I didn't say that the South was power mad. But the men behind the secession were certainly greedy for increasing the power of their own interests. The secessionists and their greed for power and material gain through slavery expansion into the territories dragged the rest of the South into the war. Although too many southerners should have known better, the southern revolution was one of the politicians and not the people as North Carolina Confederate governor Vance later admitted. Lee and the many Confederate who had to choose would never had been faced with the choice had the generally worthless pro-secession politicians of the South left well enough alone.
It was the North that was “power mad”. The South was simply defending their homeland from invasion!
Some might say that the Northern army was liberating the South from the misrule and heavy-handed big government of the slavery promoting power in the saddle in Dixie. I know in my family during the war, all of my Southern relatives that were murdered and harassed in those years were victimized by the Confederates and by not the liberating Union army.
The South was not the Confederacy and the Confederacy was not the South. I think Southern people would do well do look beyond the "hooray for Dixie" pro-Confederate myths and examine the low quality of public morals among the people that ran the political Confederacy.
The same can be said of many of the founding fathers, including Washington, who looked on British rule as an impediment to their personal acquisition of additional lands to the west.