if you participate in the 'mainstream press' you're misinformed and this article will show you a part of why i say that, and this includes 'all the crap you learned in high school';

The original union of American states was a voluntary union, not a coerced one held together by violence, mass killing, and terrorism as with say, the Soviet Union.  The citizens of the “free and independent states,” as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, sent delegates from their communities to the constitutional convention that resulted in the delegation of eighteen specific powers from them (Article 1, Section 8)  – the citizens of the independent states – to the federal government for their benefit and for their mutual advantage.  The federal government was to be the agent of the citizens of the states, who everyone acknowledged as the principals. 

Three states – New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia – specifically wrote in their ratification documents that these delegated powers “may be resumed by the people” of those states at any time, and for any reason determined by them, if they were to conclude that the federal government was behaving in a way that was not “necessary to their happiness.”  Since they were accepted into the union, it was assumed by everyone that all states had the exact same rights to secede from the union.  Secession was assumed by no one to be dependent on permission by any other state or states.  They took their own language about the “free and independent states” in the Declaration of Independence seriously........read more.......