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When a wife asks for a divorce, and the husband forces her to stay through violence, then beats her to a pulp when she resists, who's fault is it?

If you want to go with that analogy you have it all wrong. The South didn't ask for a divorce. They walked out. After helping to run up the credit cards, they walked away from their share of the responsibility. They walked out on family obligations. They took every bit of community property they could get their hands on. And they fired some shots at their spouse on their way out the door. Considering all that it was the North that was the aggrieved spouse and not the South.

We'll never know what might have been.

We can be pretty sure that the South would have fought as hard for their slaves in 1870 or 1880 or maybe even 1890 as they did in 1861.

It only took 700k dead and hundreds of thousands wounded to "prove" that political unions at the point of the sword might eventually work out OK after the better part of a century,...

It was their war, maybe the South should have fought harder for their chattel? Then we would be in different countries and not having this delightful conversation.

Then we would be in different countries and not having this delightful conversation

Are you in the South? 'Cause I'm in Ohio.

If you want to go with that analogy you have it all wrong. The South didn't ask for a divorce. They walked out. After helping to run up the credit cards, they walked away from their share of the responsibility. They walked out on family obligations. They took every bit of community property they could get their hands on. And they fired some shots at their spouse on their way out the door. Considering all that it was the North that was the aggrieved spouse and not the South.

I can't agree with this analogy. What share of responsibility did the South walk away from - they were paying a good part (some would argue more than their share) of the taxes. The South didn't assert it owned part of federal properties in the North. If the North surrendered, the South would be free to leave as they asserted was their right. The South had no claim to the territory or assets in the North. If the South surrendered - well the outcome is just as anyone would have predicted.

We can be pretty sure that the South would have fought as hard for their slaves in 1870 or 1880 or maybe even 1890 as they did in 1861.

Perhaps. Or perhaps if Northern industrialism, instead of being used to wage war, had instead been used for productive industry, the revolution which followed the civil war would have been accelerated by many times, making slavery less profitable of a venture. More importantly, instead of banning what was the key to an entire economic system, the North could have used the industrial revolution to ease the transition - a revolution that largely bypassed the South due to it's economic shambles for decades. This would have benefitted both sides. As despicable as slavery was for those 2 million in the South how much better off were they in return for the awful carnage? The North ignored the Klan and Jim Crow for most of the next century, leaving the former slaves who couldn't or wouldn't leave closer to slavery than to freedom for generations.

With the money the North spent on the war and reconstruction, they could have bought a good portion of the slaves outright and transplanted them out of the South without a shot fired or a life lost.