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Good comments all
There used to be a strong northern state's rights tradition. Read on:

Examples of Secession

• 1798-99 Virginia and Kentucky Resolves. Said states could nullify national law if they violated individual state rights!
• 1804, Massachusetts plotted to secede and tried to get New York to withdraw from the union and establish a "Northern Confederacy".
• 1807 Embargo Act New Jersey was going to secede due prohibition of foreign trade
• In 1814, delegates from several New England states threatened to secede over President James Madison's war policies against England.
• In 1844, the Massachusetts Legislature threatened secession when Congress started debating whether to admit Texas into the Union.

Here are some other quotes from influential leaders

1. Abraham Lincoln endorsed secession: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable -- a most sacred right -- a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world." (1848)
   
2. The Declaration of Independence clearly states that governments are institutions that can be defined as "deriving their power from the consent of the governed."
   
3. Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence also stated: Whenever "any Form of Government becomes destructive" of the inalienable rights granted by the Creator, "it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government."
   
4. Alexander Stephens in his "A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States," submitted, the central government, the common agent of the people of the states, is legitimate only so long as it exercises its delegated powers within the bounds established by the people through the Constitution.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I do not think Lincoln believed he was asserting a right to secession in 1848.

Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence also stated: Whenever "any Form of Government becomes destructive" of the inalienable rights granted by the Creator, "it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government."

The full passage from the Declaration clearly shows the illegitimacy of the secessionists' action:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government"

Jefferson and his generation believed that revolution must be a sober action. I cannot think of a more light and transient cause than anger over losing an election. That hot headed stupidity by itself warrants the beating and humiliation the "Southern Revolution" received.