Written by a Philadelphia lawyer, this nearly-forgotten book is an excellent treatise on the federal Constitution and openly discusses and defends the right of a State to withdraw from the Union. Wrote Rawle, "It depends on the State itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on the State itself whether it continues a member of the Union.... The secession of a State from the Union depends on the will of the people." What is not widely known today by the advocates of an "indivisible Union" is that this book was used to teach cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York from 1825 to 1826. pb 350 pages $19.50 + shipping.

Beginning with the usurpations of Abraham Lincoln, this book explains how the so-called emergency powers of the President of the United States developed over a period of seven decades and finally culminated in the virtual supplanting of the Constitution by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal democracy. The author draws heavily from a wealth of rare political literature from the past two centuries, as well as long-forgotten Government documents to paint an unsettling picture of American history and to show why nothing ever seems to change in Washington, no matter which political party is currently in power. pb (oversized); 546 pages $36.00 + Shipping

For forty years from the ratification of the Constitution, it was well understood that the American States were united in a political compact in which certain of their powers had been entrusted to a common agent, while their essential sovereignty and its attendant rights were reserved to themselves. One of these rights was that of secession. It was not until 1830 that the theory of a permanently consolidated nation from which withdrawal was unlawful first made an appearance in Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution. Daniel Webster would rely heavily on Story's work in his debates in Congress with South Carolina Senators Robert Hayne and John C. Calhoun. Story and Webster denied that the Constitution was either "a compact between State governments" or that it had been "established by the people of the several States," asserting that it had instead been established by "the people of the United States in the aggregate." As such, the States were creatures of the Union rather than vice versa, rendering secession not only impossible, but treasonous. This book, written in 1840 by a Virginia lawyer who served as Secretary of the Navy in the Tyler Administration, and later re-issued in Philadelphia in 1863, is a brilliant response to the Story/Webster theory and also serves as a challenge to the modern Leviathan State which is modern America. pb 151 pages $8.50 + Shipping