"The Confederacy was not so much about slavery as it was about the desire to be a separate country ..."

They didn't want to be a separate country just for giggles. They wanted to be a separate country (actually, 11 separate countries bound together in a "confederacy") so they could continue to legally own other human beings. That was the whole impetus for secession. 

It doesn't do anybody any good to pretend. The Confederate states were not the good guys in the Civil War.