Quality Civil War Revisionism?

It seems like it, according to reviews from Salon.  The author in question attempts to argue ultimately that the Civil War could have been avoided by a more skilled set of politicians seeking more compromises rather than forcing one form of labor or another on the other section, North or South.  While this is an attractive interpretation for many, I do not think it quite cuts it and I expect the reviewer is correct when he states that the evidence simply seems lacking in this book.  In my own work, I have found that Southerners were becoming progressively intransigent and uncompromising from the 1820s right up to the war.  Slavery was as sacred an institution as was the Nativism and antislavery crusades of Northern moralists which does indeed catch the author’s attention as the source of Northern intransigence and lack of willingness to compromise.  In fact, the author is correct that slavery would have ended without the war, but he is wrong when he attempts to argue that it’s end would have been political.  The South would only have accepted disowning her own slaves by her own action, which is to say, economic necessity would surely have ended slavery by the turn of the century without a great conflagration.  For those who then note that slaves could very well have been turned to factory labor, I would merely note that slave labor costs far more than free labor and tends to be less productive.  Remember how incredibly cost-effective manufacturers had to become in the new world of global markets which dawned in the late 19th century.  Every penny of production costs mattered dearly and, in some industries–like oil refining–made the difference between domination and bankruptcy.   In a production regime like that, no one could afford to maintain foolish slave labor systems and they probably would have been quickly replaced by some sort of short-term apprenticeship period at the end of which the former slave/apprentice was granted freedom and a wage to continue plying the trade he learned during his apprenticeship.  Oddly enough, under this scenario, the antislavery laws of the North may have actually impeded the death of slavery by barring access to the most heavily industrialized area of the country and therefore preventing such a scheme from even being enacted.

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