Did the southern states have the right to secede from the Union?
The United States under the Articles of Confederation was a league of sovereign states with a weak central government. It became clear after a few years that this arrangement had created a nation that wasn’t really a nation; it was a loose confederacy that had no future in the world. The United States under the Constitution is a “more perfect union” with a strong central government that is more powerful than the individual states. (The federal government derives its power not from the states, but from “We, the people.”) Under the Constitution, the people and the states agree to specific procedures for passing laws and electing national leaders. No state has the right to pull out of the Union because it doesn’t like the outcome of a Presidential election. But that’s exactly what secessionist Southern states tried to do after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. They were wrong, and they lost the ensuing war. To get information for the essay you’re writing, look up “Articles of Confede
