Cherry-picking your quotes again, are you?
Well, here's a quote -- addressed to Georgia and all the Southern States.
The Southern States now stand in the same relation toward the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation, that our ancestors stood toward the people of Great Britain. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation, and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British Parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue -- to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures. [Emphasis added.]
--Robert Rhett, "South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States" (1860)
Oh, yeah, and he talked about slavery, too -- since the Northern politicians had put slavery on the agenda, politically and rhetorically.
Not even Lincoln had talked about slavery, before 1854, the way he did afterward. But after that time, he talked about it, and the freesoil Whigs talked about it, and the Republicans talked about it, incessantly.
So the mantra, "it was all about slavery," belongs rather to the Northern politicians like Lincoln, and even then only to their public platforms and position papers on the subject, and it is not descriptive of their legislative effort as a whole, or of their relationship as a whole to the body of Southern opinion. It was one element in a grand strategy of national domination, one that the South confronted by leaving the Union.
And here's his reply -- from Alexander Stephens.
"The next evil that my friend complained of, was the Tariff. Well, let us look at that for a moment. About the time I commenced noticing public matters, this question was agitating the country almost as fearfully as the Slave question now is. In 1832, when I was in college, South Carolina was ready to nullify or secede from the Union on this account. And what have we seen? The tariff no longer distracts the public councils. Reason has triumphed. The present tariff was voted for by Massachusetts and South Carolina. The lion and the lamb lay down together-- every man in the Senate and House from Massachusetts and South Carolina, I think, voted for it, as did my honorable friend himself. And if it be true, to use the figure of speech of my honorable friend, that every man in the North, that works in iron and brass and wood, has his muscle strengthened by the protection of the government, that stimulant was given by his vote, and I believe every other Southern man. So we ought not to complain of that. Yes, and Massachusetts, with unanimity, voted with the South to lessen them, and they were made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at. If reason and argument, with experience, produced such changes in the sentiments of Massachusetts from 1832 to 1857, on the subject of the tariff, may not like changes be effected there by the same means, reason and argument, and appeals to patriotism on the present vexed question?[emphasis added]