STANDING ON THE BRINK

After South Carolina voted to secede from the Union this letter was sent to, and it was very specific. Quote from The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton.

 "to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States," and it was somewhat more pointed. It recited that the government of the United States had become a despotism, said that the Constitution was but an experiment that had failed-—"the whole Constitution, by the constructions of the Northern people, has been absorbed by its preamble"—and came to a ringing peroration: "Citizens of the Slaveholding States of the United States! Circumstances beyond our control have placed us in the van of the great controversy between the Northern and Southern States. We would have preferred that other States should have assumed the position we now occupy. . . . You have loved the Union, in whose service your great statesmen have labored and your great soldiers have fought and conquered—not for the material benefits it conferred, but with the faith of a generous and devoted chivalry. You have long lingered in hope over the shattered remains of a broken Constitution. Compromise after compromise, formed by your concessions, has been trampled under foot by your Northern confederates. All fraternity of feeling between the North and the South is lost, or has been converted into hate; and we, of the South, are at last driven together by the stern destiny which controls the existence of nations. . . . All we demand of other peoples is to be left alone, to work out our own high destinies. United together, we must be the most independent as we are the most important of the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace than our beneficent productions. United together and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread through the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest age. We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States." 10 The statement was forthright and revealing, touched with simple eloquence, expressing deep determination. Yet somehow it was not quite the sort of manifesto which men compose when they know they are going to have to make desperate war. It was written in the light of the faith that King Cotton was irresistible, and it hinted strongly at the belief that no one would be insane enough to take up arms against a united band of cotton states visibly in earnest. Implicit in all that was said and done was the conviction that the rest of the South would follow where South Carolina led, provided the leadership was vigorous and unhesitating. "

I'm rereading Bruce Catton's books on the Civil War or the War of Northern Aggression depending on which part of the country you hale from. By 1860 both sides had reached an impasse the size of the Grand Canyon. The north was willing, reluctantly, to tolerate slavery as long as it was contained to the South. The South would tolerate no interference. 

The letter makes it perfectly clear. Yes it was about so called states rights. The right to classify a whole group of unvilling immigrants and their children, referred to  by the way as persons in the constitution, as property. And since that "property" didn't always stay where it was supposed to the citizens of the rest of the country were expected to cooperate in the reocvery of that property. Both sides were using the same languge, the words anyway, even if they didn't mean the same things.