[pnathan]

It's also important to note that there were a number of factors playing into the Civil War. Slavery was but only one of the factors, albeit the highest profile one (and likely the one with the longest and nastiest shadow when all is said and done).

I do agree your thoughts and want to push further - it is critical to not exoticize the Confederates into an 'other', unknowable, evil, "literally Hitler". The Confederates were as human as us all - they fought for similar reasons as people do today, with the common shared fate of soldiers everywhere: death, destruction of family, trauma stemming for years afterward, vast distortions of the previous culture from the scars of war.

We "simply" disagree today on certain key beliefs.

This immediately leads to the question: What beliefs today that we hold will be considered as bad as what the Confederates held?

[Kalium]

It's also important to remember that almost all of those other factors boil down to slavery. Economic differences? Yeah - slavery. State's rights? Yeah - the right to choose slavery. And so on.