 With the 11th Amendment, we start the realm of political actions. Consider in reading these that the purpose of the Constitution was set in the preamble and will not change until that preamble is changed or replaced. The purpose was and continues to be to ordain and establish a government for a self-governing people. The purpose of the 11th Amendment is to honor the legal sovereignty of these states when it is convenient. Under the amendment, the states can refuse to be sued in federal courts by either foreigners or sovereign citizens in other states. To set the understanding into context, the states as signatories were representative of the people in a region of the United States. The originating language that allowed this type of legal action addressed the Supreme Court, not the federal courts. This provision also puts a muzzle on Congress that it cannot ordain and establish inferior courts that are empowered to hear such suits. Simply, the state representatives did not want to be sued by citizens of another state or by foreigners. They used the amendment process to slam the door on even hearing such suits. There was no problem as to foreigners, but cutting off the sovereign U.S. citizens from the federal courts is no support to we the people, nor in any way promotes unity or justice or any other of the stated purposes of we the people. Our 12th Amendment was the result of experimenting with the process of election. It was a second attempt to provide a process that both assured representation and was sufficiently supportive of order to give reasonable government support to the people. You should note that it still kept the Electoral College a witness to the physical problem of tallying the votes of a large and widely dispersed population. The biggest change was voting specifically for Vice President, where the original concept was that the two most supported political leaders still the two top spots. Where the original process had assumed that either could represent the people, either as President or as President of the Senate, the new process recognized that these were separate elections. The 13th Amendment resulted from the divisive issue of slavery. It had become a major source of social and economic life for the people in the southern states, but was considered to be an offense by the majority of those in the north. There had been a longstanding and intensified push to outlaw slavery. A number of states had actually refused to continue as part of the United States on even the threat of outlawing their way of life. Agreement was not then possible. And so we entered into a self-defeating war that cost 165,000 lives. The legal foundation is remarkably simple in terms of the original Constitution. No citizen had a legal means to enter into his neighbor's property and liberate what the neighbor owned. We the people could not delegate this to our government or to its leadership. Could the states accede from the Union? Again, under the Constitution, the states were just territorial representatives of the sovereign people who lived in that territory. The sovereign citizen can, being sovereign, turn his back any way he wants to on a unit of government. The people were not educated in their legal relationship with the government under our constituting agreement, and so acted as if the states' rights were the real issue. And the central government, ignoring the limits of the Constitution, acted as if its sovereignty over the states was in threat. The price of this ignorance was the lives of 165,000 American citizens. That was at the time about 1% of the number of males and probably 2% or more of the young men of our nation. This amendment was passed with questionable agreement. The war might not have taken place if leadership had understood the deeper limits and potentials of the Constitution. Freeing the slaves by law was a seizure of private property. It was theft by government. It was legally forbidden on almost every count. It was also banned under the principle of being an ex post facto law, simply declaring that the slaves had always been wrongly owned, does not justify a change of taking them. That was an abuse by government that had been addressed in the Constitution, and here the government was acting just as badly toward its sovereign citizens as England had. There were legal ways to address this issue that could have been used, even over the objection of citizens. Political leaders acting as sovereign representatives of a sovereign government simply ignored what was legal because they had a cause they believed to be right. So what was legal? We have a constitutional process for taking private property for a public purpose, but it required judicial determination of value that had to be paid in order to make that seizure legal. Would there have been a civil war if the government had paid each owner what a jury of citizens determined to be fair? There would certainly have been great unrest, but the change would not have been tearing up the United States. Those who had been freed would not have just up and left the former owners with no way to make a living, and the owners would not have refused them higher. The work still had to be done if either were to make a living. There would be much difficulty in transition, but the federal courts would be there to urge the state courts to respect the seizure of a slave and the granting of freedom. The former owners would have less to complain about as they would have received just compensation in accord with a jury determination. So who would pay the massive bill? And it was then you ask, who paid for the civil war? Who paid for 165,000 lost futures for young men? Those who would free the slaves would have come up with the funds. They just couldn't enter their neighbors' homes and seize upon them like thieves. We will also address another potential method in accord with the 14th Amendment, one that could have provided a much gentler and less disruptive process for ending slavery. And so we see that two of these three amendments address political matters rather than the ordination and establishment of a central government. The 13th was so poorly conceived that even the threat of using the Constitution to legislate away the property rights of slave owners led to actualizing the division of the United States. As we will see, this is the witness to the abandonment of legal government, wherever those who are granted public authority believe their cause is just. They will behave as sovereign rulers and will spend the lives and fortunes of other sovereign citizens without any compunction. Our need for a course in government and law goes beyond good policy. It goes to defense of our rights as a sovereign citizenry.