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Harry Macarthy (or McCarthy) was a British-born vaudevillian. He also was a passionate partisan of secession, or at least he assumed that pose to win an audience. He joined the Confederate Army and performed for the troops. He also wrote a song to induce Missouri to secede. He did love the soil/toil rhyme, coming back to it in "Missouri, Bright Land of the West." Maybe he just wasn't that creative.

Some versions of "The Bonnie Blue Flag" changed the second line from "Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil" to "Fighting for our Liberty, with treasure, blood and toil" -- a sign of changing attitudes, perhaps -- but it's clear that Macarthy wrote about "property we gained by honest toil" and thousands sang it in 1861 with no doubt about what property they were fighting for or about the legitimacy of their claim to it.

There's more about the "Bob Hope of the Confederacy" here:

Harry Macarthy was an English-born vaudeville entertainer who emigrated to the United States in 1849 and settled in Arkansas. He billed himself the "Arkansas Comedian" and traveled widely throughout the South in company with his wife, Lottie, putting on "personation concerts." These performances featured Macarthy singing in the dialect of other cultures, dancing to ethnic-sounding music, and dressing in flamboyant costumes. Stephen Currie, in Music in the Civil War, reports that one of Macarthy's traveling companions during the war years was a cockatoo who had been trained to squawk "Three cheers for Jeff Davis!" on stage. Macarthy premiered "The Bonnie Blue Flag" during a concert in Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1861. He performed it a second time in September of that same year at the New Orleans Academy of Music in front of an audience of soldiers headed for the Virginia front. Again, the response was enthusiastic, and Macarthy was suddenly in demand as he had never been before. He traveled throughout the South during the war years, performing to packed houses of appreciative listeners, and although he continued to compose patriotic songs (among them "Missouri and The Volunteer" or "It Is My Country's Call." "The Bonnie Blue Flag" was his greatest success. Although some claim that Macarthy was more interested in attracting audiences and making money than he was in supporting the Southern cause, the song was an undeniable hit with Confederate soldiers and civilians alike and remains one of the classic Southern War songs.

... but of course, we know it was all because he was mad about protective tariffs ...

Slavery was legal and a part of everyday life in much of 19th century America. The most naive and unguarded utterances might simply assume the existence and the rightness of slavery and slaveowning. I don't say that everything that was said in the antebellum South refered to slavery -- that would be foolish. And I'm not drawing a distinction between North and South. The majority generally made assumptions about outgroups -- Indians, Blacks, and others -- that would shock or surprise us today. But today, some people are so determined to remove slavery from the history of the Rebellion that if someone raises the point, some nutjob will accuse him of being a "slavehound." Ironic, ... but sadly typical.

Things were different in the 1850s than they had been earlier, though. In 1780 or 1820 one could raise the question of whether slavery was a good idea or a just institution or not. By 1860, this was impossible. Fear of abolitionists accounted for much of it. Perhaps Jacksonian Democracy played a role as well. The old aristocratic Virginia of the Founders could tolerate discussion of topics that would have been anathema years later. But of course, South Carolina and the new slave states were quite different from Virginia, and even in the days of the Founders, South Carolinians had been more worried about keeping control of the enslaved work force than other Americans.