It has been said that the victors write the history; but that is only true, when that victory is absolutely total and those that are the defeated, effectively thereby have had their voice silenced, once and for all. While there may be many things that those that made up the Confederacy so represented, one of those things that they for a certainty believed and of which was patently false on every level, was their fatally misguided belief that the Southern cause was noble and just, and that the Federal government was therefore the unjustified oppressors of those Southerners that took up arms against that Federal government; so done after the Southern States had lost a fair democratic election, so that such a belief then that the Southern cause was noble and upright is a great lie, and a primary example of why those that delude themselves into thinking wrong, subsequently have actions which reflect that wrong.
In point of fact, the South had nothing really to worry about when it came to their peculiar institution, of enslaving fellow human beings, within those States in which such was long established and legal, of which, the President-elect had made it vividly clear that he did not believe that he had the Constitutional right to interfere in such; yet, the South took the problematic position that to be precluded in the extension of that slavery within territories subsequently added as States to this Union, would bring the death knell of said institution, though even that belief, was fundamentally flawed as being unnecessarily too fatalistic.
The South, through its own arrogance and lack of foresight, took the words as spoken by President Lincoln that in regards to the voluntary and inviolable Union of States that he had a solemn obligation to "preserve, protect, and defend it;" as being the words of an oppressive dictator and further believed that Lincoln and that Union of loyal States would not successfully take up arms against their own compatriots, and therefore that the South would be able to secede from that Union, with nary a shot fired, or perhaps through a short war, in which the North would after being bloodied a bit, simply give up and just let the South be.
Instead, the South became the aggressors in a war that need not have occurred, and compounded that error by not taking in the reality that they were severely outgunned, outnumbered, and without a legitimate cause that European countries would support them in. So then, that Confederacy of States, who took battle upon that loyal Union of States, did so, for no other real reason, other than their bigoted belief that the natural state of those that were of a darker complexion, was to be perpetually enslaved to the Southern white man, for the exploitation and benefit of that white man.
There are still some that reside in this country today, that believe somehow that the South was right and thereby justified in their cause, without seeming to understand that those that lose at the ballot, and thereby take up arms against those that are the victors thereof, have no moral ground to stand upon; and further that all those that abuse, exploit, and enslave their fellow human beings, are by definition, immoral, unpatriotic, and at odds with the eternal justice of God, which will not be forever denied.