What was it's purpose? As John Adams plainly said: " With these qualifications, we may admit the same right as vested in the people of every state in the Union, with reference to the General Government, which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies, with reference to the Supreme head of the British empire, of which they formed a part - and under these limitations, have the people of each state in the Union a right to secede from the confederated Union itself."
"Thus stands the RIGHT. But the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several states of this confederated nation, is after all, not in the right, but in the heart." Lincoln took a blow torch to that - didn't he?
That would be, John Quincy Adams:
[snip] ...Notwithstanding the commemorative purpose of Jubilee, Adams said recent events made it necessary once again to consider, as in the revolutionary era, questions "of the deepest and most vital interest to the continued existence of the Union itself." The key questions were "whether any one state of the Union had the right to secede from the confederacy at her pleasure," and "the right of the people of any one state, to nullify within her borders any legislative act of the general government."Secession was possible under the confederation. Adams pointed out that the question came up and was "practically solved" in the framing and ratification of the Constitution. The people of Rhode Island, for example, refusing to take part in the Convention, "virtually seceded from the Union." When eleven states formed and ratified the Constitution, North Carolina, although it participated in the Convention, joined with Rhode Island in staying out of the reorganized Union. Adams wrote: "Their right to secede was not contested. No unfriendly step to injure was taken;...the door was left open for them to return whenever the proud and wayward spirit of state sovereignty should give way to the attractions of clearer sighted self-interest and kindred sympathies."
With the ratification of the Constitution, secession assumed a different aspect. Adams explained: "The questions of secession, or of resistance under state authority, against the execution of the laws of the Union within any state, could never again be presented under circumstances so favorable to the pretensions of the separate state, as they were at the organization of the Constitution of the United States." Although a national government had the power to decide when violation of a contract absolved it from reciprocal obligations, Adams argued that "this last of earthly powers is not necessary to the freedom or independence of states, connected together by the immediate action of the people, of whom they consist."
Nevertheless, in the conduct of American federalism, uncertainty about the boundary line between the constitutional authority of the general and the state governments led to collisions threatening the dissolution of the Union. In different sections of the Union, Adams noted, the right of a state, or of several states in combination, to secede from the Union, and the right of a single state, without seceding, to nullify an act of Congress within the borders of that state, had been "directly asserted, fervently controverted, and attempted to be carried into execution." Fortunately, these examples of state resistance proved abortive, demonstrating in Adams's view the superiority of the Constitution over the Confederation, as a system of government "to control the temporary passions of the people." Adams observed: "In the calm hours of self-possession, the right of a State to nullify an act of Congress, is too absurd for argument and too odious for discussion. The right of a state to secede from the Union, is equally disowned by the principles of the Declaration of Independence." Adams's fundamental argument was that no right of state secession or nullification existed under the Constitution because the right to revolution was a natural right of the people. "To the people alone is there reserved, as well the dissolving, as the constituent power, and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience, binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven." In Adams's theory of the Union, the "whole people" of America, in the Declaration of Independence, declared the existence of a "compound nation." In their dual or compound character, the people were capable of acting as a "whole people" for national purposes in the government of the Union, and as a state people for particular purposes in their state government. "With these qualifications," Adams summarized, "we may admit the same [natural] right as vested in the people of every state in the Union, with reference to the General Government, which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies, with reference to the Supreme head of the British empire, of which they formed a part—and under these limitations, have the people of each state in the Union a right to secede from the confederated Union itself."
Throughout his public career Adams struggled with the seeming contradiction involved in maintaining a constitutional order that owed its existence to the right of revolution. At a high level of generality, and more explicitly than in any previous writing, Adams in Jubile advanced a theory of the right to revolution for Declarationist ends, couched in the language of secession or disunion. The timing and specific form that a division of the Union might take was a contingent matter, to be decided on prudential grounds. A few years later, Adams provoked the fury of Southerners by defending the constitutional right of Massachusetts abolitionists, in order to avert unjust domination by the slave power, to petition Congress for dissolution of the Union, without himself recommending exercise of the right to revolution on the merits. [snip]
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1207/article_detail.asp
Cordially,
and under these limitations, have the people of each state in the Union a right to secede from the confederated Union itself."
What limitations and qualifications? Perhaps it is as the Declaration of Independence argues:
The right to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another depends on three conditions:
a. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends (securing unalienable rights). But not to be changed for light and transient Causes.
b. They can right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.
c. They declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
Neither Adams nor Jefferson would have argue that there is a right to separation the chief purpose of which was to perpetuate and expand chattel slavery.