Do you now want to discuss Reconstruction as well?
Actually I have a Bachelor's in History, magna cum laude, with a concentration in American History and several theses in Civil War History and a law degree thereafter. I am still waiting for your specific constitutional citation as to prohibition of secession.
I am waiting to see some statement that specifically allows it.
As for your education credentials, you would never know it by the intellectual quality of your posts.
What this one or that one theorized is not the text of the constitution. What Lincoln or Billy Sherman imagined when committing their crimes is not the test of the constitution. We could also get into the violation of international law at the time which was represented by the "Union's" naval blockade of what it claimed was its own territory when blockades were legal only against foreign powers.
Well, Madison didn't think secession was legal.
Jackson didn't.
Robert E. Lee didn't.
And if it were legal then, it should be still legal now, but it isn't.
The Constitution was to form a more perfect union between the people, not one that could be broken apart at whim.
So you don't think that the basis for our nation was success in armed rebellion? Burke was admirable as a friend of the revolution but that did not make it anything other than a revolution. The Brits hanged Nathan Hale quite legally. If Cornwallis had succeeded, they would have hanged Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton (! they should have caught him early on instead of Nathan Hale) and a lot of their friends just as legally. I'll bet that Madison was speaking of the potential Federalist secession of New England represented by the efferts at the Hartford convention.
The American Revolution was a revolution for the rule of law, not against it.
As the 'Sons of Liberty' correctly understood.
No, Madison was speaking of the writings coming out of South Carolina.
But what difference would that make anyway?
New England had no more right to secede then did the South.
That little attempt destroyed the Federalist Party, since they became known as the 'Party of treason', until the Democrats took over that honor after the Civil War.
Oh, and was John Brown a grisly mass murderer and megalomaniac (Potowatomie Creek and Harper's Ferry) or do you justify him because he was allegedly upholding the "rights of man" by machete murders of farmers in Kansas and his planned arming of a slave rebellion in Virginia??? Personally, I think that Bobby Lee and J.E.B. Stuart in charge of U.S. Marines at Harper's Ferry did justice and carried out the rule of law by hanging the SOB. Do you regard him as a martyr?
No, John Brown got what he deserved, but he did nothing that the Confederates did on a much grander scale,being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men by their treason.
Jackson certainly opposed secession. On his last night in the White House, he was knocking back Old #7 with his youngest protege Sam Houston as his house guest. (This story is from a history of Texas called Lone Star) Jackson told Houston that he (Jackson) would not live to see the day when hotheads would demand civil war over slavery. He enjoined Houston, in the event that Houston were still alive at such a time, to run for POTUS and, if elected, declare war on the entire world as necessary to avoid civil war. Jackson confidently predicted that the nation would rally around the flag. He warned that the wounds of a civil war would never heal even in a century. Interestingly, Lincoln's Secretary of State Seward (the best man by far in that administration) advised Lincoln likewise without any knowledge of what Jackson told Houston). Lincoln ignored the advice.
Paleos who favor the Union's lawless invasion of the Confederacy and its horrendous gore limited to American victims only are in a poor position to pose for peacecreep holy pictures when they seem to favor only those wars which kill only Americans.
The plain terms of the Tenth Amendment restrain the federal government only and deny to it any non-enumerated powers, leaving those to the states and the people respectively. Unless the constitution itself empowers the federales, they have no power to act. There is no enumerated federal power to force unwilling states to remain under the knout of the "Union."
BTW, considering the source and your overall eccentric views, your insults are received as compliments. Keep 'em rolling.
The Federalists called the Hartford Convention because they were already finished as a political force (by 1815, the Federalists were as much of a laughing stock in executive and legislative branches as is paleoPaulie now), having only Chief Justice John Marshall as the dead hand of the past on SCOTUS to try to thwart the popular will. Hamilton was already dispatched by then as well. David McCullough, in his brilliant biography of John Adams, seems to suggest that Hamilton's radical authoritarianism as expressed in the hysteria of the Alien and Sedition Acts not only defeated Adams but also destroyed the Federalists.
Where, in the constitution, are the federales authorized to impose "reconstruction" as a consequence of their victory in a war they launched and fought illegally. Cite constitutional article and section not what you think someone may have thought.