Sickening Lincoln worship.

Rating: 1/10 (16 June 2020)

The movie is bad. I mean shockingly bad. It is filled with ridiculous Lincoln worship. Ben Gates even says Lincoln was the one to change how the United States was arranged, saying he made it to where the United States 'are' became the United States 'is'. This is so unbelievably wrong in so many ways. He is correct that Lincoln's war did this, but he fails to mention how this destroyed the Federal Union of the Founders and that the States were never meant to be one nation, but a Union of free, sovereign, independent States. Article 7 of the Constitution explains that the document was to be ratified by the "free and independent states," as they are called in the Declaration of Independence. The union of the founders was voluntary, and several states reserved the right to withdraw from the union in the future if it became destructive of their rights. Since each state has equal rights in the union, this became true for all states. That is why, at the outset of the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of Northern newspapers editorialized in favor of peaceful secession. Most of them quoted Jefferson from the Declaration saying that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when that consent is withdrawn it is the peoples' duty to abolish that government and form a new one.
Lincoln thus destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style coerced union held together with the threat of total war waged on the civilian population of any state in the future that attempted to make Jefferson's argument and act on it. It is telling that on the eve of the Civil War several federal laws were proposed to outlaw secession. This occurred because everyone at the time understood that secession was perfectly legal and constitutional. No less a figure than James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist 39 that the Constitution was to be ratified by the people "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong" (emphasis added). He also stated that the federal government gets all of its authority from the sovereign states and not the "whole people." The "whole people" who resided in the states stretching from Maine to Georgia at the time had nothing at all to do with the ratification of the Constitution. It was ratified by state political conventions (not state legislatures). Madison continued on to say that each state ratifying the Constitution "is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act."
Virginia, New York and Rhode Island specifically reserved the right to withdraw from the Union if it ever became "destructive of our liberties." Here's what the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention put in writing:
We the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . Do, in the name and behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them at their will . . .
New York and Rhode Island made almost identical statements as conditions of ratifying the Constitution.
The phrase "united States" is always in the plural in the Constitution, signifying not one consolidated government but that the independent and sovereign states were united in forming the federal government as their agent with only narrowly defined, delegated powers. BTW, the word "perpetual," as used in those days, did not mean "forever" or "cannot be broken." Treaties between nations at the time often used the word "perpetual" to mean the agreement had no sunset provision, but the treaty could, in fact, be broken, and many were. The Confederates did not commit treason and any argument otherwise is historically absurd. They were the last defenders of the Constitution. The Union of the Founders died in 1865 when Lincoln conquered the South.
This movie is trash.