Around 1960, Smoky Joe Wood, the great Red Sox pitcher around 1915, was asked if he ever bet on baseball games like the Black Sox, Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb did. Wood responded that you can't judge an earlier generation by a succeeding generation's standards. Pretty smart for a dumb jock, eh?
Only five percent of Southerners owned slaves and only two percent owned more than three. The money men in the South knew slavery was dying because the industrial revolution in the North proved it was cheaper to pay workers by the hour than support them and their families from birth to death.
Southerners fought because they hated the North, in large measure because John Adams had outsmarted the Virginians in setting up the country, knowing the North would soon control the Presidency and the House due to predictable faster population gains. Something like 20 percent of Southerners, black and white alike, failed to survive childhood because of malaria, etc. The average Southerner didn't fight to preserve slavery because it was an economic system that had worked against them. Similarly, northern soldiers fought because they were conscripted, not for a noble purpose.
"Honey, I'm going down South to free the black man."
"Get your butt back in the field. There's crops to tend!"
Two years into the war, Lincoln said he wasn't fighting to end slavery but to preserve the Union.
I think I read where Julian Bond recently called it the Confederate swastika. Let's honor the war dead on both sides by understanding why they fought. Not why modern-day rabble rousers say they fought.