Reflections of a stormy petrel

No: civil wars are not fought over small issues. Nobody revolts against the established government of the country except over the gravest issues. And the South was on the verge of doing so - think of the Nullification crisis of 1837, of the virtual preview of civil war that was "bleeding Kansas" - for more than a generation before the 1860 election. Of course other issues got tangled into it: if you have an institution that the majority of your country wants to destroy, you will use all legal resources to defend yourself, and will put an accordingly higher value on the resources in question. "States' rights" - an issue that in reality had long since been settled, in part by the Constitution itself, and in part by the precedents established by the John Marshall Supreme Court - became a fetish to the South because they offered some hope to resist the movement against slavery. This is something that can easily be read in the facts. The South had been blackmailing the North with the threat of secession and civil war for decades, purely over this issue; and a pro-American French observer described the election of 1860 as "the uprising of a great people" - the majority of the American people, in his interpretation, weary and disgusted with constant threats and violence, using the vote for the obscure Illinois candidate as in effect their revolt against the paralysis of the republic under Southern threats. And if you think that slavery was not at the heart of everything that led to the bloodiest war in all American history, answer me this: why was it that only slave states, with no exception, were willing to go to war over "States' rights," while no other part of the union - not distant California, not the Mormon-ridden territory of Utah, not fractious New England, which had threatened to secede at the time of the 1812 war - not a single one showed the least interest in it?