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The Declaration of Independence declared that "government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed". That was the principle under which the 13 colonies seceded from the British Empire.

The US went on to champion secession from its early days and even to military back multiple secession movements around the world be it Panama from Colombia, Bosnia from Yugoslavia, Kosovo from Serbia, etc. This was a typical view:

"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

Yet when some of its own sovereign states no longer consented to be ruled over by it, imperial Washington could not stand it and immediately got violent. Outside the US, everybody else very much noticed the blatant hypocrisy.

Times of London hit the nail on the head in September 1862:

“If the Northerners on ascertaining the resolution of the South, had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart, the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy; but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war rather than suffer any abatement of national power, it was clear that nature at Washington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg. There was not, in fact, a single argument advanced in defense of the war against the South which might not have been advanced with exactly the same force for the subjugation of Hungary or Poland. Democracy broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms.”

"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

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,

it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,

laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,

as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;

and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,

than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design

to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government,

and to provide new Guards for their future security.--

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies;

and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,

all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exactly. It’s the one argument for which the southernphobes have no rebuttal. Well, no legitimate rebuttal.

It’s an argument based on logic, not emotion. And not “free the slaves,” which Lincoln argued was not the reason for the war.