Changing the context doesn't really help. Regardless of how many motives the South had to succeed, slavery was central, and the Confederacy should therefore not have been allowed to exist. While racisism was prevalent in the North as well, it was one of the guiding ideologies of Southern society and in particular, its economy. And thank God that it was so short lived. Our country is better than that.
You have a very strange perspective on history, to which I have already responded in another reply, to another poster. Slavery is not the defining issue in the determination of human morality. Slavery, for example, was tolerated and accepted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Western Bible. It has existed in one form or another in virtually every non-Biblical religion, as well.
I believe that it is a mistaken system--unfair to both slave and master, for a variety of reasons. But you cannot revise the whole human experience, the way many hereabouts have tried to do, in order to make an angry statement.
And so far as relations between the races? There was then, and still is now, more goodwill between Caucasian and Negro inhabitants in the South than in the North. The reason why the Old South was considered the last true Civilization was because it accorded everyone respect, from the greatest plantation owner to the lowliest field hand. There is no equivalent respect between different classes and conditions in America today.
No, the system was not a good one. But it was not the consummation of evil, either. Read what Booker T. Washington, who rose from it had to say, a generation later: Booker T. Washington.
William Flax