Would a more industrialized ACW have resembled the fighting in WW1?

What if you postpone the ACW until British-Indian cotton production surpasses the South's, causing the Southern cotton industry to decline due to the availability of cheap Indian cotton imports. This could cause some Southern landowners to diversify their production at the risk of losing their livelihood, including constructing factories. Many factories would likely be owned by the quasi-airstocracy of the South, and the workers in such factories would be enslaved. Virginia has been mentioned as an ideal candidate for such an economy, but might Alabama be another candidate? Today its industry is focused on iron and steel, along with lumber, which might have become the basis for the beginnings of a Gulf coast rust belt. I think that Mobile would have become an industrial hub in this scenario, using Mobile Bay as a major shipping port, and the Alabama River to gain access to the resources further inland.
 
And did it ever amount to an appreciable percentage?

Yes, although in terms of % of slave population I don't have exact figures handy. We do know, however, that the iron industry was always pretty well dominated by slaves although labor would decline with the upswing of cotton prices for example; Iron production in the South declined from 1850 to 1860 as cotton prices rose.
 
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@History Learner

Actually your coverage raises an interesting question. Since the main limitor of slave industrial takeoff in the South, according to the school of thought you subscribe to, was a limited labor base that could be diverted into consistent industrial work (I hesitate to think heavy up-front investment industry is going to sprouting up at a similar rate in the South as the North of the capitalist has to worry about a sporadic labor pool based on the shifting price of cotton), we need to assume any industrializing Dixie has found a way around this problem. Say, owners of large numbers of slave stock liquidate their landholdings to get the initial capital outlays to move out of ag. into manufacture and raise and train their own workforces from the slaves they'd otherwise use to grow cash crops. Logically speaking that land is now open for use and would need to be purchased by somebody else;given the lack of spare cash or creditworthiness among the poor whites, and the fact this is obviously suitable land for more than subsistance farming of low margin of profit food crops it's probably going to remain as plantation land out of profit motive. How do you see these finding labor? I'd imagine slave breeding or attempts to revive imports would try to fill this lucrative gap as the price of slaves rises due to increased demand for efficient, oppressable labor.

Well, generally speaking, if we've expanded the labor pool you've got the labor to do both Industry and plantation agriculture.
 
Well, generally speaking, if we've expanded the labor pool you've got the labor to do both Industry and plantation agriculture.

Except you haven't expanded the total labor pool: or at least you haven't explained how you have. You've just shuffled it around to feed industry at the expense of agriculture. I'm specifically asking where the extra labor is coming from if we're assuming it's there.
 
Two wars foreshadowed the trench warfare and massed assaults of WW1--the US Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War.

European generals ignored both. Some things you've just got to learn to do by yourself.
 
Except you haven't expanded the total labor pool: or at least you haven't explained how you have.

I assumed you meant the labor pool had been expanded here:
Since the main limitor of slave industrial takeoff in the South, according to the school of thought you subscribe to, was a limited labor base that could be diverted into consistent industrial work (I hesitate to think heavy up-front investment industry is going to sprouting up at a similar rate in the South as the North of the capitalist has to worry about a sporadic labor pool based on the shifting price of cotton), we need to assume any industrializing Dixie has found a way around this problem.

You've just shuffled it around to feed industry at the expense of agriculture. I'm specifically asking where the extra labor is coming from if we're assuming it's there.

In terms of how to expand the labor pool? The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade stays open longer or restarts via backdoor means; Louisana, for example, in the 1850s did begin to attempt an "Apprentice" program with Africans. Alternatively, if Cotton prices have collapsed you'll just see cotton production reduced in favor of the more profitable industry.
 
Take this as your axiom for all future discussions of slave labor systems:
You can't have enslaved labor in an industrial system. It is economically more advantageous, as a slave, to break the machinery you work with. Breaking machinery produces a "profit" of a day's rest--the only profit a slave can ever earn. Slaves can work in agriculture or manual mineral extraction. They can't extract oil; they can't refine metals; they can't manufacture goods in factories. They will inevitably cost more than they produce. To hold slaves as a workforce is to consign your business to eventual failure. To permit slavery is to doom your nation to poverty.​
 
Two wars foreshadowed the trench warfare and massed assaults of WW1--the US Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War.

As I said above, there were plenty of wars which foreshadowed WW1 far more than the ACW did. The Russo-Japanese War is one, but the Balkan Wars, Boer War, and Franco-Prussian War all had elements of it as well.

European generals ignored both. Some things you've just got to learn to do by yourself.

Again, totally false. Though it is worth mentioning that US forces early after their entry into the war made a lot of the same mistakes the British/French/Germans had made in 1914/15. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be mentioned much by the "European generals were stupid and incompetent" school of thought.

It is economically more advantageous, as a slave, to break the machinery you work with. Breaking machinery produces a "profit" of a day's rest--the only profit a slave can ever earn.

Not true. For one thing, there's the threat of punishment if you're caught, which is going to act as a disincentive. For another, there were plenty of slave-owning societies where it was perfectly normal for masters to give their slaves rewards for good work, whether in the form of money or other gifts, or by promoting them to more cushy and high-status jobs, or (ultimately) setting them free. So there would be plenty of ways for slave-owning factory owners to incentivise their slaves.
 
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