You can't show such a thing by appealing to the record
"The most succinct, compelling and balanced picture of the antebellum political economy is contained in McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom." The statistical portrait describes more than regional differences. The direction and momentum of those statistics show a fragile and severely distorted slave-based economy that is crusing towards an implosion, with or without the impetus of the ACW and reconstruction.
Population? "Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa...seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were plentiful and cometition from slave-based labor nonexistant. " McPherson, P. 91
Infrastructure? "In 1840, the South had possessed 44 percent of the country's railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of Northern construction had droppped the South's share to 26 percent." McPherson, p. 91.
Industrial capacity? By 1850, "With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity, a decline of twenty percent from 1840. Most alarming, nearly half this industrial capacity was located in four border states, whose commitment to southern rights was shaky." McPherson p. 91
"Using three per capita indices--railroad mileage, cotton textile production and pig iron production [two econometric historians] found that the south ranked just behind the north in railroads, but ahead of every other country. In textile production the South ranked sxth and in pig iron eighth. But the railroad index...is specious, for railroads connect places as well as people. By an index that combines population and square miles of territory, the South's railroad capacity was not only less than half the North's, but also less than that of several European countries in 1860.
Combining the two measures of industrial capacity [textiles and pig iron]...the South produced only one-nineteenth as much per capita as Britain, one-seventh as much as Belgium, one-fifth as much as the North and one-fourth as much as Sweden..."
An industrial Eden whose slave economy should have been exported to the plains states? "The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850's, and this agricultural society was headed toward the status of a food deficit region." McPherson p. 100
McPherson's summary of the statistics: "...like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall." The South's decades--long struggle to recover from its colonial economic status as an exported of commodity raw materials and an importer of capital manufactured goods is a consequence of the severe distortions of a slave based economy and society."
In point of fact, the south was a drag on the country as a whole.
Oh wait.
I've heard people put forward the Hunley as an example of CSA technical prowess. That's great. Until you remember that 22 men died in the Hunley in order to kill 5 on the Housatanic.
The whole CSA wasa a bad joke.
Walt