No, you don't get to pull that trick. You have to show where it is forbidden. Just because a right is not enumerated does not mean it doesn't exist.
The Declaration said this right existed, and the Constitutional convention was only 11 years after everyone in the nation had put forth the Declaration, so the burden of proof is on you to show how they intended the Constitution to *CONTRADICT* what was a recognized right at the time.
Consider that the Declaration urges that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
I have considered it. It is a suggestion, not a requirement. People don't have to explain why they are exercising a right. It is only a curtesy when they do.
Yet you insist that while slavery is prominently mentioned in the official Southern statements of secession, economics was the real reason.
My position is that rights are not conditional. You can exercise your right for bad reasons as well as good. The point is it is *YOUR* right.
And again, they don't have to explain their reasons for leaving. The North needs to explain it's reason for stopping them, and so far I see no support in the US Constitution for their actions.
If you are accurate, that obscurity takes Southern secession away from the requirement of the Declaration that the causes be stated.
It is not a requirement. It is a curtesy.
Moreover, the Declaration states that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This principle makes slavery ineligible as a legitimate basis for secession.
Firstly, you don't have a conditional right of secession. You have a complete and total right to secede for any reason the people of a state see fit.
Secondly, the "all men are created equal" relies on the same God that says
" When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
The right to leave is given by the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
As for whether the North had a right to oppose secession, the Declaration did not claim that Britain had no right to try to keep America as a colony.
I do not grasp how you can reach that conclusion. The entire point of the Declaration and the War for independence was to assert the position that Britain had no right to try to keep America as a colony.
My position is that rights are not conditional. You can exercise your right for bad reasons as well as good. The point is it is *YOUR* right.
Rights are not absolute.
“And again, they don’t have to explain their reasons for leaving. The North needs to explain it’s reason for stopping them, and so far I see no support in the US Constitution for their actions”
Legal exoerts and the USSC do.
Was that adequate and proper cause to repudiate the Constitution? Not in my view, nor in the view of anyone with a lick of sense. That is why, after the Civil War was over, Southern apologists contrived all sorts of evasions and excuses for secession other than slavery.
Unfortunately, this Lost Cause myth and its pseudo legalisms are attractive today to people who ought to know better. Secession cannot properly be defended as a species of no-fault divorce that does not need a proper reason. Secession was foolish and wicked.
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