If the South had won at Gettysburg, would the CSA still exist?

If the South had won at Gettysburg, would the CSA still exist?

No, no way, not possible.

Could Lee have won? In hindsight, quite easily. If a few breaks had gone his way, or broken even, he could have won. Would Lincoln have struck a peace deal to save his government? Maybe.

But the CSA was going to fail even if everything went right for it. And, for empirical evidence, I point to Brazil. Brazil ended slavery in 1888, even though it was popular nationally as late as 1884. However, the economic weaknesses in slavery led to the national downfall rapidly, against popular opinion and with no violence. In Brazil, one province outlawed slavery in 1884. As a result, all the slaves in the neighboring provinces only had to walk to that province to be freed. Consequently, the value of slaves in those provinces dropped precipitously - who would buy a slave that becomes worthless when they walk 20 miles to a different province. Soon, slavery was functionally gone from the neighboring provinces. And it wasn’t long after that those provinces outlawed slavery - once freed from the philosophical bonds of having much of their capital tied up in slaves, they were free to think of slavery rationally and morally. This process repeated itself until there were no more holdouts and Isabel promulgated the Lei Áurea ("Golden Act") officially ending slavery in all of Brazil.

That translated easily to the CSA - while much of the northern border is bounded by rivers, getting across was not overly difficult. From a county perspective, the bordering counties would rapidly lose their slaves - either by selling them to more southern plantations or when the slaves walked across the border to the USA. There was no way the USA would have returned a slave to the CSA after the Civil War ended. This would probably have taken longer than it did in Brazil, given the South’s attachment to slavery, but it would have spread like a cancer across the CSA. Even before the war, there were very different prices for slaves in northern Maryland vs Alabama - this process was already in progress.

As Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee lose their slaves, what happens? Do they stay in the CSA? They only seceded after Fort Sumter, they were not the die-hard break-away states. The economic reasons for being in the CSA have walked away and there is a clear choice about the future economic prospects in the CSA or USA. And in developing global economic news: industrialization is spreading and agricultural labor is getting less important. Eventually, they each give up on the CSA and attempt to return to the Union. And the process repeats itself, until only the die-hard states remain. Can South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana survive as an independent nation with no slaves along their own border counties? The sheer amount of labor required to keep slaves, in the form of slave patrols, are inefficient and cannot last as unpaid militias. Eventually, the costs of enforcing slavery would be the undoing of the CSA. While one would hope that the immorality of slavery would help, I’m not optimistic it would have made a difference until the economics of it were untenable.

Picture Source Wikipedia

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