So I felt when we were in the south.
How different would the country be today if the south had succeeded and seceded?
Would Spain have taken us over? (I heard they were waiting in the wings for the Confederates to win.) What would have happened then?
Spain would most definitely not have taken over either part of the country.
They were trying to govern a shrinking empire with an administration that had preserved a sixteenth-century management style. Just as oil producers tend to stagnate today, the silver and gold of the Americas had allowed them to keep a system that simply did not measure up to the far more advanced systems around her and here in America.
McVey
"How different would the country be today if the south had succeeded and seceded?
Would Spain have taken us over? (I heard they were waiting in the wings for the Confederates to win.) What would have happened then?"
No, Spain was not powerful enough to take over either the USA or the CSA. By the end of the Civil War, the USA and CSA, with their massive, modern-armed armies and their dual monopoly on ironclad vessels of war were in fact the world's number 1 and number 2 land and sea powers, respectively.
A couple of Monitors, or the CSS Virginia and Shenandoah, would have made driftwood out of entire British Navies thrown at them...let alone Spanish. The qualitative difference between ironclad vessels of war of North and South and the wooden ships-of-the-line that everyone else in the world had at the time was about the same as the difference between German Panzers and those brave Polish cavalry. NO amount of cavalry could defeat tanks. NO amount of wooden sailing vessels, however brave their British (or French, or Spanish) crews could defeat ironclads. The wheel of technology turned and gave an absolute advantage to the ironclad ships.
The advantage on the ground was a bit less, but the Union, especially, was armed with breach-loading repeating rifles; and the Confederates were incredibly battle-hardened and experienced. Also, compared to European Armies, the Union and Confederate armies were HUGE. There were literally MILLIONS of men under arms. The British Army - the whole thing - of the period had perhaps 60,000 - 80,000 effectives; the French army perhaps four times that - and they were the best Europe had to offer. The COMBINED might of the British and French land forces would have made an interesting week's work for one wing of EITHER the Confederate States' Army or the US Army...and that's assuming that the Europeans could get their wooden ships-of-the-line past either Union or Confederate ironclads.
They couldn't.
Had the Confederacy survived the war, there would have been no danger from any European states. They were too small, and far too weak compared to the two American behemoths.
However, that would have not been true in 1918. A divided America would have been a neutral and mutually suspicious America in World War I (or, less likely, a NORTH that sided with Germany, while the SOUTH sided with England). Result: German victory in the First World War, and Imperial (not Nazi) Germany would be the primary world power today.
True, but how different is the country today from say 1850? One difference that I know for sure is that the Federal government is bigger and more intrusive and powerful than it was back then. Also special interest groups have more say than they did back then. So another question you might ask is "What did we lose as a nation when the North won in 1865?" I know one answer to that would be "the validity of the principles of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence."