DoodleDawg: "It is possible, but nobody can say for sure..."
Bonemaker: "Depends on whether the federal government of the time had adhered to the ideals behind the founding and left the South alone."
DiogenesLamp: "From what I have learned of the era, there was a pretty good likelihood that the CSA would have taken over the entire Union.
It would have certainly gotten all the border states, and then it would have slowly acquired other states which would have discovered that their best financial interests lay with the CSA.
We might have seen New York replaced as the financial capitol of the US with Norfolk or Charleston, or perhaps even New Orleans."
OIFVeteran: "If the southern states had not seceded and started a rebellion we probably would have had legal chattel slavery in this country until the early to mid-twentieth century."
First, all are correct, depending on your definition of "United States" -- absent Civil War a rump country would remain, slowly or rapidly shrinking as each new Confederate demand resulted in more lost Union territories & states.
At some point the overall balance of power would flip and Northern cities like New York petition to join the Confederacy.
Second, however, it's important to remember that DiogenesLamp's obsession with promoting the Port of Charleston SC is as fanciful today as it was in 1861.
Today the Port of New York & New Jersey is ranked #3, behind New Orleans (S. Louisiana) and Houston.
In foreign exports, NY is #7, imports #2.
In the meantime, Charleston SC's port is ranked #34 overall, just one ahead of Boston.
Even in 1860 Charleston was smaller than New Orleans and Baltimore, roughly equivalent to Mobile & Savanah, both of which today far surpass Charleston.
So DiogenesLamp's notion that Charleston was destined under a Confederacy to become North America's premier port city is pure cloud-gazing.
Long before that could potentially happen, New York itself would join the Confederacy.
Third, but the real problem with SeekAndFind's question is: how could there not be a Civil War?
Answer: only if the Union conceded every new Confederate demand for states (i.e., Kentucky) & territories (i.e., Oklahoma).
Such a "Union", if not fought for, would surely deserve its fate on the ash-can of history.
Finally, on OIFVeteran's implied question on when, if ever, Confederates would abolish slavery, the answer is: a nation Founded explicitly & Constitutionally to protect slavery was certain never to abolish it, absent some huge existential crisis.
What sort of crisis?
Well, suppose that all the nations of Europe told Confederates they would refuse to import another bale of Southern cotton until Confederates abolished slavery, would that do it?
Maybe, but the chances of that happening any time in the century after 1860 are: zero, especially if, as seems likely, without Confederate support the Brits & French lost the First World War.
A victorious Imperial Germany would have no particular problem with African chattel slavery:
- "Like other colonial powers, the Germans expanded their empire in the Africa Great Lakes region, ostensibly to fight slavery and the slave trade.
Unlike other imperial powers, however, they never formally abolished either, preferring instead to curtail the production of new "recruits" and regulate the existing slaving business.[3]"
