There was no right of any state to secede except in the minds of demented Slavers who attacked the American nation.
They were appropriatedly dealt with but only after dragging the millions of non-Slavers into their dementia.
Slaver insanity ruined the South for over a century. Thank God for Abraham Lincoln.
Next, noting that the federales have the power ONLY to do what the constitution specifically reserves to the federales and leaving EVERYTHING ELSE to the states and the people respectively, show me WHERE in the TEXT of the constitution, as of 1861, the federales were specifically authorized to attack and conquer states exercising their right to secede or to deprive the conquered of their property without due process of law by presidential fatwa, however philosophically disreputable the form of property holding.
Your post is one more proof that liberals like the letter of the law BUT ONLY when it produces results they like and otherwise cavalierly ignore the law when inconvenient to their imaginings.
Your legally incoherent theory denying without any authority whatsoever the constitutional right to secede suggests a belief that the Commonwealth of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations could reject the constitution on several occasions and yet eventually ratify but that ratification, once cast, exhausts the state's ability to decide. Where is ratification itself so favored IN THE LANGUAGE of the constitution over refusal to ratify or over secession?
I would also refer you to the Articles of Confederation which required unanimity of the existing states to implement a new government (such as the current constitutional regime). The new "government" was instituted about three years BEFORE Rhode Island was bludgeoned into submission. That the constitutional convention claimed that 3/4 would be sufficient did not change the provisions of the Articles which governed at the time.
No one is suggesting re-instituting slavery but the Emancipation Proclamation itself a gross constitutional crime does not justify itself much less the rest of Lincoln's crimes. Lincoln was essentially John Brown with a lot more firepower, a lot more casualties, a lot more lawlessness and no better legal analysis. Bobby Lee rightfully assisted by J.E.B. Stuart and the US Marines hanged John Brown after Harper's Ferry. Lincoln was a smoother John Brown.
I will concede to you that Lincoln was a better man in that last year and that, after Mr. Booth's improvident behavior and its results, the nation suffered from his assassination (particularly the Southland) as the Southland fell under the knout of the likes of Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens, and the New England Transcendentalist, Unitarian nutcases. Fortunately, the republic survived and, weather being destiny, has become near dominant in presidential politics and quite influential in Congress. The Arkansas Antichrist was a counterfeit Southerner.
The last Northern Demonrat elected was 46 years ago. And before him 62 years ago. Without the Southland, no Republican is electable. Without the Southland, the Congress would be the People's Soviet.
Lincoln was unfit to clean the latrines of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson. J.E.B. Stuart or James Longstreet.
The revolutionary war was a war of secession. So was the civil war. I guess it depends on whether you win or not.