First of all, the south fought on the basis of states rights.
The only right at issue was to make slaves of other men.
"I am a plain, blunt-spoken man. We say that man has a right to property in man. We say that slaves are our property. We say that it is the duty of every government to protect its property everywhere. If you wish to settle this matter, declare that slaves are property, and like all other property entitled to be protected in every quarter of the globe, on land and sea, Say that to us, and then the difficulty is settled."
-- Louis Wigfall, Texas Senator
Soon to be CSA congressman Lawrence Keitt, speaking in the South Carolina secession convention, said, "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it."
"It cannot be believed that our ancestors would have assented to any union whatever with the people of the North if the feelings and opinions now existing among them had existed when the Constitution was framed. There was then no tariff -- no negro fanaticism. It was the delegates from New England who proposed in the Convention which framed the Constitution, to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, that if they would agree to give Congress the power of regulating commerce by a majority, that they would support the extension of the African slave-trade for twenty years. African Slavery existed in all the States but one. The idea that they would be made to pay that tribute to their Northern confederates which they had refused to pay to Great Britain, or that the institution of African Slavery would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South, never crossed their imaginations. The Union of the Constitution was a Union of slaveholding States."
--Robert Barnwell Rhett
Such comments were typical.
You've seen this before.
Walt
That's incorrect.
(Abraham) Lincoln said he did not wage war on the Confederacy to stop slavery. He felt slavery was on the path of total extinction. (In other words, slavery would fail of its own accord.)
In 1862 Lincoln said "my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union." He felt that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln hoped that after the war was over he could gradually stop slavery.
Note: one of the possible solutions Lincoln considered was shipping former slaves back to Africa.
(This information here.
But, you already know all this.