Some historians thought that way about a century ago. Charles Beard was a prime example. But they were projecting their own feelings about rampant, post-war industry back on an earlier era when industry was less powerful, and slavery was a major issue.
Plantation agriculture was a real force in antebellum America, and the planters had plans for expansion. Industry took a a backseat in the Old South, but there were factories, including some which used slave labor. Manufacturers were wealthier and more powerful in the North, but didn't yet have the great power that they acquired later.
In retrospect it's easy to view the Confederacy as a victim of the industrial juggernaut, but the Confederate leaders were real players in the political games of the day. Had things gone differently it might be more common to think of them as the aggressive, expansionist force and the Northerners as the resistance.
In Beard's day it was possible to associate industrialism with power and freedom with resistance to it. Before and after, though, it's harder to make that link. Slaveowners and Southern nationalists weren't simply resisting Northern power. They had their own power agenda which can't simply be identified with freedom or liberty, libertarianism or agrarianism.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's book dropped into that undetermined condition like a depth charge. Add the Industrial Revolution on top of that by 1860, and the chaotic Democrat National convention where the Southern Democrats were not seated, and the Civil War that followed, and that was near the beginning of the most chaotic period in American history--1869 to 1896. The dust has still not settled, as witness FR itself.