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The reason I think the South cared about the Union is because a Southerner, George Washington, was the Father of the Country. And because a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, is credited with writing the Declaration of Independence. And because a Southerner, James Madison, was the Father of the Constitution. And because a Southerner, James Mason, was the Father of the Bill of Rights. Southerners loved the Constitution, the country, and the Union which they “helped” found. They were willing to fight for their Constitutional rights.

Please allow me to quote the words of another son of the South given 80 years after those Southern Patriots you mentioned worked together to help form this union.

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.

But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
--- CSA Vice President Alexander Stevens, March 21, 1861.

You can not claim the heritage of both the Founding Fathers of the 1770s and the Fathers of Disunion of the 1860s who rejected those Founding Fathers. They are mutually exclusive. Pick one or the other.