No, they tried. They launched their rebellion in an attempt to change their government, and they got their head handed to them. And have then spent the last 140 years complaining about it.
So, who do you think was sovereign instead of the People? You've never answered that question, as many times as I've asked it.
I do believe the people are sovereign. All the people, North and South, the people of the United States. I don't belive that the states are sovereign over the people, I don't believe that the Southern people were more sovereign than those in the North, and I don't believe that only the South had rights that deserved to be protected.
We've been over this, too.
There is no unitary, lumpen People. The individual States made up the Union, ratifying the Constitution each according to its own People's lights.
The People are the States, and vice versa. Don't confuse state governments with the States, in an attempt to blur the issues.
I think you know perfectly well what these terms are and what they mean, and you know I'm using them properly -- the supporting documentary material's been produced and discussed until Hell won't have it. You are clinging to the fiction that Lincoln copped off old Daniel Webster, who cobbled it up to deny -- wrongly -- that a State has the right to leave the Union. It's all lies.
As long as I'm a politician in the majority, nobody can leave the Union because I'm going to fleece everybody in the room, nobody gets to leave, no exceptions.
But that isn't the constitutional and historical experience of the American polity.