The Old South, which has been vividly described in our "American History" books, is an equivocation. I always got the impression that the Confederates were all uneducated and simply wanted to keep slaves. The reality, is much more complicated.
Many of us now know, that the Confederacy dealt with slavery, whether or not a national bank would be allowed, who would ultimately rule, etc... The Confederate Constitution-to me-is chilling.
Chilling? How so?
Much of the Confederacy's Constitution was directly copied from the US Constitution, but there were some notable differences.
The CSA Constitution specifically forbade the foreign slave trade, which was more than the US had done. That is a significant detail because it was New England shipping companies who were doing all of the foreign slave trading. No slave ship ever sailed under a Confederate flag. Not a single one.
It limited the CS president to a single 6-year term in a lifetime. The Confederates were thinking about term limits 70 years before FDR.
The CS Constitution did not include the General Welfare Clause because the Confederates saw the potential for abuse in it and they were right.
That said, had the South won the war, I think both governments, the CS and US, would have failed, forcing a reunification. Both side were going too far in opposite directions.
The Confederacy was going too far in the direction of states rights and sovereignty, to the point that the central government was too weak. Jefferson Davis was constantly complaining that he needed the powers that Lincoln had in order to fight the war and the states could barely get along with each other for the war effort. North Carolina and Georgia probably would have been the first states to secede from the Confederacy.
The US, on the other hand, was going too far in the direction of a strong central government and beginning to encroach on the Constitution and many and various ways. Lincoln was the quintessential tax and spend liberal. The Whig Party had almost bankrupted Illinois in the 1840's while Lincoln was serving in the state legislature and the state had to amend its constitution to stop the subsidies of private enterprises that almost bankrupted them.
Without Southern conservatism, the US government would have gone bankrupt much sooner. Lincoln and the liberal Republicans, formerly Whigs, were all about spending and subsidies, especially the railroads. Lincoln had been a railroad lawyer and was certainly earning favors for a job after the presidency. The scandal of the Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific's construction are an often ignored aspect of Lincoln's legacy.
By winning the war and bringing that conservativism and Jeffersonianism back into the system, it has managed to delay liberalism's bankruptcy of America by 150 years.