I quite agree. However.
As I've said, I think that the slaveholders, like all parasites, were with each generation becoming more and more dependent upon their slaves to care and provide for them and in that sense, weaker and less capable.
Those "less capable" slaveholders proved remarkably capable at the hardest task of all, war against a superior foe. Not capable enough, as it turned out, but as valiant an effort as any group in the history of the world.
"Secession" was designed to ...increase the power of the more local state governments which could be counted upon to protect their addictive, parasitic relationship.
I don't think so. State governments would merely retain their existing powers under the CSA, not gain new ones. Except of course the obvious recognition that they could split whenever they felt like it.
That's just so much baloney.
Most addicts are grateful to be free of their debilitating addictions, even if they were forced to give them up. But, perhaps you've heard a few say things like, "I was doing fine, it wasn't hurting me a bit. I was really in full control of all those things in my life that might have looked like chaos." Or, maybe you've heard some say, "I could have quit whenever I wanted to. " Or, "I was just getting around to quitting myself. You didn't need to force me." There's always a few who say things like that and some of them even believe it. Some of them just miss in some sort of sick, romantic way, the old addictive habits and lifestyle.
Slaveholders as a class had become sick, weak people by the 1860's and that weakness was reflected in the weak, incompetent decisions that they made. Their eventual doom was inevitable, whether at the hands of some outside force like Lincoln and the Union or at the hands of the slaves and serfs that surrounded them. This world eats the weak and that's what happened to the slaveholders. Any fight you saw was attributable to the courage shown by some of the serfs and others who were either forced or duped into fighting what nevertheless always remained a fight to protect the lifestyles of slaveholders.
And, yes, the slaveholders were Statists. They were dependent upon government to protect their lifestyles just as members of our current welfare class are dependent upon government to protect their lifestyles. A culture of dependency is never a good thing. There isn't anything noble or romantic about dependency.