The issue of the validity of secession is moot. The confederate states, by announcing their withdrawal from the Union at the same time announced their withdrawal from Congress. While the validity of withdrawal from the Union is debatable, the validity of withdrawal from Congress is explicitly recognised.
We don’t need to decide whether secession was legal or not to see that the lack of Congressional representation by the former Confederate states at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress was indeed valid.
If the issue of secession is moot, did we then not have a right to secede from Britain?
***While the validity of withdrawal from the Union is debatable, the validity of withdrawal from Congress is explicitly recognised.***
Then why did the North feel the need to force the South to sign the Amendment? They already had the Congressional representation right?
LOL! Sorry, but there is a minor fact that occurred prior to the 14th Amendment that blows the 'Constitutional validity' of your argument out of the water.
It's called the 13th Amendment.
The ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 8, 1865 undoubtedly supplies this official proof. If the Southern States were not member States of the Union, the 13th amendment would not have been submitted to their Legislatures for ratification.
The 13th Amendment was ratified by 27 states of the then 36 states of the Union, including the Southern States of Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia. This is shown by the Proclamation of the Secretary of State December 18, 1865.
Without the votes of these seven Southern State Legislatures the 13th Amendment would have failed. There can be no doubt but that the ratification by these Southern States of the 13th Amendment again established the fact that their Legislatures and State governments were duly and lawfully constituted and functioning as such under their State Constitutions.
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It wasn't until the States of the South refused to vote for the 14th Amendment that the unconstitutional Reconstruction Acts were passed, wherein the federal government created military districts out of the southern States.
In President Andrew Johnson’s Veto of the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, he pointed out the hypocrisy of Congress... particularly since it had passed the Crittenden Resolution by a majority vote:
It is a part of our public history which can never be forgotten that both Houses of Congress, in July, 1861, declared in the form of a solemn resolution that the war was and should be carried on for no purpose of subjugation, but solely to enforce the Constitution and laws, and that when this was yielded by the parties in rebellion the contest should cease, with the constitutional rights of the States and of individuals unimpaired. This resolution was adopted and sent forth to the world unanimously by the Senate and with only two dissenting voices in the House. It was accepted by the friends of the Union in the South as well as in the North as expressing honestly and truly the object of the war. On the faith of it many thousands of persons in both sections gave their lives and their fortunes to the cause. To repudiate it now by refusing to the States and to the individuals within them the rights which the Constitution and laws of the Union would secure to them is a breach of our plighted honor for which I can imagine no excuse and to which I can not voluntarily become a party.