Would America Be Better Off If The South Won The Civil War?

Hypothetically let's say the south did win. America and the Confederacy probably would have eventually had diplomatic relations and I think slavery would have been illegal in both places at some point. In modern times I see it as a Canada/ America relationship. There is a common language and friendly relations but it's agreed upon that each side needs to do what is best for it.

The role of slavery in the war is often overstated in my opinion. Yeah it was an issue but there were so many economic and cultural differences that also were a factor. Differences we still see today. The south of America has never really gotten over the war and still holds a very romantic view of it. During Obama's presidency I heard many people in the south talk of leaving America again. The politics of the two regions are so different. In general the North"is now democratic and the South is overwhelmingly Republican. There is a distrust of the "liberal elite" of the north in the south.

Take our recent presidential election. Would Trump have won without the south? No chance. The south hated Obama and the north hates Trump. So sometimes I wonder if it truly would have been better for America to be split. Because now we are too large of a country and often people are not happy with the goverment because of this. Compared to many European countries America is huge. It is much easier to make 7 million people agree than 300 million.

The South can have guns and the Christian church and their law being one entity. The north could have none of that and both sides would be happy. Does anyone agree?

 

Would America be better off if King George had won The American Revolution?

 

The south would potentially be better off. The destruction from the war as well as the reconstruction set the south back in ways from which it still hasnt completely recovered.

Slavery would have ended on its own, the social tide was changing in Europe and the states. I cant really say if blacks would have gotten a better deal if slavery ended on its own rather than by force. They defnitely got the shit end of the stick as it is with 100 years of Jim Crow laws

It is interesting to think about the north and south growing and changing through the last 150 years as two separate nations!

 

To be honest i dont know if some of the pecularities of southern culture and politics that you mentioned would exist without the deep poverty the south saw after the war

 

What an interesting topic.

I have no idea what I really think either. I know that the south is primarily Republican and that I have been Democratic for as long as I can remember. I wonder if that has anything (or everything) to do with why I feel like the majority of white folk I know here believe and think completely differently than me.

I also have never understood why the south is primarily Republican.

I think slavery definitely would have ended without the war...how things would have turned out I have no idea. (Like Mel said) Those 100 yrs of Jim Crow laws definitely demonstrated the lowest, sorriest side of "white" people.

This is a thread that reminds me I've often wondered if I was born in the wrong place, in the wrong time, or in the wrong body.

I love living in the South...but at the same time I'm embarrassed by what many Southerners did.

 

No, because the south would have sought retribution against the 110,000 black soldiers who fought for the North but managed to survive the war.

It’s possible, I would have never been born


Hotwater

 

Oh come on. ^^

 

Hotwater

 

Consider this: would a (literally) divided America have been powerful enough to win the world wars?

 

depends on if both sides agreed on the way to fight the wars, we could never know what southern presidents would have done.

 

trump won plenty of northern states. i think it is more the coasts that you are thinking of. new england (mainly new york) and california, oregon and washington are the big liberal states. its the center of the country that is mostly republican/conservative.

texas is about as south as america gets.

(oops proved your point with texas, but it is the fact that they are in the center that i think has more to do with it)

 

technology ended slavery, not the war.
the cotton gin and other inventions made it economically unfeasible to maintain slaves any longer. slavery always was/is an economic endeavor.

 

Both slavery and industrial revolution destroyed the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy the south was founded upon. A nation of middle class farmers we are not and the same fight between rural populations and the continuing encroachment of civilization is why terrorism is now so popular around the world. Fundamentalists of every denomination are fighting a losing battle against the modern military-industrial complex. Obama was elected because, for the first time in US history, the urban population outnumbered the rural and this trend is only going in increase. Already the children of fundamentalists are moving to cities and adopting new values such as tolerance for homosexuals. They have no choice and the rural populations can fight and bitch and argue all they want, but they keep accepting the money and supporting the money and allowing it to destroy their way of life.

 

i think that's been the case for quite some time now. according to the US census bureau's website, urban outnumbered rural 79% to 21% back in 2000. i didn't immediately see older numbers than that, and didn't bother to look, but i'm sure it didn't happen overnight.

 

Democrats and republicans are mostly divided along rural/urban divides. Large southern cities generally vote Democrat.

 

Just the thread title by itself...

Would America be better off if the south won the civil war.

My answer: maybe so, but isn't racism a huge terrible thing? Why are we all in the boat together here ignoring that the south was extremely racist? That's not going to be forgotten, at least not by me. I don't care if it was two hundred years ago... Racism lives on! what a bunch of bs.

 

Yes, but many of the urban today are merely rural people who have moved to the suburbs and still retain more of their rural values making calling them "urban" a matter of opinion. Some of my friends like to call them "urban rednecks", but Obama was elected by the major urban centers in the country. To put the trend in perspective, it wasn't until about the 1880s that most Americans attended school learning how to read and write and a hundred years ago perhaps 95% were living on farms, while today its the other way around. That's a pretty dramatic turnaround for a single century and it won't be complete for perhaps another fifty to a hundred years, however, its pretty safe to now say that the urban population outnumbers the rural and all the estimates are that the republican party will either find a new role for itself or become defunct within twenty years because fundamentalism and organized religion in general is changing dramatically according to all the demographics. That's what all the stink with the Tea Party is all about. Despite being composed entirely of fundamentalists they claim they are a secular organization and have become the tail waging the dog of the republican party.

 

The confederate states of america were falling apart towards the end of the civil war. They couldn't get along with each other. So, we see where that was headed.

Trump won in a landslide. Stein's recount has exposed rampant voter fraud that nullify's the idea of hillary winning the popular vote. It's more like the democrats stuffed the ballot box in the cities and still couldn't pull it off. That's how much of a landslide it was.

The cotton gin increased the need for laborers, in this case, slaves. It processed cotton so fast that they needed to grow more cotton to keep up with the cotton gin. "Cotton is king."

It is good that people still consider that extremely bloody civil war. Read about it. Watch Ken Burns "The Civil War". We owe it to those men and women who fought so bravely on both sides (women didn't fight, but they ran the hospitals and traveled with the armies). I believe that we, as Americans, need to understand what happened and move on as President Lincoln wanted us to.

 

Most nations all over the world had a poor opinion of the southern states. When the confederacy sent one of its diplomats to Mexico to plead its case, they actually jailed the diplomat, from what i read.

So even if the south won the war, they would have been despised all over the world, and to some extent diplomatically isolated as well, which would have greatly retarded its growth as a nation. The British could have conquered it again as a colony, and abolished slavery there as well , as it had banned slavery in its territories at that time.

The present U.S.A , of unprecedented strength and power, would not have come about if the south had won the war.

The culture of slavery also contributed to the poor work culture and poor work ethics of the south and hence its poorer cultural and material development compared to the north.

Religion is mostly of a hypocritical,superstitious nature in the south and so they may be highly religious but poorly developed spiritually as well.

The war actually helped the south to progress rapidly , or else it would have regressed to the point where it would have become a british,spanish or french colony again.