Northern businessmen:
"Now, it is for you, sir, to say whether the whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy, whether grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities. Then will you yield to the just demands of the South?"
- William E. Dodge, spokesman for a New York delegation, to Abraham Lincoln, March 1861
Congress:
"Should the Northern States continue willfully and deliberately to circumvent federal law, the South would no longer be bound to observe the {constitutional] compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side."
- Daniel Webster, Senator from Massachusetts
The Supreme Court:
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in his opinion rendered in Merriman vs US in 1863 that Lincoln in his arbitrary arrests of northern citizens and his declaration of war and calling up of troops in 1861 while preventing congress from meeting for 90 days that Lincolns actions were unconstitutional and illegal. Furthermore that there was no cause to invade the Southern states as secession was a constitutionally granted right. Lincoln was so enraged that he signed an order to arrest Chief Justice Taney when he heard the opinion.
Lincolns past statements:
"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 and 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 many of the territory as they inhabit."
Abraham Lincoln
January 12, 1848.
