"We have not sought this conflict; we have sought too long to avoid it; our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defence of our rights, is required at our hands." - Robert Toombs, November 13, 1860
Let’s update the record:
“Sirs, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition de novo, yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given to it, and intend to give it, unfaltering support and allegiance...I say that the Constitution is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that ‘the powers not granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people’...
Senator Robert Augustus Toombs of Georgia, upon his resignation from the United States Senate
January 7, 1861
“Southern machismo?” Not hardly – that’s the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America...
;>)