Ok, this is for anybody and everybody. Seceding from the Union was a States' Right. And the North threatened to do it 5 separate times within a 50 year span.
States' Rights - The rights of the states to serve the people by using the powers accorded to them by the social compact theory. The states' rights view held that each state was primarily an independent entity joined in a compact of union, but a union in which they maintained their identity and were not subservient to a centralized national authority.
The Social Compact Theory - The theory of government states that, regarding human authority, the people are sovereign. They establish state (and other local) governments and delegate limited authority to them. The government is obligated to protect the people's inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. If the government abuses its power, the poeple have the right to "alter or abolish" it. This theory is expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and is evidenced in the ratification ordinances of the United States Constitution by the states of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia.
Secession - A States' right, specifically that of a single state, to leave a union and become its own national entity at any time.
New York, Rhode Island and Virginia actually included in their written ratifications of the Constitution statements on the subject of a states' right to secede from the new union. New York's ratification ordinance read in part: "That the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary to their Happiness..." Virginia's read in part: "...the People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them (the Virginians) whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will..."
New York, Rhode Island and Virginia each declared that if ever the rights they granted to the Union were misused to their harm, by the federal government or the other states, it was proper for the offended state to resume its right of self-governance and withdraw from that Union.
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions - Authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, these resolutions rejected the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which threatened prison time for Americans who criticized the federal government. The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions reasserted the social compact theory of the Constitution between the states and the national government. Kentucky and Virginia charged that the Sedition Act ran contrary to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.
Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution further advocated the states' rights to "nullify" any law they believed not to be in accord with the Constitution.
Thus, two of America's greatest statesmen thundered forth their own declarations that no powers were conveyed by the individual states to the federal government that could be employed to the former's harm, and that if they were, the state could act as necessary to protect itself and its people.
The North and not the South (New England States) threatened to secede 5 times and never was a charge of treason or accusations of being unpatriotic leveled at them.
A first term Congressman supported the right of secession in 1848 when he said the following:
“Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.
This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world”. Abraham Lincoln – U.S. Congress, 1847
Thirteen years later, when the Southern states wanted to exercise the right of secession which the New England states had threatened repeatedly over the past half century, President Abraham Lincoln called it treason. And those New England states who had themselves viewed the Federal Government as a social compact from which they could depart, now rose up and decried what they viewed as the South's intent to destroy the Union.
Taken from "The War Between the States - America's Uncivil War"
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Thomas Jefferson,
First Inaugural Address, 1801.
