I agree with NS that we would have had more wars if the South had gained her independence as an outcome of the War of Northern Aggression because, if not for the Southern red states, the north would have become a communist country allied with the USSR, Cuba, et al, and we Southrons would have to fight them for our freedom.
Hell, we're fighting the damn yankees (Schumer, Obama, Kennedy, Kerry, Franks, etc.) for our freedom now and if Obama wins in November and the congress continues to be controlled by the damn yankee liberals, NS and his pals will finally see their dream of a socialist/communist USA come true.
The south lost something they didn't have in the first place. The U.S. would have lost lives and territory and property and a war. But look back through history at conflicts between countries, where 'nothing but size and pride' was lost and tell me how they got along. France and Germany. Israel and Egypt. England and Argentina. An end to the conflict would have left hard feelings between the two countries. And those hard feelings could easily have led to future conflicts and even more hard feelings.
The number of slaves at that time "off the reservation" so to speak, was substantial in many area's of the south. Humpty was too broken to put back together except by using those men that were in the CS army, and I doubt very seriously they could have been forced to fight to get back another man's property when they didn't believe they were fighting for that against the Lincolnite's. They would have simply replaced slavery then the same way they did 143 years ago.
Slavery was too ingrained into their culture and society. They rebelled to protect it, their economic livelyhood depended on it, and their society was built on it. It was not an institution that they would have given up lightly, and an independent confederacy would most likely have taken whatever steps necessary to protect it, and to replace the lost slaves through other sources.
Hardly, a study of the inner struggle of the Confederate states is one of resistance to federal authority.
A history of the confederacy was an example of how quickly a people give in to a central authority. During the war, the Davis government tossed the whole concept of states rights out the window. They seized the state's authority to control their militia by forcibly extending enlistments and instituting conscription. It stripped the population of their civil rights by suspending habeas corpus, instituting martial law throughout the country, seizing property for the war effort without compensation, requiring people to get government permission to travel, and in countless other areas. The population accepted these restrictions as a part of winning the war. And once the war was over, the Yankee bugaboo doesn't just go away. Now you have a wounded and pissed off North just waiting for revenge, and it would have seemed very prudent to continue the restrictions, for safety's sake. After all, there was no supreme court around to tell the government it couldn't. And if an independent confederacy had followed what you suggested and done away with slavery? Well, then there were all those suddenly free blacks to keep in line. You couldn't have them suddenly going where they wanted, living where they wanted, having the same rights as the white folk did. So restrictions would have had to continue, certainly on the blacks and to a lesser extent on the whites, to make sure none of them stirred up trouble. It is easy to see how an independent confederacy could have, and probably would have continued on the repressive path that marked its 4 years of existence. There was nothing that might have stopped it.