But even if you look at it like a slippery slope argument, it wasn’t shrinking. Because it’s not as if the Confederacy was a communist dictatorship. (It turned into a sorta dictatorship as Billy Yank killed it, but then again so did the North without the excuse of fighting for its existence.) Had they remained split there would’ve been just as much government by the people as before, only in two instead of one country.
Actually, a better argument could be made that Lincoln was fighting against government by the people in forcing Southerners back into the union against their will.
Well hey, you could say Abe was looking down the years of the future and saying, hey we’re going to go to pot while the good part has just walked away :-)
The US Constitution never defined any kind of statehood recission procedure. That doesn’t sound like an oopsie to me....