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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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To expand on ripcord's answer, which is entirely accurate, there's nothing inherently conservative or progressive about states' rights. Politicians support or oppose states' rights based on whether they support the policies of the state or the federal government.
Slavery was federal law. Secessionists opposed a state's right to declare escaped slaves as free.
New territories were split on the issue of slavery, but it was Lincoln's promise to make abolition the law for all new territories that upset secessionists. The Nebraska territories were anti-slavery, while the New Mexico territories were mixed. In either case, neither wanted to leave it to new states to determine the law for themselves.
Then you have the question of secession itself. South Carolina, and the subsequent Confederate states, claimed that a state's right to secede was implied in thr Constitution. Lincoln, the Republicans, and really everyone in the Union disagreed. It's a weird, tautological argument to say that seceding states were seceding because they were in favor of a state's right to secede from the Union. But on this issue, there were clear opinions on either side, with the Union opposing the legal "right" to secede and the Confederacy supporting it. One might argue that the Civil War was technically fought over a state's right to seced, but that's a big circular freeway with no exits.
There were many more factors that led up to secession and the Civil War, but the common thread of slavery ran through the entire conflict. On that one issue, slavery, it is not correct to say that the Confederate States seceded to defend the state's right of self-determination, because they were specifically and vehemently opposed to a state's right to self-determine whether slavery was legal. The abolitionists were not in a position before the war to free the slaves in the South, and the federal government was not trying to exert its power over the states that attempted to secede. The federal government was refusing to enforce slavery legislation in all states, and it intended to make slavery illegal in all new territories, but in both of those questions, the Confederacy was not taking the side of state's rights.
TlDr, Confederates were even bigger shitheels than you probably think.