No it wasn't. The southerners of the 1860 were the "Tea Party" of that day. They believed that the Constitution was the ruling legal document of the Republic at that time. Lincoln and the radical republicans trashed that Constitution and we have only lived under a form of it, picking and choosing only those parts we want to believe and twisting the other parts to fit our different political agendas as we need them, since 1865. That is the reason that phrases like "shall not infringe" and "shall pass no law" in our Amendments and Constitution have no meaning anymore.