This was another response that I wrote to him:
"I’d recommend getting your history from real historians, whose approach is scientific, and whose views are based on historical facts, rather than Lost Cause sentiment, modern day politics, or, worst of all, neo-confederate extremism.
Then what was the prime cause of secession? If you contention is true, why did the seceding states issue proclamations upon secession declaring that the purpose of secession was to protect the institution of slavery? As in nullification slavery is at the root of the trouble. Nullification in 1828 was about tariffs but it is because of the south’s slave driven agrarian economy that it was an issue at all.
So slavery is at the root of or in some cases is the whole tree of secession whether it be tariffs or expansion or states rights or whatever.
https://wallbuilders.com/confronting-civil-war-revisionism-south-went-war/
Of course, a nation without the ability to make treaties with other nations, or coin its own money, or mantain a military force of its own would not be regarded as fully sovereign, to say the least.
The States in my understanding were never sovereign.
First they were colonies.
Then they formed a tenuous union. The "United Provinces of (North) America."
Then we get the Articles of Confederation, which produce a weak (pitifully so), but real national government.
Then we get the Constitution, which pretty much rules out any of the powers that are exercised only by independent sovereign bodies and grants them to the national government.
The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it were intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It is intended for perpetual union, so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government (not a compact) which can only be dissolved by revolution, or by the consent of all the people in convention assembled.
<J. William Jones, Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee, Soldier and Man. (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1906), pp. 120-121.> "