Not clear to me that Davis was all that popular then or now. I netciod that it’s RE Lee rather than Jefferson Davis who seems to maintain a shiny reputation, even among war buffs in the North who still admire his strategic brilliance as a general. However for me the more I learn about the Civil War the less convinced I am that it was a just or rational war for either side. I would argue that Lincoln failed dramatically to bring clever diplomacy to bear while the South hot-headedly chose to fight a losing cause, mostly in support of a profoundly immoral economic system based partly on slavery. Virginia initially voted strongly NOT to secede. Seems to me Lincoln could have taken advantage of this ambivalance and either allowed the deep south states to secede or simply waited for what would have been a meek military response without Virginia. Rather, Lincoln quickly mustered northern troops to attack, bringing Lee and other Virginians into the battle, many of whom were the masterminds behind the South’s early successes.Technology and tradition and law were in the process of making slavery obsolete, so I remain confused why so many academics seem to insist that the war was all about slavery when it’s very clear that Lincoln would have rejected a bargain where Slavery was abolished in exchange for secession. He didn’t even emancipate northern slaves! IMO the war is best described as caused by Lincoln’s obsession with keeping the union intact. I’m going to study this in more depth, but it seems to me we are in a period of odd and revisionist Civil War history where academics are sort of cleaning up after Lincoln’s incompetent handling of the war and national affairs, focusing on the importance of unification and ignoring the human and economic costs among the greatest ever paid by any nation or group in all of history. One could make a case that the benefits of getting abolition a few years earlier than otherwise outweigh the huge human and economic costs of the Civil War, but this argument needs to show freedom brought significant benefits to former slaves and to already free African Americans and to broader US interests. It’s hard to ever know if that is the case and if those benefits were greater than the massive costs of reconstruction, of 625,000 dead, and all the other ravages of a huge war. By contrast about 25,000 died in the Revolutionary War.