A newly identified brain protein may play a major role in how the body ages. Researchers discovered that declining levels of Menin in the hypothalamus triggered inflammation, memory problems, bone los... View MoreA newly identified brain protein may play a major role in how the body ages. Researchers discovered that declining levels of Menin in the hypothalamus triggered inflammation, memory problems, bone loss, and other aging-related changes in mice. Restoring Menin reversed several of these effects, while a simple amino acid supplement called D-serine boosted cognition. The discovery opens a surprising new path for fighting age-related decline.
​https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260524012959.htm
Scientists discover hidden driver of aging — Simple supplement reversed brain decline
A newly identified brain protein may play a major role in how the body ages. Researchers discovered that declining levels of Menin in the hypothalamus triggered inflammation, memory problems, bone los
Chet McAteer
·June 19, 2015
The Tenth Amendment’s Irrefutable Mandate: Secession as the Reserved Sovereign Right of Every State
The American Secession of 1860–61 was not rebellion, not treason, and n... View MoreChet McAteer
·June 19, 2015
The Tenth Amendment’s Irrefutable Mandate: Secession as the Reserved Sovereign Right of Every State
The American Secession of 1860–61 was not rebellion, not treason, and not even a constitutional crisis, it was the plain, logical, and unavoidable exercise of a power the Constitution itself explicitly reserves to the States under the Tenth Amendment.
Any claim that the War “settled” the question by force is mere victors’ mythology; no amount of battlefield conquest can amend, repeal, or override the text of the Constitution.
The document’s silence on secession is not ambiguity, it is conclusive proof that the power was never delegated to the federal government and never prohibited to the States.
Therefore, by the Tenth Amendment’s own ironclad command, it remains Reserved. To deny this is to deny the plain meaning of the English language, the historical record of ratification, and every principle the Framers enshrined to prevent the very consolidated tyranny the South confronted in 1860.
Begin with the text itself, for the Constitution is not a living document to be twisted by later interpreters but a written Compact whose words must be given their ordinary public meaning at the time of adoption.
The Tenth Amendment declares: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Secession, the withdrawal of a Sovereign State from a federal league, is nowhere delegated to Congress, the President, or the federal judiciary. It is nowhere prohibited to the States.
The syllogism is inescapable:
(1) only expressly granted powers belong to the federal government;
(2) Secession is not expressly granted;
(3) therefore Secession is Reserved.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, affirmed this exact logic in Federalist No. 45: the powers of the federal government are “few and defined,” while those of the States are “numerous and indefinite.”
The power to enter or exit a Compact of limited purpose is the most fundamental attribute of Sovereignty; the Framers left it untouched because they dared not touch it.
Every counter-argument collapses under elementary Constitutional logic. Opponents claim the Preamble’s phrase “to form a more perfect Union” implies perpetuity. Yet “more perfect” meant simply “more complete” than the Articles of Confederation, not eternal or irrevocable.
The Articles themselves declared the Union “perpetual,” yet no one in 1787 imagined that language barred a State from leaving if the Compact were broken; the States ratified the new Constitution precisely because they feared the old one’s centralizing defects.
The same States that formed the Union could un-form it when the federal agent exceeded its authority. The Supremacy Clause (Article VI) is likewise misread: it makes federal law supreme only “in pursuance” of the Constitution, i.e., within the enumerated powers.
A federal government that invades reserved State powers forfeits supremacy; it becomes the aggressor. Article IV’s provision for admitting new States says nothing about expelling old ones, yet silence here is not prohibition, again, the Tenth Amendment supplies the default rule.
Lincoln’s assertion that the Union “created” the States reverses history: the thirteen colonies declared Independence separately, formed State governments first, then united under the Articles, and only later ratified the Constitution State-by-State.
Each ratification was an Independent Sovereign act; each State could have refused. Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island expressly declared in their Ratification instruments that they retrained the Right to Resume their Sovereignty if the Compact were violated, yet even without those reservations the Tenth Amendment binds every State equally.
