The arguments in favor of secession are not persuasive. The Southern states did not experience any oppressions or deprivations of rights before they seceded. Secession was instead due to slavery and the South's pride. The South feared that Lincoln's election marked a decisive loss of power that would eventually lead to the admission of additional free states and abolition.
In arguing for secession, pro-slavery Southern leaders projected that an independent, slave-holding Confederacy could dominate the Caribbean and Central America, adding new slave territories and states so as to rival or exceed the North. It was believed that by commanding most of the world's production of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, the Confederacy would accrue much additional wealth and power.
These fantasies and secession should have been rejected. Even with Lincoln's election, the South remained powerful enough to delay or block abolition in favor of gradual emancipation on terms suitable to the South. And even without pressure from abolitionists, soil exhaustion and cotton from Egypt and India would have made slavery economically unsustainable by the 1880s.
Without the Civil War, slavery would have been succeeded by a system of sharecropping acceptable to the South. Indeed, most of the North would have supported a system of sharecropping to keep freed blacks tied to Southern agriculture and out of the North's cities where they would depress wages and bring racial problems.
Without the Civil War, the South would have industrialized and diversified its agriculture. Considering the disruption and loss of life and treasure, secession and war were not just foolish but were virtually acts of suicide by the Old South.
Fulminations these days about "traitor Robert E. Lee" or "dishonest Abe" are ludicrous as the issues do not now merit such passions and attitudes -- if they ever did.
However, anybody from California - when they get out of a A/C cooled jetliner - after landing in the South in July, gets this tremendous urge to dig up Lincoln's body, kick it dead in the a$$ and yell, "What the hell were you thinking?!!! This place is hot and muggy, let'em go!"
Unless you live in a state(s) that votes(or voted in the past) for secession, your opinion means jack squat.
The arguments in favor of secession are not persuasive.
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Good Mornin'
Not Persuasive? Whom was the delegating authority?
Federalist #43
The first question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. PERHAPS, also, an answer may be found without searching beyond the principles of the compact itself. It has been heretofore noted among the defects of the Confederation, that in many of the States it had received no higher sanction than a mere legislative ratification. The principle of reciprocality seems to require that its obligation on the other States should be reduced to the same standard. A compact between independent sovereigns, founded on ordinary acts of legislative authority, can pretend to no higher validity than a league or treaty between the parties. It is an established doctrine on the subject of treaties, that all the articles are mutually conditions of each other; that a breach of any one article is a breach of the whole treaty; and that a breach, committed by either of the parties, absolves the others, and authorizes them, if they please, to pronounce the compact violated and void.
JOHN TAYLOR of Caroline, who was a ratifier for the State of Virginia:
The sovereignties which imposed the limitations upon the federal government, far from supposing that they perished by the exercise of a part of their faculties, were vindicated, by reserving powers in which their deputy, the federal government, could not participate; and the usual right of sovereigns to alter or revoke its commissions.
March 2, 1861 - Journal of the Senate. This vote should place your concerns at rest:
28 nays to 18 yeas “Under this Constitution, as originally adopted and as it now exists, no State has power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States; and this Constitution, and all laws passed in pursuance of its delegated powers, are the supreme late of the land, anything contained in any constitution, ordinance, or act of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsj&fileName=052/llsj052.db&recNum=378&itemLink=D?hlaw:3:./temp/~ammem_iHF8::%230520379&linkText=1
“Did Virginia and the other states of the Confederacy have a right to secede”
Lincoln argued that they did.