The South Was Right by James Ronald Kennedy & Walter Donald Kennedy

Author:James Ronald Kennedy & Walter Donald Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781455612161
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company
Published: 2011-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

2. North Carolina governor J. Martin, August 1775

3. South Carolina governor W. Campbell, early 1776

4. Georgia governor James Wright, January 1776 27

Each of the Southern colonies was demonstrating the attributes of a sovereign state by changing the type of government under which its people would live. These actions were performed by a free people. The theory that the Declaration of Independence formed the Union and that this document called the states into being cannot be justified by historical facts.

Let us look at more evidence to prove that the Southern states existed before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In April 1776, the congress of Georgia had empowered its delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for American independence.28 Now, if the states did not exist before the Declaration of Independence, how could the state of Georgia empower its delegation to vote for American independence?

The last straw to which the anti-secessionist will cling is the myth that in international matters the colonies always had to depend on either the British government or the Union. Sorry; wrong again! According to James Kent, in Commentaries on American Law, Vol. I, the only way the colonial congress could enforce the rule of international law was “… to have infractions of it punished in the only way that was then lawful, by the exercise of the authority of the legislatures of the several states.”29 Note that James Kent was from New York, and not a Southerner. Kent states that the only legal way to enforce the rule of international law was through the power of the individual states. We have now demonstrated that the Southern states have been active in the pursuit of the rights of free men since 1700. Before the signing of the Declaration of Independence the Southern states had exercised every attribute of a sovereign power. So much for another Yankee myth.

If the colonies acted as independent states prior to the Declaration of Independence, how did they view themselves while adopting the United States Constitution? A glance at how Massachusetts expressed herself as far as her sovereign rights will demonstrate that even the Northern states considered themselves sovereign. Before it would ratify the United States Constitution, Massachusetts demanded “… that it be explicitly declared, that all powers not delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several States, to be by them exercised.”30 Before it would adopt the Constitution, the state of Pennsylvania insisted upon the following amendment to the Constitution: “All the rights of sovereignty which are not, by the said Constitution, expressly and plainly vested in the Congress, shall be deemed to remain with, and shall be exercised by the several States in the Union.”31 Every state insisted that this and similar language be added to the United States Constitution, resulting in the adoption of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.”

We have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.