George, thanks for linking this website. Unfortunately, the article has a lot of problems.

Here are just a few:

The author writes, "On a human level there were 4 causes of the war--New England Greed--New England Fanatics--New England Zealots--and New England Hypocrites."

Any article that simply blames all one side or the other for a complex sectional conflict and war clearly is not being objective. Were someone to say that the 4 causes of the war were Southern Greed, Southern Fanatics, Southern Zealots and Southern Hypocrites, I think many here would rightly object to such a ridiculous assertion. Even if fanatics and greed played a role in the outbreak of war, no section or political party in the US can claim a monopoly on them.

Next, the author trots out some interesting, but completely unsubstantiated, numbers regarding the tariff. Where does he get his information? His statistics are not even close to what established historians have estimated.

His portrayal of centralization versus states rights also takes a simplistic approach. The Confederacy struggled in its short four year lifetime to balance the two, and leaders such as Jefferson Davis did push stronger federal measures over the states when he deemed it necessary for the cause (including the draft). He was sometimes met with resistance from state governors, most nobably Joe Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina.

His portrayal of the Civil War as a battle between Christianity and secular humanism is, to put it bluntly, absurd. There certainly were different religious beliefs involved in the conflict, but some historians have emphasized the stronger Christian beliefs in the North. I do not have enough information to comment on this matter further, but I have to point out that the author's biggest targets in his essay (New Englanders) were among the most notable Christians in the nation at the time (particularly abolitionists). He does not explain this contradiction.

The idea that old world cultural differences lent to the conflict has been voiced by others, but generally does not have much backing in the historical profession. There are plenty of examples of people from all European backgrounds fighting on both sides.

The author's brief five sentence discussion of the western territories does not even begin to embrace the vast importance or reality of the issue. The struggle over Kansas was absolutely about slavery (as a political and ideological matter), and Southerners were not merely victims in that battle.

Perhaps one of the most bizarre claims the author makes, though, is this: "The Northern Industrialists wanted a war to use as an excuse to get the South's resources for pennies on the dollar." This begs the question, how would a war (that could, and did, damage the South's resources or ability to harvest them) financially benefit northern industrialists? While he twice makes this claim, he never explains the logic behind it, or provides any evidence to support it.

Much of the rest of his article complains of anti-Southern rhetoric in northern newspapers, accuses northerners of trying to instigate slave rebellion, and then drags out the tired habit of directing blame of slavery in the South (in 1860) to New England colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The article is an interesting look at one extreme version of the sectional conflict and the war, but it fails on many levels to understand the historical realities (or the findings by historians over the past 100 years) of 19th century America.