How can any American deny the right of secession and at the same time celebrate Independence Day and the principle it embodies? As Greeley put it in his editorial in the New York Tribune December 17th, 1860:

If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 colonists in 1776, I do not see why the Constitution ratified by the same men should not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of the Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861…

We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that government derives its power from the consent of the governed is sound and just, then if the Cotton States, the Gulf States or any other States choose to form an independent nation they have a clear right to do it…

And when a section of our Union resolves to go out, we shall resist any coercive acts to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets.” —Horace Greeley, NewYork Tribune, Dec. 17, 1860.

From an article by Steve Scroggins