Certainly, given the lack of a transcontinental railroad in 1860, there was a real possibility that California and Oregon Territory (current Washington and Oregon) could secede. Indeed, there was always a surplus of ambitious men like John Fremont who would see a personal advantage in being a big frog in a smaller pond. The same would be true for Texas pulling out of the Confederacy. And once secession was enshrined by precedent, the likelihood of the State of Deseret (Utah and its adjacent Mormon-settled territories) seceding would be high, as an alternative to the intense Federal persecution that took place from 1865 to 1890 or so.

Given those developments, the transcontinental railroad would have been substantially delayed, and Alaska would remain part of Russia. The possibility of war among any of the remaining fragments of the former United States would be very real, such as over an attempt by the slave holding South to expand westward into territories claimed by the Union. There would no longer be an incentive for the Northern States to enforce the fugitive Slave Act, so attempts by slaves to escape across the new, nearer borders, to the north or west, would increase.

Reaching the 20th Century, there would be no USA capable of taking on both Japanese imperialism and Nazi conquest. It is unlikely that there would have been a significant naval fleet in Pearl Harbor to be attacked, and the Philippines would not be US territory. Hawaii and Alaska would have slipped into the orbit of Japan’s control as the USSR was distracted by Hitler. Without the Pearl harbor attack to bring America into the world war, the remaining eastern states would have been limited in their aid to Britain, which eventually may have gone the way of Vichy France.

Assuming the USSR survived the Nazis, there would have been no USA to deploy troops in forward positions in Europe and wear down the soviets.

Whether Lincoln understood his actions as justified at the time or not, if he had not held the Union together, the freedom of most of the world would have become a forgotten dream.

“(b) the Upper South was expected to join in a bloody war with the Deep South,”

and this being key to the Upper South’s decisions to secede?

I.e., what books are you basing this on?

You would have two regimes from common political ancestry divided over a compromise most had agreed too, but which over time would have been obfuscated over the inevitable bitter political disputes–RI profiting for building ships for souther cotton plantation export. As lincoln pointed out, the principle of secession is anarchy, and if this throws a wrench in the idea of American independence then so be it. I suppose we’re all screwed!

This was the actual resolution anyway–RP Warren’s Legacy of the Civil War argues this case (as well as his story The Circus in the Attic). So perhaps it would not have made any difference to fight the war–except justice had been moved forward for many blacks, and the Union over time has remained in its attraction for even unreconstructed southerner.

This was the real meaning of the Spanish American War and WWI. The sons of former Confederates and former Union soldiers fought together for something called the USA.

Thus, (in a doubly ironic turn the Devil no doubt delights in) the right side of the question of self-determination and popular sovereignty was set in support of the moral evil of slavery and the right side of the question of slavery was set in support of a morally evil tyranny against fellow sovereign peoples.

Lincoln could prevail in the issue of essential freedom only by imposing military subjugation of unwilling peoples; the South ended up defending their own freedom from subjugation by championing the subjugation of the essential freedom of their fellow men.

It was the Devil’s due for obtaining freedom from British oppression by enshrining chattel slavery in the Constitution.

Perhaps I am a bit thick, but I am struggling to get my mind around how there could be a Union where members are free to leave at any time for any reason without permission from the other members of the Union. This is only a Union in the sense that an open marriage is a marriage (i.e., not much of one). If fidelity and exclusivity are what make a marriage, then a political Union is similarly bound.

If one simply wants to look at this from a contractual perspective, it normally takes two parties to void a contract unless one party is found to be in breech of the contract already. As Lincoln pointed out innumerable times, the North hadn’t violated the rights of Southern states at any point. Yet Southern states chose to secede.

This being an illegal act, the government had to defend the rule of law. Setting up a government (the Confederacy) was an act of rebellion on the part of the South with predictable consequences.

I believe war was inevitable in the sense Lincoln puts it in the 2nd Inaugural. The South chose to have secession and war rather than give up slavery; the North (Union) accepted war as an outgrowth of this decision by the South.

