What made 1861 such a hot topic in the blogs of late? Douglas Turnbull wrote:
So yes, there may be a Constitutional case for a state’s right to secede from the Union, but the Southern states did not secede just to show they could, to demonstrate the proof of the abstract principle of states rights. They seceded because they felt their pecific right to slavery was in danger from Lincoln and the North, and then used the argument of states rights as a justification. I really don’t see how anyone can plausibly deny the primary role that slavery played in the decision of the Southern states to secede.
An argument has been made that the issue of slavery was a proxy for Southern sectional interest, rather than the reverse.
Northern population was growing more rapidly than Southern. (Lincoln was the first president elected without a single Southern vote.) Southerners called for the extension of slavery into the new Western states in the hope that Western senators would tend to align with the South. When the crunch came, “a threat to the sanctity of our distinctive domestic institution” made a better sound-bite than “the increasing irrelevance of our votes.”
This view is bolstered by the facts that Congress proposed an Amendment protecting slavery – and that this gesture did the Union cause little if any good: none of the seven(?) preceding secessions was reversed, and four more followed.