History books are written by the "Victors".
It is amazing how much ignorance there is out there among people who think they know history and try to condense it to a simplistic answer. You will never convince the historically blind of the many valid reasons the South seceded in order to become a new nation.
How the "North" of 1861 and some of its leaders are currently given the aura of being the moral compass of the nation is frightening. The North had plenty of its own dirty laundry in the abuse of immigrants in sweat shops, as well as condoning slavery within its own borders. Lincoln recognized this when he presented his Proclamation, ( AFTER the invasion) for it called for the freeing of slaves in those states currently "in rebellion" but not for those states which had not seceded, parties he did not wish to offend. It was purely a political ploy to focus an unpopular war (in the North it was extremely unpopular, in case you didn't know) on the simple message of the abolition of slavery. That, the agitators could understand and in their limited way, accept. Like today, these same agitators cannot understand the issue of States' Rights. This phrase conveys nothing to them. Ask them what it means, and they will stare at you blankly like a cow with no glimmer of intelligence. They only understand dumbed-down history, and have learned their history from movies of that period which emphasized the mistreatment of slaves to make them more salacious. If they have read any history at all, they have read liberal revisionist history.