You make an interesting point with the growing areas or lack of in Texas. I take your word for not knowing enough about Texas in that respect.
Excellent overview of the types of geographical crop boundaries for the topical crops grown on plantations and the realities of California.
The South really did not possess the manpower to enforce their will on the entire nation for any great length of time prior to counter strikes breaking in all Confederate occupied zones even if rebel forces overran Washington D.C. and penetrated deeper into Pennsylvania after Gettysburg, possible threatening Philly itself.
Pro-Union & anti-slavery forces would have rallied overnight from New England, New York to the Great Lakes if Washington had fallen.
The whole thing is hypothetical and should remain so.
The 'LOL' on the map ...is it the Canadians? :)
No, that's not quite true, either. There is a substantial opinion, possibly the majority opinion among scholars and not just on this board, to the effect that slavery was on borrowed time, even with the cotton gin, and that increased mechanization of the cotton fields would have spelled its end -- after all, think about machinery prices versus what it cost a man to keep 300 slaves, much less how much capital he had tied up in them. In 1860, the total value of capital tied up in slaves just in Texas was $160,000,000 gold, which Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, in Lone Star (the manual Texas history written 40 years ago), says was more than the value of ALL the improved real estate in the State. That's why compensated emancipation could never have worked -- the nation would have gone broke, buying all the slaves at market prices; and yet that was what Southern planters and farmers had paid for them.
The vast amount of capital involved was, at the end of the day, the anchor of the problem, and it would have provided the impetus -- under the competing theory -- for mechanization and "unlocking the value". Slaves would have been sold off to Brazil or whoever would give a price for them, in theory, and mechanical methods of harvesting substituted.
However, contrary to the happy theory, the actual difficulty involved in picking cotton so that it doesn't end up full of twigs and shards of the hard boll (which is hard and sharp and cuts fingers of less-than-dextrous manual pickers) is quite high. Mechanical picking degrades the cotton's maret value, so that hand-picked Egyptian cotton fetches better prices today than machine-picked American cotton, because of all the foreign matter that ends up embedded in the mechanically-picked cotton. Therefore, the market would have continued to offer a substantial premium for slave-picked cotton over bales picked by more "modern" methods, and the premium, plus the cost of equipment, would have presented a substantial continuing penalty to cash flow, offsetting whatever benefit the planters might have received from disposing of their expensive human capital. Worse, as they disposed of millions of slaves on the world market -- which by then had essentially shrunk to Brazil and the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial possesssions -- the price would have fallen dramatically, effectively raising the economic bar to making the transition.
Ergo, I don't share other people's optimism, born of a sincere wish no doubt, that slavery would have "faded away" as quickly as some historians have insisted in recent years.
I had a source for the revisionist study published just a few years ago that supports my POV on the durability and vitality of the terminal plantation culture, but I can't locate it now, unfortunately. I will point out in support of my contention that, despite emancipation, Texas Archeological Society investigators excavating the remains of slave quarters in some of the sugar-cane plantations in the Brazos Delta country of coastal Texas (they are also interested in the "freedmen's town" area of Houston) have found proof that the quarters continued to be inhabited by the former slaves for up to 25 years after emancipation, on the evidence of numismatic and cultural finds that provide termini post quem for occupation of both the quarters and the "big house".