"South Carolina and the other states decided not to go before the Supreme Court despite the fact that the Constitution requires them to. The Constitution says 'all cases' and it specifically includes 'controversies between two or more states'. South Carolina's specific complaint on December 24, 1860 was, 'The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them'. Instead of going to the Supreme Court with this complaint, South Carolina chose to declare, on its own, the U.S. Constitution 'has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation'. By issuing an ordnance instead of obtaining a judgment, South Carolina produced a meaningless declaration that President Lincoln rightly considered 'legally void'. Between the time of South Carolina’s declaration and the war, Lincoln became President on March 4, 1861 and went about things business as usual, assuming correctly that all states including the seceding states were still part of the union. President Lincoln didn’t have to sue in the Supreme Court to bring the seceding states back because they never left. Secession declared was not secession accomplished. After South Carolina finally took un-ignorable military action against the USA at Ft. Sumter on April 12, 1861, President Lincoln asked Congress to give him authority to undertake a war to put down the rebellion."