Yeah. Stirring, empyrean rhetoric.
The Southerners were still acting within their rights. Which is the thing about rights, as opposed to permissions.
As has been said many times before, the south had every natural right to rebel and the north had every constitutional right to suppress that rebellion. Especially after the south started the shooting. The social contract expressed in the Constitution was broken and the south could no longer claim its protections by their own disavowal of it.