The Sun Belt in a Confederate Victory TL

Highly doubtful. The northerners were not exactly pro-black. Sure there were lots of abolitionists, but not many wanted to actually LIVE with ex-slaves in their neighborhoods.

The ex-slaves would be homesteaders, living in their own towns, not sharing neighborhoods. It sounds like the North is going to be the benefactor of new settlement and immigration. That leaves the South short of workers.
 

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The only problem is that midwest farming, not to mention northern midwest, is quite different from the south. Especially given the cold, if the government does not offer massive assistance to the resettled ex-slaves, they are not going to prosper and may suffer severe attrition. As the poster before me mentioned, the German and Scandinavian settlers in the area had enough money and experience farming in similar climates with similar crops to afford to make a go of farming in the northern midwest. So the question is if the US government wants to make the investment to settle ex-slaves, or just let the south deal with it.

As it is, they could just let the northern European immigrants have it for free and develop it at their own cost. If the abolitionist organizations want to shoulder the cost of settling and equipping ex-slave sharecroppers, the west would be warmer and probably a bit more like the south as far as farming goes. Though, we should note, the southwest is going to be half in the USA, as the Confederacy did not take this area or settle it by the time the war happened. In fact, place like Colorado and Utah were firmly in the north during the civil war.
 
There is a continuing Southern reluctance to fund education to this very day. The Southern states are dead last in funding education, dead last in literacy rates, lowest pay for teachers, etc.

In some Southern states you have a significant faction that opposes public education of any kind, wants vouchers only, or even church sponsored education only. In Texas I recall the religious right actually defunded much of the funds dedicated to public education and moved the money directly to building more prisons and hiring more cops. Which makes sense in a weird way, a less educated young population will be committing more crime. And the South leads regionally in crime rates as well.

As a teacher in a Southern State (Mississippi) I can tell you that education is poorly funded here and that most parents would prefer to place students in private schools. I am poorly paid especially for the hours I work (One of my fellow coaches and I on a nice long bus trip to a game figured out between classroom, prep, meetings, and coaching we had working 80 hours a week for under 3k a month before taxes :() Most parents and members of the community though want Church involvement in the schools. Our administration has a monthly ministers council where most of the local ministers in a community of 25000 attend and being Mississippi there are A LARGE amount of churches per capita.
The area is a very poor region where about 95% of the school population receives federally funded free food and most of our kids actually take the ACT for free through federal programs. All but 5 of the teachers at the high school are forced to rely on a single computer for the classroom and most of the those still run Win 98 which is 10 years out of date.
With a change to the Sun Belt I see that being worse as this community is still better off than most around it simply due to its location along the I55 route from Memphis to New Orleans and the fact we have both Amtrak and freight rail going through town.
 
Hendryk,

Actually, I read a news story once about American retirees going to live in Mexico because they could stretch their pension dollars farther.

The Confederacy would have an advantage over Mexico in TTL because it is an English-speaking country.
 
Hendryk,

Actually, I read a news story once about American retirees going to live in Mexico because they could stretch their pension dollars farther.

The Confederacy would have an advantage over Mexico in TTL because it is an English-speaking country.

Somewhat regrettably many retirees would probably be attracted towards the aristocratic life of white privilege and cheap plentiful help, But retirees alone does not the sunbelt make, and California was already a leading destination for retiring professionals as far back as the 1890's.
 
One thing not really discussed in this thread is that the growth of the Sun Belt was in large part due to major U.S. corporations wanting to avoid unions. The south developed into a fertile climate for union avoiding businesses rather quickly. First, the CIO utterly failed in their post WW2 attempt to organize the south - Operation Dixie. Secondly, the passage of Taft-Hartley allowed "right-to-work" states, in which the only legal form of union was an "open shop" model - where there can be no requirement upon members to join the union, even though the union is still compelled to represent them. Which means that a union would need to constantly organize to keep membership up, and always be broke - ergo the south was largely abandoned by the national labor movement, and businesses began moving their own production to the South.

With the South not in the Union, things could change dramatically. It is true that there were some right-to-work states outside of the U.S. south (all in the interior west). It's also true that Taft-Hartley was actually pushed by Northern Republicans. However, presumably a U.S. without the South will be slightly more to the left economically, making it unclear to me if business interests will be powerful enough to leave a segment of the country essentially unorganized. If there are no right-to-work equivalents, the North will stay highly industrialized at least until the passage of some NAFTA-equivalent.
 
Highly doubtful. The northerners were not exactly pro-black. Sure there were lots of abolitionists, but not many wanted to actually LIVE with ex-slaves in their neighborhoods. They just hated the institution. For instance, remember the race riots during the civil war and just about every succeeding decade with the greater immigration of blacks to northern industrial jobs.

Depends. New Englanders were more willing to accept them as equals; the midwest wanted them out; the other states were a bit in between.
 
It is true that there were some right-to-work states outside of the U.S. south (all in the interior west).

The distribution of right-to-work states is interesting. Iowa appears to be the "bluest" state in the group, with an attitude towards business, industry and education far more "northern" than "southern."

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