My first college history professor, the late Lee Benson, caught me at a teachable moment. The class was about the Civil War, and Prof. Benson’s focus was on the role of self-esteem in history. As I recall — it’s been over fifty years — Benson believed that the southern radicals’ self-esteem made secession inevitable. They could not admit that slavery was as bad as the Northern states thought it to be, because, if it was, they would…