Why the Southern Man took up musket and bayonet in 1861

From Chapter 1, Co. Aytch, memoirs of Private Sam R. Watkins, 1st Tennessee Regiment, Company H: 

The Federal army was advancing all along the line. They expected to
march right into the heart of the South, set the negroes free, take our
property, and whip the rebels back into the Union. But they soon found
that secession was a bigger mouthful than they could swallow at one
gobble. They found the people of the South in earnest.

 

Secession may have been wrong in the abstract, and has been tried and
settled by the arbitrament of the sword and bayonet, but I am as firm in
my convictions today [20 years after the war] of the right of secession as I was in 1861. The
South is our country, the North is the country of those who live there.
We are an agricultural people; they are a manufacturing people. They are
the descendants of the good old Puritan Plymouth Rock stock, and we of
the South from the proud and aristocratic stock of Cavaliers. We believe
in the doctrine of State rights, they in the doctrine of centralization.

John C. Calhoun, Patrick Henry, and Randolph, of Roanoke, saw the venom
under their wings, and warned the North of the consequences, but they
laughed at them. We only fought for our State rights, they for Union and
power. The South fell battling under the banner of State rights, but
yet grand and glorious even in death. Now, reader, please pardon the
digression. It is every word that we will say in behalf of the rights of
secession in the following pages. The question has been long ago settled
and is buried forever, never in this age or generation to be resurrected.

 

The question has been resurrected in our generation, friend Sam.