The country splits into two parts, neither of which can resist the aspiration of foreign powers. The South eventually becomes part of Mexico, and the North once again comes under control of Great Britain.
Read some books written by Harry Turtledove. He has a whole series about alternate history based on that very subject.
I doubt we would have been up to taking on the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.
‘The Calamity of Appomattox’ by H.L. Mencken
bmp
More apt and more plausible.
What if the North conceded defeat after First Bull Run.
The aristocratic plantation society wouldn’t survive, and would probably collapse within a generation; after which the USA/CSA would reunite. The ascension of American as the leading industrial nation would probably be delayed.
The only way that could have ever happened is if a gigantic asteroid had hit the northern seaboard. Result: calamity all around.
We lose the Revolutionary war.
Slavery ends in 1833 when the British Empire bans it...
There was the 1961 novel by MacKinlay Kantor, “If the South Had Won the Civil War”.
I’d lease jesse and keep him in the bushes. Being from the losing side, I think that Yankees couldn’t own slaves, but we could lease them from the winners.
The north soon discovers warp technology and moves among the stars. The south discovers decaf coffee.
Spike Lee has a movie like this.
CSA. Watch it. It’s kinda funny. Of course it paints all white people as horrible animals, but it’s target audience has no problem doing that.
At the end, they play the racist commercials. It’s very ey opening and should be watched by younger folks.
With no United States to intervene, Germany wins the First World War. Having seized all the colonial possessions of a beaten France, and some significant ones from Britain, such as India and much of Africa and China, they become the world empire they desired. By the 1930s they have bought enough prestige that most of Latin America is essentially German protectorates, and a controlling majority in the corrupt Yankee United States Congress is permanently in the Kaiser’s pocket. Since they bought a lot of their oil from Texas, the German Empire signed a mutual defense treaty with the Confederate States around 1924. Pax Germania reigns for about a century, when a dispute over the succession sets the world ablaze.
-PJ
Imagine that George McLellan, a Democrat, wins the Presidential election through voter fraud (realistic so far, eh?).
He declares an immediate cessation to the war, and withdraws all Union troops to the pre-war Union states. Both sides remain bitter over the war, and especially the South, since the war has been fought primarily on their soil and has caused immense destruction, even by the end of 1864.
Many in the North press for resumption of the war, and private militias are raised for the purpose of harassing the South. The South, nearly broke and trying to rebuild its economy, has no one willing to lend it money to do so (think of the Marshall Plan after WW II). Weakened economically and militarily (which are the same thing, really), it becomes embroiled in multiple defensive actions against the British, who never got over losing their colonies, and who still want cheap Southern cotton for their mills, the Mexicans, who want Texas back, and the Northern private militias.
The South eventually falls, and is split into multiple countries by whomever happened to control the fragments of the territory at the time. This would lead to multiple countries existing in what is now the Continental US, all of them in conflict.
Skipping ahead to WW I, the remaining "US" never enters WW I because it is too small in population and resources to fight in that war, and because of the ongoing conflicts on its own continent. The Germans, in their last push of the war, over run the French / British, and claim a large part of France (primarily Alsace Lorraine) as theirs. Hitler never emerges, and all of Europe eventually fights united against Stalin, but with a much smaller, weaker Soviet Union confined to its own territory (Russia).
Of course, I've left out a few details. :-)
There would have been a second war within 50 years. Slavery was on the out due to public opinion and technology, so that issue would have been resolved, but foreign interests would have swayed both sides. Each side was far too weak to resist foreign influences.
The South wins the Civil War. What about the wars that would follow? Would they continue to beat the United States?
Germans win World War I. No World War II. No Nuclear bombs. Most of the killing in the 20th century doesn't happen.