This may be true of contemporary Confederate sympathizers, but it wasn't true of the Confederacy. Why did the southern states choose that precise point in history -- after the election of Abraham Lincoln -- to leave the Union? It had nothing to do with an abhorance of "big government" (it was result of the Civil War that the federal government grew; a big, centralized federal government was not an issue when Lincoln became President). It had everything to do with the shrinking political base of the slave states, the momentum of free soil sentiment in Congress, the tip in the balance of power in Congress away from slave states, and the election of a Republican President.
It is true that Lincoln's initial justification for the war was to perserve the Union, but in the end, after the Emancipation Proclamation, it became a war to save the Union, AND to end slavery. And both those who fought for the north, and for the south, knew it. Lincoln and his supporters were ridiculed by anti-abolitionists (all Democrats, BTW) as a "Black Republicans" for their support for the end of slavery.
Contemporary libertarians who might find heroes in the Confederacy to promote their views of federalism and states rights undercut their arguments by adopting icons that were less interested in the cause of liberty, and more interested in preserving their "peculiar institution" of slavery. I've always been of the opinion that had the Confederacy been about preservation of the Constitution, states rights, and liberty against a growing national government, they might have had a point. But since these things were used, primarily, as justifications for protecting slavery, their position is untenable.
People who made much less provocative statements were actually subjected to worse.
Well stated!