Yes, we've heard it all before. Your opinion carries little weight with me as well. But what you cannot dispute is that the decision was handed down. And agree or disagree as you will, secession as practiced by the Southern states is unconstitutional and will remain so until the Constitution is amended or a future court overturns or modifies the White decision.
You forgot to emphasize "or an abuse of the compact." The unconstitutional Northern laws that prevented the return of many fugitive slaves weren't sufficient enough abuse against the South? The fact that Texas had to pay its own forces to protect against armed invasions by Mexicans and Indians when the US failed to protect the state as required by the Constitution wasn't enough? The fact that the Congress passed tariffs and partial legislation that enriched the North at the expense of the South wasn't enough abuse?
No need to. Because as Madison also wrote, "The characteristic distinction between free Governments and Governments not free is, that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but between the parties creating the Government. Each of those being equal, neither can have more rights to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved, than every other has to deny the fact, and to insist on the execution of the bargains." You say that the compact was abused. The Northern state say it wasn't. What makes you right and them wrong? Or them right and you wrong for that matter?
You would have us believe the abusers get to decide whether an abused state can leave or not.
And you would have us believe they were abused merely because they said they were. Considering the power the South wielded in Congress, the laws passed to support their slave ownership, and the court decisions handed down which overturned every law passed that was meant to hinder the abduction of runaway slaves from free states, not to mention the abuse of a state's right to run their own affairs, then your claims of abuse is nonsense.
Madison referred to the Constitution as a compact a gazillion times. Yet you found a place where he doesn't call it a compact?
During the Virginia ratification delegates worried repeatedly about being in a Union where there were seven Northern states and six Southern ones. Virginia and the South would be outnumbered and possibly oppressed and injured as a result. Consequently, Virginia put in its ratification document, a document written by Madison, Marshall, and three other Federalists, the right to resume its governance.
And you would have us believe they were abused merely because they said they were. Considering the power the South wielded in Congress, the laws passed to support their slave ownership, and the court decisions handed down which overturned every law passed that was meant to hinder the abduction of runaway slaves from free states, not to mention the abuse of a state's right to run their own affairs, then your claims of abuse is nonsense.
Modern DNA excluded, a woman who says a guy raped her is more believable than the rapist who says he did not do the crime.
The South protested various Northern personal liberty laws as being unconstitutional over a twenty year period. The North looked the other way and claimed they weren't. Yet when the Southern states started seceding, all of a sudden a number of Northern states started repealing or amending their heretofore "constitutional" laws. They knew they were unconstitutional, but they didn't do anything about them for years. By suddenly repealing and amending them, they admitted that the South's claims were not "nonsense" and that the Southern states had a right to protest unconstitutional laws in Northern states. What was it those distinguished Massachusetts lawyers called their personal liberty laws? Oh, yeah, "conspicuous and palpable breaches of the national compact by ourselves" possibly leading to a breakup of the Union.
NS is a staunch believer in 'might makes right'.