DBWI: A Powerful Confederate States of America

I just don't see how that happens with the CSA short of a revolution, though. It was always an artificial state, created for nothing but the interests of the planter elite. This is clear in how fast everything fell apart during Pershing's March to the Sea. Even before the breakthrough of March 1915 the CSA was falling apart; the elite had lost control outside of the cities and it had descended into a race war between poor whites and slave rebels.
 
I don’t know how this had not been talked about yet but...
Maybe the confederacy bans slavery soon then 1902? I mean Robert E. Lee wanted to end it, maybe if he had not been murdered by a slave, and stay president longer, he could get the south to soften up on the slaves, and latest thirty years later, they ban it. Slavery had turned the nation against itself in many ways.
 
It's also important to remember that the principles on which the CSA was founded meant it could never be a great power. State's Rights meant that the CSA was much reduced by the time of the Great War; Texas and Oklahoma had seceded (the former of which the Union partitioned with Imperial Mexico) and the government was repeatedly paralyzed. The Confederacy was a failed state from the word go; this is well and truly ASB.

Would it helped if more states joined the CSA in the first places, states like Maryland and Delaware perhaps? Sure, they might bail out later anyways but in the meantime any pieces that the CSA has means less for the USA...
 
The problem is that the "free" population of the CSA was much smaller than the USA at the time of the Civil War, and the overall culture of the CSA was unattractive to most European immigrants, so the USA continued to be at least five times the population of the CSA between immigration and natural increase. The millions of slaves, while "producing" for the CSA represented a lit stick of dynamite ready to explode at any moment. The effort the CSA used to keep the slave population under control represented effort that could have been much better used in improving the CSA. Of course when the war started, slave uprisings large and small were a cancer on the CSA.

For the CSA to develop in to a diversified industrial power, albeit substantially smaller than the USA, between the ACW and the Great War would require a CSA with an entirely different philosophy than the one that existed. If the political elite had been inclined to that political philosophy, then a plan of gradual emancipation, acceptance of infrastructure improvements,and industrial development would have been the way forward - but that means the disagreements with the north could have been settled amicably with no need for secession.

The CSA was like the scorpion in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, where the frog asks the scorpion after it stings it, so both will drown, why it did such a foolish thing and the scorpion replies because it was his nature as a scorpion. The CSA was as it was because that was its essential nature, to be something different it would have to be not a scorpion but something else.
 
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