Slavery itself is also not necessarily black-and-white (literally!). First of all (and this is going to get me in trouble with everyone) slavery as such is not anywhere forbidden in G-d's Law either for Jews or non-Jews. This does not mean that the form of slavery practiced in the South was Halakhic (it probably was not), but it is important to note that Halakhah regulates rather than forbids slavery. And if G-d did not forbid slavery, to attribute such a prohibition to him is to "add to the Torah" which is strictly forbidden (and which leads to all sorts of trouble).
However, slavery as practiced in the South at that time was more than just slavery--the owning of human beings by other human beings. It was racial slavery in which skin color was used as a mark of identification, so that even free Blacks had to at all times have papers on them to show that they were free. Now this is far from the only case of racial slavery in history; in fact, considering the habit of conquerors to enslave their victims, racial slavery may very well be the norm. But there is a schizophrenia deep within many neo-Confederate apologists (which all palaeoconservatives have inherited to one extent or another) which is to defend slavery while having come to hate (or at least extremely dislike) the slaves themselves. Now certainly in the beginning the white slave owners did not "hate" their slaves. Why would a person hate his own property? But over the years, beginning with the radical abolitionists and continuing down to our own contemporary "political correctness," neo-Confederates and paleocons have picked up an extreme negrophobia as a reaction to the "negrolatry" of the Left. This simply makes no sense. One cannot defend slavery as the bedrock of a stable society (which is what they did) if the slaves one is fighting so tenaciously to hold onto are regarded as a class of evil undesirable left wing "trouble makers." This negrophobia is not so much a product of slavery as the "jim crow" period that followed it, which in many respects was far worse than slavery had been. During slavery the owners had to at least provide the bare minimum of necessaries to their slaves. During jim crow the Blacks were on their own and back to performing the original tasks they had performed during slavery. Plus during slavery the slave owners played the slaves and the poor whites against one another. During jim crow the aristocrats were allied firmly with the poor whites and the Blacks had no one.
At any rate, I have read more than once on this forum the sentiment that "next time we'll pick our own d@mn cotton." I cannot read this line without wondering why the aristocrats did not merely enslave the poor whites who were all around them rather than import an originally alien people whom historical circumstances would eventually turn into their beit noire. Yet early ideologues of African slavery such as Calhoun despised poor whites and actually praised slavery for running them off the land to make room for the more noble slave-owners and their human property. This contempt of the Southern aristocrats for poor whites has been almost forgotten by history, though one catches a whiff of it in Gone with the Wind.
Another area of what I define as schizophrenia (or at least hypocrisy) among palaeoconservatives is their selective outrage not only at the charge of treason for disunion (since Southerners themselves made the same charge against secessionist New Englanders earlier in the nineteenth century) but also at centralization. The vast majority of foreign leaders admired by our liberty-loving decentralist palaeocons were in fact practitioners of centralization (Franco, Salazar, Papadopoulos, Chiang Kai-shek, etc.). There was no localism or regionalism under any of these palaeocon heroes. Why is Lincoln a tyrant for an attitude that made Franco a hero? This simply makes no sense. Even the beloved Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a centralizer! For that matter, for all the hoo-haw about the suspension of habeas corpus, the Birch Society's hero J. Edgar Hoover advocated the same thing during the Korean War, but you won't find the Birch Society criticizing him!
Anyway, the while the situation is not black-and-white as understood by most people, neither is it black-and-white as understood by neo-Confederates.
I am myself a descendant of Southern Unionists (though from the Upper South in my case) whose family has been Republican since Lincoln (there were lots of Union supporters in the South, many of whom fought for the Union--a fact often forgotten). I have had to admit to myself that their cause was not as lily pure as I used to believe. I wish the neo-Confederates would admit the same thing, but I know that they won't.
I see consistency in Lysander's POV and also support the proposition of a "right to be independent" - as long as it is accomplished legally and equitably. See donmeaker's post #68.
Most excellent post.
Neither side, as in all human affairs, was entirely right or entirely wrong. Each had good and bad arguments on its side and there were honorable men and opportunists on both sides.
Which means one has to decide which side was in the right on a net basis. For me, that was Lincoln and the Union.
YMMV