In the context of the secession crisis and the Civil War. I'm thinking historically.
In the 1850s, the nation was convulsed over the issue of slavery vs. free labor. This conflict had many flashpoints: the enforcement of the fugitive slave law, filibustering, Bleeding Kansas, the Ostend Manifesto, the list goes on. What it was not convulsed over was federalism. Because no one convulses over federalism, ever.
There has to be a real, tangible reason for people to engage. When some states passed personal liberty laws they weren't doing it in a demonstration of state vs. federal power, they were doing it because they opposed slavery, and wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery. When the slave states were appeased in the Compromise of 1850 by a draconian fugitive slave law, they didn't accept it because they wanted to demonstrate the supremacy of the federal government over the states, they did it to support slavery, and all that means.
People like feeling they are on the right side of the Constitution. Whether they are or not.