Size isn't the only defining characteristic of "one people." Do you think the Kosovars or the Bosnians etc are "one people" within context of the Declarations' meaning?
Turn that around. Dissident parts of states in 1860 had the population of whole colonies in 1776. What about their rights.
Did dissident parts of the state have their own governments, governing charters and so forth like the original colonies did? Loyalists in the Colonies were still part of the fundamental makeup of the whole colony. They were outvoted.
Well, we are all sorry Lincoln didn't have battleships, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, but the contradiction is glaring and impossible to ignore.
Only as a matter of hairsplitting. When it gets to practicality or realpolitik, the two things aren't even remotely similar.
There is a great difference in terms of both investment and of necessity. Nothing about Ft Sumter was valuable to the larger government. It was built to suppress British attempts to seize Charleston, and was never manned and never of any actual importance. It was supposed to have been completed decades earlier, but it is a measure of how inconsequential it was that they didn't get around to it until 1860, and still had no plans to man it until Anderson took it upon himself to flee into it.
Like the Democrats in 1860. Majority rule. If it's right to override it in one case, it's not wrong to override it in another, if you can make an argument that what the majority wants is oppressive.
There is a great difference in terms of both investment and of necessity. Nothing about Ft Sumter was valuable to the larger government.
So if a fort is useful to you it's all right to retain it, but if it's not it has to be surrendered.
You make all these pseudo-moralistic condemnations of Lincoln, but you would have behaved in the same way if you thought the stakes were high enough. You might even have gone much further.
If your wrong-headed economics didn't lose you all credibility years ago, you've lost it now.