The Compact Theory is not a Southern invention; it is the original understanding. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 85 described the Constitution as a “Compact” among the People of the Several States.
Madison in Federalist No. 39 called the Union “partly federal, partly national,” but emphasized that ratification was by States in their Sovereign Capacity.
The ratifying conventions were State Conventions, not a national plebiscite. When Northern States later imposed Punitive Sectional Tariffs and failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause, a clear breach of the Compact, the Southern States invoked the same remedy the Framers themselves had contemplated.
Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and Madison in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 declared that States, as parties to the Compact, possess the Right to judge infractions and to “interpose” or nullify; Nullification is but one step short of Secession, and both flow directly from the Tenth Amendment.
Chief Justice Marshall, no friend of States’ Rights, still admitted in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that the Constitution is a document of “enumerated powers,” leaving everything else untouched.
The Supreme Court never held Secession Unconstitutional before the war because the question was political, not judicial, and because the text left no room for such a holding.
Even the Right of Revolution, so often dismissed as extralegal, is Constitutionally anchored by the Tenth Amendment. The Declaration of Independence is not ornamental; it is the organic law that precedes and informs the Constitution.
It proclaims that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that whenever government becomes destructive, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
The People of each State, acting through their Sovereign State government, retain that Right as a Reserved Power. Lincoln himself conceded the moral validity of revolution but denied the South had just cause.
Yet the cause was overwhelming: a sectional party had captured the federal government, refused to enforce Constitutional protections for Southern States, and threatened to subjugate the South under majority tyranny.
The Tenth Amendment protects minorities of States from exactly this consolidated despotism. To claim the South had to remain in a Union that no longer protected their Reserved Rights is to convert the Constitution into a suicide pact, precisely what the Framers rejected.
Nationalist theories fare no better. The notion that the Union is an indivisible nation whose “perpetuity” overrides State Sovereignty appears nowhere in the Constitutional text.
The States never surrendered their Sovereignty; they delegated specific powers while retaining all others. Chief Justice Chase’s post-war dictum in Texas v. White (1869) that the Union is “indestructible” was not Constitutional interpretation, it was judicial legislation after conquest.
Justice Grier’s dissent correctly noted that Texas had in fact Seceded and was treated as conquered territory; only military victory allowed the majority to rewrite history.
Conquest does not Repeal the Tenth Amendment. If force could settle Constitutional questions, then a British victory at Yorktown would have made American Independence Unconstitutional.
The logic is identical: the Sovereign People of the States decided in 1776, and the Sovereign People of the Southern States decided in 1860.
The Tenth Amendment is the Constitutional embodiment of that continuing Popular Sovereignty.
No honest critic can evade this chain of reasoning. The Constitution’s structure, enumerated powers, deputized Sovereignty, ratification by States, makes Secession the logical safety valve against federal overreach.
The Framers, fresh from breaking one Compact with Britain, deliberately withheld from the new federal agent any power to coerce a State into perpetual submission. They knew that without such a Reserved Right, the “more perfect Union” would become the old British Empire in disguise.
When the federal government breached the Compact by refusing to enforce its own provisions and by wielding powers never granted, the Southern States did what the Constitution commands: they Resumed the Sovereignty the Tenth Amendment had always preserved.
Appomattox proved only that superior force can silence argument; it did not amend a single syllable of the Constitution. The Right of Secession remains exactly where the Framers left it, Reserved to the States, inviolable, and as American as 1776 itself.
In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance,
C.M.McAteer
June 19, 2015
References
U.S. Constitution, Amendment X; Article VI, cl. 2; Article IV, § 3; Preamble.
The Federalist Nos. 39, 45, 85 (Madison & Hamilton).
Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (Jefferson); Virginia Resolutions of 1798 (Madison).
Ratification Instruments of Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island (1788).
Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869) (Grier, J., dissenting).
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819).
Declaration of Independence (1776).
Madison, James. Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.
