"The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North, as you say. I feel the aggression, and am willing to take every proper step for redress. It is the principle I contend for, not individual or private gain. As an American citizen, I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions; and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for "perpetual union," so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession. Anarchy would have been established, and not a government, by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the Revolution. . . . Still a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and progress of mankind. If the Union is dissolved, and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.
I tried to catch the full context of his letter, not just the usual excerpts.
Yes, thank you, that doesn't happen often enough.
Robert E. Lee clearly anticipated by your citation and quotation, that the dissolution of the Union would lead to Civil War, that the North would fight. He was correct in this. There have been lively discussions about how the North, initially iffy on the subject of secession, came to its determination to fight, but I think that there were two factors that determined the outcome: a) Lincoln successfully baited Davis into opening fire first, which galvanized Northern opinion and essentially transformed secession from a political movement into a war, which IMHO was his objective all along -- even before he ran for office; and b) the Northern money interests recognized the danger to their own interests entailed in the departure of the South from the Union, and they spurred as much action as they could, IMHO, in the direction of retrieving the Southern States by force.
Lee was correct in his statement that the South was exercising its natural right to revolutionize its affairs. He was incorrect about secession, and he was in error to prefer the intentions and opinions of the Founders to the sovereign voice of the People: vox populi, vox Dei. Either the People are sovereign, or we're all just kidding ourselves and we can just take it to the house.
The People acted correctly in convening conventions and scheduling plebiscites to determine whether to secede: such a determination was ultra vires any State's legislature, since they and all the officers of the States were bound by the Supremacy Clause to support the Constitution. An act of the People in their aspect as Sovereign, assembled in convention or in their voting precincts, was something else again, and I think Lee missed the distinction.
He also erred in using the quote, "perpetual union" -- that phrase is found in the Articles of Confederation but does not appear in the Constitution or its Preamble.
The phrase does not exist in the Constitution. It is from the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which was dissolved by the secession of the parties involved.