To the contrary and you are practicing marxian labor reductionism when you suggest as much.
Well, that's nonsense blue smoke and mirrors.
The rebels had machinery stolen from the federal government that could produce 300 rifles a day. But they only had skilled labor to produce 100 rifles a day. At this same time the federal government was producing 5,000 rifles a day in 44 different factories. The rebels had no ability to either repair or build railroad engines, spikes, rails or cars anywhere in the insurgent area. As Bruce Catton said:
"As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it."
The south failed in its bid for revolution because it couldn't operate as a modern economy. They downplayed and denigrated free labor. That meant they couldn't guarantee their borders. Nothing else matters.
Walt
A lie. The South failed in it's bid because a military foe denied it the right to self-government.
Simply calling it names doesn't make it so, Walt. One would think you'd have learned that concept by now.
The rebels had machinery stolen from the federal government that could produce 300 rifles a day. But they only had skilled labor to produce 100 rifles a day. At this same time the federal government was producing 5,000 rifles a day in 44 different factories.
So in other words, your measure of their economy is its war production abilities in that very same war that The Lincoln thrust upon it by invading them?