There is a common little rhetorical tool, utilized frequently by politicians, where when you find yourself asked a question which you don't like, you choose instead to pretend that you've been asked a question with which you're more comfortable. That's what you've done here, by ignoring the points that I've made, and instead attempting to associate me with some other bucket of claims which you feel more comfortable responding to.
> The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people.
The states that seceded in 1860 seceded purely to preserve slavery--that's a matter of fact. I don't see how that changes anything I stated above, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
> The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
This is an odd statement, because it contains two assertions, one true and one false. The Confederacy was created by white supremacists who wanted to preserve slavery. But they didn't start a war, they started a country. A country which was, for all the odious motivations underpinning its inception, just as much a democracy as the one that was founded by the Washington and Jefferson. When the United States declared their intent to wage war on the South, they were just as much a foreign power as the British were in 1775. The idea that Southerners were not defending their communities is simply bizarre.
None of this has any bearing on the assertions made above. Slavery is evil, we're all on the same page there. The Confederacy was created to preserve slavery. That was evil. But that doesn't change the fact that the North did not fight the war to free the slaves, but to subjugate the South and to preserve the American Empire. The fact that Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery doesn't have any bearing on the simple moral fact that imperialism is evil, too. And that nations don't get to start imperial wars, kill a million people, fall ass-backwards into taking an important moral action, and then pretend that the war was about that moral action all along.
If the North had fought the war to free the slaves, then you could make the case that it was a moral war. But they didn't, and it wasn't. It was an evil war which happened to bring about the end of an evil institution. We're adults, and we should be able to entertain nuance in our appreciation of history. It is okay observe that the end of slavery was a beautiful thing, and that we're glad that it happened, AND that the Civil War itself was a moral abomination and nothing to be proud of.