"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."

Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848 speech in Congress

"No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy."

Abraham Lincoln

"Had (President) Buchanan in 1860 sent an armed force to prevent the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law, as Andrew Jackson threatened to do in 1833, there would have been a secession of fifteen Northern States instead of thirteen Southern States.
Had the Democrats won out in 1860 the Northern States would have been the seceding States not the Southern."

George Lunt of Massachusetts, Origin of the Late War

"The Confederate soldiers were basically fighting for the independence of what they called their country, the Confederate States of America, and they really harked back to the model of the American Revolution in 1776. In 1776 Americans had declared their independence of the British Empire - had seceded, if you will, from the British Empire in the name of liberty, establishing independent, free, government. The Confederate soldiers said they were doing the same thing in 1861 - they were fighting for liberty, for self-government. They were defending their country against invasion by what they now considered to be an alien power that no longer represented their interests."

 James McPherson,  Civil War historian
"If the states were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the (Constitutional) Convention refused to baptize it by the name .... If the Union was formed by the accession of States then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States."

Daniel Webster, U.S. Senate, Feb. 15, 1833

"The Union is a Union of States founded upon Compact. How is it to be supposed that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard one provision of it and expect others to observe the rest? If the Nortern States willfully and deliberately refuse to carry out their part of the Constitution, the South would be no longer bound to keep the compact. A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides."

Daniel Webster, Capon Springs Speech, 1851

"Americans who wish to live free have two options: We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed to force America's tyrants to respect our liberties and human rights, or we can seek a peaceful resolution of our irreconcilable differences by separating. That can be done by peopling several states, say Texas and Louisiana, controlling their legislatures and then issuing a unilateral declaration of independence just as the Founders did in 1776."

Dr. Walter Williams, It's time to part company, Sept. 9, 2000

"The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to its constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over statesí rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today; Not only did the war lay the foundation for eventual nullification or weakening of basic constitutional protections against central government abuses, but it also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Dr. Walter Williams, The Real Lincoln, March 28, 2002

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