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For the last few weekends, CSpan 3 has been showing a talk by Dwight Pitcaithley of the National Park Service talking about his book The US Constitution and Secession. Pitcaithley collected all of the various constitutional amendments designed to save the union that were proposed in Congress and in state conventions in the years leading up the the Civil War.

He shows that the vast majority of proposed amendments concerned slavery. A few were designed to provide a constitutional route to secession or to restructure the presidency as a multi-person executive. Only two proposed amendments had anything to do with tariffs.

If you want to understand what was on the country's mind a century and a half ago, those proposed amendments might be a good place to start. If you want to understand what Jefferson Davis thought, rather than speculate about his secret abolitionism, you might consider that the amendment that he wanted in order to save the union would have made slavery legal and protected in all the states.

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A few were designed to provide a constitutional route to secession

That totally unnecessary because state secession is not unconstitutional, even now.