"I wish I were in a land of hatred"

Romanticizing the southern plantation is much like romanticizing Nazi Germany. In fact, slavery might seem a bit worse than the holocaust, because, at least the Nazis put their slaves out of their misery at some point.
The leaders of the confederacy were guilty of sedation and treason and should have been tried and executed for these high crimes.
In the present day, those who engaged in slavery could be charged with crimes against humanity.
It should be remembered that the American South had the least enthusiasm for the American Revolution. And their social structure was based on the backwards European accstocracy. In the Civil War, the North fought for the future, the South for the past. The South contributed little to American society. They were a backwards and stagnant agrian culture. And to this day, the south is one of the most socially and intellectually backwards parts of the country.
The north wasn’t too harsh with the South, they weren’t quite harsh enough. Any part of the world which bases it economy on slave labor deserves no mercy.
In recent years, the same backwards confederate mentality has seeped into American politics in the form of the Religious Right and much of the Republican Party. Much of the leadership of the Republican Party is Southern and seem to have pro-Confederacy leanings.