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Slavery as an economic institution seemed doomed by changes to how wealth was generated in the 19th century. The cotton bubble of the 1850’s would, as do all commodity bubbles, have collapsed at some point. The Civil War may have retarded this event by creating an unnatural shortage of cotton from 1861 to 65. This did lead to extensive experiments in cotton growth in both India, Egypt, and Brazil. The end of the war reduced but did not eliminate these new producers especially the last two locations. For some years the price of cotton remained high even as the South began to produce virtually as much as before 1861 due to a world wide consumption driven boom generated by intensive railway development, investment of surplus liquidity some generated by the Civil War, and credit speculation. No where was the boom more more pronounced than in the US where a veritable mania of railway speculation fueled flush times.

The proximate cause of the crash which brought this period to an end and ushered in a global depression lasting 6-10 years depending on the country and decades of low financial return on most investments was the demonetization of silver by both the new German Empire and the US. The Grant administration ws concerned with the escalating inflation that rapid monetary growth was causing and enacted both a silver demonetization act and Treasury Department tight money policies to discourage easy credit.
These actions and possibly the machinations of Jay Gould led to the collapse of Jay Cooke the second largest bank in the US as this firm was just about to launch a $300M bond issue to cover the major construction of the second transcontinental railway, the Northern pacific. (The Gould connection comes from the indication Gould was shorting both Cooke and the NP, even though he was the largest share holder in the NP with the expectation of making a quick and vast killing by buying up depressed NP shares for a fraction of their value and being able to get control of Cook's bank in the same fashion. Cooke had frozen Gould out of the profits from the bond sales and wouldn't participate in any joint activities with Gould. Gould did not expect the crash to be as severe as it was and quietly cut a low profile in financial circles as the financial and stock markets virtually imploded in a matter of days after Cooke declared bankruptcy.)

The Crash of ‘73 flattened staple agriculture prices world wide. Most would not regain the same levels until the Spanish American War, the Boer War and the Yukon gold rush fired up demand in the world economy. For the South and the wheat belt these events had a protracted impoverishing effect. Had slavery been in effect in the US the slave owners would have found themselves upside down in the same fashion as many home owners are today with a vastly over priced stock of labor, a very expensive mode of production and a plummeting price for the product they were selling. Inherently labor and production costs would over time doom slavery. Planters as did Russian landlords would have been converted into an interest group pressing ‘compensated manumission’. If this had not occurred over time the force of economic realities would have driven the plantation economy towards manumission and a semblance of freedom but a continuation of economic servitude. Pretty much what happened in the South after 1865. The huge trauma of the war would have been absent and potentially the intensity of racial feelings in the South would have been much less. In other words what would have happened over a period of decades would have been a slow decompression rather than a violent explosion.