We tend to be slaves (no pun intended) to the idea that it's 'always better when things, families, countries stay together and work it out' ... but the fundamental issue was not worked out ... the south was ethically wrong about slavery, right about seceding from a tyrannical government.
Once the war starts, then you get all sorts of unethical and greedy stuff going on from both sides. War is a wonderful time for arbitrage.
"But even so, do you think that is justification for state-sponsored murder, destruction, dislocation, and persecution of millions of innocents?"
Absolutely not. But the 'State Sponsoring the Murder' will always believe it's the 'State Sponsoring Justified Killing for the Benefit of Man and High Principles' ... and, that's just what mankind does, and will always do. It's just one outcome of the original sin, or, mankind's powerful ability to delude himself. The wrongdoer is either sociopathic and doesn't care if what he does is wrong (doesn't have right or wrong,) or, his pride tells him what he's doing is right because it's for the greater good.
Lincoln himself - probably a do-gooder - blinded by his pride. But a thousand interests, blended together, almost all of them delusion, sometimes appearing as good, sometimes appearing as bad, always appearing as good or bad depending on who's doing the doing and who's doing the done-to, power the actual war and everything leading up to it and everything following.
When an ocean meets a river, and the tide comes in and out and that spot moves, that location where there seems to be a 'war' ... appears as an actual 'thing' ... but it's just water being water, force being force. One wouldn't say the salt water is right or the fresh water is right. I'm not arguing for moral relativism. I'm just saying if one seeks an answer to the end of the suffering caused by war, and one seeks that answer in ethical questions about who was right or wrong and how to stop wrong deeds, then there is only one conclusion ... that there need be an organization of men to stop it. And what does that give you? It gives you your next government, which in a few years will be on either the more or less immoral side of the next war against either its own people or another government.
War is baked into man, because delusion is baked into man. The wise man simply says 'I am deluded.'
Given a choice, though, I would have fought for the South - fought against the power of centralized government (or any concentrated power,) and having won, would like to think I would have been a southern abolitionist, but had I grown up in the south, probably would have actually believed there was nothing odd about these darker men working for free. Probably most of the darker men thought that too. Probably too, I would have sought profit from the war if possible.
The more I wrangle over the rightness and wrongness of the acts of men and myself, the more I'm convinced that riding a roller coaster with the hopes of actually getting somewhere, simple because the ride is compelling, is itself a delusion.
But faced with taking up a gun right now for either side, I believe a southern victory better for those who live on this plot of land, and the entire earth, and, while the Union was apparently preserved for a couple centuries, wasn't the thing that will no doubt eventually, and is currently, destroying the US, left to live ... Centralized Power ... the ONE thing the founders sought to avoid at all costs.
Not sure that's a direct answer - I am waxing way too philosophical this morning and perhaps subjecting everyone else to it. In my opinion, the Left suffers from a far more morbid case of delusion than the right. And in my opinion, the North was then more deluded than the south.
Though my sympathies are Southern, i admit that there were and are valid moral arguments to made on both sides, i.e. abolition vs. state sovereignty. The focus of the book however is to defend Southern culture and the Southern people, the institution of slavery not withstanding. Abolition of slavery could have been achieved, without the devastation of war, and without destroying republicanism.