The men, flawed as they were, who broke away from Great Britain, had a moral basis for the break, one which, because of its intrinsic moral power, eventually persuaded the world.
The Confederacy had an immoral basis, one which unsurprisingly therefore lacked the moral power to convince anybody in the end.
Even you, I would suppose, support the sort of moral, constitutional, republican self-government to which the founders aspired, and oppose chattel slavery. Don’t you?
If you have to justify the separation with a moral cause, then you don’t have a right to self governance. If I have a right to something, then I don’t need to justify exercising the right.
But the law of God as they wrote in the Declaration does not place conditions on the right to leave.
This is good, because if it placed the same conditions on them that people try to place on the South, then the 13 slave holding colonies wouldn't have been permitted to secede either.
The Confederacy had an immoral basis, one which unsurprisingly therefore lacked the moral power to convince anybody in the end.
Tell me my Friend, are your rights contingent on your morality? Must you be moral to exercise a right? It would seem to me that if you must be moral to exercise a right, then we are all doomed, because there is often not much agreement on what constitutes "moral".
I have to conclude that the Union didn't regard slavery as a "moral" issue upon which the rights of others is contingent, because the Union had five slave states that remained with it throughout the war.
Is it okay when they did it?