This is tantamount to a claim that the Declaration of Independence was invalid because the 13 colonies allowed slavery. If the South may not secede because it allowed slavery, the same must apply to the 13 colonies.
The Declaration is absolutely clear that revolutionary alteration or abolition of government is a profoundly serious act, justified ONLY by the honest judgment that the current government has manifested an undeniable resolve to tyrannize over a people. Tyranny is defined, in the Declaration, as a government which has become destructive of the rights government is instituted among men to secure, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights which follow from men's equality before the Creator.
The honest judgement of the people of the south was that the current government had manifested an undeniable resolve to tyranize the people of the South. You may disagree with their judgement. But that certainly doesn't give you the right to impose your view on others. And it did not give Lincoln that right either.
It is either naive or intentionally misleading to interpret the Declaration as declaring an absolute right to change governments at pleasure. It declares a right to change them, as a profoundly serious measure, when such a step is the only means remaining by which to secure the rights that are due to all men because of their equality.
Actually that's what "consent of the governed means". It means that when people no longer consent to a particular form of government, they have the right -- indeed the obligation -- to change it. The Declaration points out that people will be slow to do this because it is a serious thing. They will tolerate injustice rather than change their government. But when they reach the point that they no longer consent to that government, then they have the absolute right to change it.
It is no accident, in my opinion, that the Southern states do not make such a claim, having as they did no conceivable right to appeal to the rights of man, in order to alter their government to secure the right to own slaves.
You ignore the fact that many of the states did make such declarations. And they did have the right to do so. The tariff alone was enough to prove federal tyranny.
You must not be so quick to apply our ideas to the past. We are, at least theoretically, against slavery. We think it wrong. (Though our government goes out of its way to toady to countries such as Red China and Saudi Arabia where slavery is still practiced.) But that was not the view for most of human history. Slavery was an accepted practice and had been on every inhabited continent. Slavery was on the way out in the Western world -- though it is still practiced in much of the world today. Most of the western world achieved emancipation peacefully. But that was not even tried here.
It is simply a fallacy, a cheat of reason, to attempt to substitute the arbitrary right to change government for the right of revolution articulated in the Declaration. The South Carolina assertion of a right to leave the Union is a lawyers claim, presuming that acts of ratification are revocable at pleasure. The Tennessee document assumes that the right of revolution requires no defense in natural law, such as the Declaration clearly demands. Neither document, as quoted, offers any reason for the step taken. Neither was justified or licit. I would distinguish between them only by saying that South Carolina claims a non-existent legal right to alter the national government by departure, while the Tennessee document invokes the genuinely extra-legal right to revolution but omits to make a claim in justice to support such invocation, which is the whole point to the Declaration. Neither is, finally, more than acts of political will in the service of passion, as is clear from their careful avoidance of any REASON for the action taken.
As noted above, many states promulgated a separate document giving their reasons for secession. I suspect this doesn't matter to you. You will no doubt find their reasons invalid. No matter how many hoops they may have jumped through, you will always find an excuse to claim that they should have jumped through at least one more. You will continue to embrace your preconceived notions in spite of all evidence or reason. And of course, that is your right.
But it does disturb me that you have completely missed the point of the Declaration of Independence. That point is that the people have an absolute right to self-determination. The absolute right to have the form of government that suits them. And no government is legitimate that does not have the freely given consent of the governed.
you: This is tantamount to a claim that the Declaration of Independence was invalid because the 13 colonies allowed slavery. If the South may not secede because it allowed slavery, the same must apply to the 13 colonies.
Sorry to reply in pieces, but I have a class in five minutes, so I'll take this piece now. The colonies/states may or may not have been entirely clear on the implications that they declared. As I'm sure you know, Jefferson sought to include the imposition of slavery by the Crown as one of the grievances enunciated in the Declaration.
The point is that the Founders expressed, and in significant measure acted on, a willingness to grant the universal right of self-government. The inconsistency of this principle with the existing principle of slavery was noticed at the time, and the emancipation movements that resulted in the end of slavery in about half of the states of the new republic is evidence of this.
Please note that what I said was NOT that the right of self-government can be legitimately claimed only by men "currently granting that right in practice" to others, but by men "willing to grant it" to others. The "gotcha" of pointing to the existence of slavery at the time of the Revolutionary War overlooks the extraordinary step TOWARD the universal acknowledgment of human equality that the document represents.
