Sorry for taking so long to get this done. I got sick and then distracted with some other projects. Excuse the disjointed style.

The Declaration of Independence includes “consent of the governed” as a fundamental human right along with the right to establish new governments when existing ones violate human rights. Many people in the South felt that they no longer consented to Union rule, in the same way that the colonists didn’t consent to rule from England.

As far as I know, there is nothing in the Constitution preventing secession. In fact, in the run-up to the war many people favored letting the South go its way. They compared it to “self-amputation of a diseased limb”.

And remember, too, that it was the North that invaded the South. Almost every battle, except Gettysburg and Antietam was fought south of the Mason Dixon line. (Oh, Jubal Early almost made it to Washington DC right before the Confederate surrender.) The North intended to bring the South back into the Union at bayonet point.

At the time of the Civil War, power was vested in the states because they were closest to the people. The role of the federal government was limited to adjudicating disagreements between states and acting as the face of the nation to other countries. This was changing, though, as technology and industry were bringing states closer together, like it or not. The time was coming when more power would need to be ceded to the federal government to keep the states strongly united.

In fact, one of the reasons the South lost the war was because without some degree of centralized authority the states spent too much time bickering with one another instead of sharing resources. At one point Georgia even threatened to secede from the Confederacy. So the Confederacy was an example of what happens when states are too independent and don’t have some sort of centralized unifying authority.

As far as slavery goes, at the beginning of the war it wasn’t really a factor. Preserving the Union was the utmost priority, not the issues threatening that preservation. When Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 – two years after the beginning of the war – it was seen as a “military exigent”. The hope was that slaves would up rise up in the South undercutting the economy. Also, it made the rationale for the war easier for people to grasp – political theory only went so far to motivate people to go to war.

On the other hand, entire regiments from Illinois and Ohio laid down their weapons and went home saying that they would fight for Union, but not against slavery. Things were not as simple and clear-cut back then as we would like to believe.

At any rate, if the war really was about slavery the 13th Amendment would have come at the beginning of the war, not at it’s end.

But the Emancipation Proclamation forced people to think about fundamental human rights and how to incorporate them more fully into the Constitution. That line of thinking snow balled into enough popular support to get the 13th Amendment passed by Congress and approved by the states in 1865. That’s incredibly fast for an amendment to go from introduction in Congress to passage by the states.

We have the same issues with federal vs. state power today.

When the federal government threatened Oregon doctors who would participate in the Death with Dignity law passed by voters this question came up again. The same thing happened with medical marijuana in California, more recently with federal COVID restrictions states resented, and right now with Biden’s vaccination mandates. I think that disagreement made it to the Supreme Court docket.

Thankfully we’ve figured out “shared sovereignty” between the state and federal governments.

I can’t end this without mentioning the Gettysburg Address.

If you read it carefully, you can see it squared emancipation with the values of liberal democracy expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And that puts everything I’ve said above moot. Interesting, maybe, perhaps even illuminating, but in the end irrelevant. That’s probably the most important aspect of everything I’ve written here.