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But I can clearly see how the South would see it was an aggressive war, but they DID fire first, and, ironically enough, last for that matter in Texas :)

IMO, war between North and South was inevitable, even had the secession been allowed. The South needed/wanted to expand slavery westward and northward, and the North wanted to prevent its spread. This was the underlying pressure for the Sectional Crises, not to mention the secessions themselves.

The antagonism would probably only have escalated had the Confederacy succeeded in becoming its own country, though the war itself would probably have started in the West. The real joker in the deck would have been Britain: would they have been willing to openly support an unambiguously independent South? Probably so, and the North couldn't allow that, for a number of reasons.

The North had a lot more at stake than just "preserving the Union."