Never a serious student of the Civil War, I ask this question honestly and without bias. How would a panel of the best qualified Constitutional scholars view the war in retrospect? Was it legal? Or was it Mr Lincoln and supporters, saying, no, I'll kill you before I let you divorce me?
It was not legal, since each state was always, prior to the war, considered to be free to separate from our voluntary union (which notion was one of our nation's founding principles, see, e.g., the
Declaration of Independence). That ever-present possibility was one of the built in checks against centralized tyranny intended by the Founders and Framers. In fact, the threat of secession had been already successfully used several times to moderate proposals for the concentration of national power in the decades prior to the Civil War.
