Secession Was Illegal

 The Civil War is often described as a conflict between “the Union” and “the Confederacy,” with two competing groups of states that were organized under two different “national” governments. Legally speaking, however, the Confederate States of America never existed. No foreign government ever recognized it as an independent country. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1869 case Texas v. White that secession had been unconstitutional and that the “Confederate states,” including Virginia, never actually left the Union during the Civil War.

Matt Ford in The New Republic