Snake Featherston
Banned
I agree. If the Planters had been willing to coexist with an industrial sector and accept the abolition of slavery in the long term, why did they secede in the first place?
If this question gets a response at all it's usually a non-answer about people who criticize the CSA in this regard believing in US exceptionalism and thus meanie anti-Southerners who don't get the CSA was really not concerned about slavery at all, just states' rights. The record of massacres of blacks by the CSA and the refusal to raise slaves as soldiers when this would have undercut the major US moral advantage over the CSA *and* created a huge manpower source are men behind the curtain to be ignored in favor of the big talking mask. Robert's The Black and the Grey has the simplest general idea for how the CSA could actually win (as opposed to ensuring the USA loses) the war, but a CSA willing to abolish slavery that pragmatically would not have seceded in the first place and instead negotiated gradual emancipation with the abolitionists. It's also worth noting for the "Blame Jeff Davis" crowd's critiques of Davis, he's the only man who would scrap slavery and be POCS if it would help him stay POCS. Toombs, Stephens, Cobb, Breckenridge, and particularly Rhett would never do this. And with the historical CSA unwilling to take a political step that would have let it not merely save itself but outright win the war on its own power, the odds of a victorious CSA in a short or long war doing this are as little as a Nazi Germany that has an Ultra-Orthodox Jew as minister of war and a Russian Communist as minister of the treasury.