Long Live the Confederate States of America?

Dear David,
I stumbled across your website in researching information on the Confederate General Jeb Stuart for one of my students and was saddened to read your effusive praise for the Confederate States of America. Before you dismiss me as (according to your webpage) shooting off my "uneducated Yankee mouth," please keep in mind the following:

My ancestors did not arrive to the United States until long after the Civil War had concluded.

My roots are neither in the northern nor southern sections of the United States. I am from California.

As to whether I am "uneducated" or not, I will let you decide that yourself.
Hamilton vs. Jefferson

Who re-cast the nation in his image with a "rebirth of freedom", as a better place. - feudal way of life - Jefferson to John C. Calhoun. Upon reading the proud aristocrats of the antebellum South, it seems clear in retrospect that they needed to be taken down a peg or two. The Civil War achieved that, and then the country (Dixie included) could continue to mature on towards the 20th century. The Civil War and the Confederacy losing is the reason most parts of the South are today more modern than huge tracts of Latin America which still have not emerged from fedual agrarian economies with small numbers of persons holding most of the political power and vast masses living impotent lives of penury in the countryside. Change is a constant in life. One can either treasure what is best of the past and then make the future happen or sit back and watch history sweep you away into oblivion.
Notwithstanding the many noble and decent soldiers and statesmen from the South during the Civil War, I cannot but look upon the Confederate States of America as one of the worst causes men ever fought and died for. And I have very little time for those who would romanticize the "cause" which cost so much blood and sacrifice to defeat. It is true that very few entered into the war to end slavery; people either fought to preserve the Union or defend the Southern way of life (re: the economic way of life sustained by slavery). But there was no single problem which contributed more to the beginning of the war and the impasse between the North and the South than slavery. The North had matured into an industrial region and the South had stayed mired in a semi-feudal agrarian culture. It seems clear to me that under the hard but gentle hand of Abraham Lincoln the United States emerged a country with a "rebirth of freedom" which earned its maturation through hundreds of thousands of lives lost in war:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/sullivan-ballou/sullivan-ballou.html
When I see these Confederate flags and apotheoses of Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee, I see it as a slap to those who died to defeat the Confederacy. Even Lee at Appomattox urged his defeated soldiers as they returned home to be "good Americans." Unlike Lee, you obviously have decided not to let the Civil War end at Appomattox.
Or would you insist, as you do on your webpage, that I refer to the struggle between the North and South as "Revolutionary War II?" It is one thing to rebel and proclaim independece in a revolution against a monarch on an island a thousand miles distance across the ocean. It is another to attempt to divorce oneself from one's next door neighbors with whom you have shared a common language and political culture going back generations. But upon further reflection I might agree with you and agree that the carnage of the Civil War was the second stage of the American Revolution which helped to legally extend the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: that ALL men are created equal, etc. Along with Lincoln, I can see redeeming value in the enormous sacrifice in terms of monies and lives lost during the Civil War only if it leads to a new and better America: "...that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Lincoln successfully steered the Republic through the fire of the Civil War and re-cast it in more than a little in his image; and perhaps only a cataclysm like the war could have so absolutely brought about such a renewal of the principles of a more mature American nation. But it was ever Lincoln's desire that the South be re-integrated into the Union as painlessly as with as little punitive spirit as possible. There were many in the North during and after the war who wanted to treat the South as a hostile soon-to-be vanquished foe; and after Lincoln's assassination, they got their chance. But I see Lincoln somewhere reading your Confederate States of America webpage in 1998 and weeping for a citizen who could not understand what the sixteenth President of the United States strove so hard and paid so dearly to accomplish. Think on it a little. Please.
Very Truly Yours,
Richard Geib

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses
my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the
difference, is no democracy."

Abraham Lincoln