Thanks.
I've thought about it a lot. I think that the only people who would be better off in a world where the CSA won would be Southerners....bad way to put it. Richer. *Materially* better off.
(Not inevitably. This is AH. We're not dealing in certainties. Just possibilities.)
Real, out-of-timeline-talk, I do believe that racism--its invention as an ideology--is a pure cope for treating people like shit. As you can see by the timeline, I try not to conflate racism and slavery, because they were different (but related) issues *at the time*. But freedom really did ring when the slavers were defeated. There is a great book of academic essays, _American Civil Wars_, which goes into wonderful detail about the international public/media diplomacy in the UK, Cuba, Spain, Brazil, and so on, wrt the war and emancipation. Many Brazilians, Cubans, and Spaniards themselves explicitly saw what was going on as the canary in the coal mine. It was, thankfully, but what if the canary had lived instead?
The South is materially better off TTL bc all of their wealth, banking systems, and manufacturing isn't destroyed. OTL probably held the South back, materially, by 20 years. Maybe more. Consumption didn't reach 1860 levels till around 1900.
But what is twenty years worth of money and compounded interest worth when weighed against the moral cost of *letting slavery ring*?
Gives me the chills thinking about it, you know?