"Of course poor Southerners would give up their lives to protect the rich slaveowners they DID just that."
Marxist indoctrination, anyone? My slavery-era ancestors owned a fair amount of land, and by local standards were relatively well-off. They did not own slaves. The sons who went off to war did so to protect their homes from invasion. One died of peritonitis at Point Lookout, MD. One is buried in an unmarked mass grave by the former Gordonsville Receiving Hospital in VA, and one, my second great grandfather, ran off and enlisted at age 14 to try and go find his older brothers. Needless to say, he didn't find them.
Some of my ancestor suffered under the same delusions as yours. So what? There was NOTHING under attack by the Union prior to the Revolt. If people didn't see what the realities of the time were they often simply did not have the education sufficient to understand what was happening.
RAT propaganda was just as effective in 1860 as in 2004 and gulled millions to move against their best interests.