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[Yupster]

46. I believe secession was legal

I would make the following points.

1. The 1869 Supreme Court decision holds no weight with me because it was ex-post facto. What were they supposed to rule? That four years after the war that the south was a separate country. Then what? Not likely.

2. When the Bill of Rights was passed, there were many against it,. They were afraid that by listing individual rights people would think that if a right wasn't written down, then the people don't have it. They wanted it to be clear that if a right was not specifically given to government, then the people retained it and if a power wasn't specifically given to an arm of government, then the states would retain it. That's why the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were put into the Bill of Rights.

3. If it was understood at the time that if a state ratified the Constitution, then they could never leave the union no matter how much the nation or its government changed, under threat of armed invasion, there's no way the Constitution would have ever been ratified.

4. People changing their government wasn't considered so weird back then, at least in some parts of the nation. If you were a Texan
born in 1820, you would have been born in Spain, then became a citizen of Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, then the USA, then the Confederacy all within 40 years.