Rawle, William. A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (1825).
Stephens, Alexander H. Cornerstone Address (March 21, 1861).
Davis, Jefferson. The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881).
From the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump and the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk to the recent attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, they explore how left-wing rhet... View MoreFrom the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump and the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk to the recent attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, they explore how left-wing rhetoric, media demonization, and the breakdown of our institutions are fueling real threats. Dr. Roberts also explains why this is not a “both sides” problem, citing clear polling data that shows dramatically higher tolerance for political violence on the Left.
https://youtu.be/v08d6KAT8sc?si=X3ZejJdfYB6_NFzt
What Do We Do About the Increase in Political Violence? | The Kevin Roberts Show w/Larry O’Connor
Dr. Kevin Roberts and Larry O’Connor confront America’s rising political violence. From multiple assassination attempts on President Trump and the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk to the recent at
·Courtesy of History Uncovered
A boy drummer in Confederate ranks caught the eye of Jefferson Davis, leading to a rare wartime honor that shocked soldiers.
William Nelson Boswell, a Virginia boy bare... View More·Courtesy of History Uncovered
A boy drummer in Confederate ranks caught the eye of Jefferson Davis, leading to a rare wartime honor that shocked soldiers.
William Nelson Boswell, a Virginia boy barely entering adolescence, stepped into the Confederate service during the American Civil War as a drummer in the 56th Virginia Infantry. In a time when most boys were still bound to schoolbooks and childhood games, he was already marching through drill fields, keeping rhythm for soldiers hardened by war. His presence in the regiment was unusual, but his discipline and composure quickly set him apart even among seasoned men.
His soldierly bearing during drill did not go unnoticed. According to accounts preserved in regimental memory, President Jefferson Davis himself took interest in the young drummer’s conduct. Impressed by his steadiness and military demeanor, Davis is said to have personally presented the boy with a sword—an extraordinary gesture in an era when honor and symbolism carried immense weight. For a child of his age, such recognition blurred the line between innocence and the grim responsibilities of war.
Boswell’s connection to the regiment was also deeply personal. His father, Thomas T. Boswell, served in the same 56th Virginia Regiment, embedding the boy’s story within a family already committed to the Confederate cause. Even more striking, young Boswell reportedly used his own limited resources in 1861 to help uniform Company A of the regiment, part of Pickett’s Division, reinforcing his identity not just as a drummer but as a devoted supporter of the unit’s survival and pride.
As the war intensified, the image of a boy in uniform beating time for marching soldiers became a powerful symbol of sacrifice and lost youth. Drummers like Boswell were essential to battlefield communication, yet his story stood out because of his age and the attention he received from high command. In the harsh reality of Civil War camps, such moments of recognition were rare and often became legend among the troops.
Over time, William Nelson Boswell’s name became part of the broader tapestry of Confederate memory—an example of how war pulled even children into its orbit. His story reflects both the romanticized ideals of honor and the sobering truth of youth exposed to conflict, where moments of glory were inseparable from the shadows of a divided nation.
Courtesy of History Uncovered
Chet McAteer
·February 17, 2015
CEDED SOVEREIGNTY REVOKED: The Dormant Reversion Clauses of Fort Sumter and Pickens – Federal Trespass on Sovereign Soil After Lawful Dissolution of the Compact
From a... View MoreChet McAteer
·February 17, 2015
CEDED SOVEREIGNTY REVOKED: The Dormant Reversion Clauses of Fort Sumter and Pickens – Federal Trespass on Sovereign Soil After Lawful Dissolution of the Compact
From a strictly legal and Constitutional perspective grounded in cession law, Compact Theory, and the plain text of the agreements themselves, the events surrounding Fort Sumter in late 1860 and early 1861, and their parallel at Fort Pickens, were never acts of Southern aggression but the inevitable activation of reversionary Rights embedded in conditional State cessions, once the Voluntary Union Compact was lawfully dissolved by Secession.
