[central_va]

the confederacy would have been a failed state.

Your high opinion of Southerners is duly noted as bigoted bull crap. For a "failed state" they sure did put down a lot of Yankees. Grave yards down here full of them.

[Regal]

Dysentery can fill graveyards, but that doesn’t mean it can govern.

No way the south would have operated independently. Even without abolitionists in the US, slavery was ending around the globe. The basis for the southern economy was ending and adaptation was nowhere to be found.

[onedoug]

Had The South put more into a guerilla war with the likes of John Mosby it could have been a lot nastier. Though it’s difficult to see how the South could have prevailed over yankee logistics.

[Pecos]

With ancestors on both sides of that conflict, and after having lived most of my life south of the Mason-Dixon line, my take on the "failed state" comment had nothing to do with body counts. IMHO, if the Confederacy had successfully repelled the Union long enough (and won at Gettysburg), they would have forced northern politicians to declare a quasi-peace, but the South would have never become a successful nation. Slavery, the cornerstone of the Confederate constitution, cannot operate an industrial economy. It could never achieve today's high tech accomplishments, and therefore would always be an economic failure.

Please note that I have not said anything about the inhabitants of the South or indulged in any bigoted statements. Slavery would have been as much a blockade to progress as the hatred we see in the Middle East. Different sources, but the same outcome.

Harry Turtledove's alternative history series on the subject make for useful reading. Not gospel, but interesting reading.

[dangus]

My opinion of Southerners has nothing to do with it. They weren’t doomed to fail because they were genetically inferior; they were doomed to fail because their socioeconomic system was based on unjust and therefore wildly dysfunctional.