There are a bunch of people in the "liberty movement" and the Free State Movement and in the FTL community who keep saying that the South had a right to secede in 1861. This is complete and utter hogwash. There is no right to secede, and if you secede you are a traitor, and if you advocate secession you are a seditionist.
When the North fought the Civil War against the South, it was fighting to bring a group of people who had seceded and thus had committed treason back into the Union, which it certainly had the right to do. And furthermore, when the South seceded, everyone in the South who aided and/or abetted secession lost all their rights, and only had the rights that the rest of the Union (the North) was willing to give to them. So if the North would have decided that the South was only to have half the rights that they had before, i.e. that every Southern state was now to be only a half-state with only one Senator in the national Congress and only half the representatives that they had before, then that would be legit. If the North would have decided that the South now had no rights, and was to be governed as a conquered territory with no rights indefinately, then that would have been legit too. But luckily for the South they got Andrew Johnson in there and he pardoned them, so all their rights were restored. But if Johnson hadn't have gotten in there, and it was decided by the North that they were to only have half rights or no rights, then that would have been perfectly legit because they seceded and committed treason and thus lost all their rights.