My thoughts exactly.

Dr Edward L Ayres, University of Virginia, takes a more balanced approach. He describes Mr Rhea's position as "fundamentalist": the war simply "pitted slavery against freedom." The opposite side, of course, is that of the revisionist. This person flatly states that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.

Historical events (and people for that matter) are just not that easy to fit into a neatly labeled box.

In his book, What Caused the Civil War, Ayres writes, "Many of the largest slaveholders in Mississippi and Louisiana did everything they could to keep their counties and states in the Union." p 136

Slavery was a profound economic, political, religious and moral problem, the most profound the nation has ever faced. But that problem did not lead to war in a rational, predictable way. The war came about through misunderstanding, confusion and miscalculation. . . . By the time people made up their minds to fight, slavery had been obscured. Southern white men did not fight for slavery; they fought for a new nation built on slavery. White Northerners did not fight to end slavery; they fought to defend the integrity of their nation. Yet slavery, as Abraham Lincoln later put it, "somehow" drove everything. p 134