“Southerners were fighting against everything today’s conservatives hate: centralized power”
No they weren’t. They were exactly like today’s Democrats using the courts to force their will on other states, Dred Scott for example.
More broadly there is no greater centralized power than keeping others in bondage under the aegis of government force, which is what they were doing.
No they weren’t. Dred Scot was a Supreme Court decision. It was not a policy the Southern states insisted on. What the Southern states most wanted was relief from paying for the vast majority of the federal government’s revenue even while they got only a small portion of the federal government’s outlays. They furthermore wanted some kind of limit on how much the federal government would tax them. The Northern states were not willing to give any such guarantee.