RE GONE WITH THE MYTHS EDWARD BALL PATHETIC EDITORIAL

He and his acolytes might want to read something like Nevins, which I am reading, too. Volume 1 has been especially helpful.

It paints a rather more densely textured canvas.

One might review what many citizens, North and South, were saying, what they were worrying about, in the 1850s, regarding proposals for abolition and its possible consequences, to see that the looming problem of race relations underlay the disagreement over slavery; and it was this deeper issue which prevented a solution going forward, and ultimately lead, after decades of ferment, to secession when the abolitionist North increasingly forced the slavery issue (with accruing frontier political preponderance).

If he has read it, and he is now, as so often with journalists,

just stirring the pot, then too bad.