When we look at the “state’s rights” argument in this context, it is always helpful to remember what right the Southern states thought they were protecting. The “right” they wanted to protect was the right to own slaves and the right to expand that institution of slavery to places (territories) where it had hitherto not existed. Because Lincoln opposed the latter and because the South saw the former as at risk, they chose secession and war. I happen to think war was inevitable because anti-slavery sentiment in the North was growing and Southern defense of slavery was becoming more vociferous (look at the caning of Sumner). The South had created a culture that was dependent on slavery and they were willing to go to war lest that institution be threatened.

One key historical development is, of course, the circumstances surrounding the promulgation of the “Constitution.” And, while I have no time to go into ‘conspiracies,’ the fact that the Constitutional Convention was called to modify and improve the Articles of Confederation and not to create a ‘new’ document is a matter worthy of discussion.

Re: the ‘state’, it’s critical to understand that it is the fundamental constitutionally grounded political entity at work in the American political apparatus (I once debated a Harvard history professor who could not comprehend that). That is to say, that while the ‘state’ is permitted under the proper circumstances and because of its constitutional construction to withdraw from the federal union, a county, city, township may not, legally/constitutionally, withdraw from the state.

Re: your question, the purpose of the Constitution is to perfectly and specifically explicate the purpose and construction of the federal gov’t., and to, in the instant case of the Bill of Rights, to explicate that real political power is maintained and jealously guarded by the several states and the people which by definition reduces the theoretical importance the concept of “Union”. So, I’ve taken the opposite position that Pres. Lincoln did, and that is if the federal gov’t moves to oppress its people, it is the moral obligation of free men to resist, and if they find it necessary, by convention, to secede then so be it.

It does not matter if the act of secession is ‘inimical to the Union.’ What matters is the maintenance of freedom even if it means a secession from an established union of states. Which is what, eighty years earlier, the founding generation successfully accomplished.

A book you may find informative is “Secession, State, and Liberty,” ed. David Gordon, Transaction Publishers, 1998,

That’s not to say the South was right to have seceded. Maybe the South should have tried harder to maintain comity. But the historical recod does indicate a high degree of Northern intransigence concerning the well-established political autonomy of the states, and it’s understandable that Southerners were not happy about it.

Assume that as a matter of constitutional law, any state — certainly those whose ratification signing statements included an explicit comment on the matter — reserved the right to withdraw from the Union. But then consider the Unionist or Federalist proposition that the Constitution itself is not enough to bind the rest of the Union together — whether any states secede from it or not.

The claim behind this proposition is that the Constitution, though venerated and authoritative, did not *create* the Union, but merely supplied the preexisting Union with a political regime more suitable to its perpetuation than the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution itself refers to a preexisting People of the United States, and the Federalist papers (e.g. Federalist 2) refer to the Union as a deep and complex social, cultural, economic, religious, and in at least some way political organization among the People of the United States that predates the Constitution.

The usual or default case that proceeds from this interpretation is that the Constitution could not be interpreted in a way inimical to Union (i.e., permissive of secession) because the Constitution was created to preserve and perpetuate the Union. My interest is in asking whether all secession was indeed inimical to Union — while conceding that the secession of some combination of states certainly was inimical to Union. If so, then could not all the following be true?

* The Deep South was not acting unconstitutionally in opting out of the Union;

* The departure of the Deep South did not pose an existential threat to the Union, demonstrating that the Constitution did not need to be interpreted as making Union permanent out of an understanding that the remainder of the Union would collapse without such an interpretation;

* The departure of the Upper South, after the Deep South had seceded, much more probably *did* pose an existential threat to the Union, tending to justify a pro-Northern claim that invading the whole South to restore its states to their “proper relationship” with the Union was a necessary response;

* Nonetheless, given that the Upper South did not secede until it was apparent that the North would (a) not accept Deep Southern secession and (b) the Upper South was expected to join in a bloody war with the Deep South, the North managed to precipitate the very crisis which it was obligated above all to avoid, namely, an existential threat to the Union.