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Chet McAteer
·June 19, 2015
The Tenth Amendment’s Irrefutable Mandate: Secession as the Reserved Sovereign Right of Every State
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·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).
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