Actually the nation is the people. The country is the land they live on, bounded by their borders; and the Constitution is the compact made among them....by consent.
And if you read the little human rights document known as "The Declaration of Independence", you'll see that sometimes, "when in the course of human events", such bonds are unilaterally broken.
It asserted in that document that this is a right of free peoples, whenever a government crosses the line into tyranny.
Killing 1/4 of the White males in the South, virtually all of them descendants of the original American colonists, in pursuit of an abstract claim about violating a contract, pretty much qualifies as violent Tyranny, much more than imposing a lousy 3% tea tax or whatever it was.
The subtle irony of using the Declaration of Independence, a document that declares that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to liberty, to justify the disbanding of the Union over the supposed right of some human beings to own other human beings, is just too rich for words.
If there was tyranny rampant in the United States prior to the Civil War, it was nowhere more evident than in the antebellum South.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, most (if not all) conflicts were centered around the issue of slavery.
From the debates on the three-fifths clause in 1787, to the compromise of 1850, they all revolved around the South's "peculiar institution." The end result was inevitable.
Many want to retool the issues leading up of the Civil War, and the South's attempt at destroying the Union, to make them seem more patriotic, more noble even, and palatable to today's Americans, but to do that, one must ignore the fact that a moral abomination existed in the same nation that stood on the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine; In memoria æterna erit justus, ab auditione mala non timebit.
Beauseant!