OTL, in all but name?
This. I think that the rising Social Darwinism of the fin de seicle, combined with all the weird "biology" that was accepted norm of the good virtuous scientific gentlemen of the time would lesson the outrage over Southern slavery a great deal more than we assume.
Likely something along these lines.
To *some* extent, at least amongst conservatives. Liberal types, however, might actually become even *more* outraged, especially as time goes on.
It didn't have a huge, hostile neighbor just across the border nor was 1/3 of its population eager to leave .
Or an economic system that would have been eventually doomed to failure, bar the rise of a dictatorship.....
The Confederate Constitution made it almost impossible for slavery to be abolished. Congress is specifically stripped of any ability to pass laws limited slave ownership in any way. A state might conceivably abolish slavery within its own borders, but other language makes clear that any slave-owner can travel with his slaves to any state in the Confederacy, so in effect slavery is legal throughout the Confederacy until every single state individually passes state-level legislation abolishing slavery. Needless to say, that's very, very, very difficult to achieve (I'm looking at you, South Carolina).
Yep, unfortunately this happens to be correct.
And in 1860, there was next to no abolitionist sentiment in the Confederacy. There had been a sharp change from Jefferson's day, when slavery was seen as a necessary weevil that had to be eventually extinguished, to the age of Edmund Ruffin and his ilk, who saw slavery as a positive good that had to be protected at all costs. There were some who privately harbored anti-slavery feelings (John C. Breckinridge probably being one of them), but they could never have expressed them publicly without being cast out of proper society.
Sad, but true: Jefferson would have been horrified by the Fire-Eaters, and even Andrew Jackson didn't like them much.
Didn't Cleburne die in battle, though?After all, look what happened to Patrick Cleburne in early 1864.
The lost cause has succeeded in spreading this meme that slavery was becoming unprofitable and was fast on its way out. It's hard to be further from the truth.
I'm not so sure of that: they might have publicly adopted this stance for their own purposes(it certainly made for good PR, admittedly.), but they sure didn't start it. Hell, if anything at all, the meme that slavery would have survived to the present day with no problems at all, actually fits the real belief systems of much of their ranks, rather more closely(as horrible as that sounds, it's true).
Plantation slavery wouldn't have become economically obsolete until the 1930s, when IOTL the first mechanical cotton pickers were developed. Even then, it would take time for the technology to mature and for planters to invest in it. It's important to remember that slavery's successor system, sharecropping, survived into the late 20th century in some places. It's reasonable to assume that at least a few old fashioned plantations would still be in business a full century after confederate independence, assuming a perfect world where only economic forces are at play.
To *some* extent, but that's if the C.S. economy doesn't implode by then; this may not be accepted by some, but we often grossly underestimate just how greedy many planters were, often to the point of irrationality.....and greed is never good for a nation's overall well-being: just look at the U.S. IOTL prior to the Great Depression.
In a world where liberalism has ended in a said farce, presuming that the Union simply comes apart and the Confederates simply have decided that Slavery = Good is a national credo, I think the more likely course of action is that the modern views of humanity--things like the UN Declaration of Human Rights--never emerge at all.
I'm not convinced of that. Not one bit. Now, granted, I don't disagree that the C.S.A. being successful *would* be a blow to liberalism, but I doubt this would actually prevent anything like the U.N. D.H.R. from being created.
Oh, and by the way, for anyone who thinks that traditionally reactionary societies are inherently stable-one needs only to look at Russia prior to 1918 IOTL; it can be plausibly argued, sadly, that the death of Alexander II was what started Russia on the road to societal ruin. Or hell, even Qing China counts for an Eastern example.
Confederate Victory means the defeat of the United States, a ramification that the Sons of the South have not considered beyond the first conclusion. If Liberalism ends in Mexican style warlordism or what would basically be an failure over much of North America, how does it exactly influence the world in its direction?
And again, we can point to Qing China in particular.
National Exceptionalism, that we are better than them and therefore they can plow our fields and mill our grain, will likely not end.
It hasn't quite ended even IOTL. But that won't necessarily prevent a decline.....
At least up until the economy implodes.....which, admittedly, could take a long time(maybe up until about 1960 or so at the very worst) depending on how all the cards are played.Meanwhile, Slavery likely becomes more and more cruel and more and more profitable. Imagine the profits of selling organs for transplants, or sexual gratification with children, under the aegis of a belief that God approves. If enough people make enough money, the guys who ask the hard questions can get shot, or lynched, or recant under torture, and the system can perpetuate itself, vindicating itself by its mere existence.
Nope, barring some highly unlikely massive spike in technological advancement, the C.S. economy would have imploded some time before that.Given a Southern Victory and the collapse of ideas that make opposing Slavery politically feasible, you likely have slavery lasting until Robots become cheaper.