I don't know, how you define what or isn't Honorable certainly determines whether X or Y were honorable in your opinion. Developing a contemporary baseline for such a term seems like a worthy subject. Likewise if a question is if X or Y is honorable to a persons specific modern sense of honor then that definition is equally important.
Many disputes are simply a matter of a lack of common terminology defined the same ways.
While the path to war in the 1840's and 1850's was surely paved with economic concerns about ending slavery, pride and honor increasingly took command of people's motivations and decision making, especially after the war started.
The conflict between North and South was depicted by cartoonists as a fist fight
between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
In the South, William L. Yancey told the 1860 Democratic convention in Charleston:
“
Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours in the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake–the honor of children, the honor of families, the lives, perhaps, of all.”
The OP is a great question
@IndianaBoy because the South’s culture of honor still influences it today. It seems the definition of honor in the North evolved during the 19th century while the South held onto the ideal of traditional honor. Based on my reading about the men who lived during this period, Southerners related more to the medieval honor code of Europe - big on public virtue and the chivalry of knights.
The code of honor for Southern men required having:
1) a reputation for honesty and integrity
2) a reputation for courage and strength
3) self-sufficiency and “mastery” (control over wife/children/slaves)
4) a willingness to use violence to defend any perceived slight
As in the days of medieval "knights in shining armour," might seemingly made everything right in the antebellum South.
Social psychologists have offered a good bit of research that supports the premise that the differences between the industrialized North and agrarian South led to differences in their honor codes. In the South, a man’s public reputation was the foundation of his honor.
Sources:
Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Plain Folk of the Old South by Frank Lawrence Owsley
Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina by Bill Cecil-Fronsman