"...and his slaves."
The war was not about slavery, despite what they like to tell anyone in the pro-Northern history books that pollute most classrooms in the country.
I forget the number of Southerners who actually owned slaves, but I know it was a very miniscule percentage, something around 2-3%. Most people who fought in that war were fighting for their homes, their country, their way of life. The cause of the Southerner in the war was very just. I will note one thing. William Sherman, the war criminal, was a supporter of slavery, and after Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation (which had zero legal effect in loyal border states), draft riots occured in Northern cities, because all those young northern men were more than happy to fight to deny the South self-determination, but they had no desire to see slaves freed.
This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In his “Cornerstone” speech, delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, at the same time that the South was in the process of seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was “fundamentally wrong.” That premise was, as Stephens defined it, “the assumption of equality of the races.” Stephens insisted that, instead, “our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth.”
I agree. The south has been repressed and poor ever since then, too. And the stupid stereotypes and discrimination of the southern people is just plain wrong. The southern people are a genteel and well mannered people. Southern hospitality is still alive and well.