FYI - Lincoln wanted to keep Ft. Sumter (which had no other strategic value) as a "gate keeper" to insure he collected import taxes off goods entering into SC. Once again you have missed the underlying reasoning. You go on thinking your PC Yankee line of crap. You of the North brought the whole nation into slavery to Washington DC, when you defeated the Southern Forces. Thank Lincoln for the first income tax, the first Trials by tribunal and etc. However by celebrating what you think was a righteous cause, you denied the very document that is the cornerstone of American values. A hint here bozo, it isn't the Constitution. Even the Founders believed that the preponderance of power should reside with the States. They didn't want the strong central government knowing full well it was ripe for corruption and tyranny to prevail.
I think James Madison (a Virginian) said it best - " If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is, that every nation has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written inevery American heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs; but it is the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold their existence as a nation." - 1793
And for your further edification " Our Governmental System is established by a compact not between the Government of the United States, and the State Governments; but between the States, as sovereign communities, stipulating each with the others, a surrender of certain portions of their respective authorities, to be exercised by a Common Government, and a reservation, for their own exercise, of all their other authorities." - 29 June 1821
Do you have any support for this assertion?
(Lincoln was mean, etc. etc.)
I note with dismay that I have repeatedly posted an inquiry as to what "rights" the South seceded over in 1860 if not the right to hold slaves. You have noted that the Founders felt a balance of power was important between the federal government and the states, which is undoubtedly true. You have noted that the Southern states felt that they had the right to secede from the Union, which is also undoubtedly true.
To say that the Southern states seceded in order to demonstrate their right to secede is however both a logical absurdity and unsupported by the actual secession resolutions themselves. To say that the Southern states seceded in order to protect their "rights" makes more sense, but the question is then what these rights are. If these rights are to "the right to live free from federal tyranny", then the question becomes in what way the federal government was acting tyrannically towards them, that caused the South to secede in 1860 instead of 1859 or 1790.
The truth, as can be evinced from both history and the secession resolutions, is that the South wished to protect its right to practice slavery, and the reason why it felt the need to secede to do this was because in 1860 a President was elected who was pledged to stop the expansion of slavery into new territories, which would diminish its viability as an economic institution. The South had successfully made slavery the "third rail" of American politics in the years before the war; the Kansas-Nebraska Act which overturned the Missouri Compromise was an attempt to bolster slavery, as was the "gag rule" which forbade Congressional debate about abolition. Historians have pointed to the Mexican War as another Southern adventure to expand slavery (although this is an entirely different topic). When a President committed to a free soil policy was elected, the Southern states felt that the jig was up and seceded to protect their right to the "peculiar institution".
As the Mississippi secession declaration demonstrated, behind the pious handwaving about the South's right to protect its culture and sovereign destiny, "[their] position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world."
In the end, the only federal tyranny the South was fleeing was the possibility that slavery and its expansion might be threatened, and the shaky reasoning that "slavery is in the Constitution, and the North is opposed to slavery, therefore the North is opposed to the Constitution" is the root of Southerners' bleating that they were seceding to protect slavery and two states' rights to be named later. Many honorable men followed their states into secession and bemoaned the South's aggression against the federal United States, but the real face of the Confederacy was Bully Brooks, not Robert E. Lee.