“And the Union was saved.”
The Union still had the northern States in it so it never was in peril of disappearing.
I meant the Union. All the states. The South wanted to continue in slavery. In fact South Carolina wanted slavery kept in the Constitution otherwise they wouldn’t sign it and it needed the approval of all the then existing states to ratify it.
If the South seceded, and took better than 70% of the tariff revenue of the US with it, the Union would have folded pretty quickly through default.
One take on this might be that the South was providing a living for the US, and the North was not only the principal beneficiary, but then also questioning the manner in which it was provided, in violation of the 10th amendment.
The North had several legitimate economic problems with the South seceding beyond moving from a recipient of tariffs to a payer of tariffs. From the North’s perspective, the peril was real.