To say that states 'withdrew' from the confederation is inaccurate. They were the United State before the Constitution, the United States during the ratification of the Constitution, and the United States afterwards. One nation.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there any mention of the union of the states being permanent.
I've never said it did.
Their claim to the right of secession was understood and agreed to by the other ratifiers, including George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention and was also a delegate from Virginia.
You have that backwards. Congress did not accept the ratification by the states, the states ratified the Constitution as passed out of the convention. And while Virginia may have said that they were reserving the right to resume power in their ratification document, that same document also contained the statement, "We the said Delegates in the name and in behalf of the People of Virginia do by these presents assent to and ratify the Constitution...by the Federal Convention for the Government of the United States hereby announcing to all those whom it may concern that the said Constitution is binding upon the said People according to an authentic Copy hereto annexed..." In other words, Virginia agreed to abide by the Constitution, and if that document did not allow certain actions on the part of the states then those actions were illegal. And the Supreme Court ruled that secession without the consent of the states, as practiced by the Southern states in 1860-61, was not allowed under the Constitution.
Third, many lawyers believe that the acceptance of these three ratifications (New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island) as valid guarantees all states the right to secede.
They would be wrong in believing the right to secede is absolute and unilateral, as the Supreme Court found.
Well into the 19th century, the United States was still viewed by many as an experimental confederation from which states could secede just as they had earlier acceded to it.
Except that with the exception of the original 13 states, none of the states acceded to anything. They did not join the Union or ratify the Constitution. They were allowed to join and agreed to be bound by the Constitution, and only after the other states had agreed to let them in as expressed by a vote in both houses of Congress. There is no reason to believe that leaving should not require the same process.
It took a bloody war to prove them wrong. LEGALITY did not win out, FORCE did, at the cost of over 620,000 lives
But LEGALITY did win out. The Southern acts of unilateral secession were illegal. Their actions constituted a rebellion. A rebellion they lost.
RE: In other words, Virginia agreed to abide by the Constitution, and if that document did not allow certain actions on the part of the states then those actions were illegal. And the Supreme Court ruled that secession without the consent of the states, as practiced by the Southern states in 1860-61, was not allowed under the Constitution.
Your appeal to the decision of the Supreme Court fails to impress. Supreme Courts can be wrong and their decisions can be overturned.
Let us remember that the Surpeme Court also gave us the Dredd Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney gave us such unconsistutional gems as blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Taney concluded that blacks could never be citizens of the United States, even if they were born in the country and considered to be citizens of the states in which they lived. This also meant that Dred Scott had no right to sue for his freedom in a federal court.
In fact, Taney’s goal was to finally settle the status of slavery in the territories in favor of the South. Ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, Taney argued that Congress did not have power to pass laws to regulate anything, including slavery, in the territories.
So, to appeal to a Supreme Court decision, makes it legal AT THAT TIME, but it does NOTHING to tell us whether the Surpeme Court was RIGHT in its decision.
I would rather appeal to the ORIGINAL statements made by the framers.
Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address said,
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it.”
Fifteen years later, after the New England Federalists attempted to secede, Jefferson said, “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in the union .... I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’”
At Virginia’s ratification convention, the delegates said, “The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.”
In Federalist Paper 39, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, cleared up what “the people” meant, saying the proposed Constitution would be subject to ratification by the people, “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong.”
In a word, states were sovereign; the federal government was a creation, an agent, a servant of the states.