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By voting to secede, the Souths legislators were admittedly violating their oaths of office to defend the US Constitution.

Nonsense! In fact, many of “the Souths legislators” asserted a constitutional right to State secession. As Senator Robert Augustus Toombs of Georgia declared upon his resignation from the United States Senate:

Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government; they have demanded no new Constitution. Look to their records at home and here from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the disruption of the empire, and they have not demanded a single thing except that you shall abide by the Constitution of the United States; that constitutional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be done.…

Senators, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition de novo, yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance… I say that the Constitution is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that “the powers not granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people.”

That hardly qualifies as ‘admitting that he was violating his oath of office to defend the US Constitution,’ now does it? Rather, it is a declaration by a Southern legislator that the Constitution itself (Amendment X) reserved the right of secession to the States and their people...

;>)

That hardly qualifies as 'admitting that he was violating his oath of office to defend the US Constitution,' now does it?

Sure reads like that to me..

Rather, it is a declaration by a Southern legislator that the Constitution itself (Amendment X) reserved the right of secession to the States and their people...

Nothing in the 10th reserves the right to break an oath to defend our Constitution. They should have fought to preserve the Constitution in court, not to violate it by secession & war.