Shelby Foote and Lincoln
I'm glad Foote's books exist; I'm glad someone taking an old-fashioned, story-telling, "great man," well researched approach could become so popular.
But on the PBS series on the Civil War, Foote said something like: if the Southern states had believed at the time of ratification that the Constitution precluded secession, they never would have joined the Union in the first place.
This is Southern boilerplate. Lincoln at best understood the Constitution differently than many Southerners, but was willing to force them to conform to his view. At worst he knowingly twisted the Constitution to fit his own doctrines and ambitions.
Lincoln was conscious that he was taking on both a "states rights," anti-Union, live and let live kind of approach, and various defences of slavery, all at the same time. He said: no state was ever sovereign except Texas. (And Texas, of course, acted like it wanted to lose its sovereignty and join the Union as quickly as possible).
This means: it was always the people of the United States who rebelled against the Crown, fought for their freedom, and established one constitution after another. It was never sovereign states. The Rehnquist court has spread a certain amount of confusion on this, abetted by conservative and libertarian constitutional law profs.
The South cooked up states rights, and codified it, because of their need to defend slavery. It wasn't some kind of accident that they wanted to defend slavery in addition to states rights. (It's more true that the South wouldn't have joined if the Bill of Rights had applied to states; they wanted the ability to maintain crude majoritianism within southern states, combined with anti-majoritarian provisions in the Constitution (especially the Senate)).
My main source is Walter Berns, but I've done my own reading, especially as I've taught American Con Law for two years.
I suppose this could be my 4th of July message to all my American friends.
UPDATE: I was thinking of Lincoln's remarks immediately after the surrender of Fort Sumter, in April 1861. He called for troops to fight a Southern insurrection, and explained that individual states were not, and could not, be sovereign. http://file:///c:/Documents%20and%20Settings/First%20user/Local%20Settings/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/J5ULT9JQ/Document%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20A%20War%20to%20Preserve%20the%20Union.htm
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