When a State cedes land or better described as Concurrent Jurisdiction to the United States, the acceptance must be formally acknowledged and agreed upon by the federal government.
Any jurisdiction not specifically ceded in such agreements is reserved strictly for the State, not the federal government.
South Carolina’s withdrawal on December 20, 1860, and Florida’s on January 10, 1861, rested on the bedrock Principle, affirmed by the Founders and by Jefferson and Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, that the Union was a Compact among Sovereign States.
The Tenth Amendment reserves all undelegated powers to the States or the People, while Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution expressly limits federal acquisition of land for “Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings” to purchases or cessions made “by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be.”
These grants were never unconditional transfers of perpetual federal sovereignty in fee simple; they were expressly or implicitly conditioned upon continued mutual defense of the ceding Sovereign State.
Once Secession dissolved the compact, federal authority over intra-state territory lapsed by operation of law, and title reverted to the States unless the land had been purchased outright, precisely the legal mechanism the Founders designed to prevent the creation of irrevocable federal enclaves inside Sovereign States.
It was a legal design that protected the Sovereign States and State Territory while providing the general government with usage rights under stipulations agreed upon by the State Legislatures and the federal government.
The original cessions of harbor lands by South Carolina illustrate this conditional framework with unmistakable clarity. The 1805 Act of the South Carolina General Assembly transferred specific sites, including Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and Fort Johnson on the explicit stipulation that the United States must “repair or build the works within three years” and “keep a garrison or garrisons therein,” or “this grant or cession… [would] be void and of no effect.”
The statute further preserved South Carolina’s full civil and criminal jurisdiction, permitted State processes to be served on the sites, and exempted the lands from taxation only while the conditions were met.
The 1836 resolution ceding the shoal site for Fort Sumter mirrored these terms: it conveyed “all the right, title and claim” solely for harbor defense, again with the understanding that State jurisdiction continued unabated and that the grant served the mutual-defense purpose of the Compact.
These were not blank-check deeds; they were revocable licenses tied directly to the Constitutional purpose articulated in the Enclave Clause and the 1845 Texas annexation resolutions (which similarly limited cessions to pre-existing defense assets).
Identical reversionary logic governed Florida’s coastal installations after the 1819 Adams-OnĂs Treaty, where Forts such as Pickens were accepted under the same mutual-defense framework.
Federal neglect, decades of incomplete construction, funding shortfalls, and sporadic civilian caretakers did not immediately void the grants while the Compact endured, but it preserved the States’ reversionary interest as a dormant legal safeguard.
Fort Sumter itself exemplified the conditional and incomplete nature of these federal holdings. Construction began in 1829 on an artificial island of dumped granite as part of the Third System of coastal defenses, yet by late 1860 it remained only partially finished, seventy percent complete at best, with just a handful of guns mounted and barracks unfinished.
For years the sole federal presence consisted of a lone lighthouse keeper or caretaker and civilian Corps of Engineers workmen, many of them local Charlestonians; it was never a completed, manned military stronghold.
The actual federal garrison in Charleston Harbor was at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, housing Major Robert Anderson’s small command of about eighty-five men. Sumter was merely a construction site under renovation, not a fortified federal enclave.
On the night of December 26, 1860, six days after secession, Anderson, acting under standing U.S. Army authority executed a surprise operation that legally constituted federal seizure of State territory: his troops spiked Moultrie’s guns, burned the carriages, cut down the flagpole, rowed across the harbor, and drove the civilian construction workers out at gunpoint with stern commands and no explanation.
The workmen were forced into boats and returned to Charleston without parley. This was not South Carolina attacking federal property; under cession law it was the federal government occupying an incomplete, State-cited construction site, evicting South Carolina’s own laborers, and planting the Stars and Stripes on soil whose title had already reverted upon the violation of the cession agreements and the dissolution of the Compact.
Moultrie, the only legitimately garrisoned post under the 1805 cession was simply abandoned and later occupied by State forces without bloodshed.
