This comes from the Sep 04, 1860 edition of the Charleston Mercury. Keep in mind that this is printed a few months before Lincoln's election and the subsequent secession crisis:
"we think that the serfs of Russia ought to be emancipated. They are of our own, the Caucasian white race, and with a mild just government, would soon be so far civilized as to be fit for the duties of citizenship, and like the people of Germany or Norway, would constitute the strength and stay of the Empire... The reigning Emperor has advanced in the policy of Alexander, and in 1857 put forth a proclamation pledging the will and word of the Autocrat for the full and complete emancipation of all the serfs in his empire. Three years have since transpired, yet what has been done to emancipate the serfs of Russia? Next to nothing.".
This article excerpt illuminates a very pertinent point; The civil society of what would be the Confederate States of America was one that valued whiteness as a core tenet of continuing and furthering its slave society. Additionally, this article of the Mercury seems to suggest that it was a travesty for whites to subjugate other whites to lives of toil and hardship. This further suggest that the South was a society which valued the appearance of whiteness without as much consideration of ethnicity or class, and that Southern civil society saw Africans as a group particularly destined as 'right' for the work of forced labor and slavery.
The Richmond Daily Dispatch, however, would print this in an article a year later, in April 1861:
"The emancipation of 25 million serfs at a single dash by the present Emperor of Russia is one of the boldest strokes of policy ever attempted... Its effect is to reduce at once to beggary, nearly the whole of the Russian nobility, hitherto the ruling power in the State. It is understood that almost all of them are in debt, to several times the value of their whole estates, leaving out the serfs... The emancipation act, therefore, describes at a single blow so much capital, and so much credit. This cannot be done in any part of the world without producing a shock which must be felt throughout the whole range of civilized society".
This tells us a different interpretation. This article of the Dispatch seems to push the idea that the emancipation of serfs wasn't worth it because of its impact on the economic standing of Russia's aristocratic upper class. This could simply be a different point of view between two different journalists. The South had a somewhat free press, provided that you were white and did not espouse pro-Union or abolitionist views. However, this article is at odds with the first. It doesn't consider the freedom from toilage of a people worth it to the existing class/economic structure, despite that toiling class being themselves white.
The same month, the Northern paper, the Chicago Tribune, printed this, in an article entitled "A Southern Howl Against Russian Emancipation"
"... The hope is even entertained that there will be no scarcity of Labor. The hope is a lost hope. The example of the negroes in the West Indies shows that men who have been slaves all their lives, will not work when released from bondage. We have been told that is a peculiar trait of the African. It is no such thing. It is a trait just as much of the Russian. We have read many descriptions of the serf. He is the laziest and most thoughtless of mortals. He delights in nothing so much as sleep. He will sleep upon the slightest opportunity in the most dangerous situation, sometimes on the very eaves of a house, or in a street where thousands of carriages are passing."
I found this excerpt very interesting as well. This Northern paper argues that laziness is something endemic not to African slaves, but to anyone forced to work, whether they be white or black. That it is simply innate that someone in forced toil will be lazy at the advent of their freedom from peonage.
Back to the South, the Memphis Daily Appeal would print this in the Spring of 1863:
"The experiment of emancipation in Russia, planned two years since and submitted to the country for gradual preparation, was consummated on the third day of the present month. On that day twenty millions of serfs became free from the obligations which bound them to the nobility... They acquire an independence because in the first place, they are of the same color and nationality as their masters, and thereby entitled to dignity and respect so far as their abilities can command them... In this the Russian and American emancipation systems differ most widely."
The Memphis paper goes on to draw on how the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln and the wants of Northern abolitionists are not the same because the people of Russia are white and of the same nationality as their own nobility, and that this made their case for freedom more relevant and worthy than that of enslaved blacks in the Confederacy.
In short, I'd say that the South consistently reported on the Russian emancipation of serfs with the message that Russians are white and that Africans are not, and that therefore, the two cases cannot be compared. One must remember that the Confederate mythos was that slavery was the natural condition for the black man. This would not apply to white Russians, and therefore, it was an apples to oranges comparison to proponents of black slavery in the CSA. This equivocation is rooted in the fact that the entire foundation of the Confederacy was its ideology of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. At the same time, The Confederacy was a very strict society when it came to class, with an all powerful oligarchy of agrarian plantation capitalists controlling the state, the economy, the political machinations etc. This suggest to me that there was possibly an internal debate about whether being part of the 'Caucasian race' or being a wealthy person of distinct privilege was more important in the South's understanding and analysis of Russian emancipation. It was likely interpreted as the former by poorer Southern whites, and the latter by wealthier elites.