The legal argument against secession is straight‐​forward. Beyond the simple fact that most countries don’t provide for their own dissolution at the outset, the Constitution is not silent on the use of force by the federal government. Article I Section 8 clearly grants Congress the power to put down insurrections, as the South was well aware. As recently as 1859, that power had been used by then‐​Union colonel Robert E. Lee to put down John Brown’s mindless and bloody raid on Harpers Ferry.

But to support the Declaration of Independence is to support secession. Thus, from the outset, it is nearly impossible to defend the American idea—that the people may separate themselves from an oppressive government in order to govern themselves—without accepting secession as a legitimate political action under certain circumstances, at least. This, however, does not necessarily mean that all secession is justified. In the Declaration, Jefferson writes, “Prudence…will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes,” necessarily implying that some separations are indeed imprudent and any such separation should be judged on its individual merits. A predictable and stable adherence to the Rule of Law is the indispensable tenet of any form of just government, and so the dissolution of that government must be preceded by systemic injustice or other reason that appeals to higher or natural law. Without this ordered liberty and deference to individual rights, laws cease to mean anything other than the imposition of will by man upon man.

Because Confederate‐​secession defenders will not typically make arguments in favor of chattel slavery, they rely instead on the assumption that secession is an unbounded right and thus a state may leave a country for whatever reason it chooses. To accept this premise, one has to bypass moral judgment on the cause of secession, yet affirmatively assign a morality to secession as a matter of preferred political procedure—in common parlance as “states’ rights.” This turns the assumption of individual rights on its head, if the federalist procedure is to supersede the right of exit of any group or individual within that state, as the Confederacy’s slave economy unquestionably did.

People who imagine themselves free have, in theory, a right of exit if and when they choose to separate themselves from the state in which they live. Suspending for the sake of argument the economic hardships that may entail, the right of one’s own separation—an individual secession, if you will—remains. Except in the Confederacy, where no such right existed for the slaves for which the Southern states unquestionably and proudly seceded.

Mirroring the language and purpose of the Declaration, the Southern states explained to the world the purported righteousness of their actions and listed the reasons why prudence dictated they sever their ties to the American Union. Four Southern states—South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi—made clear their rationale for secession. Simply glancing over these four documents leads the reader to the conclusion that chattel slavery was the primary cause for separation. The following are excerpted from the four declarations of secession.

Georgia: