Reasonably well for certain white people that is.
Tell that to the Chinese who built the railroads.
They were serfs in China. They were free laborers in the USA. They came here rather than stay there because they appreciated the difference.
Somebody had to be living in all those cities that exploded in population in the latter half of the 19th century.
Plenty of people were. But plenty more weren't.
Wrong.
You made the claim that de facto slavery existed in the North. Back it up.
Not before 1913, when the 17th Amendment was passed. Senators were elected by the state legislatures.
That never applied to the House, the engine room of US legislation.
Yes, those areas specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Secession is not one of them.
Again, either the federal government is the supreme law of the land or it isn't. Secession directly contradicts this explicit provision of the Constitution.
.... in some functions ...
No, secession means complete independence. That's certainly what the architects of the Confederacy took it to mean.
Making treaties does not in itself constitute independence.
In America it does, because the only entity that has the power to make treaties is the federal government according to the Constitution.
the Revolution cast off the notion of a detached, tyrannical, centralized authority in favor of local rule.
More accurately, the revolution repudiated the notion of non-representative government by fiat and embraced representative government by law.
The colonist's objection to British rule was not that it was centralized, but that it was arbitrary and unelected. The Acts of Union were not singled out for opprobrium.
The federal government usurped those prerogatives at the point of a gun.
No, the federal government is given those prerogatives in the Constitution: raising armies, declaring war, negotiating treaties, final interpretation of laws, etc.
Did innocent civilians die during those sieges?
Not at all. Everyone in those sieges had the opportunity during ceasefires and negotiations to abandon sedition and go over to the legitimate military forces of their country.
They chose sedition.
Or for the very indictable reason that a band of abolitionists managed to overturn the Constitution in their self-righteous zeal to have slavery banned.
That never happened.
At the time of the acts of secession, the grievance was that there was a legitimate president-elect who did not sympathize with the pro-slavery agenda.
That is all. They were provoked by a completely legal election result. Are election results indictable? Should the South have called for a do-over?
Bilge. The grievance was that federal military installations on sovereign state soil were being used to enforce an agenda that was not palatable to the locals, in defiance of constitutional protections. Since the federal government had declared itself a hostile entity -- an invading force if you will -- the states felt they had the right to contain federal troops or force them to withdraw. That is what happened at Sumter, although that was only one of many federal forts that were treated similarly.
Read the Acts of Secession of the various states yourself. They make it pretty clear that it was the repeated violations of state sovereignty that motivated them.