No, it wasn't. You are a traitor revisionist and sympathizer, and thus a disgusting human being with no moral or ethic compass, a failed education, and are probably a racist.
Let us quote the famous "Cornerstone Speech" of the Vice-President of the traitor States of America, Alexander Stephens, laying out the true meaning of the Confederacy, a few weeks after the first states seceded.
"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the black in spanish is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."
And the brave traitor patriots who fought to preserve their freedom?
"The Twenty-Slave Law, passed by the traitor Congress on October 11, 1862, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), created an exemption to military conscription for the owners of twenty or more slaves. The law was controversial in much of the South, where it served to exacerbate certain social rifts and led to claims by drafted soldiers that they were fighting a "rich man's war.""
Also, the articles of the confederation outlawed any traitor states from ever seceding themselves. Because Big Government is only ruining liberty and freedom when its stopping you from whipping friends to death in your cotton fields as you get rich off generations of despair, in an entrenched aristocracy that would make even Russian or Chinese serfs of the era shake their heads at the backwards Americans.
More freedom for the traitors? How about the traitor Home Guard, the literal Gestapo of the south? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/traitor_Home_Guard They went around dragging off Real Americans who possibly didn't want to be sent to the front lines for suicidal human wave charges by brave General Lee after living an already impoverished life in order to maintain the status quo of an absurd inequality in wealth and power.
Do you know how West Virgina was formed? A region of poor, slaveless mountain farmers, part of the wealthiest, most slave owning state of the confederacy, realized that "Hey, we don't hate friends enough/get enough money from friends to be willing to be sent to die in human wave attacks for the next 5 years. Fuck you Confederacy, we are making our own state and joining the Union" Bless them.
I could go on, but you probably already have it ingrained in your mind, from your family, your uprbringing, your culture, your friends, and your seething hatred of the inferior black in spanish race, that the Confederacy was a popular movement founded in principles of freedom and liberty, unlatching themselves from an oppressive, overbearing federal government.
Well Tugboat. You're wrong.
Eh, Tugboat is absolutely right, I remember i few years back i had this same exact conversation with my father, to sum it up, i thought the civil war was mainly off of slavery, he proved me otherwise, and his credentials are that his major was history, and political science at harvard.