Confederate soldiers did not consider themselves traitors, and in general they were not thought to be traitors by the men they fought against. It is only in the last few years that race hatred has tried to cast them a traitors.
This article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette explains why they were not. It says:
The founders of the Confederacy understood themselves as the real Americans, as those who had kept faith with the real American Constitution, as opposed to the compromise-laden failure enacted in 1789. They cast themselves as the true Americans, the true inheritors of the Revolutionary legacy of ordered liberty and political sovereignty. They were the champions of liberty, standing firm against the usurpations of the Northern hordes.
They were, in short, fighting to defend no less than the promise of the American dream. To dismiss them as un-American is to ignore their own understanding of the counter-revolution with which they greeted the election of Abraham Lincoln in November of 1860. To pretend otherwise is to whitewash history.
The North and the South reunited after the Civil War, and most people of that generation dropped the animosities that had pervaded both sides during war. Recently, racist recrudescence has reignited these old hatreds. The Civil War was not a race war, not was it even a war about slavery per se; it was about states rights and whether states had to remain member of a union they no longer supported.
Dixie Gone With The Wind 