“If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, July 1867 (Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3, p. 765)
I also don’t know of any republicans that advocated letting the fire-eaters have their way. Hell, you would be abandoning a lot of US citizens who did not want to join the confederacy.
The founders abandoned a lot of British Loyalists. As a percentage of the population, they were likely greater than Southern Unionists.
The only people in the north that supported just letting the southerners go were “copper-head” democrats, but even hey seemed to be a minority.
In truth, most of the North was in favor of letting the South go. It was only after the wealthy and influential started to realize how much money it was going to cost them that there began to be resistance to the idea of letting them go.
"The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more than all other trade. It is very clear the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go." The Manchester, New Hampshire Union Democrat Feb 19 1861
"The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole...we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually." - Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860
DiogenesLamp is the master of the out of context quote. To understand what Chief Justice Chase felt about the Southern actions one has to look at more than just a single sentence.
In June 1867, one month before the DiogenesLamp quote, Chief Justice Chase issued a ruling in the case of Shortridge v. Macon (22 F. Cas 20). Writing from the Circuit Court Bench, Chase wrote, "The national constitution declares that "treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The word "only" was used to exclude from criminal jurisprudence of the new republic the odious doctrines of constructive treason. Its use, however, while limiting the definition to plain, overt acts, brings these acts into conspicuous relief as being always and in essence treasonable. War, therefore, levied against the United States by citizens of the republic, under the pretend authority of the new state government of North Carolina, or of the so-called Confederate government which assumed the title of the "Confederate States," was treason against the United States."
Chase is clear that treason is clearly defined and requires a clear waging of war or adhering to an enemy to qualify as such. Given this, then Chase is not contradicting himself when he says secession is not treason. It is not, not under the definition given in the constitution since secession does not automatically involve war or adherence to one's enemies. But Chase is also clear, both in this ruling and in Texas v. White, that secession as practiced by the Southern states was illegal. That the rebellion that they waged to further that act of secession was treasonable, but that governments are not automatically bound to put rebels on trial for a variety of reasons.
In short, DiogenesLamp is correct in that Chase did not equate secession with treason. But he is as wrong as he could possibly be by implying that meant Chase thought the Confederate secession was legal.
Link to the Shortridge v. Macon decision.