Confederates had moral highground during Civil War

 

“To southerners the election’s most ominous feature was the magnitude of Republican victory north of the 41st parallel.

Lincoln won more than 60 percent of the vote in that region, losing scarcely two dozen counties. Three-quarters of the Republican congressmen and senators in the next Congress would represent this “Yankee” and antislavery portion of the free states. These facts were “full of portentous significance” declared the New Orleans Crescent. “The idle canvas prattle about Northern conservatism may now be dismissed,” agreed the Richmond Examiner. “A party founded on the single sentiment… of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power.” No one could any longer “be deluded… that the Black Republican party is a moderate” party, pronounced the New Orleans Delta. “It is in fact, essentially, a revolutionary party.” –Historian James McPherson

An abolition of slavery forced on the South by the whites would have been a justification for war and also a slap in the face to southern citizens and their values. While Lincoln plotted abolitionist policies Conf. President Jefferson Davis fought to keep the status quo.

“For his entire life (Davis) believed in the superiority of the white race. He also owned slaves, defended slavery as moral and as a social good, and fought a great war to maintain it. After 1865 he opposed new rights for blacks. He rejoiced at the collapse of Reconstruction and the reassertion of white superiority with its accompanying black subordination.” –William J. Cooper, Jr.

In a farewell address to the U.S. Congress following southern succession, Davis made clear the reason for this action was the refusal of Lincoln and the Republicans to recognize southern domestic institutions, which had traditions dating back to pre-Union colonial days. This attempted taking of Confederate property, he said, was blatantly unconstitutional.