For the nation? I don't know. It sure did change a lot of things. Since we don't know the alternative, it is hard to say if we would have been better off if the war had never happened. If we want to project backwards, I'd go back to 1787 and do what the vast majority at the Constitutional Convention wanted to do --- insert a clause that would have ended slavery. We may have started as a nation of only 10 or 12 states, but that would have been the best re-write of history I can imagine. But going forward to 1861, I do know that Union victory was the best thing that ever happened to the south. If the Confederacy had "succeeded", it would have spiraled down into a banana republic. The slaveocracy had virtually turned their back on the modern world. The south nearly missed the industrial revolution just as Latin America missed it because the sources of wealth were devoted to land ownership and agriculture pursuits and there was no desire or even respect for private enterprise or industry. It and labor were looked down on by the controlling society. (White Trash) Even a rabid pro-Confederate capitalist like DeBeau couldn't get the slaveocracy to invest in industry.
Those questions are all academic however. Even if a wussy Buchanan-type administration had remained in power in Washington and the south had been able to pull off a peaceful secession, war would have came eventually. There were too many opportunities for conflict to hold any hope that war could be avoided for long.
Are some of us wrong to say that a lot of the lack of respect for the Constitutuion, the current moral and intellectual plight of the Blacks in the US, and the out-of-control nature of the Federal government can be traced back to this conflict and its outcome?
When I look at the post civil war Jim Crow laws that existed all the way up through the 1970s, completely ignoring the Bill of Rights, respect for the Constitution is not what comes to my mind. States Rights is a valid and powerful tool left to us by our Founders. Unfortunately, it has been so damaged by using it first as an ex post facto justification for armed rebellion and afterward as a tool to deny Constitutional rights to a class of citizens. For nearly a century and a half, the states rights doctrine was abused by the southern states. The challenge for we conservatives today is to return the states rights doctrine to its rightful place and convince people that it is not code for discrimination. It is an uphill battle.
But surely such complexity in the documents of the time can't lead us to the story the public indoctrination camps tried to teach us when I was a kid that the North was a bunch of abolitionists who were motivated by a deep compassion for the slaves, and the South were a bunch of Nazi-style racists and drunks ready for a fight, because they knew in their hearts that being mean to Blacks (which is what they lived for) was wrong.
I don't know where you went to school, but my experience is very different. I was in elementary and high school through the 50s and early 60s in both parochial and public schools. On civil war studies, we were given what I would consider a homogenized, politically correct "nationalized' version of the war with a lot of emphasis on tariffs, states-rights and other "sectional differences" with slavery being just one of them. As I later discovered, that interpretation began early in the 20th century as an effort to placate the south and promote national unity. It was itself a re-write of history. In college, I only took one American History class, and the instructor was so deadly dull, I slept through most of it. I have zero recollection of what if any spin he put on the issue. I pretty much carried that milk-toast "somehow tariffs and states rights caused it" theory for many years until I began to educate myself on the issues. Once I did, I understood that slavery, or more precisely, the expansion of slavery, was the cause of the war.
It is not that there were no other aggravating issues, but all of those other issues combined would not have led to secession, while the expansion issue alone was more than sufficient to cause secession and war. And contrary to what many say about expansion, the south's concern was not that more free states would have lead the north to dominate them in congress. Unlike the founding era where the nation's interests were clearly divided "north and south", by 1860, there was North, South, East, West, and lots of areas that could at any time be more than one of those orientations. Just like today, multiple coalitions of interests were available to the south to force compromise on tariffs or on any other issue. Some said that a free state dominated congress would end slavery. Looking at the math of passing a constitutional amendment ending slavery also makes that argument silly. Even to this day, if 15 states wanted slavery, there are not enough other states to pass a constitutional amendment ending slavery. Those arguments were and remain smoke screens.
The only issue that mattered was expansion. Expansion of slavery was vital to the southern slavepowers for both economic and social reasons. In the 70 years between the 1st census of 1790 and the 1860 census, the number of slaves had quadrupled, from less than 800,000 to nearly 4 million. For the first 30 or so years of our nationhood, slavery was becoming less and less of a profitable enterprise with all of the Northern states ending it by the 1820s. Many in the Upper South freed their slaves and there were serious abolition movements throughout the south that had a lot of support. That all changed with the advent of King Cotton. Slavery suddenly became fabulously profitable for those who could amass a large enough cotton plantation and afford enough slaves. Even the poor, burned-out plantations of the Upper South benefited by basically becoming breeding stables to supply the ever-expanding demand for slaves in the Cotton Belt.
It was a great deal as long as new markets for slaves continued to be opened as they were in the Gulf States and Texas. But by 1860, the Cotton Belt was nearing its geographical limits. By that time, slaves made up over 1/3 of all the population of the entire south and 40-50% of the population of the Deep South while white population grew slowly or not at all. Those 4 million slaves represented over 60% of the privately held wealth of the south. If new outlets were not found for slaves, not only would whites in the south soon be hopelessly (and dangerously) outnumbered by slaves, but the value of those slaves would rapidly fall as supply outstripped demand.
In a nutshell, that is why a wealthy planter in Charleston was willing to go to war over the question of slavery in Nebraska or Colorado. Economically and socially, he had no other option. Their wealth, power, and even safety, depended on finding new markets for slaves, and Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans stood directly in their path.
Walt