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What would the South be like today if they had won the Civil War? I am aware even if the South did win the war, slavery would eventually cease to exist there. Would it still likely to retain its independence from the USA?
Since the war was never fought over slavery (a big lie that has been told so many times that people tend to believe it)... I would assume it would be long gone.
Unions would never have gotten the stranglehold on the Northern states that almost killed them.
More governmental issues would be handled at the state level rather than shoved down our throats from the Feds.
We probably would have killed at least a million more Northerners... just to watch them die.
The Confederacy would probably have fragmented further. A nation founded on a doctrine of individual units being free to nullify Federal laws, or free to depart whenever they were upset with central policy, is not a nation designed to last very long.
Probably a lot like South Africa today. Likewise, the North would not likely have become a true world power and the West may have become a country of it's own that was more Latin American in nature.
United We Stand and all that... Lincoln knew we would be screwed if the union didn't stay together.
It would be a lot worse off today if they won the right to take their slave property out west. I suspect a considerable amount of the wealth that was in the South would have been taken out west to gold country. At the time of the Civil War America was becoming less of a "North and South"
country and more of an "East and West" country.
The South could not have "won" the war. There was nothing to win. They only could have held off the inevitable re-unification of the Union and the Confederacy, which would have occurred as soon as the Emperor of Brazil freed the slaves and they figured out that they were the only "rogue state" left in the western world, and there was no place for the principles of their Confederacy in modern civilization.
The answer, about all modern wars, is that things would be very much the same today as they are, regardless of the outcome. What if Germany had won the First World War? What if the USA had won the Vietnam war? Wars are not won or lost, they are just ended,and people get back to their peacetime lives within the context of whatever culture had prevailed at the time of the outbreak.
If the Zulus had won the Zulu wars, and expelled the Europeans from Africa, well, Zimbabwe would now be just like Ethiopia. Guess what? Zimbabwe is just like Ethiopia.
The Confederacy would probably have fragmented further. A nation founded on a doctrine of individual units being free to nullify Federal laws, or free to depart whenever they were upset with central policy, is not a nation designed to last very long.
How true. There were fractures already forming in the CSA during the war over actions that the CSA's central government was taking that was overstepping even the bounds of the federal government they had left. A nation founded on ones right to break away over any disagreement wasn't bound to last long. Especially when we consider that there was a major difference in the reason for the Lower South's secession versus that of the Upper South.
Then we could get into the fact that slavery was an untenable system destined to collapse in on itself. That is only reinforced by the fact that the entire South's economy was basically hinged on cotton production that got sold to Britain. The British had developed their own more stable cotton sources in Egypt and India that didn't require them to do business with the slave holding south, which was a major political issue in Britain. To take it a step further, the South could barely feed itself and lacked its own industrial base to provide the manufactured goods they wanted.
Ultimately a Southern victory (not that such a thing was ever even a possibility as long as the North wanted to keep fighting) would most likely have just seen a distintegration of the CSA and those pieces eventually rejoining with the USA. It is really hard for me to conceive a scenario that results in the continual existence of the CSA or even an independent nation. Perhaps Texas stays independent and expands in the west, but that's about it.
Of course, and the Revolutionary War was never about freedom.
At any rate, if the south had won, the seceded states would probably be as comparatively poorer and lesser-developed now with regards to the north, as it was then. "' 'Poorer' and 'lesser-developed' back then" doesn't make the south inferior in any way, it's just the truth.
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