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We should notice once again: the reason the Democrat party split-up in Charleston -- it was related to what Catton calls Senator Jefferson Davis' "Southern rights code" and what Sherman biographer McDonough calls "a Federal slave code in all US territory".

Not tariffs
Not "money flows from Europe"
Not "northeastern power brokers"
Not the 1817 Navigation Act
Not Southerners paying for Federal government.

The issue was slavery in the territories, and by extension, the threat to slavery everywhere from Northern Black Republican abolitionists.

Senator Davis' words to the Senate & Catton's commentary:

" 'The power of resistance

...consists in no small degree, in meeting the enemy at the outer gate...
We of the South have made no war upon the North.
We have asked no discrimination in our favor.
We claim but to have the Constitution fairly and equally administered.'

Catton: Firmly entrenched at the outer gate, Senator Davis would await the assault, which at the moment was verbal.
He was fighting over words.
If it could be said plainly, flatly, and irrevocably that the United states government must under no circumstances interfere with slavery, all might be well, but the drift of the times, unhappily, was against it.
The desperate intransigence of Southern leaders in this spring of 1860 carried an anxiety that their cause might be doomed no matte4r what anyone said.
The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simploy because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset.
Senator Davis would try, stalking into the shadows with infinite integrity and fixity of vision..."

Slavery was the issue, the only issue powerful enough to split the Democrats' party and eventually the nation.

In the end, the Senate will pass Senator Davis' "Southern Rights Code" but it will go nowhere until eventually modified by Ohio Representative Thomas Corwin, hoping then to appease Border State slaveholders.

“The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simploy because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset.”

If that view was correct - and you put it forward as if you think it may have been correct - then we can forever dismiss notions posted on this site that slavery would have continued indefinitely without Lincoln's wily, but virtuous, interventions.

In fact, the inevitability-of-slavery's-demise argument undercuts the blue-state premise that Lincoln's invasion of the South, and all the killings, were morally necessary at all.

Once 300,000 Southerners were safely buried, the North was able to dictate a new constitution and a new economic and political equilibrium to blue-state advantage.