All people are justified in having political independence. The United States is a voluntary political union founded on that very idea. The American Revolution was itself a war of secession.D. C. Bear said:For you to continue a rational discussion, you would have to have started a rational discussion. There has been precious little evidence of the latter.Redbrickbear said:If the words of the leading Politicians, Presidents and Generals of the North have no substance than I don't know how to continue with any rational discussion.D. C. Bear said:
Again, lots of words, little substance.
It is an undisputable fact that the south saw leaving the union as necessary to preserve the right to own other human beings in the same manner that one owns livestock. No number of words or quotes can alter that truth.
In answering the question of why the south tried to leave the union and whether they were justified in doing so,
"the Constitution cannot be maintained nor the Union preserved, in opposition to public feeling, by the mere exertion of the coercive powers confided to the General Government. The foundations must be laid in the affections of the people..."
-President Andrew Jackson's Farewell address
"If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation...to a continuance in this Union...I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'"
- Thomas Jefferson
"If the day should ever come when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other...far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint."
-John Q. Adams, 6th Pres
"be one of the maddest projects ever devised: no state would ever suffer itself to be used as the instrument of coercing another"
~ Alexander Hamilton
"But if the right of a state as an organized community to sever its political relations with other communities does not exist, there can be no claim of sovereignty for the state. For if political sovereignty means anything, it includes the attribute of... self-determination as to its status in respect to other sovereignties. Limitation in this attribute is fatal to the conception of sovereignty, and accordingly, the failure of secession removed one pregnant source of confusion at the very basis of our system."
-Prof Dunning
[There is no moral or ethical right to coerce a State that seeks to "alter or abolish" a supposed voluntary political association with other States. It's called self-government & the principle was clearly expressed in the original Declaration of Independence in 1776. ] -William Dunning
"When they were finally separated from Great Britain, the allegiance of their citizens was not to the Nation for there was none. It was to the States."
-President Calvin Coolidge 5/30/1924
P. Gordy (Prof at Ohio Uni) "Political Parties in the US" (1900):
"The convention framed a Constitution by the adoption of which 13 peoples, imagining themselves still independent & sovereign...They continued to think of themselves as sovereigns who indeed permitted an agent to exercise only some of their functions for them, but who had not abdicated their thrones. If the constitution had contained definite statement of the actual fact; if it had said that to adopt it was to acknowledge the sovereignty of the one American people, no part of which could sever its connections from the rest without the consent of the whole, it would probably have been rejected by every State in the Union."]
"If the Union was formed by the accession of States, then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States."
~ Senator Daniel Webster Massachusetts, US Senate, February 15, 1833
Prof Goldwin Smith, an Advocate for the Union, said 'Few who have looked into the history can doubt that the Union originally was…a compact dissoluble perhaps at pleasure…certainly on breach of the articles of Union'
- C.F.Adams Jr.
"today, no impartial student of our constitutional history can doubt for a moment that each State ratified the form of government summited in the firm belief that at any time it could withdraw therefrom."
-C.F. Adams Jr. (Pres. AHA, Union Vet)
"When a proposition was made to authorize the Federal Gov't to make war upon a State, if necessary to the enforcement of the Federal laws, the great convention which framed the Constitution expressly denied such power." -Sen. Henry C. Burnett
"Realize the existing fact that the constituents of this Union are sovereign powers & that those sovereign powers are not mere component parts of a common empire...reason with them as you will, about the exercise of their sovereignty, but concede it. "
-Sen. James M. Mason, VA 1861 (grandson of George Mason)
"I am sworn to support the Constitution. I am NOT sworn to be true and faithful to the Central Government, as I have sworn to be true and faithful to the State of Virginia"
-James M. Mason (VA 3/1861)
"If the Declaration of Independence be true, (and who here is against it?) every community may dissolve its connection with any other community previously made, & have no other obligation than that which results from the breach of any alliance between States."
"The Southern States had rightfully the power to withdraw from the Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered; that right was a violation of the letter and spirit of the compact between the States; and that war waged by the Federal Government against the seceding States was in disgrace of the limitations of the Constitution and destructive of the principles of the Declaration of Independence." Jeff Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.