From my understanding of the document, the only step necessary is to decide you no longer wish to be part of the existing government.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
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The South should have first notified the feds of why certain acts were unconstitutional.
That is not a requirement as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration states that the listing of grievances is just a courtesy.
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
But instead, the South ceded in anticipation of acts of the feds that hadn’t even taken place yet.
Yeah, like who could predict that a Race-Obsessed Liberal Lawyer/Politician from Illinois might use powers of "executive orders" to impose his own political agenda on the states?
I believe Lincoln was right to put down the unconstitutional rebellion of the South.
And why do you think the United States had a better right to put down an independence movement than did the United Kingdom?
What makes Lincoln more correct than King George III?
The D of I shows the steps necessary for valid secession:
1) should not be “for light or transient causes”
2) requires a certain “patient sufferance” while “evils are sufferable”
3) notifying and submitting the facts of abuse “to a candid world” (27 specific abuses are listed in the D of I) and finally
4) “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.”
These are not a constitutional dictates, but, as the D of I says, what “Prudence, indeed, will dictate...”
The colonists suffered many decades of harm from George III and continually notified him of his wrongs and pleaded for redress.
In contrast, the South had not yet suffered any unconstitutional acts from the feds regarding slavery. The South should have first notified the feds of what acts were unconstitutional and why they were unconstitutional. Instead they ceded in anticipation of federal acts. There was really no “patient sufferance” and no attempt to notify the feds with reasonable constitutional arguments.
So the South’s cessation was invalid IMO and I believe the North had a constitutional right to fight them and get them back into the Union.