A mixed bag really, from the Washington Post. What ya think libertarians?
Freedom has always been the only route to progress.
I would argue with the concept that slavery was sustainable. It was not. Certainly the industrialization of the USA at the end of the century would have destroyed slavery on its own. Even with their own country the Confederacy would have found itself in a giant mess as slave owners would have had to compete with motivated immigrant labor. Eventually this labor would have spilled out of the Northern cities into the Confederacy along the thousands of miles of pourous border. The author can say how people felt, but feelings did not make the price of cotton, corn, steel, petrol, etc go down. It was the industrial revolution that did this. And even if the Confederacy was extremely stubborn, it would have had to deal with Virginia, Florida, Texas, Missouri, etc that were industrializing quickly. Is it logical to believe that Charlieston would have remained a place to buy and sell slaves? What about New Orleans? Would it be more profitable to handle tranportation from the Northern states down the Mississippi or handle tobacco and cotton? And then there is Texas where there was already a huge source of motivated cheap labor in the persons of Mexican decent. Slavery was doomed no matter how people felt about it.
And what if the South won and had their own Confederacy? How hard, aka expensive, would it be to harbor slaves who now have thousands of miles of border to cross and be free. Would the Abolitionist North agreed to something like the fugitive slave law? I just don't see it. So not only would the slave holders in the Confederacy had to compete with immigrant labor and Mexican labor, they would have a huge problem trying to keep their slaves in their own country.