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FLT-bird: "Charles Beard was correct that both sides were really motivated by money - as people pretty much always are - no matter what grand noble cause they claim is their motivation."

Summary of Civil War historiography
It appears you're a fan or follower of Beard, so let's take some time to look closer at him:

Charles Beard (1874-1948) is described as "one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century"
" His works included a radical re-evaluation of the founding fathers of the United States, who he believed were motivated more by economics than by philosophical principles.
Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication."
"An icon of the progressive school of historical interpretation, his reputation suffered during the Cold War era when the assumption of economic class conflict was dropped by most historians.
Richard Hofstadter (a consensus historian) concluded in 1968: 'Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography.
What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival'.[5]"
"Denis W Brogan believed that Beard lost favour in the Cold War not because his views had been proven to be wrong, but because Americans were less willing to hear them.
In 1965 he wrote; 'The suggestion that the Constitution had been a successful attempt to restrain excessive democracy, that it had been a triumph for property (and) big business seemed blasphemy to many and an act of near treason in the dangerous crisis through which American political faith and practice were passing'.[6]"
"Beard's interpretation of the Civil War was highly influential among historians and the general public from its publication in 1927 until well into the civil rights era of the late 1950s."
"The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality.
They ignored constitutional issues of states rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory in the war.
Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event.
Charles Ramsdell says the Beards emphasized that the Civil War was caused by economic issues, and was not basically about the right or wrong of slavery.[37]"
That is exactly the version of the Civil War I learned as a young man.
"Thomas J. Pressly says that the Beards fought against the prevailing nationalist interpretation that depicted, 'a conflict between rival section-nations rooted in social, economic, cultural, and ideological differences.'
Pressly said the Beards instead portrayed a, 'struggle between two economic economies having its origins in divergent material interests.'[38]
Much more important was the calculus of class conflict.
The Beards announced that the Civil War was really a 'social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South'.[39] "

Of course Beard would never agree to be called a "Lost Causer", but it does seem that our own Lost Causers have embraced Beard with a vengeance -- Beard the progressivist, economic determinist, Marxist dialectician is now also a Source of our own Lost Causer interpretations.

So now let's contrast Beard to a leader of the "Comparative School" which has FLT-bird & others so agitated & opposed:

"one leader of the Comparative School, which does emphasize slavery, was Eugene Genovese who in the last decades of his life became a solid Southern conservative."

Bottom line: Lost Cause icon Charles Beard = Progressive Marxist.
Comparative School leader Eugene Genovese = Conservative Southerner.

Summary of Civil War historiography
It appears you’re a fan or follower of Beard, so let’s take some time to look closer at him:****

I’m not a fan of his. I DO think he was right in saying that the War for Southern Independence - like the vast majority of all wars - was driven primarily by money/economic concerns. Of course there were other issues like very different interpretations of the balance between the federal and state governments as well as slavery, as well as cultural differences between North and South. Those were all significant issues - but money/economics was the real driving force.

Of course Beard would never agree to be called a “Lost Causer”, but it does seem that our own Lost Causers have embraced Beard with a vengeance — Beard the progressivist, economic determinist, Marxist dialectician is now also a Source of our own Lost Causer interpretations.****

Its funny you say that. Shall we explore Howard Zinn and James McPherson and the profs who current are tenured on liberal arts faculties who are all PC Revisionists? I’ve got news for you. They’re all hard hard HARDCORE Leftists. PC Revisionism and the whole “it was all about slavery” myth are products of the Left.

So now let’s contrast Beard to a leader of the “Comparative School” which has FLT-bird & others so agitated & opposed:

my post #483: “one leader of the Comparative School, which does emphasize slavery, was Eugene Genovese who in the last decades of his life became a solid Southern conservative.”

Bottom line: Lost Cause icon Charles Beard = Progressive Marxist.
Comparative School leader Eugene Genovese = Conservative Southerner.****

See? This is what you do. You find ONE GUY who was not even the most influential of PC Revisionists, note that he later became conservative and then try to paint PC Revisionism as a product of the Right.

