Quote by Joseph Befumo
““the Southern States rebelled against the usurpation of their rights under the Constitution as sovereign states. It’s critical to remember that, until that time, the United States was a voluntary confederation of independent states, rather than the mandatory monolith, maintained by force of arms that it has since become.””
![“...[at the Constitutional Convention] the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.” quote by James Madison](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f2a/james-madison-373_constitutional-conve_at-the-constitutional-convention-the-sta_1425365.jpg)
