I still believe that secession is unconstitutional, although I know of others who do not.
I'll restate my points again here:
The Declaration of Independence was an irrevocable mutual "pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to form a new nation. It took the Articles of Confederation, and throwing off the Articles of Confederation, before we arrived at the Constitution, our governing document.
Throwing off the Articles of Confederation was not leaving the nation, it was only changing the form of government. Our Constitution has Article V as the mechanism to change the government; throwing off the Constitution is not seceding from the country.
The only way to throw off a tyrannical government is to amend the Constitution to rein it in, eliminate the parts we don't like, and add new ones to it with the consent of the states. Individual states choosing to become "sanctuary states" vis-à-vis the Constitution is not permissible.
Secession violates the mutual pledge between the states at its founding, and is not an option.
Madison's argument here is that when the states ratified the Constitution, that conferred United States citizenship on the citizens of the several states with all the rights and powers laid out in the Constitution.It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity. They might, by the same authority & by the same process have converted the Confederacy into a mere league or treaty; or continued it with enlarged or abridged powers; or have imbodied the people of their respective States into one people, nation or sovereignty; or as they did by a mixed form make them one people, nation, or sovereignty, for certain purposes, and not so for others.Once given, a governor or legislature does not have the right to strip its state citizens of their citizenship in the United States.The only distinctive effect, between the two modes of forming a Constitution by the authority of the people, is that if formed by them as imbodied into separate communities, as in the case of the Constitution of the U.S. a dissolution of the Constitutional Compact would replace them in the condition of separate communities, that being the Condition in which they entered into the compact; whereas if formed by the people as one community, acting as such by a numerical majority, a dissolution of the compact would reduce them to a state of nature, as so many individual persons. But whilst the Constitutional compact remains undissolved, it must be executed according to the forms and provisions specified in the compact.
Madison argues that the ratification of the Constitution was a compact between the states, and as such, each state has equal say in all matters. When one state declares itself to secede unilaterally, it says that its own decision is elevated above all the rest.The case of a claim in a State to secede from its union with the others, is a question among the States themselves as parties to a compact...Madison then suggests that if a state declares its own desire supreme over the others, then that right extends to all the other states too. That means that if a state has a right to secede from the others, then the others have the right to secede from it. In other words, a body of states has the right to oust a state against its wishes, which is a dangerous precedent.It surely does not follow, from the fact of the States, or rather the people embodied in them, having as parties to the Constitutional compact no tribunal above them, that, in controverted meanings of the compact, a minority of the parties can rightfully decide against the majority; still less that a single party can decide against the rest; and as little that it can at will withdraw itself altogether from its compact with the rest.
The characteristic distinction between free Governments and Governments not free is, that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved, than every other has to deny the fact, and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single State has a right to secede at will from the rest, is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them.
It is my understanding that a state could leave, as a final measure to protect itself against a tyrannical Federal government, because there are sometimes no other options and the Union was not meant to be a backdoor way to enslaving smaller states in favour of the large states.
However, although a state could option for secession along with whatever conditions they agree to upon leaving, the feds don’t have to let back in so freely. The feds can impose all the conditions it wants to admitting a state, but it can’t keep a state that wants out.
Before 1869, that was my understanding of the arrangement to joining the Union.