State's Rights? Yeah, you are right—the trouble is the right the States wanted to keep as their own prerogative was the right to own human beings. Period.
No slavery, no Civil War, it's as simple as that. They feared that Lincoln and northern congressional majorities would start to dismantle slavery, and left the Union.
You can argue that States should have had the right to leave the Union all you like, but the reality was that they chose to leave in the first place to protect the institution of slavery, nothing more. Assigning it some more admirable purpose retroactively is like claiming that all Germany wanted to do in the 1940s was to spread timely railroad service throughout Europe.
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