Describing the circumstances as "at pleasure" is disingenuous considering the list of grievances listed in the SC Secession Declaration.
It would appear that South Carolina did use "available constitutional remedies". Buchanan may have been against secession but he believed states had the right, and the Court agreed and ruled as much in Dred and Kentucky v. Dennison.
No, not "disingenuous", factual.
In fact, secessionists had no legitimate grievance, only exaggerated fears of what a President-elect Lincoln might do at some point in the future.
So secession was purely preemptive.
The truth is that by 1860 the great Slave Power had all but made slavery constitutionally legal in every state -- through the Compromise of 1850 shifting responsibility for enforcing Fugitive Slave Laws from state to Federal government, and the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred-Scott decision making all slaves perpetual slaves regardless of which state they moved to.
Lincoln was the first openly anti-slavery president ever elected, and even he only promised to restrict slavery from territories which didn't want it.
So the Slave Power's declarations of secession were, in fact, strictly "at pleasure" for no real reason except their fears of what might happen in the future.
moehoward: "It would appear that South Carolina did use "available constitutional remedies".
They did nothing of the sort.
Within days of Lincoln's election on November 6, 1860, South Carolina called for a secession convention which met in December and immediately declared secession, more than two months before Lincoln's inauguration.
They made no efforts to seek "mutual consent" from Congress, sought no redress from the Supreme Court, and provided no list of real grievances in their formal "Reasons for Secession" document.
It was strictly secession "at pleasure".
moehoward: "Buchanan may have been against secession but he believed states had the right, and the Court agreed and ruled as much in Dred and Kentucky v. Dennison."
On all three items, you have it wrong.
First, out-going President Buchanan was opposed to unilateral, unapproved secession on Constitutional grounds, and said so forcefully, in his 1860 State of the Union address.
But Buchanan also refused to use military force to stop secession, a policy that Lincoln intended to follow, so long as secessionists did not start a war.
Second, the Supreme Court's decisions in both Dred-Scott and Kentucky v. Dennison had nothing to do with secession, period.
They both strengthened the rights of slave-holders to transport slaves through non-slave states without losing their "property rights".
And Kentucky v. Dennison is irrelevant to this discussion because it involved the Union states of Ohio and Kentucky, and was issued in 1861, after the Deep South had already declared secession.
Buchanan The Feckless was opposed to secession but believed the office of president was powerless to stop it. He shrank from his duty to put up any opposition to the secessionists which only served to embolden them.
The only grievances that South Carolina referred to was the reticence of northern states to enforce and defend THEIR practice of the Peculiar Institution. I found it interesting when a lost causer proffered the argument that Prigg v. Pennsylvania represented an unwarranted federal intrusion into individual (southern) state sovereignty. As you’ll recall, Prigg v. Pennsylvania defended the slavers right of retrieval of slave-property from non-slave states.
So it appears that there was no pleasing some people when it came to owning other people.
Let's say that tomorrow New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota say that they are fed up with the Republican obstruction in Congress and announce that they are leaving the United States. They hold referendum among their population, which pass overwhelmingly, and declare that they are now the sovereign nation of Northeast North America. They claim that all federal property and facilities within their borders are now their property - including Fort Knox and the gold reserve. They say they are not responsible for any of the $16 trillion in debt that has been run up, leaving that responsibility to the remaining states. They refuse to support U.S. initiatives in Afghanistan instead insisting that all their soldiers be returned to the states immediately. In your opinion is that a constitutional remedy?