What do you think the world would look like today if the Confederacy had won the US Civil War?

Counterfactuals, whee!

Well, that would have been a victory for the plantation economy over the industrial economy…And decentralized government over a federal system. Which means that the Confederate States of America probably would not have become a major economic power, or at least not so entangled in the world economic system…Which means that 20th century world history would likely have been completely different.

Maybe something like this mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

@RareDenver: Nice, now I know what I’m doing this afternoon :-p

@bookish1 the fake TV commercials are hilarious

@Yetanotheruser I believe you are referring is The War of Northern Agression.

And to quote the Southern Gentleman who wrote that article:

“The North, sir, never whipped us, unless they were four to one! If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence. The South did not lose the war; we Confederates wore ourselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. ”

I think it would look a great deal like today in America (but of course, there would be NO tolerance for gay marriage) & Monsanto would be the ruling corporation. Oh, wait, MONSANTO IS THE RULING CORPORATION!

I don’t recall the title, but it should be easy to look up. During the 1950s (I think) McKinley Kantor, an historian of the day, wrote a serious look at what might have happened to bring that about. Basically, the premise of his story was that 1) Ulysses Grant had a fatal accident while riding his horse at Vicksburg, and the siege there was eventually broken and the Mississippi River held by the Confederacy, so he was unavailable to come back East after 2) the Confederate victory at Gettysburg… which was never a sure thing for the Union until it was over.

Based on these stunning Confederate wins, including the successful incursion into Pennsylvania at Gettysburg and the rout of the Union Army there which effectively surrounded Washington DC with dominant hostile forces, Lincoln sued for a peace treaty with the South, and that was eventually agreed upon.

The two nations repaired their relationship as well as possible, eventually started to realign their economic policies out of necessity (the North becoming more agrarian than it had been, and the South developing more industry), and the South gave up slavery on its own as its economy grew.

The upshot of the pseudo history was that the North and South were allies during the two World Wars, and decided to re-unify in the 1950s. It was a pretty good read.

Newt Gingrich, who as you all know was a history professor before he became a politician, also wrote some alternative histories of the Civil War with a co-author. Again, I fail to recall his partner’s name in Grant Comes East.

A great book that covers this topic is The Guns Of The South by Harry Turtledove. He posits that the US was marching toward it’s current incarnation regardless of the idiosyncrasies a Confederate victory would have created.

Its funny how we just were learning about this today in History! One student asked the same question. The teacher replied “countrys would be very differen, they would probably be in different spots, and America would be stuggling to be a leading country unlike how it is now.” She also said that there might have been another Civil War. Civil War 2 to be exact!

Slavery would have ended in bloody, violent uprisings. Many southerners would have been slaughtered. The Confederacy would have collapsed and rejoined the U.S.

I don’t think it would have looked that different in the long run. The North would still industrialize and the south would continue with the plantation system until other nations pressured us to abandon the practice of slavery.

America would have joined WW2 on the side of the Axis Powers.