I will just point out that bashing the South and using slavery as the device to bash Southerners is a device that liberals have always used to try and further their political beliefs.
They did it before the parties switched when they were Republicans and the South was Democrats and they have continued to do it after the parties switched when they’re all Democrats and we’re Republicans.
It’s the same game they have been playing since the 1870s when they always waved the bloody shirt in every northern precinct to gain support for their liberalism.
The fact is that the run-up to the Civil War was pretty much all about slavery, and the South's refusal to accept abolition of same.
That conflict begins with the "three-fifths" compromise back in 1787. The Missouri compromise, Great compromise, and Kansas-Nebraska Act were all part of the same dynamic that finally led the South to secede over the issue of slavery.
If stating the facts about the South and its slaves constitutes "bashing," then perhaps the problem is not with the facts, but with the fantasy world you and your pals have been trying to build from the ashes of the old South.
Southerners of today had nothing to do with slavery and bear no responsibility for it. Just like descendants of slaves should get no benefit because their ancestors were enslaved.
But the slave system as it existed in 1860 had no place in a nation that claimed to be a Free Republic. None. Zero, zip, nada.
Calhoun and Davis do -not- get a free pass just because Jesse Jackson can't shut up about slavery.