It started to come apart the moment that Lincoln made the decision to exercise tyrannical powers and completely ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to force people that wished to exercise their specifically enumerated "freedom of association" in order to no longer associate with the North. He did this for one reason and one reason only. Money. The only source of income available to the federal government at that time was excise taxes on exports, and the only states that were net exporters were in the South. The US gov still owed loans, plus interest, to France from the Revolution. The North, on it's own, would have foundered under the weight of that debt. The instant the supreme executive uses force in order to crush a constitutional right to leave, it is rendered null and void forever after, and the "citizens" are now prisoners to that power. The next major blow was in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, which effectively gave a private bank, owned by the Rothschild family, control over the nation's money supply and placed the people in debt to them, established the US as a corporation (with a corporate ID number), the federal income tax to service the debt incurred by allowing the Rothschilds to print and *lend us our own fucking money*, and the IRS as a collection agency empowered to use force to collect that debt. And here we are, just as surely as night follows day.