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Communication would have remained based on railways of short length, that aimed at getting the cotton crop to the railheads. By the time the car arrived, and with the notion that Richmond was not very important having been firmly entrenched, the most that we could hope for would be paved roads connecting the major cities, which is what roads are like in most third world countries.

The United States would have continued to grow economically, and would have been the major supplier of weaponry and foodstuffs to Britain and France during the Great War of 1914-1918. In reality what happened is that both poor whites and blacks moved north, but in our counter-factual world it is more likely that only poor whites would have made the journey from the 1880s onwards.

Brazil was actually the last major country to abolish slavery in 1888, so if we assume that the Confederacy would have done it at around the same time - probably under pressure from the Europeans - then it is not too fanciful to suggest that the Confederacy's racial balance might have changed after 1880.

In the first place because the USA might have introduced laws that forbade the entry of Blacks into their territory. Such laws were introduced to stop the Chinese crossing the Pacific, and a defeated United States might very well have decided to do the same to the Confederacy's Blacks. The United States' economy would still have needed labourers, so those Whites would still have gone north, but blacks might not.

Furthermore, the federal projects also brought a new White population into the south's new cities. That would not have happened so we can posit a situation where the white population declines from the 1880s onwards and is not replaced by new blood from the USA. On the other hand, the black population continues to grow because they are restricted from entering the USA.

Under circumstances like these, it is impossible to argue that the Confederacy would have developed economically in any meaningful way. She would have remained, like Mexico remains today, a poor, backward provider of primary products.

Learn more about this author, Kenneth Bell.
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