Which is why they get upset if you say, "We should have picked our own damned cotton."
Yes, we should have picked our own damn cotton.
Labor-saving cotton-picking technology would probably have been invented faster, the South would have had much more investment in non-agricultural production and a more diverse economy, economic conditions would have been more aligned throughout the United States, there would not have been a "kept" political class beholden to a system of relatively few wealthy slave-holders (or there would have been competing political interests), average working-class whites and farmers would have been much better off, and the civil war would probably never have happened.