Chateau Lloyd

Apparently there are people who are so determined to be what the cool kids call "edgelords" that the new hotness is to argue that the Southern Confederacy was fully justified in secession.

This is really stupid.

The argument (as I understand it, it's riddled with contradictions) is that any state can secede from the United States at any time.  This being the case, there is no Union. 

Think about it.  Why would the Constitution include language of "rebellion" or "treason" when a majority vote (or legislative resolution passing by one vote) is sufficient to make a rebellion legal?

People keep trotting out the precedent of the American Revolution for a "right of rebellion," and this is quite telling because it completely undermines their argument.  If one bothers to read the entirety of the Declaration of Independence (that is, beyond the soaring rhetoric at the beginning), one finds a rather dull catalogue of offenses against the colonies, which includes things like: taxation without representation, dissolving legislatures, quartering troops in private homes, restricting trade, and so on.

None of which happened in 1860.  Remember, South Carolina voted to secede months before Abraham Lincoln even took office.  They were basically in a snit over their party fumbling the election.  If losing an election is grounds for secession, there is no democracy.  The whole point of even having elections is that the loser agrees to abide by the result.

If the loser can instead simply vote to end the Union, there is no country just a jumble of people waiting to fall upon each other.

This also disregards the fact that there was (and is) a remedy for a state wanting to leave: an Article V convention of the states.  If South Carolina (and other Southern states) believed there were deep, profound, irreconcilable differences and that separation was the only remedy, they had a legal mechanism already in place.  The fact that the secessionists didn't even try speaks volumes.

The Neo-Confederate argument is essentially that Rhode Island or North Dakota (or any state with a tiny population) has within themselves the power to dissolve the federal government whenever they feel like it.

The deep irony here is that the Constitution was developed precisely because the Articles of Confederation were so weak.  A stronger central government was needed, and so a new document was created. 

Using the Neo-Confederate line of argument, any state unhappy with a presidential election result could simply vote to leave, seize federal property (including weapons) and - presumably, invite foreign troops to help them secure their independence.  The Confederates very much wanted this to happen.

They were thwarted because of the one thing that Neo-Confederates swear wasn't a cause of the Civil War: slavery. 

The growing democratic movements in Europe would not tolerate a war to defend slavery, which they found morally reprehensible.  Without slavery, European recognition of the Confederacy would have been immediate.  Because of it, the South had to create a military environment where Union defeat seemed inevitable, resulting in two the disastrous strategic gambles at Sharpsburg and Gettysburg.

There's a saying about the Civil War:  people who know nothing about it think it was about slavery; people who know something about it think it wasn't about slavery; people who know a lot about it know it was about slavery.  Slavery was the core question that split the Union and it was the moral issues wrapped up in it that rendered compromise impossible.