I'd have to check on that. Frankly I haven't read every constitution of that period.
Yet even if it were true that wouldn'tnecessarily be reflective of a Founders' views, since it is not a given that one was involved in the drafting of a state constition or a provision thereof. In fact, the Founders as a body were, I would argue reasonably, more nationalist than elites as a whole.
Until the mid 1800's the right of succession was never seriously questioned. Many states had threatened succession including New York and Masachussetts.
Your latter statement is certainly correct.
The doctrine itself, however, was a contentious one. I wouldn't paint it as settled as you do. There was a reason why no one actually carried out such a threat until 1860.
Even during the Civil War many people even in the north asserted that succession was constitutional.
Some certainly did.
New York City even had a major movement at one point for secession.
If the founders had argued that succession was somehow illegal they would have been undermining their own assertions against England.
Legally the cases are somewhat different.
The Constitition and the Articles of Confederation were voluntary pacts in a way that Crown control of the colonies never really was. And voluntary agreement creates moral and legal obligations which a coerced one, I might argue, does not.
But in the end secession is really the right to revolution which may be said to exist in natural law. If it succeeds it's a revolution. If it fails it's a rebellion. And the South, unlike the American colonists, failed.
And, may I say, thank God for that. However much I dislike what has become of the federal government and federalism, a world in which the South won the Civil War would be a much worse one all the way around.
"a world in which the South won the Civil War would be a much worse one all the way around."
You are assuming that the South would have remained in the state it was in circa 1860. I don't think you can make that assumption. All societies evolve and change over time, the southern states would have been no exception.
If the CSA had managed to achieve independence, it is a certainty that the two countries would have fought subsequent wars.
In my humble opinion...
The obvious moral repugnance of enslaving another human based on ethnicity (or any other factor, at that) is forced to balance against the equally obvious self-serving corruption of Northern business interests and Federal collectivist (i.e.: tyrranical) tendencies when we look back at the American Civil War (or the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between Union Goons and Dixie Thugs, if you will). Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but if I had been President and could persuade a sizable majority of my colleagues in Washington to agree, I would have let the South secede... good riddance to backward blowhards. Then the United States of America would suspend all trade with the Confederate States of Dixie or whatever they would call themselves, and declare that any slave who made it into the North was automatically free and any white (or other) person caught entering the North with the purpose of kidnapping and returning said slave would be jailed. A loud declaration to the rest of the world that the "peculiar institution" is abhorrent and contrary to the principles of freewill and natural law, constantly updated with intense economic and idealogical pressure, would put a fairly decisive crimp in the viability of such antiquated racist institutions and do irreparable damage to the emerging nation... perhaps enough to change the minds of the average Southerner, if not the slave-owning elite. I'm guessing this would go on for about 20 years - maybe less - before the South would be begging to rejoin the United States, rescinding slavery as a matter of course to do so.
I could be wrong, of course. And I'm sure there are those who take exception with my characterizations of intention, especially our friends in the "New South". Confederate flag-waving Freepers... FLAME ON!
Except in the neo-confederate fantasies.