Here's where I stand on that:
- the Union had no right to invade or attack the Confederacy, but
- just because the Union had no right to do this does not mean the Confederacy wasn't defend something that was also wrong.
I guess my point is that I don't really care if both sides were wrong, what we're talking about is a portion of our society that has been forced to look at statues revering people who might not have been slave owner, might not have even liked slavery, but still chose to support the side that, at least in part, did support the right for one man to literally own another.
And that's where I draw the line. Everything else is just philosophical discourse.
You are right, of course.
The folks that erected these statues, however, did so after the Great Disfranchisements.
In 1861, southern voters had decided that they could no longer remain in the Union consistent with their safety. The federal government killed 260,000 of them and destroyed billions of dollars in non-slave property for making that decision and over-ruled the decision itself.
In 1865, the same southern voters had the temerity to send to Congress the same people they had chosen to lead them during the war. Despite explicit prohibitions against doing so, Republicans refused to seat them (because they were mostly Democrats).
Then, in the late 1860s, the federal government ordered the states to draft new state constitutions by electing delegates to state constitutional conventions, and ordered that anyone who could not take the ironclad oath could vote for delegates. The Confederacy had had universal white male conscription, so almost no citizens of those states could vote for delegates who would draft the new state constitutions.
That tends to stick in people's craws a bit. These statues were erected after the Great Disfranchisements (and I believe as a
result of those events).
(This experience also had the unfortunate effect of teaching white southerners that if you do not like the results of elections, just disfranchise your opponents, something white southerners would adopt with relish over the next century, but that is another debate.)