The distinction relating to the South is that secession was not an attempted revolution in partial and imperfect, but sincere service of human equality, but -- as I say quite plainly in the words you quote: "in order to avoid granting the right of self-government to others."
Failure perfectly to accomplish a duty one acknowledges is simply not the same as action undertaken for the purpose of avoiding that duty. Don't you agree?
You can't mean this as a universal principle. Hitler no doubt had reached an honest judgment that the Jews manifested an undeniable resolve to tyranize over the Arians. I trust you won't think I intend the comparison beyond this basic point -- the Declaration cannot mean only that groups of "sincere" people have the right to establish whatever form of government they sincerely want. Fanatics and tyrants are frequently quite sincere.
The Declaration BEGINS with the assertion that a people finding it necessary to dissolve political bands must, out of a decent to the opinions of mankind, declare the causes that impel them to the separation. The document, from its first sentence, implies a court of rational judgment, presided over by the reasonable opinions of mankind, to which appeal must be made if a revolution is to be considered just.
Of course such a court of opinion, of judgment, may be mostly or entirely composed of people who have no power or political authority to stop the revolution. But the Declaration means nothing if it is not an assertion that revolutions are legitimate only if they can give rationally compelling reasons that the radical step of dissolving political bonds is justified. Unless we are to choose absolute moral relativism over the principles of the Declaration, I think we have to say that every revolution is either justified or not, that morally wise men can reach some kind of agreement on that in each case, and that whether or not such agreement gets practically applied by someone, we should not abandon our belief that moral truth on the question exists. So, I and others would say about the American Revolution, it was justified because of the compelling case its agents made that it was necessary in order for the Americans to secure their unalienable rights by establishing a government substantially devoted to securing them. And we would say that the Southern rebellion can give no such compelling justification.
So the first question is -- what were the reasons the South could offer that made their revolt necessary? And given the overwhelming proof that that revolt was motivated chiefly by the passionate insistence on keeping the institution of slavery, can they possibly have offered the kind of reasons that the Declaration judges necessary -- to avert tyranny which subverts the possibility of government in the service of human equality?
Finally, the secession was a withdrawal from a previously compacted political community, in which the non-seceeders had placed their fundamental political trust for the securing of their unalienable rights. One particular reason that revolution-makers must make their case is that they are proposing to cancel fundamental arrangements and commitment that they have already made with other, equal, human beings. Fellow citizens of the Union do most emphatically have a stake in that question -- because the Union was a government THEY made to secure THEIR rights. And President Lincoln was the man solemnly charged to execute that commitment for the four years of his term. When you are in an office like that, "imposing your view" of the very matter for which you are responsible is more accurately called "doing your duty."
As I say, let's see those declarations. I'd like to see the ones that offer the tariff as the reason for secession. At the time of secession, the tariff was at the 1857 rate, and Democrat President Buchanan was calling for the passage of the Morrill Tariff bill, which he eventually signed, not Lincoln.
But, really, rather than open the door to all the "tariff" sophisms, why don't you just see if you can find one state that offered the tariff as the reason for leaving?
You must not be so quick to apply our ideas to the past. We are, at least theoretically, against slavery. We think it wrong. (Though our government goes out of its way to toady to countries such as Red China and Saudi Arabia where slavery is still practiced.) But that was not the view for most of human history. Slavery was an accepted practice and had been on every inhabited continent. Slavery was on the way out in the Western world -- though it is still practiced in much of the world today. Most of the western world achieved emancipation peacefully. But that was not even tried here.
I don't know what you mean to suggest here, unless that the Declaration was not understood to apply to all men, but only white men. Lincoln famously said that there was no man on earth who thought, at the time of the founding, that "all men" meant "all white men." He dared anyone to find evidence that this was so.
But be serious. The northern states "achieved emancipation peacefully," so I don't know what you mean by "that was not even tried here." It was repudiated in the most solemn way as even an ultimate, distant goal by the Southern states who cast their lot with a regime based on slavery, after they had almost a century to think the matter over carefully, and while the rest of the world moved toward emancipation and substantially accomplished it. The civilized world of 1776 was very clear on the moral issues involved in slavery, and the civilized world of 1860 was even clearer -- the South just ILLEGITIMATELY DISAGREED. And they quite openly based their revolt on that disagreement. So let's see what statements by seceeding states you have that a) offer reasons for the justice of secession as an avoidance of tyranny, and b) don't make slavery the principal, even only, cause of secession.