My impression was that the issue of state's rights is one that could have been resolved over time via discussion and debate, but the issue of slavery is what made it impossible to have a rational discussion and led to war. The fact that Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation until it was absolutely necessary indicates that he knew that it was the one thing that would keep the South fighting until the very last. The South must have known that freeing the slaves (even if the only change was to pay them a subsistence wage and allow them to own property) would have turned them into a powerful economic bloc just through sheer numbers. It's the one issue that I don't think could really have been resolved without a fight.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
