answer:I think this is the problem that Lincoln wrestled with when he decided that the Union had to be preserved. If you allow secession, then where does it end? Can East Tennessee secede from West Tennessee? Can Mobile secede from the rest of Alabama? Can Upstate New York secede from Manhattan and Long Island secede from both? Had secession been ‘allowed’ then it is very likely that the entire Union would have broken up into small fiefdoms along the lines of what was then Germany. MacKinlay Kantor wrote an interesting article (for Life magazine?) in the 1950s, titled “If the South Had Won the Civil War” which was so popular that he made it into a book of the same title. In the book, everything works out great, and we go on to win WW1 and 2… and then reunite (with Texas, who would have also seceded from everyone else). But I doubt very much whether we would have won the Cold War in like manner.