 With the 11th Amendment, we start into 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 the 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 recognize the legal sovereignty of the states under this amendment. They 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 the representatives of 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 put the 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 the citizens of another state or by foreigners. They used the amendment process to slam the door and even hearing such suits. There is no problem with foreigners not being allowed, but cutting off sovereign U.S. citizens from the federal courts is no support to we the people, nor to any way promote this unity or justice or any other stated purpose of we the people. The 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 telling the voting 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 would fill the top two spots, where the original process had assumed that either could represent the people either as president or president of the Senate. The new process recognized these as separate elections. The 13th Amendment result from the divisive issue of slavery. It had become a major source of social and economic life for people in the southern states, but was considered an offense by the majority of those in the north. There had been a long-standing 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. 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 right to enter into his neighbor's property and liberate what his neighbors owned. We the people could not delegate this to government or our leaders. 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 citizens can, being sovereign, turn his or her back on any unit of government. The people were not educated in their legal relationship with government under our constituting agreement. And so acted as if it was the states' rights that were an issue. And the central government, ignoring the limits of the Constitution, acted as if its sovereignty over the states was the real issue. 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 in our Constitution. Freeing the slaves by law was a seizure of private property. It was theft by government. It was wrong on almost every count. It was also banned under the principle of being an ex post facto law. Simply declaring that slaves had always been wrongly owned does not justify taking charge of 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 are 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 would require judicial determination of value that had to be paid in order to make that seizure legal. Would there have been a civil war if government had paid each owner what a jury of citizens determined to be fair? There would certainly have been a 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 their former owners with no way to make a living, and the owners would not have refused to hire them. The work still had to be done if either were making a living. There would be much difficulty in transition, but the federal court would be there to urge the state courts to respect the seizure of the slave and 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? It was then that you asked who paid for the civil war, who paid for the 165,000 lost futures for young men. Those who would free the slaves would have had to come up with the funds. They just couldn't enter their neighbors homes and seize upon what they had as 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 constitution to legislate away private property rights of the 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, whenever those who are granted the public authority believe that their cause is good. 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.