The Southern soldiers, many of whom were conscripted, fought for the same reasons that soldiers everywhere fight. They are told by their elders, their preachers and teachers, that it was the right thing to do. They were told that they were fighting oppression and for the safety of their mothers, their girlfriends and their homes. Young men go to war because they have not yet learned question, much less to say no, to authority. It has been the same through all time. The exact same thing goes for the Union soldiers. I think it would be a misunderstanding of the time to believe that they were willing to sacrifice their lives so that some black person they had neve seen could be freed from bondage. This is not meant as a defense of the war, support of the Confederacy or an apology for slavery, it is just stated as fact.
The war was about the almighty dollar, nothing more or less. Slavery was a factor, but, the bottom line was the bottom line. The enormuous wealth of a small portion of the poplulation was at stake. Money talks and philosophy walks.
The guilty parties were the leaders, the plantation owners, the cotton traders, the politicians who had the most to lose. The rest of the people of the South were no different from those in the North except for being less prosperous because of slavery. You wouldn't pay a man to do a job your slave could do.
During the Civil, on both sides, it was the young man without connections that served on the battlefield. Below is the link to an individual that was not far from a typical Southern trooper. He would have been my 2nd cousin if we were in the same generation. He joined at age 16 and died at 17, he never owned a slave (or anything else of value) Are we to damn his soul for the accident of where he was born? If he had been born in New York, I have no doubt, he would have been an American trooper, just like my other ancestors from Pennslyvania who fought for the Union.
The kid pictured below was not some black hearted monster If we hold individual soldiers guilty for the sins of their political leaders, all of us Vietnam era veterans (myself included) should be tarred and feathered from the same bucket, for we know now just how unjust that war was was too.
When we talk about black hearts, lets be clear who we are speaking of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Francis_Jemison
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