The Confederacy still lingers within the progressivism that birthed it

Chief among them was John C. Calhoun, who could see as early as 1846 that unless more slave states were added to the nation, a growing number of new free states would eventually make it impossible for southern states to veto antislavery legislation in the Senate, as they repeatedly had done to the Wilmot Proviso in the late 1840s. Eventually, free states would have a three-fourths majority to abolish slavery by amending the Constitution without the consent of any southern states.

Calhoun considered this a “tyranny of the majority,” and developed a novel political theory that would preserve the “minority” rights of the slave states: the doctrine of the concurrent majority. Stated simply, the doctrine maintained that within the framework of American constitutionalism, certain minority groups (like slave states) had the right to veto decisions of the majority, which could only act with the acquiescence of the minority. Hence, these minorities also had the right to secede from the union — secession was merely a form of veto.