A number of prominent southerners as well as common southerners stepped up to reaffirm that indeed the Constitution was a compact especially when it came to the issue of slavery, whose names include above all else James Buchanan and the eventual president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis. .
In April of 1861, Davis refers to roots of the country and that it was then that the states had agreed upon a compact between the states rather than a contract above them. .
Strange, indeed, (The Constitution has) proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was not a compact between states, but was in effect a national government, set up above and over the States. (Davis, 1861) .
In direct criticism to the Northerners adapted point of view, he adjudges their claim and refers to the irony of the situation as strangely beneficial to the Northerners case. A little over two months later, Abraham Lincoln declared that the secessionists (including Davis) had "invented an ingenious sophism" to further their argument. This sophism, or devious and untrue statement, revolved around the idea that the supreme powers of the Union lay in the state rather than the federal government. Buchanan affirmed Lincoln's assessment of the Southern position when, in 1860, he sneakily justified the Southerners case by stating that if the principles of the Constitution have been breached, then the "injured States" will have the right of revolution towards the government of the Union. He goes on to say that Congress has no stated power that allows them to "coerce a State into submission," implying his support of an amendment to the Constitution to adapt the "Deep South" position. His proposal includes a need for a written document addressing the U.S.'s position on slavery (Favoring the right of property and the Southern States), the protection of this right in all of the territories, and the strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law.
