First of all, there is no "natural right" to break a compact "at pleasure" and then declare war on your previous country.
Yes, that would be a "right of rebellion", but rebellion is only lawful if it wins.
By law, our Founders would have hanged had they lost the Revolutionary War, and they well knew it:
But second: if you follow CW debate threads (whether they started out as such, or not ;-) ), you well know that all here who defend Lincoln, Republicans and Union believe that secession could be perfectly legal if done lawfully.
"Lawfully" means: according to our Founders' original intentions, that "disunion" be by mutual consent or for some serious material breach of contract such as oppression or "usurpations".
So secession could be constitutionally granted by Congress, or the Supreme Court, but not by the President who is sworn to uphold the Constitution and its laws.
And no such constitutional condition existed (or was even claimed) in December 1860 or early 1861, when secessionists in seven Deep-South states declared disunion.
That made those declarations unlawful.
But despite its unlawfulness, secession by itself caused no serious military response from the Federal government.
What forced a major Federal action was secessionists' many acts of rebellion, insurrection, "domestic violence", invasions, declared war and treason.
These were all explicitly contemplated and provided for in the US Constitution.
I have detailed some of them in post #272 above.
Jay Redhawk: "As long as you uphold statism as superior to individualism and states rights we will never agree."
The fact is, our Founders' original intent was to establish a "compact", a "more perfect Union", of limited Federal government, but still powerful enough to defend us against invasions, rebellions, insurrections, "domestic violence", declared wars and treason.
These constitutional provisions began to act when secessionists first declared their disunion, committed many acts of rebellion and then formally declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861.
Jay Redhawk: "So if Texas were to secede tomorrow you would call them traitors and encourage Obama to prosecute a war against them?"
First of all, a majority of Texans are not going to vote to "secede tomorrow", or any time in the future, so the question is purely hypothetical.
But if someday Texans' representatives in Congress submitted a bill authorizing secession, that would certainly be perfectly legal.
Or if Texas' attorney general brought suit in the Supreme Court for secession, that would certainly be perfectly legal.
Nobody on these threads disagrees with lawful political "divorce", when such proves necessary.
Jay Redhawk: "Southerners saw the anti-slavers and yankee bureaucrats, and bankers in the same light that I see liberals.
I do not see them as my fellow countrymen, and want nothing to do with them.
I greatly resent liberals dictating to me what I will and will not do, and I will find ways to rebel against them."
We can have no doubt, that Deep-South slave-holders saw Northern abolitionists, and their Republican Party, as a mortal & intolerable threat to their "peculiar institution" of slavery.
That's why they declared secession.
But in actual reality, there was no threat from Republicans to slavery where it already existed.
The Republican promise was simply to prevent slavery from expanding into states or territories where it was not wanted.
So slave-holders fears were mere phantasms, encouraged by propagandists (i.e., "fire eaters") who wanted secession and a new Confederacy for reasons which had nothing to do with Constitutional justifications like "mutual consent" or "usurpations and oppression".
The Slave-Power wanted a new Confederacy, and military victory over the United States, to establish itself as the world's premier protector of the "peculiar institution".
Anything less would not support the asset values of their monumental investments in human "property".
Jay Redhawk: "There has been enough demonization of conservatives and contitutionalist, and it is time to stop it."
The only actual "demonization" on these threads is what Pro-Confederate propagandists do to anyone who insists on historical accuracy and political truth-telling, FRiend.
Jay Redhawk: "If you believe Lincoln's persecution of the war was justified I can't see how you could be in opposition to Obama’s unconstitutional actions."
Well, that's just ridiculous, and I'm sure you know it.
First of all, as I've repeated here over-and-over, once the Confederacy formally declared war on the United States (May 6, 1861), it's fate was sealed: Unconditional Surrender was the Confederacy's destiny from that day on.
And before that date, there was there was only rebellion, no Union war -- zero, zip, nada: no Confederate soldier had been killed in battle, no Confederate state had been "invaded" by a Union army.
Second, despite our Pro-Confederate propagandists' repeated claims, Lincoln was not our "first Progressive President" by any stretch of imagination.
Lincoln simply Constitutionally defeated the military power which had declared war on the United States.
Indeed I'm saying, it's time for us to take-on the Neo-Confederate Big Lie head-on, and point out the real truth of the matter: the old Democrat Slave-Power which dominated Federal Government for over 70 years, from the Founding of the Republic (1788) until it declared secession in 1860, that old Slave-Power has long been replaced by the new Progressive Power which began dominating with the election of Southern Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
So today's "Progressives" (or "liberals" or "socialists" or "Democrats", or whatever you wish to call them), are not the political "descendants" of Republican Abraham Lincoln, no, they are descendants of the Democrat Slave-Power whose motto in 1860 was "rule or ruin".
And one reason we can know that is because progressives like Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt got solid support from the Solid Democrat South.
Jay Redhawk: "...Lincoln was a tyrant in the same fashion as the current punk from Illinois."
As other FReepers have pointed out, one difference is Lincoln's birth in Kentucky, the other's in Kenya.
But I say: the Kenyan far more closely resembles that other tall slim president born in Kentucky, the Slave-Power's President Jefferson Davis!
Now there is a historical analogy just ripe for the picking...
;-)
And rebellion is only morally justified when faced with intollerable opression and all pleas and petitions for relief have been ignored.
Searching the historical record, I can see absolutly no evidence of intollerable opression by the general government upon the southern states prior to secession.
You fail the logic test. Secession is neither legal or illegal. The Federal government was created by the sovereign states and was meant to be the servant of the states. Lincoln either did not understand that or he did not give a hoot. States were never meant to have to answer to the federal government except in those areas enumerated within the Constitution. Secession is neither expressly denied or granted the states, but is rather to be assumed under the nature of the agreement, and the necessity of the states to ratify this Federation before it would become legitimate.
Your contention that a state should be forced to petition that government which it has in part created for its right of separation is illogical. The parent does not ask the child’s permission.