Yes but there's a fine distinction about what they really were trying to defend, be it slavery or way of life, economic or not. By the time the Civil War started, technological advances in agricultural machinery were already imminent, just around the corner. Surely these well-educated, many of them, aristocrats were aware enough of what was going on in the world to know that these advances would make slavery economically unviable, and in the very near future. I think the aristocrats who did want the war probably did want to retain their way of life, but not in an economic sense. They were the last of the feudal lords. The rode away to battle, in tailor-made regalia, as the last knights, ranked by status and wealth. They wanted to keep their slaves for the same reasons that medieval lords wanted to keep their peasants/serfs. You can't very well be a lord without people whom you can decide life and death over, with no accountability at all.

I do not and will not defend their actions. Slavery was a horrible crime and there was no excuse for defending it, or even for defending a place where it was allowed to happen. But you do have to admit, off the subject, that there was an ironic but powerful poetry in that time and in that place, the place where I have always lived. For all its perversity this part of the country has always been the soul of American arts and spirituality, and I wonder if we'd have that without our strange past. As it is the only American cultural art forms that are known around the world are Southern in origin; blues, jazz, and rockandroll. When I visit my family in Prague, there are Dixieland bands on every corner in warm weather, and in the clubs all year. There are bluegrass and country bands wearing overalls easily found. Blues and Bebop. When I say that I am from South Carolina, where Rhett Butler lived in Charleston, that's enough to make me interesting by itself.

History's a damn mystery, Chet