Assuming that there are any open minds' left in this debate (opinions on the Internet always seem polarized to the point of dogma), have a look at
Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The book is about how the former Confederacy after 1865, France after 1871 and Germany after 1918 shaped the historiography of catastrophic military defeat to satisfy specific nationalist and cultural agendas.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Defeat...1114583&sr=8-1
In the Southern States the aim was to subtract slavery from the "Cause" thus purifying the motives of those who sanctioned succession and later a war that actually destroyed all that was being fought for. This version of events was begun almost on the heels of Appomattox and subsequently prospered under the aegis of groups like the Southern Historical Society.
For France he looks at the mythology behind pre the WW1
revanche movement and Germany is taken to task for the post WW1 "stab in the back" mythology.
Culture of Defeat is by no means perfect and has some flaws, particularly in misreading (in my opinion) certain aspects of American culture that are mostly foriegn to Western Europeans with no direct experiance of America (as opposed to Americans). It is however, an interesting and well researched book that is bound to anger some longing for the myth of the antibellum South of legend, written by a German without a North-South agenda but with academic experiance dealing with national trauma.