My apologies for mistaking your meaning. Yes, I believe there were quite a lot of people who's best interest lay in convincing people that the bloodshed and calamity served some higher purpose than the enrichment of the pockets of wealthy robber barons. The truth would have invited a vengeful fury on the perpetrators.
I found a Wikipedia bio of Thomas Kettell, author of Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. Apparently he was a New Yorker who spoke freely:
That's what I discovered when I went looking for information about him. So far as I was able to find, he was a New Yorker, and so therefore you would think he would deal with Northern concerns and positions in an even-handed manner.
Consider: our pro-Confederates often tell us that average Confederate soldiers did not own slaves and were not fighting for slavery.
Fair enough, and average Union soldiers knew nothing of and cared nothing about "the pockets of wealthy robber barons."
What they did care about was preserving the Union and, by war's end, defeating slavery.
Once again: in those days, Northeastern "wealthy robber barons" were Democrat globalist allies to the wealthy Southern planters before 1861 and again after 1865.