How did the Civil War affect the viewpoint of most southerners?

For most
southerners, the Civil War was an existential struggle for the preservation of the only lives
they knew, which unfortunately were intimately tied to the welfare and fate of thousands of
slaves, who provided the cheap labor that kept the South's plantation economy alive.  In fact,
the establisment of the Confederacy under President Jefferson Davis and the move to secede from
the union was grounded in these concerns about the southern states' ability to preserve their
way of life and to resist the imposition of dictates from the wealthier states north of the
Mason-Dixon Line.  

The issue of states' rights that stood at the center of
the Confederacy and, thus, at the core of the movement towards a civil war, was...