Interesting, obviously we are both using hypotheticals, but i’m curious as to why you think waiting would have made the south more likely to lose the war? Would a more industrialized south have a better chance, or are you assuming the south either wouldn’t have industrialized or that the north would have been able to enlarge the industrial gap as time went on?
The north was resource rich with Coal, Iron, Zinc, sulfer from the rust belt states, gold and silver from the west, and they had the gateway ports to Europe which also was Industrializing. It had higher population, higher birthrate and higher education (all unsourced unverified, speculative observations). The north was the Industrial arm of the U.S.
The south was largely agrarian, it ports not as enticing as Boston, New York, Baltimore — being almost all Caribbean which probably gave them good access to bat guano, but to much access to other agrarians and not enough raw materials for rapid Industrialization. Not to mention Huge swaths of swamp land.
No, they couldn’t industrialize as fast as the North as part of the fight was about industrialization and the changing attitudes that go with it. Look at the Missouri Compromise and the Tallmadge Amendment for example of changing attitudes, and that was some 40 years pre-civil war. The scope, attitude and sympathies of slavery two generations before the civil war. It’s hard for me to fathom how people can disassociate slavery as the reason for the Civil War.
The longer they waited, the further the encroachment came and probably subsumed in a brief one sided war upon just 2 or 3 states that maintained a secession.
If I ran that enterprise, I would have gladly given up Texas for a sympathetic Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio. The war would have been much different, but 1860 it was impossible to turn those states. For every decade that passed, the slave states grew weaker and by 1860 they’ve had enough.