The ball's in your court. Just what was good about the Confederacy?
I'll grant that once the Davis regime started shooting and the Union responded militarily a lot of Southerners felt bound to "defend" their home soil, but what good did or would secession and the creation of the Confederacy have served?
Would a slave state rebellion really have made the world any freer?
What was good about it? The men who fought for it, both the soldiers and the officers. The idea that people have a right to form a new government when they conclude their current one no longer serves them.
What good would a Confederacy that survived have done? Well obviously the persistence of slavery would have been bad (just want to make that clear in case you’re a Michael Gerson type of conservative), and who knows, maybe later results would have been disastrous. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a united American nation strong enough to wage WW2. Then again maybe slavery would have ended by other means sooner than expected, and maybe North and South would have reunited peacefully. Maybe we’d have a much smaller federal government.
Who knows how history would have turned out. What if there had been no slavery in the US? Then most black Americans would either not exist, or they’d have come to be in Africa.
I don’t know why you felt compelled to put quotation marks around “defend.” That is no doubt how they saw it, and back then one thought of themself as much a Virginian, or North Carolinian, or Tennessean as they did an American.
I’m not saying I wish the South had won. Considering how many lost opportunities there were for the South, it almost makes me believe they were simply destined or meant to lose. My major point in all of this is that having admiration for the Confederates/Southerners/Rebels doesn’t make one a bad person. Statues of Confederate war heroes should not come down. Lee and Jackson were admirable and honorable. The hundreds of thousands who fought were doing what they felt to be right. One shouldn’t have to apologize for any of these sentiments for beliefs.
You may disagree totally about the Confederacy, but as a conservative I would hope that you recoil at how people are attacked for harmless sentiments like those I just mentioned, and at how they give in and apologize, which only emboldens those on the Left who seek to restrict public discourse to such a point that nothing but their views are deemed proper.