“The statement that establishes the right to secede and the specific application are not in conflict.”
The DOI does not “establish” the right to secede. It recognizes the right to secede.
And the government does not give us our rights. When operating properly the government protects our rights.
Hopefully, we agree on those points.
I disagree with you on at least one point in post 365: “I believe the North had a constitutional right to fight them and get them back into the Union.”
The North fought a war of aggression over money and empire. That war stood the DOI and the U.S. constitution on their heads and killed over 600,000 people to boot.
But it did give us the government we have today, if that is a good thing.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
I think it is reasonable to say that Jefferson's purpose here was to establish the right to session based on natural law principles.
That war stood the DOI and the U.S. constitution on their heads
How was the South justified to secede according to the D of I and the Constitution?
The North fought a war of aggression over money and empire.
The D of I states that aside from a "long train of abuses", "Governments long established should not be changed". The D of I supports the North 's resistance of the South's unjustified secession which failed to identify any unconstitutional acts of the North against the South much less "facts submitted to a candid world" of a long train of abuses suffered at the hands of the North. Also, not that it is really germane to the moral and legal rights being discussed here, the South actually was the aggressor, firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.
it did give us the government we have today
No it didn't. It restored America's true free constitutional republic for the rest of the 1800's. Beginning in the 1900's The Fabian Socialist Left began the steady undermining of constitutional limitations with giant leaps of unconstitutional federal power by FDR, LBJ, and Obama.