From what I understand, over six hundred thousand soldiers died in the US civil war? It wasn't a micro-mutiny on a pirate ship. It was a formative part of American history, two rival sides in sustained battle for years. So why do people refer to confederate soldiers as traitors?

It seems to me, that any working man who went to die at war, was demonstratively loyal, to thier people & the only world they had ever known. Most soldiers weren't rich property holders & weren't fighting for a right to own slaves, nor even the abstract notion of "slavery".

In virtue of that, seems morally suspect to retrofit today's repugnance toward slavery to yesterday's events, fixing it to the collective memory of footsoldiers sent to die in a war whose historic weight proved so much larger than the very ordinary, lives they were able to live.