Our independence was founded on several notions, but all of them centered on the basic principles of the Glorious Revolution - freedoms of speech and the press, and a right to representation. The "taxation without representation is tyranny" statement was a very strong one. We were using the same language used in 1688 and upon which, as is rightly mentioned by the defenders of our independence, the British political system was founded.

By contrast, the secession of the Southern states was the exit from a nation of states represented in Congress, able to vote for President and with all the rights enshrined in the Constitution, on the grounds that the states wanted to preserve the right to determine whether or not they could buy, sell and own other human beings. Even Jefferson Davis realized that the moral grounds for the South's existence were shaky, and the irony of it all is that Davis was far more of an autocrat in the South than Lincoln was in the North, for reasons of expediency.

Just as Marbury v. Madison declared that the power to appoint does not automatically grant the power to revoke (along with establishing the Supreme Court's power of judicial review), so the Civil War established that, absent an affirmative right to leave the Union, states cannot dissociate themselves from it if they are properly represented, and the Tenth Amendment is a truism - the states have only those powers which the Federal government has not arrogated to itself.

QED.