You make a very persuasive argument, and I think you've won. I had three great grandfathers who were officers for the Confederacy, oddly enough, all South Carolinians. I have some medals and uniform buttons (all marked with eagles and stars, but no battle flags.) I also had a great grandfather who was hanged for bushwhacking Yankees in the hills of North Georgia. I think these people, and the others who fought with them, are worth remembering. We cannot understand them. My mother's father's father owned hundreds of slaves and "miles and miles of land" but was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe and died of disease acquired as a 56 year old prisoner of war. His heirs lost everything. My mother's mother's father was part black and part Indian, and died broke at the end of a rope as a guerilla. My father's mother's father was a rich plantation and slave owner and became a commissioned (unprofitable) blockade runner. He ended penniless the father of numerous white and mulatto children on his island off the coast. My father's father's father was a physician who at the start of the war turned his property into gold, and went off to serve as a military surgeon. He was rich enough after the war to educate his sons.
I don't know what their motives were. I suppose most of them thought their duty was to their States. They paid a price in life and property to do what they thought was honorable. None of it was necessary, of course. One could leave. Take his money with him. Apparently, very few people did.
I don't know why the poor whites without slaves went off to fight and die. It was against their interests. But many of them fought like hell.
Obviously, these largely white people are not all the people of the South. There are immigrants, and African-Americans who do not sympathize at all with them. But we do not have to limit honor to the ancestors of anyone. We don't honor people because they were right, but because they lived, and fought, or died. If we can only honor ancestors who died in wholly righteous causes, we won't have to honor very many.
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