Well, there were plenty of hard feelings when Jefferson beat Adams (1800) and when J.Q. Adams "beat" Jackson (1824). The election of Lincoln didn't warrant any "secessions" or a Civil War.
When South Carolina announced its attempt to "secede" in December 1860, we had an extraordinarily weak president (Buchanan) and the "secessionists" correctly predicted that Buchanan was a pushover unable to defend the United States or its Constitution. I think the "secessionists" guessed that by the time Lincoln became president in March, 1861, he would be forced to accept the attempted "secessions" as a fait accompli. They guessed wrong.
Compare to the current situation in the US where taxpayers are supporting the "poor" with subsistence packages which are often more costly than they themselves can afford, if you want a similar sentiment.
I have read the Constitution, and saw nothing to prevent a State from dissociating itself from the Union. If one considers the powers not enumerated and reserved to the Federal Government are reserved to the States and to the People, and further considers that a Right not enumerated may nonetheless exist even though it is not specifically stated, the right of a group of people to freely associate might be implied as well as an individual Right. To infer from that somehow that the Constitution would prohibit the dissolution, in toto, or in part, of the Union--especially in light of the very origin of the Republic--would require some extraordinary contortions of logic.
Furthermore, the sentiment contained in another seminal founding document, the Declaration of Independence: " That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, ..." was still fresh in the minds of many not intent on maintaining the status quo.
Americans have always reserved the right to rebel--it is part of our nature.
Many of the little industrialized States joined South Carolina, and the list would have continued to grow had Virginia seceded in time to permit the Maryland Legislature to vote on secession before the State was invaded by Northern Militias. (The MD legislature was placed under house arrest at Fort McHenry, Habeas Corpus suspended by Lincoln.)
Consider that nearly half of the country was sufficiently intent on separation to fight for it, if necessary, and the only question becomes one of what was the final straw, not what single thing moved the South to secession. That no one would want another nation to have an armed presence in the midst of and controlling a vital harbor, and would be willing to use force to evict that presence is a no-brainer. In the mind of the South Carolinians, Fort Sumpter was just such an entity.
Consider carefully how the Right to dissociate from the Union is treated. We are again at a juncture where large portions of the country are at loggerheads over economic and other issues. We again find ourselves squared off over an abyss of disagreement at a fundamental level, where some embrace the overreach of Federal Government and others eschew it--favoring instead local solutions. We have reached the point where the Federal Government is not doing its Constitutionally enumerated tasks (securing the borders, for instance), and yet will not allow the States to secure the international borders within their jurisdictions. We have taxation without effective representation. We have swarms of Federal officers sent forth to disrupt commerce and travel, and have standing armies of federal agents and militarized police armed with military grade equipment. We are not secure in our persons, places, papers nor effects from the very government sworn to uphold the Right to be so.
Frankly, our forbears would have been up at arms long ago.
So if one attacks, historically, the Right of the South to secede, that has serious implications for some lines of thought for the present.
If we are to learn from History, we need to look at a less distorted picture than the "good guys/bad guys" fable and consider many of the issues which impelled those in the 1860s to consider schism as the best solution may be echoed in the issues of today.
In the minds of many, we have a new slavery, overseen by the IRS, a rogue agency which has been used to further political aims, which forcibly extracts a "voluntary" income tax and will decide not just who wins or loses in an economic sense, but can be used to deny essential health care if current efforts come to fruition--effectively deciding not just who is economically successful, but who lives or dies. This is not a Constitutionally enumerated power of the Federal Government, and has the potential to fly in the face of the fifth and 14th amendments as well.
When we deal with a government which has such visible contempt for its own seminal documents and founding precepts, which will not perform its Constitutionally mandated tasks nor permit other governmental entities to step into the breach, seeking to eliminate what might be the only viable (if fundamentally undesirable) option would be folly.