"Northern Aggression" my ass, up is down to these idiots.
They didn't just lose a war and it's even worse than simply overlooking the small detail where it's a war they started. The Confederacy was on the verge of bankrupting themselves financially while trying to leverage moral bankruptcy when they bet everything on a single horse failing spectacularly to anticipate the opening they gave their direct competition in the textile industry and overestimating to an absolutely comical degree the value of a limited number of cash crops with their perceived trump card being cotton.
Too full of themselves and firmly stuck up their own asses to simply accept a reduced but still sizable profit from continuing to trade without relying on slave labour when it became outlawed in the rest of the world and an issue of contention with then-partners in trade they didn't even bother to realistically weigh the value of of literally everything else the Union offered in trade with Europe because they thought withholding one product would paralyze the world's entire economy as though the world was primordial chaos before the invention of the cotton gin or that cotton didn't grow elsewhere in the world centuries before anyone even knew there was another continent on the other side of the ocean and not a sheer drop off the edge of the world into an abyss.
Despite all the lip service paid to exceptionalism and sovereignty they banked heavily on the intervention of the very same empires America engaged in a war disentangling itself from which from a certain point of view is insulting and invalidating the blood spilled entirely. But rather than seeing themselves holding the apron strings they deluded themselves into thinking they could hold the purse strings and blackmail Europe into trading exclusively with the Confederacy and further attacking the Union indirectly. So even before shots were fired the Confederacy was already fumbling at aggressive political moves all to cut the costs of farming for the benefit of a handful of landowners in otherwise poverty-stricken agriculture dependent states where people were hurting for gainful employment which slavery actually kept out of the hands of whites. Something people stupidly resented the slaves for rather than the assholes who wanted to keep slavery around because it was cheaper to buy and breed people like livestock than it was to employ them.
And even putting aside the fact that the Confederacy really should have known it wasn't going to win the fight they started out of a sheer desperate inability to deal with the consequences of their own short-sighted ineptitude and their crushing defeat was inevitable when you look at it objectively it's not like the economic model was really sustainable, either. The crops themselves were land and resource intensive depleting the soil with each harvest for diminishing returns until crop rotation (devised and implemented on the advice of a former slave) became the new standard. And even if you get past the problems just keeping the crops growing the wealth gap in the state population that slavery continued to widen was ripe ground for unrest in addition to the constant fear of slave uprisings meaning plantation owners were dealing with time bombs on every front. And no measure, no matter how extreme, really abated the fear of slave uprisings. In fact they had a multiplicative effect on the fear as it just added to a looming sense of dread at some future collective revenge that the white majority keeps imagining was on the horizon that has never really reflected reality.
It was a fear that persisted even after slavery was abolished and is arguably still lingering today in several twisted forms as a self-perpetuating cycle of prejudice and pre-venge. A cycle your boy Nathaniel "Bedsheets" Forrest helped to design when he started his rise through the Klan, an outright terrorist organization that somehow manages to be socially acceptable in certain American circles even in the modern age despite basically being Christian ISIS before ISIS or any other Islamic terror group was even a thing.
The KKK would go on to subvert the law and brutally murder countless people while spewing two-faced self-serving bullshit like they were everybody's last hope protecting them from the great Satan and themselves. They went on a rampage of vandalism, violence, and rape all while spreading the lie that their victims were actually the ones doing it and claiming the moral outrage at their own fabrications entitled them to continuously escalate their attacks on as many people as they could get away with as a supposed "deterrence" when really it was all about normalizing using fear and violence to control others. You know, the Klan might want to look into suing other terrorists for stealing their bit. The world would appreciate the spectacle of you all trying to argue the moral high ground as you take a break from being the most disgusting hypocrites imaginable to eat each other.
Spitting in the face of American laws and fundamental rights, the values they claim make their country great, the very architecture of civilization that white supremacists keep trying to claim is the uniquely white bedrock that makes them superior even as they take steaming dumps all over it. That's what you're defending. If you really want to keep in the spirit of the Confederacy and how everything it stood for is exactly the opposite of what was eventually claimed what you should really do instead of making a public holiday is have the opposite of that: A day where you and every other "rebel" flag waving champion of rights that never existed that you would have subverted in practice if they did are all stripped of the real rights you take for granted and forced to perform hard labour living just one horrible day in the hideous reality of what you're making out to be your American dream as everyone around you laughs at anything you claim to be proud of as it could only ever be an imitation of real culture and reminds you that you should be thankful to them since you have contributed nothing to anyone and everything in your life is an undeserved privilege handed to you if it wasn't stolen.