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Life is Good
Even the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott Decision -- the one that stated blacks, both slave and free, were not citizens - and the one the CSA so loved, and used as a legal cudgel to justify going to war over, said secession was not Constitutional (that would be the same decision that took away States' Rights).
Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney stated:
"The South contends that a state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union formed with her sister states. In this I submit the South errs. No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise. Secession is therefore not constitutional, but revolutionary; and is only morally competent, like war, upon failure of justice."
Taney's views as to the constitutionality of secession were expressed in an untitled, eight-page memorandum in his own handwriting that was donated to the Library of Congress in 1929. This memorandum has been labeled (apparently by a library archivist) "Fragment of a Manuscript Relating to Slavery in the United States," RBTP-LC. Although the memorandum is undated, internal evidence indicates that it was written between January 26 and February 1, 1861. It was Taney's practice during the war to set forth his views on controversial constitutional issues for possible use in Supreme Court opinions, if and when those issues should come before the Court. For description and discussion of this memorandum, see Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott Case, 554-555, 7IIn.5.
Source: Lincoln & The Court, by Brian McGinty.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney stated:
"The South contends that a state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union formed with her sister states. In this I submit the South errs. No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise. Secession is therefore not constitutional, but revolutionary; and is only morally competent, like war, upon failure of justice."
Taney's views as to the constitutionality of secession were expressed in an untitled, eight-page memorandum in his own handwriting that was donated to the Library of Congress in 1929. This memorandum has been labeled (apparently by a library archivist) "Fragment of a Manuscript Relating to Slavery in the United States," RBTP-LC. Although the memorandum is undated, internal evidence indicates that it was written between January 26 and February 1, 1861. It was Taney's practice during the war to set forth his views on controversial constitutional issues for possible use in Supreme Court opinions, if and when those issues should come before the Court. For description and discussion of this memorandum, see Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott Case, 554-555, 7IIn.5.
Source: Lincoln & The Court, by Brian McGinty.
yep. 
