I can't speak for you but yeah, Davis sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths to defend the institution of slavery.
The same things that actually did replace it, of course, only without the hideous loss of life and the despicable abuses of Reconstruction.
The only reason it was replaced was because the Southern slave owners lost their chattel. They would not have done that voluntarily.
“I can’t speak for you but yeah, Davis sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths to defend the institution of slavery.”
And how did he “send them?” Did he say to them, “You who will never own a slave, or even have enough money to command the respect of a slave, must lay down your lives so that I will not lose my slaves and my great wealth”?
Is that how he did it? Come on, I cannot believe that you think *you* would have marched off to protect Jeff Davis’s slaves. Try, really try, to imagine that the average Confederate was as reasonable as you are. I know you’ve been conditioned to believe that they were horrible monsters, just slavering to maintain an institution that benefitted them in no way, but that’s not even plausible. Not in the real world.
“The only reason it was replaced was because the Southern slave owners lost their chattel. They would not have done that voluntarily.”
You are apparently unaware of the ongoing manumission of slaves in the decades leading up to the war. You are also failing to take into account economic trends and resource depletion that was fast rendering slavery-based agriculture economically untenable.
Do you think the slave-owners were stupid? Do you think they would have clung to slavery even if it impoverished them? When they discovered that they couldn’t stay rich with slavery, they’d have dumped it like a hot potato.