The South held the #1, #2, and #3 leading export of the United States. Cotton, tobacco and sugar cane. The #4 leading export was held by the North, textiles, but textiled relied on Southern cotton. So we have to assume, barring some sort of trade alliance, the South would have been markedly better off from a revenue standpoint. This would have more than funded industrialization in the South.
Human slavery was on the way out long before the Civil War. We had not had open slave trade markets for more than a generation, and the advent of the cotton gin and other technologies were on the horizon. It would have simply been economically stupid to have continued using slaves past 1900 or so.
The hypothetical question is almost impossible to consider because we have no way of knowing how history would have handled things like western expansion. Would California have been a Southern state? Would we have fought a war between the US and Confederacy anyway at some point over western lands? With the amounts of gold and silver discovered there, it's hard to imagine some hostility wouldn't have happened. What about the other wars fought with enemies to the South, like the Spanish-American war? Would the Confederacy fought that war by themselves? Would they have defeated the Spanish? Would the Confederates have obtained Florida?
Then there is the issue of the Native Americans. Could the US have cleared out the huge areas of the midwest without the help of people like the Texas Rangers? Highly doubtful. So the United States would have quickly been solidified as what we currently know to be the Northeast. Much of the Northwest would have probably been ceded to Native American tribes. Our entire continent would have looked completely different.
Vibrant agriculture trade in the South would have paved the way for technology and industrialization in the 19th century, and the CSA would have likely been the first to put a man on the moon. The South would have retained more timber, oil and coal as well. The Mississippi River would have been a huge lucrative asset for the South, as that would have been the only navigational course for export commerce from midwestern Northern industrial states.
The more you think about this, the more you can see why Lincoln felt it was absolutely vital to keep the nation intact. Smug and condescending Yankees can second guess and speculate all they like, we'll never know what might have been. I'm guessing it wouldn't have been as rosey a scenario as you may think for the US.
Lots of speculation there...it is difficult to know what would have occurred had the South been allowed to peacefully secede.
However the War of Northern Aggression was hardly rosy for most in the North and South. My point is Lincoln's aggression resulted in terrible consequences including 100 years of horrendous racism throughout the South, suffering and poverty for most African Americans, the shredding of the Constitution, the expansion of the state, to say nothing of the huge number of dead and near total destruction of half the nation. I think allowing the South to secede, would have been a much better choice.
I think it is a mistake to say it would have been a "better" choice. It would have changed the course of history in ways we can't even imagine. The horendous racism wasn't only confined to the South for the 100 years after the Civil War. In fact, there were more violent acts against blacks in the Northern states for most of that period. Granted, had slavery been allowed to die a natural slow death due to attrition, there likely wouldn't have been as much fear and subsequent racial turmoil anywhere.
I think a lot of people misinterpret the southern mentality of the time and assume that southern people were slave owners because they were racist people who hated blacks. They were slave owners because that's how you harvested cotton, tobacco and sugar cane. I think it's possible that, as slavery became obsolete, southerners would have assimilated most of the old black slaves and probably would have deported the younger ones. The South very well may have pioneered racial diversification long before the Civil Rights movement simply because of their cultural familiarity with the people. Sure, it's a speculation, but that's all we're doing here, right?
Another forgotten aspect is the fact that most of the South was destroyed, the economy was tanked, the currency rendered null and void. Aside from having 100k more able-bodied young men to forge ahead with a new nation, they would have been in pretty good shape financially as well. This would have been a huge advantage and head start in a peaceful secession.
From a purely objective economic standpoint, the South would have been far ahead of the North right off the bat.
