an icepick through the keyhole

As an additional point, I do agree that the tension between state's rights and a strong federal government had not been completed resolved by the Civil War, but then again it's been a bone of contention ever since the Revolution, from the arguments over the Constitution as embodied in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, to the conflict between Thomas Jefferson's Republicans and John Adams' Federalists and also between Jefferson and Chief Justice James Marshall (of Marbury v. Madison fame).

One of my favorite observations is that of Joseph Ellis, who said that America is not so much built on a proposition but an argument about that proposition. I think that the argument is a vital one, and one that has kept one side from becoming a tyranny, and the other side from turning a union into chaos. Point being, that the Civil War was an expression of an ongoing argument, but the specific issues that drove that argument in the 1860s were that of economic dominance, among others, and the core of the economy of the South was centered around slavery. That cannot be avoided.