Nathan Bedford Forrest would agree, as quoted below.
I think both sides were fighting from principle; they were men of their time.
And yes, it's the liberal Northeast that's been most responsible for the reinstitution of slavery - to the leviathan federal government.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from Nathan Bedford Forrest by Jack Hurst as an illustration of how these men regarded their opponents as honorable men with conflicting principles:
"In a much less private letter three days later, Forrest accepted an invitation from ex-Federals to attend and participate in another Elmwood Cemetery ceremony: decoration of the graves of Union dead.
The invitation came after former Federal soldiers had participated in an Elmwood decoration of Confederate graves, and in the spirit of his surrender address a decade earlier, he responded to this invitation by saying he 'earnestly request(ed) all ex-Confederate soldiers to join me in (the invitation's) acceptance...' The next day he led former Confederates in decorating Elmwood's Federal headstones.
The Appeal that morning carried a public letter signed jointly by him and Gideon Pillow declaring that regardless of their wartime differences with the Federals, 'we must admit that they fought gallantly for the preservation of the government which we fought to destroy, which is now ours, was that of our fathers, and must be that of our children...Our love for free government, justly administered, has not perished..."
It is without question that the states that left the union did so to form their own union, aka Confederate States of America, not to overthrow the US government.
One can parse words in any fashion to meet one's agenda and in this case I think that you've done just that. When Forrest said, "of the government which we fought to destroy", he obviously meant the destruction of the 'union', not the overthrow of the US government.