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The key issue is that, in the terms of the Declaration, independence may be sought from a larger polity "whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established." To give shape to that concept, Americans of the colonial era looked to the specific bundle of rights established in the Magna Carta and English common law. For the South, the reason for secession and the formation of the Confederacy was the protection of slavery.

No it wasn't. Slavery was not threatened within the US and lest anybody feared it was, the Corwin Amendment would have expressly protected it effectively forever. The Northern Dominated Congress passed a resolution specifically saying they were not fighting over slavery (indeed the union still had multiple slaveholding states and slavery was practiced in Washington DC) and Lincoln said many times he was not fighting over slavery. There simply was no real popular support for abolition anywhere in the North prior to secession.

Was that adequate and proper cause to repudiate the Constitution? Not in my view, nor in the view of anyone with a lick of sense. That is why, after the Civil War was over, Southern apologists contrived all sorts of evasions and excuses for secession other than slavery.

Nobody repudiated the Constitution except Lincoln and the Northern states which waged a war of aggression for money and empire to impose their rule over sovereign states which did not consent to it. The claim that even the original 7 seceding states did so over slavery - even as they offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment - as well as the attempt to just sweep under the rug the fact that 5 states of the Upper South seceded only when Lincoln chose to start a war is just so much propaganda from PC Revisionists.

Unfortunately, this Lost Cause myth and its pseudo legalisms are attractive today to people who ought to know better. Secession cannot properly be defended as a species of no-fault divorce that does not need a proper reason. Secession was foolish and wicked.

Unfortunately Leftists today as well as misguided nationalists buy into the PC Revisionist "all about slavery" myth because it is simply too politically inconvenient as well as embarrassing to admit they started a war that turned out to be a bloodbath and which destroyed the original union the Founding Fathers created due solely to their lust for the wealth of others and their insatiable greed. Leftists today love it because they are always in favor of centralizing ever more power for daddy government.