Maybe we should (peacefully) remove all statues of Columbus.
If he had not "discovered" this continent, then maybe Europeans would have stayed in Europe.
Maybe people from Africa would never have been forced to come here.
Maybe the Native Americans would still have all their land.
And maybe we would not be living in such an unhappy nation.
Technological advancements in ship building would have led to others getting to the land between Europe and Asia (and we all know that Europeans long before Chris had done so), though maybe it would not have been called America nor the inhabitants "Indians".
The inhabitants would have remained vulnerable to the same diseases and would have suffered the same fate.
Maybe slavery would not have become so extended, but as it was omnipresent in the time period, we can only assume it would have played some part.
Humans being what they are, and unhappy in so many other countries, unhappiness is mostly unavoidable to some degree. If there were better application of our intelligence, most of America's problems would evaporate.
Good points. It is certainly true that so long as European civilizations continued to develop as they had up to that point, sooner rather than later “New World” native civilizations would have been conquered and/or destroyed, just as African and even Asian civilizations were. I always recommend reading
Guns, Germs and Steel to get an overview of why this became almost an inevitability by the 16th century:
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Wikipedia
One minor point. Though chattel slavery had been around for thousands of years in many parts of the world, and continued existing into even modern times in some areas, it had essentially
disappeared in most Western European countries, especially in England, in feudal times. Even feudal relations and land-bonded serfs had mostly disappeared as a result of capitalist developments and changes in land ownership and use, and of course also due to bourgeois Enlightenment-influenced revolutions. Earlier Protestant wars fought for ostensible “religious“ reasons also were important in sweeping away many old feudal institutions. So
race slavery in the New World to provide labor for plantations, supplying commodities sold on international markets, this was quite a
new phenomenon, one often organized by, and in turn strengthening, the new capitalist transformations occurring in Europe.
Of course, the earliest slave-making colonists and conquistadors of Spain and Portugal were strongly
gold extraction oriented and sought conquest in the name of God & Crown. Spain was also heavily influenced by its direct struggle with Mediterranean Moorish power, and in that struggle enslaving and ransoming religious captives was practiced on a significant level by both sides. Spain & Portugal’s desire to find a trading path to distant China and South Asia with its spices and magnificent luxury products was important, but both they and the French, English & Dutch colonialists ultimately found that huge profits could be made in the New World using slave labor to produce tobacco, coffee, sugar, and finally cotton.