The sport?
It would be a distraction, no doubt about that!
If it was ALL bout slavery what took Lincoln so long to free them?
And why were all those people fighting who didn’t own slaves? No ancestor in my family ever own a slave yet some of them fought for the south.
YES!
Genoa: "The sport?"
First of all, go back and review the video:
Second, it's important to remember that from almost Day One of our republic, Southern political parties were Jeffersonian & Jacksonian Democrats, and the North we can call John Adams' or even Hamiltonian Federalists who eventually became Whigs and finally Republicans.
Of all those parties, only the Republicans were anti-slavery and that's what ultimately caused Civil War.
But beginning with Barry Goldwater in 1964, the Deep South realigned itself away from Liberal / Progressive / Leftist Democrats and to the same Republicans whose ancestors fought to abolish slavery, and (so the legends tell us) further abused the South during Reconstruction and later.
That was a huge problem in psychological disconnect -- how could Southerners politically align with those very people who (so they were told) destroyed their land, raped their women and ate their babies?!
The answer is: only with great difficulty, and one expression of that huge difficulty are the nearly continuous Civil War treads on Free Republic, where history buffs, some scholars and many partisans on both sides attempt to establish their own views as the more-or-less official Free Republic version of Republican history.
I say: enjoy, participate and learn -- it's all good, so long as real facts & reason prevail.