It's fascinating to read about though.
What I've found is the easiest way to find where there are holes that need to be explored is just by asking "Why?" anytime you hear of an event. If you're given history and just told, "this happened, then this happened..." the quickest way to get an answer to something is to simply ask "Why did they do that?"
That simple question will point you in the right direction more often than not. When you start answering enough of those questions, everything that happened makes a lot more sense.
Although it's popular to bash "there's no single truth" people, the more and more I look into history, the more I think that's true. Everyone has a very complicated history which is a product of what did or even didn't happen. Which results in totally different point of views and everybody see truth differently. It's truly fascinating to see how different timelines merge and separate and the today's politics and policies they cause.
Sure there were economic factors at play and those are interesting in their own right, but in the south the biggest thing that people fail to understand is the element of fear. I don't want to do a historic nose dive, but the 3 things you can read about to understand that better are The Haitian Massacre of 1804, John Brown, and The Cherokee Declaration of Causes.
Of those three, only John Brown is mentioned on the Wikipedia timeline. The other two provide context.