states to unilaterally sever their link to the union, to form a league, a country of their own, raise an army, and fire on a federal base was sure to mean war.
George Washington would have understood, which is why he called out troops to face the Whiskey Rebellion. Any president confronted with what Lincoln was would either have to roll over and take whatever a newly established hostile regime decreed, or else fight back against an unlawful rebellion. Would you want to be the president who decided that the federal government couldn't protect its property and couldn't enforce the laws?
Some things you leave out: 1861 was something close to a revolutionary situation. Militant pro-slavery elements were trying to take as many slave states out of the union as they could. It was smash and grab and they were out for all they could get. The secessions weren't always procedurally correct, and secessionist elements didn't hesitate to use force to get their own way.
You apparently have the idea that the Confederacy was jus' folks like us. A benign bunch of good ol' boys who sat around in a garage talking about guns when the feds burst in. They weren't. They were a government like other governments, with the same -- indeed, greater -- tyrannical elements as other governments.
That the secessionists would produce a free society or that North and South would live side by side in peace are both highly debatable propositions. Slavery was already deeply ingrained in Confederate society, and however things went in the future, you can bet the CSA would have excercised maximum control over the servile population. It's possible that North and South could have lived together peacefully, but it's not something you can safely assume.
>>The North could have allowed for a Confederacy. It COULD HAVE done that. No great schism in the cosmic fabric would have taken place.
Wrong. The European oligarchs were slavering over a viable Confederacy, arranging loans and arms shipments to the South, opening a future marshaling and support front in Mexico with Maximilian’s usurpation of the govt., operating espionage networks from Canada, propagandizing and recruiting Indian populations of the Western Front, etc.. The South would have constituted a base of operations for an eventual European invasion of the North led and orchestrated by our traditional enemy, England.
People think that “geopolitics” was an invention of Nazi strategist Karl Haushaufer. It has been an operant methodology for empire since there were empires.
No. I disagree. Lincoln could not have done that as one man. Any treaty would have to be ratified by the Senate. By contrast, Jeff Davis could have stopped making war, and the war would have stopped. As usual, the Reb arguments are a series of false projections.