I think you're paraphrase is a slight misstatement of what they said.
The Founders said that when a form of government becomes tyrannical, it is the right of the people to throw it off and institute another. The Declaration of Independence was the document that founded the nation; the Constitution created our federated form of government.
The Declaration of Independence was an irrevocable mutual "pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to form a new nation. It took the Articles of Confederation, and throwing off the Articles of Confederation, before we arrived at the Constitution, our government document.
Throwing off the Articles of Confederation was not leaving the nation, it was only changing the form of government. Our Constitution has Article V as the mechanism to change the government; throwing off the Constitution is not seceding from the country.
The only way to throw off the tyrannical government is to amend the Constitution to rein it in, eliminate the parts we don't like, and add new ones to it with the consent of the states.
Secession violates the mutual pledge between the states at its founding, and is not an option.
-PJ
“The only way to throw off the tyrannical government is to amend the Constitution to rein it in, eliminate the parts we don’t like, and add new ones to it with the consent of the states.”
The history of the world has never had pieces of paper preventing radical change.
Leftists understand this.
Conservatives (for the most part) do not.
Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.