Reply #7: Sorry to pick ...

[RoyGBiv]

But you've got that backwards.

"Revisionists" is not a pejorative term, and that is the sense in which you are using it.

Revisionists are responsible for having challenged the dominant schools of thought on causation in the Civil War, which some will summarize as Lost Cause mythology. And Lost Cause adherents today discount these people as "mere revisionists" or some such thing. Look into the "Dunning School" of historiographical thought and how historians, primarily starting in the 50's and 60's (but with some notable earlier examples) began to directly challenge this. "Dunning" is still alive and well in various circles, sometimes in mutated form, especially among Libertarian types.

And, FWIW, abolitionists were not, as a whole, pro-war, and were in fact fairly fractured on the issue. That changed for the most part after the war actually began, but prior to it, abolitionists were some of the strongest advocates of some sort of peaceful settlement ... or no settlement at all other than "good riddance" as famously indicated by Garrison's "erring sisters, depart in peace" comment.

I could use this as tangent from which to discuss just how pervasive Lost Cause ideology was and to what degree it infected our understanding of the war and its causes, but I'll leave it at this. The notion that abolitionists were "pro-war" is actually a pro-slavery invention and paranoia. John Brown was seen as a representative example of the abolitionist movement, when in fact he was a fringe minority. Southerners used the supposed desires of abolitionists to subjugate the South violently to whip up support for secession and then war, and all else became self-fulfilling prophecy.