You hit on the key point, profitable. The southern rebellion was in response to what they saw as a threat to their institution of slavery.
Also the south is constantly portrayed as evil for fighting this war for slavery but hardly a word is mentioned of the rape of the southern economy by the north during reconstruction. A travesty from which the south has just begun to recover from in the last 20 years.
Melodrama aside, southern losses were a result of southern actions. When you start a war you cannot decide in advance how it will turn out.
"Revisionist" is a tricky term. What it means depends on where you find the original "unrevised" view. But if you look at what happened after the Civil War, you find an effort to take slavery largely out of the discussion and replace it with "state's rights" as an explanation. People who had no trouble with slavery as an essential part of the South they were fighting for, refashioned their defenses of the Confederacy as a "state's rights" agenda. Therefore, I'd call that revisionism, more than later efforts to rediscover the role of slavery in provoking the war.
Slavery was fading out in the southern states until the invention of the Cotton Gin which made it profitable again.
True, but the cotton gin was invented in the 1790s and in the 1850s slavery was going stronger than ever. Opposition to slavery in the Southern states was less than it had been generations before. It strikes us as obvious that at some point slavery would have been abolished because we can't imagine slave labor lasting down to the present day on our continent. But when would it have ended? And in any case, people at the time, don't have the benefit of our hindsight. Slavery was a living option and a live issue at the time.
Also the south is constantly portrayed as evil for fighting this war for slavery but hardly a word is mentioned of the rape of the southern economy by the north during reconstruction. A travesty from which the south has just begun to recover from in the last 20 years.
Many of us grew up learning about how horrible reconstruction was. It was the old story of courageous Andrew Johnson fighting off the vengeful Radical Republicans. Whether you want to regard this as the original or a revised view it was widespread down to the 1980s. But attitudes towards Reconstruction have changed in recent years. Not to the benefit of Northern Republicans and capitalists, who are still seen in a negative light. You can still find historians who attack Northerners for allegedly crippling the South.
But historians have come to appreciate the positive side of Reconstruction as an effort to introduce greater racial equality into American political life. The notion that Reconstruction was a great crime perpetrated by the North upon the South that many of us learned in school has come to be reexamined and how much will withstand serious scrutiny remains to be seen.