Correction, I urged you to look at it. I posted the link to it to Mr. Rogers. For some reason I got the two of you confused.
In post #121 you concede that Texas along with several other states specifically identified slavery as the cause or one of the causes of secession. So, there is no debate.
Oh, there is still a debate. Someone else made the point clearer up thread somewhere, but a state saying that they are leaving because of a perceived threat to slavery, does not necessarily mean that they are actually leaving because of a perceived threat to slavery.
As one Northern Newspaper cleverly recognized, that was just a made up excuse to misdirect what was really happening.
Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding States are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern or Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile greatness, by a revenue system verging upon free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out policy by which only nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.The difference is so great between thee tariff of the Union and that of Confederate States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties … The … [government] would be false to all of its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.
Boston Transcript, March 18 1861
Slavery was clearly under no threat in the Union, but there was a great quantity of money to be made by the Southern wealthy if they could get out from under Washington's economic control of their European trade.
The US laws had been jiggered so that New York businessmen controlled the vast bulk of the money from Southern export products. Getting out of the Union would allow the wealthy men of the South to control that cashflow.
I believe the opportunity for greater profit drives most people, and I believe they will also lie about their real motives if profit is at stake.
This references debate over the Morrill Tariff, passed on March 2, 1861, supported by Republicans opposed by Democrats North and South.
Democrats opposed would include Boston merchants and industrialists who didn't want to disturb their long-standing trade patterns with the South.
But Republicans who supported Merrill were not tied to the South and had more interest in promoting their own industries than preserving the Southern based New England economy.
Regardless, the appropriate peacetime response to this editorial would be to adjust Morrill rates to make them competitive with pre-Morrill rates then in effect in the Confederacy.
Nothing in this editorial suggests anything else.