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No matter what anyone say, secession is not a legal issue to argue among lawyers. Secession is a political matter that requires a political solution.
Whatever the legal opinions, the leaders of the Southern states failed to realize that slavery could be preserved only within the federal union. And slavery could be ended only by a war, as no one believed that the Peculiar Institution could be abolished by any act except a constitutional amendment - which would have been all but impossible to pass in 1860.
Its all but impossible to imagine that the people of any group of states was as ill-served as Southerners were by their leaders in 1860.
The Southern states could have extracted from Lincoln any concession necessary to preserve slavery. Wasn’t his original 13th Amendment - proposed before the war began - designed to protect slavery? Whether he was serious about this amendment is unknown, but the South could have forced him into a political corner from which he would have found it difficult to escape. Instead, they betrayed the people they were elected to represent and blundered into a conflict they could not win. One might forgive the German people - they, after all, were led into WWII by Adolf Hitler - but the leaders of the South were a not a demented guttersnipe. They were educated intelligent men who should have known better. They did not act and destroyed the society they were to sworn to protect.