Our Founding Fathers were quite literate and capable men. They might have prohibited secession but they did not. Subsequent to the effective date of the constitution, they got around to enacting the Bill of Rights which in the Ninth Amendment reserved to the states and the people respectively those rights unenumerated and in the Tenth Amendment prohibited to the federales such powers as were NOT specifically granted to the federales (like forcing departing states back into the Union, by God or otherwise, whether they agree or not). After secession, those states were no longer in the Union and no longer governed by the constitution and the federal claims to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and to Fort Pickens, Florida, were hostile acts of foreign occupation. All of the rest of the forts, military supplies, etc., previously belonging to the federales were turned over by the Buchanan administration to southern state militias in anticipation of secession and the attorney general in that Buchanan administration was later Lincoln's Secretary of War: Edwin M. Stanton.
William Wallace was not guilty of treason. His nation was Scotland. Neither were the Confederates guilty of treason once secession was accomplished. Note that Jefferson Davis was NEVER PROSECUTED. To the best of my knowledge no one was prosecuted for treason for being a Confederate official.
Imagine, if you will, Slick Willie being tried before a DC federal jury. Do you think he would have been convicted regardless of the facts? OTOH, imagine that Karl Rove had been indicted and tried before a DC federal jury. I think he would have been convicted regardless of the facts. Well, the federal jury that would have had to have been impaneled to try Jeff Davis would have acquitted him in a Richmond second. Likewise, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Alexander Stephens, and the surviving better men who ran the Confederacy. Depending on the facts at Fort Pillow, the feds might have convicted Nathan Bedford Forrest before a Kentucky federal jury.
Lest you imagine otherwise, I welcome the manumission of the slaves but can find no constitutional warrant whatsoever for Lincoln's actions in attacking those states which had formerly been members of the Union.
Finally, you may recall that the Articles of Confederation were the federal constitution before the present constitution. Read them and see that UNANIMITY of the states was required to change them in any way. Read the histories of the Mount Vernon Conference and the Annapolis Conference which, ostensibly called to deal with navigation issues affecting Maryland and Virginia as to the Potomac River, were actually planning sessions to trash the Articles of Confederation in favor of more centralized power to serve commerce, raise taxes, create exclusive federal power over the minting and evaluation of money, establish military power centrally and protect business receivables from such acts as were being perpetrated by the legislature of the Commonwealth of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The constitution is in force but it was never legally enacted.
The argument of Lincoln was that the Confederate states could not leave the Union. If that were so, why did it take acts of Congress to "re-admit" them, including an utterly illegal requirement that the Confederate states actually ratify the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments as a "condition" of "re-admission." If I remember correctly, the blockade of the southern ports was illegal (under well-established international and maritime law) if the war were a civil war or war of rebellion and were legal only if imposed on a recognized foreign nation in a state of belligerence.
See "Rebellion." Triggered the Presidential powers necessary to put down. Those Founding Fathers were indeed quite literate and capable men.
See U.S. v. Greathouse, 26 Federal Cases 18 (1863). From Frontpage magazine:
The second case, in the Supreme Court of the United States, occurred in 1863, and arose out of the Civil War:
On the fifteenth day of March, 1863, the schooner J. M. Chapman was seized in the harbor of San Francisco, by the United States revenue officers, while sailing, or about to sail, on a cruise in the service of the Confederate States, against the United States; and the leaders . . . [including Greathouse] were indicted . . . for engaging in, and giving aid and comfort, to the then existing rebellion against the government of the United States.[xiv]
...you just don't unnerstan' "Pee-numbras and Emm-inn-ayshuns."