Do you believe the southern states had the right to secede?

Answer 1

At the time of the war, almost everyone did believe a state could secede. Lincoln was the real revolutionary, as he changed the deal on this issue. Since the war the idea of secession is a tainted one, because the south tried it and lost, and moreover because the south is perceived as having resorted to secession out of motivations to protect slavery.

The Constitution is silent on the question of the permissibility or means of secession. But at the time the Constitution was adopted few expected it to last for very long, and thought it would eventually be replaced by something new or better, just like the Articles of Confederation which it had supplanted.

Defenders of the right of secession pointed out that it had taken a voluntary act by each of the states to join the new national government under the 1788 Constitution, and this implied that a voluntary act could also get a state out of that government. (At the time the Constitution was adopted many "anti-Federalists" remained opposed to it, fearing the new national government would eventually turn into a tyranny and trample over the rights of the states. This was why they insisted on a Bill of Rights, and in particular the 9th and 10th Amendments. Those amendments don't really mean much these days, since the south lost the war). Unionists, like Grant writing in his memoirs after the war, offered a tortured argument that, well, maybe the "voluntary in, voluntary out" position was valid as applied to the original 13 states, BUT, as to states formed later, from the land claimed by those states in 1788 or bought from France, or won from Mexico, it did not apply, and since those newer states could not get out, well, then neither could the original 13 anymore. Somehow.

The southern states of 1861 were not the first to talk of secession. In the 1790s Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio talked of secession. These were the only states beyond the Appalachian Mountains, and depended on the Mississippi as their outlet for trade. But Spain then controlled the mouth of the Mississippi and would not allow them to trade, and they felt the national government was not doing anything to help them.

During the War of 1812, the entire war was bitterly opposed in New England, which had close ties to England. The war was only popular in the south and the west of that time. New Englanders grew rich carrying on a treasonable trade with England, without which England could not have maintained its armies in America. The New England states began to agitate for secession, but couldn't talk New York into going along with them. Nevertheless they went so far as to call a secession convention at Hartford, Connecticut in 1815. But by the time the convention could meet the war was over, and this took the wind from their sails.

So people from all parts of the country believed a state had the right to secede. It was Lincoln who insisted that he had to "preserve the union". Since he succeeded in doing so at gunpoint, everyone today pretty much thoughtlessly accepts that he must have been right, or thinks a still-united America was a good thing during the world wars of the 20th century.