My great grandfather ran away and enlisted at age 14 to try to find his oldest brother, they hadn’t heard from him in months. Never found him, he was gut shot and died in Point Lookout, MD as a prisoner of war.
My grandmother told of her grandfather on his deathbed, demanding to be put into his Confederate uniform, and raving that he was ‘going after the Yankees’.
People who think that the war was only about slavery, and that remembrance of it can only be racist, are either intellectually lazy, or intellectually dishonest.