Good post HD.
DegenerateLamp is the only person I’ve ever encountered that holds the asinine assertion that anyone can quit at any time and for any reason and not call that anarchistic rebellion. His is an outlier opinion among outliers.
When the Colonialists finally rebelled they did so honestly stating that what they undertook was openly illegal. They chose the divine right of rebellion and self-defense. And they were frank about their chances - they knew that, should they fail, they would all hang. They accepted the risks with eyes open and hearts steeled.
Likewise, the southern slavocracy knew the writing on the wall. They knew that the civilized world was turning away from the insidious practice of slavery. They knew that sentiment against slavery in America was mounting. Of course they also knew that it was sentiment not expressed by action. Beyond limiting expansion of slavery into the west northerners were more or less content to cluck-cluck about their southern neighbors and otherwise maintain the status quo.
So southern leaders had a couple of choices they could make. They could have responded to the writing and worked on mitigation plans so that they could minimize their eventual losses of “property”. They could continue to ignore the 500 gorilla and do nothing to plan for the future. They could orchestrate a PR campaign to try to increase the favorables on the Peculiar Institution.
Or they could mount a rebellion of their own and couch it in rhetoric flourishes about “secession” in order to assuage their guilt. That’s the long & short of it. They had a hissy fit over an election and set on a ruinous course that resulted in the terrible loss of American lives.
The whole carefully orchestrated and built, block upon block, big picture for the Slave Powers was seriously threatened. Lincoln exposed that whole giant conspiracy in his House Divided Speech. He named names, condemned the lot of them from Chief Justice Taney down to Stephen Douglas. It's all right there for those who have ears to hear. He details the long pathway that had been steering the country towards being "all slave". Taney had just made the decision that a black man was not, could not and never would be a "citizen" of the USA.
Of course the narrative of the noble south defending its "lost cause" was later laid on heavily. But there is no way possible to separate the noble and romanticized "Confederacy" from the systematic institution of slavery.
My question to DL would be: Did any free State attempt to independently join the Confederacy? ....... And if so, would they have been independently allowed to join?
But you are correct and I should heed your advice. The man is an outlier and should be cut loose.
Because apparently you can't read.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
You can lie to yourself, but you aren't fooling anyone with objectivity.