"The Constitution says: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
Here's another:
"As the Constitution in terms settles the fact that our republic is a state against which treason may be committed, the only constitutional question attending the late war was whether a levying of war against the United States which would otherwise be treason, is relieved of that character by the fact that it took the form of secession from the Union by state authority. In other words the legal issue was, whether secession by a State is a right, making an act legal and obligatory upon the nation which would otherwise have been treason.
This issue I suppose to have been settled by the action of every department of the Government, by the action of the people itself, and by those events which are definitive in the affairs of men.
The Supreme Court In the Prize Cases held, by happily a unanimous opinion, that acts of the States, whether secession ordinances, or in whatever form cast, could not be brought into the cases, as justifications for the war, and had no legal effect on the character of the war, or on the political status of territory or persons or property, and that the line of enemy's territory was a question of fact, depending upon the line of bayonets of an actual war.
The rule in the Prize Causes has been steadily followed in the Supreme Court since, and in the Circuit Courts, without an intimation of a doubt. That the law making and executive departments have treated this secession and war as treason, is matter of history, as well as is the action of the people in the highest sanction of war. It cannot be doubted that the Circuit Court at the trial will instruct the jury, in conformity with these decisions, that the late attempt to establish and sustain by war an independent empire within the United States was treason."
--Richard Henry Dana, U.S. attorney, 1868
Walt
The whole of Dana's argument itself reduces around its central point: "This issue I suppose to have been settled by the action of every department of the Government."
Simply put, that assertion is the equivalent of saying that the successful exertion of force determines right from wrong. If you are prepared to accept that doctrine and its logical consequences, by all means do so. Simply be aware that in doing it you are asserting your own subscription to a belief system in which no truth exists beyond that which is relative to the person enforcing it by coercion. If force alone makes right, Walt, then abortion, theft, murder, and -yes- slavery would become "right" simply because they have been and theoretically can be enforced by the power of the state. This must be so as long as you accept the might-makes-right argument. And seeing as you do, I will simply note that you have just voluntarily removed yourself from your claim to a moral cause, beyond the raw exertion of coercion in and of itself, in the north's waging of the civil war.