Actually, if Lincoln had gotten his way and the slaves had been returned to Africa, the South would have taken a financial hit, but it likely would not have been disastrous. One of the reasons that immigrants went to the North in so many numbers was not necessarily just because of rapid industrialization, as you say. A major reason why they did not come to the South is because blacks and poor whites already worked in almost all of the unskilled jobs available there. If the blacks were no longer there, there is no reason to think that European immigrants wouldn’t have come to the South to get the newly available jobs. After all, many Irish immigrants did come to the South before the war, and many of them worked in jobs considered too dangerous for slaves (slaves were too expensive to use in life threatening jobs). The Confederacy after all was able to field an Irish regiment and one of the South’s most important generals was an Irishman (Patrick Cleburne).
Beyond this, the Republicans of the day were strong supporters of spreading “wage labor.” They wanted the South to copy the North and industrialize, hence the reason why so many Southerners complained that the North merely wanted to replace slavery with “wage slavery.” If blacks had been repatriated, the South may have industrialized more rapidly. Let me remind you that the few areas of the South that did industrialized early on, such as New Orleans and Birmingham, did receive sizable numbers of Italian immigrants. Besides, many young Southern whites left the South after the war and in the early 20th century in order to look for work elsewhere. If there were more jobs available in the South, more would have stayed there.
At any rate, I’m not sure whether Lincoln wanted repatriation to Africa to be forced or merely encouraged and facilitated. Perhaps some slaves would have been allowed to stay in the South and work for wages. I don’t know. At any rate, this scenario probably wouldn’t have been nearly as damaging to the South as a hugely destructive Civil War fought mainly on southern territory.
You are so right. Lincoln didn’t give a tinkers damn about the Negro. He absolutely wanted to ship them and DID SHIP THEM to Liberia by the thousands. The War was not over slavery. It was over power and politics .Lincoln was a consummate hypocrite.