re: If secession was legal then what right did the North have to keep the South in the USA?

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The North was threatened by the existence of the South so they tried to control it ECONOMICALLY via minimizing the slave trade, tariffs, taxes.

It wasn't really a moral issue until the bodies started piling up.

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If you were talking about 1850 I would tend to agree with you about feeling threatened by the existence of the South, but in 1860, the picture had really started o change. The North was starting to experience rapid industrialization in comparison to the South .

Both sides were trying to control the other. Southern politicians wanted an expansion of slavery, Northern politcians being influenced by the large immigration wave that was hitting that region at the time ( Ireland and Germany mostly), were not too keen to see new voters pissed at them about low wages mainly due to the fact that the Sou had all of this "free" labor. Southerners wanted it almost that you could not criticize slavery publicly

But in the end it was economic. I think Marx(not a fan whatsoever) probably was close to right when he said "‘The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.’