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Anyone who's going to deal in Civil War studies really needs to take a moment to grapple with James McPherson's This Mighty Scourge. I doubt that this was McPherson's intent, but the first essay in the book is really what set me on the path of questioning the "Civil War as American Tragedy" narrative on to the "Civil War as American Revolution" line of thinking.
I suspect McPherson might not agree with my reframing--I'm probably being a bit too pat. Nevertheless, his essay demonstrates that the idea of the Civil War as avoidable tragedy didn't materialize out of thin air; it comes not just out of American popular memory, but right out of American historiography.
The origins of the American Tragedy are rooted in the Civil War denialism of historians who held that the war wasn't about slavery but, in the words of Charles Beard, "a sectional struggle" between two powers divided by "accidents of climate, soil and geography." Attendant to that view was the Fitzhughesque notion that "wage slavery" was as bad as "chattel slavery." When you reduce the Civil War to a fight between two equivalent systems of labor, it becomes much easier to believe that 600,000 Americans died in vain.
full: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/the-civil-war-isnt-tragic-cont/243713/
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