"What a lot of people don't know is that it's not what the Civil War was fought over. Slavery would not have lasted much longer had their not been a war. I believe it was a propaganda tactic. "
Then you are simply wrong, in that your beliefs are disproved by the facts.
The war began when South Carolina seceded, and in the document that stated the reasons for secession, the political leaders specifically and repeatedly name the Union's attempt to interfere with slavery as their main complaint. They define themselves as one of the "Slaveholding states." Their most explicitly detailed grievances are the northern states' refusal to return fugitive slaves. They also invoke the three-fifths clause. You can read the document here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Those who say the Confederacy was fighting for States' Rights or self-determination or freedom or any other noble concept are distorting the argument either willfully or through ignorance. The reason for the secession -- according to their own statements -- was to preserve their right to own slaves.
Officially, the Union fought the first two years of the war to preserve itself, not to end slavery, though the first volunteers were largely abolitionists, and Lincoln had for years (in slightly different words) said that the country couldn't continue half-slave, half-free. But from the Confederate perspective, you cannot separate secession from slavery.
When slavery would have ended is conjecture, but even if it were not economically advantageous -- which it still was and still is, since free labor is the cheapest labor of all -- the southern states were not about to free an entire population virtually equal to the white population and give them all a right to vote. That would have been political suicide. Even if slavery had ended, oppression would have continued -- as indeed it did through Jim Crow laws and so on. How many years would it have been okay for slaves to wait while slavery gradually faded away?
You can find all the legal analogies you want. A husband might say the government has no right to interfere with his marriage, and we would all tend to agree, until we find out that he thinks it is his right as a husband to beat his wife. Parents might say that they should be able to raise their kids according to their own beliefs, but that stops when we find out that they are whipping their kids with an extension cord as discipline. David Koresh claimed the Branch Davidians had a right to worship as they chose, but he was having sex with his followers' eight and nine year-old children.
Your freedom ends when you willfully inflict unnecessary harm on other human beings. For individuals, that means you go to prison for assault, battery, kidnapping, rape, attempted murder, or murder. For a state to speak about the freedom and right to keep slaves is an obscenity.
"By 1860, the entire United States was built upon it."
This is an exaggeration at best. Certainly the economic growth of the country as a whole benefited from slavery, but on a local and state level (even taking into account the New England states at one time making profit from the Triangle Trade), only the southern states were still benefiting from slavery.
But that's besides the point anyway: whether the U.S. was built upon it or not historically, by 1861 you could either be for it or against it. Being for it is evil, if the word has any meaning.
"Civilization itself was probably built upon slavery by that point,"
Again, a gross exaggeration -- but fine. Yes, Greece and Rome had slaves. Medieval Europe and Russia until the mid 19th-century had serfdom. Modern Europe had indentured servitude, which is temporary slavery. Civilization also has given us sacking cities, burning people at the stake, drawing and quartering, handing out blankets infected with smallpox to children. But all of those things ended at some point, and when they ended, things became more civilized. Saying "Civilization itself was probably built upon slavery" is an argument for stasis.
"and the Civil War was hardly the last remnants of it. It was certainly the most eye-opening of the evils of racism, but labling the South as evil is both racist and hypocritical. "
No, it's not. I didn't say white people were evil. That would be racist, and as I pointed out, most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves and one of my ancestors did. But the South, as in the Confederacy, as in the political system and not the individuals who fought for it, was evil. Most German soldiers in World War II never herded Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and so forth into ovens. Most were patriotic men who were fighting for their country. But they were fighting -- through little to no fault of their own -- for an evil system. We can honor the men as brave or even blameless soldiers, but we cannot honor the cause.
The same is true for the Confederacy. You want to place flowers on a Confederate grave, that's fine. You want to honor your ancestor for fighting bravely, be my guest. But anyone who wants to fly a Confederate flag and make up fairy tales about how the South just wanted to be left alone (to deny people their freedom, split up families, rape women with impunity, torture human beings with brands and whips, and so on), is on the wrong side of both history and morality.
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