Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
I'm sure there would be a group that would stay together, though I couldn't begin to guess how many states would be in that group. And they would still call themselves the United States. But they wouldn't be as large or as powerful as a nation of 50 states has become. And they would likely be very preoccupied by economic conflicts with other states/nations on the continent.
On the subject of counterfactual histories, there's a novel, "Bring the Jubilee,"
http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Jubilee-...3813819&sr=1-1
in which the rump of the USA, lacking Southern natural resources, is a backward rural nation overshadowed by the prosperous Confederacy. I'm not convinced, because it was the North's already emerging industrial supremacy that won the war, and I see no reason to assume that would have gone into reverse. More likely, like the Germans after WW1, they would have thrown themselves into economic progress to repair their pride after the military defeat; and eventually have undermined slavery, and the South's basis for superiority, by mechanising it into obsolescence. It's the backward corners of the Third World that still have slavery as an economic institution: places that can see the benefits of factory industry but can't afford the machines, so replace them with rooms and fields full of labourers who are only an economical alternative because they're not paid.

But that's not to say the War wasn't necessary. It would have taken generations before Northern-made machines were so profitable that slave plantations were no longer economically viable, and one can well imagine the Confederate government subsidising the slave farms as a part of their social heritage. Even if a combination of international pressure and economic obsolescence had led the Confederacy to outlaw actual slavery, it would certainly have remained an apartheid state like the old South Africa, probably to this day.

The other significant counter-history source is the stomach-turning Draka series,
http://www.amazon.com/Domination-S-M...3815110&sr=1-2
which makes the connection beween Confederates and Boers explicit and assumes - even though the author is supposed to be against them - that just by being white supremacists they would be so powerful they could conquer most of the world.