The arguments made by modern day southern apologists would most likely surprise the Southerners and Northerners of the 1850's. The slave labor in the south was almost exclusively used to grow, harvest, and process cotton. Were it not for the cotton gin, slavery would most likely have died a slow death by the late 1830s. Except for slave trading, slavery was not a profitable enterprise. It offered no competition to northern industrailists in any way. Virtually all of a southern planter's capital was tied up in slaves and had he been willing and able to hire cheap immigrant labor he would have done better financially. The abolition of slavery would have meant ruin for most planters not because he would have to hire his labor, but because all his capital would have been confiscated from him. In truth, slavery was far more about class and caste than it was about profit. If you read some of the primary source material from the 1840s through the 1850s you will find passions peaked by the abolitionist's attempts to free the slaves, and the Southern attempts to maintain the status quo, "our peculiar institution." It is only in modern times that southerners have grasped onto this idea that there was some other passions which led to the Civil War. Abolitionists did not suddenly crop up in 1807 with the end of the African slave trade, but had been growing gradually in the north since the 1700s as state after northern state abolished slavery. If you read the Southern anti abolitionist tracts of the time you will see some of the outrageous and idiotic claims made in order to justify slavery. Southern apologists are always pointing the finger at abolitionists and their extreme rhetoric, but they fail to ever note the degeneracy of some of the writings used to defend slavery. Slavery was to sensibilities of those times what late term abortions are to modern times. Southerners can certainly be proud of their culture and their heritage, but it doesn't serve them well to pretend slavery was not a grotesque institution which the carriers of that battle flag were fighting to maintain.
So what are we left with then. We are allowed to be proud of are heritage, so long as we accept the fact that it was all about a grotesque institution? You don't intend to leave us with anything, just admit it and be done. If you think all Southerners who have sympathy for the ANV flag are no better than Nazis just say it.
BTW, I have read many primary sources concerning both pro and ant-abolitionist philosophy. And yes I do know that the issue of "States Rights" in the context of the secessionist movements of the 1860s was, anyway you square it, the result of fear of losing the right to own slaves. And you are right that the maintaining of the class structure, which was almost feudal, and thus slavery upon which it was dependent, was the major motivating factor for secession.
Where you are wrong is in the assumption that the North was fight'n primarily to free the slaves. They were not, and since they technically where the aggressor they establish the foundation of the conflict by their initial actions.
One day, the Southern Cross will only be used by racists, then it will be a racist symbol. But, it might take otherwise good people with it on account of most humans eventually accept the epitaph of evil if you apply it long enough. For example, there is a girl I know, lives in Detroit, black, very intelligent; but she has some major problems. Her family is estranged from her, her community turned it's back on her, and why? Because she is conservative in a community where that is unpopular. Because she expressed conservative views at school she was labeled a Nazi. After some point she just accepted it and even embraced it. She's doing it out of spite for being hurt, but she wont admit it. I've tried to tell her how dangerous it is to hang with those people, but everyone up here seems to think it's funny that the Louisiana boy is try'n to get a messed up black girl from the ghetto away from the damn Yankee neo-nazis and Kluxers. I don't see that it's funny but in my liberal neighborhood it is a freak'n laugh riot apparently. Even my friends, who know I'm no bigot or Nazi, still think it's funny. Just goes to show, we're all supposed to be bigots if we are from the South. A notion reinforced by the fact that anytime we show any fondness for images or elements of Southern heritage, such as the ANV flag, it's assumed that it's really just cause we are sympathetic to that “grotesque institution.”
I'll continue to be a supporter of the flag popularized by my relatives such as General P.G.T. Beauregard (who BTW, was in favor of enforcing the civil rights of the freed slaves after the war), and if that makes me a racist... well... I don't know.