That would have addressed the situation fully. The only trouble was, the mechanization wasn’t ready to handle things like cotton harvesting yet, and there’s never been a completely mechanized way to handle tobacco. Unless people were willing to wait another, oh, 50 years for the level of mechanization to reach the point where southern crops would really be mechanized, it would not have worked.
Ahh...the devil is in the details. Thanks for pointing this out, as you can tell, I am not a farmer.
From wiki: In 1850, Taylure and Paige made the first attempt to develop a mechanical cotton picker with the intent on replacing manual labor. Mechanical cotton pickers had no further inventions until the founder of Price Campbell Cotton Picker Corporation created one in 1889. Very little progress was made from then until 1924, when the Price-Campbell patents were purchased by International Harvester. Many experimental machines that were greatly improved from Price-Campbell's inventions were brought out during the period from 1924 until 1939. The idea of mechanical cotton picking began to be practical in 1943, when International Harvester produced the first dozen of their successful commercial cotton pickers. Although there were many attempts to invent successful cotton pickers, their use was not made practical until the 1950s, and even then, it was not immediately implemented on most farms.
If there had been some common ground found between north and south, it should have been developing the needs of both for prosperity, rather than mutual destruction.