In November 1860 -- immediately after the election of Abraham Lincoln and his "Black Republicans", when Deep South Fire Eaters began organizing to declare secession -- then there was no actual threat to slavery, whatever.
In Novembert 1860, the Federal government was still largely under control of the Democrat slave-power and its Northern Dough-Faced minions -- i.e., President James Buchanan.
The Supreme Court was still ruled over by Southern Chief Justice Taney, of Dred-Scott fame.
Even the so-called "Black Republican" Party, was pledged to protect slavery within states where it was already legal.
The only possible threat to slavery involved territories which had not yet determined their slave/free status, and of those, Republicans pledged to protect ones who wished to become free states.
In other words, Republicans favored choice while the Slave-Power wanted its "peculiar institution" imposed everywhere, thanks to Taney's Dred-Scott decision.
Point is: in November 1860, the only real threat to slavery -- "existential" or otherwise -- was in the fertile & overheated imaginations of the Slave-Power Fire Eaters.
Yeah, it's hard for us to imagine a Supreme Court justice writing such baloney.
But, time moves on. Generations come and go. Lincoln is now generally regarded as one of our two or three greatest presidents.
Nearly everyone now recognizes that the slaveholders were trapped in a pathological culture of dependency from which they could not escape without intervention by an external force. Lincoln and the Union provided the tough love that slaveholders desperately needed to discover that they really could face the world on the their own two feet without the support of slaves. That is why most of their descendants are now grateful to Lincoln for all that he did to end slavery and grateful, too, to the United States for reconstructing Southern culture and creating what we know now as the New South.
Progress continues. There are now fewer people than ever who are burdened with hatred for the abolitionists or resentment for the elimination of slavery. They may be as noisy as ever, but they are very few in number now and, if asked, most of them will now bitterly concede that slavery is gone - gone forever and never coming back.
BroJoeK...for once I agree with you. There was no such threat, and I think the Fire Eaters wanted secession in large part so that they could be “founders” and men of note - I think that underlying all of it were the ego needs of certain men in the Deep South who exploited grievances real and imagined to further their careers. While I think the states had the right to secede (over which we disagree), I think it was the wrong decision. The Deep South would have been economically marginalized by the developments of the second half of the 19th Century. With a separation from the Union, slaves who escaped North wouldn’t be sent back under the Fugitive Slave Act, which would have reduced the value of slaves generally. With a diminution of the importance and value of the agricultural commodities produced by the Deep South and a large dependent slave population, I don’t see how secession would have resulted in anything but massive social and economic problems for the Deep South. It could well be that over time the non-seceding states would actually have been better off without the Deep South, although that is just conjecture.