It’s also important that the Tenth Amendment talks about powers held by the states or the people. When the Constitution was enacted it was done by conventions not be the state legislatures. It was the people who were being asked to transfer their sovereignty from the states to a national government. So states like South Carolina did not have the authority to tell its people that they were no longer part of the United States - the state hadn’t made the choice and it didn’t have the right to overrule the people’s choice.
I do not believe the US would have had a Civil War if Zachary Taylor would have lived. In his first year of office, Taylor was pursuing a plan where most of the Mexican cession would have come into the Union as free states. Southern leaders threatened to secede. Taylor responded that he would hunt down and hang the secessionists with the same zeal as he had killed deserters in the Mexican War. Given Taylor’s personal gravitas right on the heels of his signature armed conflict, I believe the South would have backed down for the most part. If there had been a war over Southern secession, it would have been very limited in scope, more like Shay’s rebellion or some such.
But then Taylor died, and his bold course of action was replaced by the Compromise of 1850.
And so the career of Shelby Foote was born.
But you stated the following:
If, as you’d put it, nothing in the Constitution says they have to stay, and nothing in the Constitution says they can leave, then it’s one of those ‘neither delegated nor prohibited’ situations, right? I like the point in your next post – that it’s not as easy to say whether it’s the states or the people who have the power to secede – but I don’t see how you can follow up the in-need-of-a-tiebreaker scenario (where both sides lead off by noting that nothing in the Constitution says they’re wrong) by saying the states delegated away their sovereignty (since, as per the 10th, any powers not so delegated by the Constitution explicitly don’t belong to the federal government; some powers must not have been delegated, or the sentence makes no sense).
Especially given that the Southern militia system was a horrid joke at that time. John Brown didn’t do anyone any favors at Harper’s Ferry.
I think a case can be made that things like tariffs, or even slavery itself, could be considered parts of a broader issue. That the North and the South were evolving into two completely different societies, with incompatible views of what form society ought to take.
The North was committed to the Industrial Revolution, a society built around commerce, mechanization, factories, finance, corporations, and wage labor. The South by contrast had many of the features of what we would today call a third-world nation: a small oligarchy of land owners, a mass of impoverished agricultural workers, and an economy based on the raising and export of cash crops. Subsidized by the demand for cotton, the South was reverting to an almost neo-feudal society, with the plantation owners taking on the airs of an aristocracy. Picture the “gentleman planter” class of the South speaking Spanish instead of English, and one can easily imagine them as grandees on their haciendas lording it over their peons.