Thei is part 1 of a series I wrote on the Civil War from the Southern Perspective.
A case for secession
The Articles of Confederation were written need the time of the Declaration of Independance. They were our first Constitution & had their problems.
Under the Articles of Confederation, artitcle 13 states "The Articles of Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the union shall be perpetuated; nor shall any alteration, at any time hereafter, be made in any of them, unless such alteration, be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the Legislatures of every State".
But article 7 of the Constitution states" The ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same"
Since they did not expect some States, i.e. Rhode Island, who boycotted the Convention, or New York who walked out, something needed to be changed. It was necessary to refer it to an authority higher than that of Congress and the state legislatures- that is, to the people of the states, assembled by their representatives in convention. Since State leglislatures operate under restricted power, this made them suborbanate to the people of the states assembled.
In this article (7) provision was made for the secession of a part of the states from a union which, when formed, had been declared perpetual and it's terms and articles to be inviolably observed by every state. Since the Constitution says nothing about being "perpetual", secession from it is less convoluted.
As James Madison states in the Federalist "It is an established doctrine on the subjuct of treaties, that all the articles are mutually conditions of each other; that a breach of any one article is a breach of the whole treaty; and that a breach commited by either of the parties absolves the others, and authorizes them, if they please, to pronounce the compact violated and void. Should it unhappily be necessary to appeal to these delicate truths for a justification for dispensing with the consent of particular States to a dissolution of the Federal pact, will not the complaining parties find it a difficult task to answer the multiplied and important infractions with which they may be confronted?"
Since in a dispute between two sides, one party cannot also be the Judge, it is up to the parties to judge for themselves the merits of their case.
As of the admission of Kentucky in 1799, it was declared that the United States was the result of a compact between the states to which each accended as a state; that it possessed only delegated powers, of which it was not the exclusive or final judge; and that, as in all cases of compact among parties having no common judge, "each party has an equal right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress." In plain english, the United States cannot be a judge & plaintif. The same standard would still be in effect today.
What this all boils down to is that the founders established a way out of any Constitution. Since the Southern states followed the perscribed path for secession, They were not guilty of insurection. They misjudged the North's unwillingness to let them go.
