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

let me make this even more clear with another quote from Stephens "cornerstone" speech.

quote:

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"Those ideas (that 'all men are created equal'), were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error."

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

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the very "foundation" and "cornerstone" of the the confederate government, in the words of its vice president, was that white people are superior and that slavery was a black mans "natural and normal condition".

spin that, you pieces of shite.