Really? Then why no Southern claims to Nebraska? Montana and the Dakotas? They walked away from all that. All they really tried to claim was New Mexico and Arizona -- and perhaps Colorado, I'm a little iffy about that, whether Confederates were more interested in the territory or just raiding the mine shipments.
They boycotted the elections because they had already made their minds up to leave the union; the election of Lincoln cinched it. He was willing to allow slavery in the states that already had it but he would not allow it to expand further west. The slavers are very clear in the articles, that this is not acceptable because it means the eventual end of the slave system. Despite Lincoln’s willingness to leave their system in place, they made the decision to break in order to preserve slavery, not merely in the south, but into the rest of the west and most importantly to avoid the natural death they foresaw if not allowed to expand.
Seriously, the slaveocracy and the Jim Crow system of race repression that followed are Democrat Party history. Let them own it. Let them defend it. Never put yourself in the position of trying to justify it. They did enormous damage to the 10th ammendment by trying to use it to justify repression rather than its natural intent, as a barrier against repression.
What the Democrats usurped in service to repression during the bad old days of Jim Crow we must now reclaim in service to freedom and rule of law.
The GOP was formed by Christians who abandoned the Whigs over its refusal to take sides on the slave issue. They were distinctly a minority party and by rights ought to have had no influence over the outcome of anything. But in a decade slavery was gone. Despite the fact that most of the country either favored slavery or didn’t care and despite the fact that their champion was willing to compromise on it, in a decade it was gone. Sometimes God gets a vote.