America's thinking about the Civil War misguided

From the TimesNews (Burlington) Letter to the Editor:  America's thinking about the Civil War misguided

Two stories about the South last month were interesting. The first was one that ran on Aug. 26 about Civil War commemorations in Mississippi, and the second ran the next day gleefully prognosticating the demise of the so-called “Solid South.”
The first was typical in its attempt to brutally suppress any alternative explanation for the cause of the Civil War that does not hinge solely on slavery. This present generation of historians is rather desperate in its insistence that Americans cannot and should not look back on that unnecessary and horrible conflict with any degree of mature reflection. But with or without its academic elite, it is high time for America to grow up in its thinking about the Civil War.
When the Roman Empire fell, scholars debated for centuries about why it happened. Saint Augustine said it was Rome’s paganism. Edward Gibbon blamed it on Christianity. Modern scholars say both were wrong and blame it on imperial overextension.
But the priest-class in the modern American universities and mainstream media fanatically brands any that offer an alternative interpretation of the Civil War with the scarlet “letter” of our time, racism. Yet this monumental event in human history is just too big to be explained in such infantile terms. Other perspectives will endure.
One of those perspectives especially has the ring of truth. That is, the unjust invasion of the South was undertaken for the same reasons every other war in human history was waged: for money and power. The industrial North fought to attain political and economic dominance over an agrarian South that had in prior decades begun to view itself as culturally and economically different. The North realized that it needed the South for revenues and raw material. But Dixie was beginning to discover she could live without Yankeedom, and could sustain herself by forging stronger ties with Europe. To reign her in, the North had to break Dixie’s power structure and remake her people into its own image culturally.
The second story revealed that this attempt to remake the South has not ceased. But newspaper writers have been prematurely forging Dixie’s epitaph since 1861. We think this November will prove that, once again, it is far too early for that.