Exactly right. For "rights and best interests" read negro servitude. If it had been any other issue it wouldn't have taken a century for the southern black man to acquire the same civil rights as everyone else ... and that at the hands of the hated "federal" government.
If the average southerner (for whom slavery wasn't an issue) had had any sense he would have liberated himself from the southern aristocracy before tackling the bigger projects.
traditional scholars of the north/south/east/west, until the rise of the HATEFILLED, arrogant, anti-Southernist,self-righteous,REVISIONIST historiography in the mid-1960s, generally agreed on at least ONE thing: that the WBTS was NOT about chattal slavery.
traditional scholarship held (correctly in my view) that the WBTS was, while complex in causation, PRIMARILY about a continuation of the American Revolution.
it was about LIBERTY for dixie.nothing more,nothing less.
IF what you say were true, the CSA wouldn't have had at least 100,000 black men as volunteers for the war (and incidently NOT a few black women!). there may have been as many as 15,000 black men in the ranks of the CSA's various military formations, according to the late (& sorely missed!) Professor H R Blackerby of the history department of Tuskeegee University.
free dixie,sw