So it appears that you share my opinion that the Confederacy did represent a serious existential threat to the United states.
Central_va wishes us to believe the Confederacy was no more a serious threat than, metaphorically, a child losing its baby-teeth.
I'd say it was more equivalent to an adult losing at least a leg and maybe an arm too.
That's what made the Civil War a matter of national life & death.
Stop posting. Take a break. Take a week off an and do some research and stop emoting. Find ONE serious contemporary reference lamenting the threat OR EVEN THE POSSIBILITY of the North being conquered and occupied by the CSA. ONE reference please.
Eventually. Not immediately. Extra capital from cutting out New York and Washington DC from their European trade would have funded industries. They would also have been the middleman for European products distributed throughout the Midwest by the Mississippi, and along the border. This would have further undercut the ability of the Northern manufacturers from making a product.
Yes, they were a quite dangerous threat economically. They were likely not going to be a threat militarily. They would have probably been as benign as Canada.
Territories that became states would have probably aligned themselves with the South over time, and so in this manner they would have also been an eventual threat to Union growth.
Central_va wishes us to believe the Confederacy was no more a serious threat than, metaphorically, a child losing its baby-teeth.
In the short term, he is correct. In the long term, they would have grown at the expense of the existing power structure in New York and Washington DC. I think Lincoln and his Industrialist backers realized this, and that is why they saw it as a necessity to stop the South from leaving.
They were thinking about the consequences years down the road.