My point, which you must concede in fairness, is that you cannot bind people to rulings made after the fact. That's judging people a posteriori, applying the standards of one time to another. And the Court's ruling was teleological, in that, in 1869, they could only rule one way anyway, politically, because Lincoln had changed the Constitution with two million bayonets and revolutionized the basis of the Union by winning his political war against the South.
And it would have upset too many applecarts for them to have ruled correctly, to-wit, that the Southern States were within their rights, sitting in convention as The People, to have seceded from the Union.
You might say that the Supreme Court's decision was a necessary one, to perfume spoils of conquest reeking of the stink of blood. And its timing falls squarely in the middle of the period when the South in no way was a participant in the Union, but a conquest under it.
I don't concede that at all because that is not the fact of the matter with the overwhelming majority of Supreme Court decisions. When the court issued it's ruling in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education did they say that those areas practicing 'separate but equal' policies could go ahead and continue while no future instances would be allowed? When the court issued their decision in Furman v. Georgia did they say that Georgia and the other states could go ahead and execute those already on death row, but had to alter their laws for those they would try in the future? No, to both cases. The court ruled that actions made in the past were illegal and that they could not continue. It voided those actions and required changes be made based on those decisions. Likewise in Texas v. White. Chief Justice Chase didn't say that secession was illegal as of now and don't you ever try it again. He said, "Considered, therefore, as transactions under the Constitution, the Ordinance of Secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the Acts of her Legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law." The actions taken were as invalid and illegal in 1861 as they were in 1869.