That’s not to say the South’s economy wouldn’t have continued to stagnate, of course: the very reason the North had more resources and manpower to throw at the Civil War than the South did was that slavery had removed any incentive for Southerners to expand their population and innovate and industrialize. Very nearly the only entry-level jobs available to non-slaveholder whites in the antebellum South were as slave overseers, and every one of those positions had several “crackers” vying for it already, so the poor European immigrants just off the boat and seeking economic opportunities had every incentive to go North and none to go South. Still, just as the inevitable economic stagnation it causes hasn’t stopped socialism from maintaining its sway over many a foolish country to this day, one suspects the parasitic Southern oligarchs who were getting rich and powerful off the stolen fruits of others’ labors would always find plenty of marching morons to support their rotten and tyrannical system; and the politically correct academia of this alternate timeline would probably be using fake words ending in “mania” (as in “drapetomania”) to smear all opposition to slavery in much the same way it currently uses fake words ending in “phobia” to smear all opposition to child abuse and genital mutilation and other sodomite perversions in ours.

The one thing I did find to be too much of a strain on the suspension of disbelief in The Confederate States of America was the idea that a victorious South would have proceeded to invade and conquer the North. For any of the three plausible scenarios in which the Confederacy could have won, the Confederates would still have had a lot of wounds to lick in the aftermath and (as mentioned) a stagnant agrarian economy run by crooked quasi-socialist oligarchs. The dynamic between Union and Confederacy would then probably end up something like the one between the USA and Mexico today: the corrupt and impoverished South dumping its undesirables on the freer and more prosperous North, and Northern politicians bickering endlessly about how and whether to secure the borders against this dumping.