WRONG WRONG WRONG. The vast majority of PC Revisionists proponents have been and still are today, radical Leftists. You are embracing radical Leftists ideology when you spew all the falsehoods of PC Revisionist dogma.

Revisionism got started in the South shortly after the war (or even while the war was in its closing phases). Slavery came to be regarded as morally indefensible, so one had to claim that something else had made secession and war possible.

Revisionism caught on in the rest of the country in the 1910s. The generation that fought the war was passing away. And the Democrats under Woodrow Wilson were becoming the more liberal and progressive party. In fact, they were becoming the party of the professors.

Progressive historians like Beard were drawn to the Old South as an agrarian region that shared their opposition to industrial capitalism and the Republican party which supported it, so they started to downplay slavery's role in the earlier national conflicts. I don't want to go the whole Dinesh D'Souza route, but Northern progressives and Southern segregationists had much in common from the 1910s through the 1940s (and in some ways even later).

They both disliked Northern corporations and capitalists and the Republican Party. They both looked to a more powerful federal government that would take on the powerful industrial and financial interests of the North and East. And they both (like the rest of country) thought that Republican Reconstruction had been a failure and (partially or entirely) a mistake.

I know less about Genovese. It looks to me like he was attracted to the Old South when he was a Marxist because it seemed like an alternative to the capitalist system that he hated. Historians still argue about the degree to which the Old South did represent a paternalistic, non-capitalist alternative to modernity.

Certainly, slaveowners were involved in market relations, buying and selling, but that's been going on since long before modern capitalism. Books like Genovese's, though, might give clues as to why most Southerners, including most planters and most political leaders weren't likely to think that their future lay with industrialization.

What's missing from the arguments you see here are psychology and culture. People aren't always wholly rational economic beings, and they don't operate in a purely economic framework, unaffected by ideas or their daily environment.

The vast majority of the US population was rural in 1860. The world that most Americans knew in 1860 was farming and farm life. If you'd heard of what was going on in Manchester or Lowell, or even if you'd been there, it was likely to bewilder and horrify you.

You might not want all that noise and smoke and squalor coming to your town. You might not want to lose control of your society to upstart manufacturers or urban mobs. And you might not think it was truly the wave of the future. If you could benefit materially from the growth of industry without importing all of its problems you probably would try to.

Look at how agricultural elites responded to industrialization in other countries, Britain, Prussia, Russia. Those countries did industrialize but the existing landowning elites tried to keep a firm hand on political power. Political and military careers maintained high status to keep mere manufacturers from getting too much power.

And in colonies and out of the way regions, landowners were all too willing to make money supplying industry and the cities with raw materials and food without going industrial and urban themselves. Ireland didn't want to become Britain. Nor did Australia, or Canada. They could make money supplying Britain with wool or grain or timber and remain emptier, freer, more egalitarian, less driven and troubled societies.

The few Southerners who believed industrialization was the way ahead tended to be in favor of tariffs and national banks and public works projects and government subsidies and even government-owned enterprises. They were the heirs of Hamilton and the Whigs.

If you spent years complaining about such policies, as most Southern politicians (who saw themselves as the heirs to Jefferson) did, you weren't going to support such policies. Because of your agrarian, Jeffersonian values, or because you wanted planters or farmers to hold on to the power they had, or because you opposed such developmentalist policies, you weren't likely to be keen on industrializing the South.

Today, society is far better informed and more economic minded and entrepreneurial. We could see that Silicon Valley, say, was the wave of the future. We can also see how that turned out. If you could supply Silicon Valley or invest in it without bringing all its problems to your own home town, wouldn't you do so? Back in the 1850s and 1860s when things were much less clear, wouldn't some of the few people who knew what we now know think the same way? Why build a smoky industrial city with poor housing and drainage and an unruly working class when you could just make a profit supplying the city's material needs?