I dispute few if any of your “facts,” but still don’t see how your commentary changes the big picture, where finally, the peculiar institution trumps everything else. All human beings should be able to identify with and understand the rationalizations we make when we do not want to give up something which is profitable for us, especially when we are being pressured by hypocrites, consider ourselves more honorable and better fighters, AND are prepared to die for our cause…even when we ourselves know that slavery is NOT morally acceptable. It is the kind of double think which we humans can do, BUT it does not change the fact that our cause was fatally flawed at its core. I say that the South got trapped by its own institutions, honor, and pride and as McCaslin Edmunds concludes in William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” “God used the Yankees to punish our pride and our sin.” He has little use for the Yankees, but also knows that the Southern Cause deserved to lose. Lincoln decides on the fly that all the blood being shed needs to have some meaning, hence the “new birth of Freedom etc.”

If there was no slavery issue, then there would have been no Civil War. What other issue could have trapped the South into such Divine/diabolical madness?