A parallel situation existed at Fort Pickens in Florida, where the installation stood dilapidated after the Mexican War yet remained under token federal control; once Secession dissolved the Compact, continued occupation likewise became Unconstitutional trespass on reverted Sovereign soil.
South Carolina authorities, acting under the plain terms of the 1805 and 1836 cessions, viewed Anderson’s move as a hostile breach of the status quo and repeatedly offered to compensate the federal government for any improvements while demanding peaceful transfer.
The federal refusal, followed by Lincoln’s armed resupply flotilla in April 1861, transformed a defensive property dispute into coercion. When South Carolina batteries finally opened fire on the now-occupied Sumter to reclaim their harbor, the action was purely defensive reclamation of Sovereign territory under reversionary rights; no one was killed in the bombardment itself, with the war’s first blood occurring only in an accidental explosion during the surrender salute.
Crucially, the complete historical silence before the 1860s demonstrates that these reversion clauses were not dead letters but safeguards lying in wait for the precise moment the Compact was broken.
Despite widespread federal neglect across the entire Third System from Sumter’s decades-long incompletion to similar delays at forts in New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, no State legislature, governor, or court ever invoked reversion, passed resolutions questioning title, or demanded evacuation for non-performance.
The Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 offers the nearest potential precedent: South Carolina prepared to resist federal coercion over the tariff and even readied its militia, yet it raised no legal challenge to the ceded harbor Forts under the unmet 1805 terms.
President Jackson’s threats to use those same Forts were met with military readiness, not reversion arguments.
Frontier posts in the West, often on leased public-domain land rather than formal Article I, Section 8 cessions, occasionally fell into disrepair between Indian wars, but these remained operational matters under active federal command, never disputes over Sovereign title.
The Enclave Clause itself was drafted precisely to bar perpetual federal enclaves without ongoing State consent; prior to Secession that consent was presumed intact, and the conditional nature of the grants remained dormant.
Only the Sovereign acts of secession, reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment and the logic of a voluntary union activated the reversionary interests. Federal occupation thereafter became nothing less than trespass on soil that had reverted by operation of cession law and stipulations of the cession agreements.
In the end, the cessions of 1805 and 1836, like all similar conditional grants nationwide, carried both explicit time-and-garrison requirements and the implicit limitation that the property served the mutual-defense purpose of the Compact.
When those terms were ignored for decades or when the Compact itself dissolved, title and control reverted to the States as a matter of Constitutional law.
The installations had never been sold to the federal government as private real estate; they existed solely by the grace of the ceding Sovereign’s Consent for a limited defensive end.
The federal government’s insistence on holding disputed soil without consent turned a lawful property and jurisdictional dispute into armed coercion. Northern narratives still frame Sumter as “the attack that started the war,” yet a deeper examination of cession law, the Enclave Clause, and the unbroken pre-1860s historical record reveals the opposite: Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens were the first and only pre-war tests of this fundamental Constitutional Principle.
The true aggressor crossed the harbor on Christmas night 1860 in a federal rowboat under cover of darkness, evicting civilians at gunpoint and claiming territory in the name of a government that no longer possessed lawful authority under the dissolved Compact.
In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance,
C.M.McAteer
February 17, 2015
References
South Carolina General Assembly, An Act to cede to the United States certain lands and buildings for the purpose of fortifying the same (1805).
South Carolina General Assembly, Resolution ceding the site of Fort Sumter and adjacent territory (December 1836).
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901).
Major Robert Anderson, official correspondence and reports, December 1860–January 1861.
Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881).
Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1868–1870).
Charleston Mercury contemporary accounts, December 1860–April 1861, and National Intelligencer, 1832–1833 (Nullification Crisis).
Ludwell H. Johnson, Division and Reunion: America 1848–1877 (New York: Wiley, 1978) and related Southern constitutional scholarship on compact theory and reversion.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 (Enclave Clause).
Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States, March 1, 1845, and related cession instruments under the Adams-OnĂs Treaty framework.
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