The South, and by that I mean the planter class aristocracy, wanted to control the federal government. Their entire worldview and social-economic system was based on an incredibly rigid class structure of power privilege that made sharing it less and less possible as the years went on. There were broad, popular movements in the south for many years supporting filibusters (not to be confused with the Senate term) that forcibly invaded other countries to try and set up slave empires/whatever. The southern people, like those in the north, were largely dissociated from how and why the war actually manifested (outside, of course, voting). The failure to reach a political compromise on the future of slavery, specifically regarding the Fugitive Slave Act (so much for not liking federal overreach and respecting state's rights) coupled with a bad election cycle, pushed the planter class into a full rejection of what they saw as permanent political marginalization. In other words, the idea was to take the ball and go home rather than entertain the notion of accepting a result that went the other team's way.
You go on and on about the economic aspects of the war, Cap, making the claim- or at least intimation- that northern industrial/financial greed and economic pillaging was the reason that they refused to let the south leave, let alone invade (never mind that the south fired the first shots).Do you know how many times they mention tariffs in the SC articles of secession? I do. Do you know how many times they mention slavery? I know this as well.
You gotta pull your head out of these memoirs; they aren't some ultimate authority. Primary sources have all sorts of problems and, as i've previously mentioned, require broad context and synthesis with historiographical perspective. The have to be interpreted, and you need to be trained to do so properly. I know this flies in the face of ideas about those damn liberal indoctrination centers, but otherwise you're never going to grow as an amateur historian of anything.