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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Counterfactuals are lots of fun...
But for my money, the really great mistake was not having the religious fundamentalists of New England secede during the War of 1812, as nearly happened. It would have clearly been better for everyone in the long run.
https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2012/06/15/new-england-succession
Somehow nearly everywhere else in the West managed to draw down slavery peacefully despite the massive amounts of money involved and how ingrained it was socially. Slavery was ubiquitous, and yet somehow everyone else managed to move past it.
Now, it could be that there was something uniquely horrible or monstrous about Southerners at the time, although they don't seem especially unusual if you read deeply about them. No saints, of course, but not really all that unusual people for the time. What does seem unusual for the time, however, is that Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban, and though the particular beliefs of their descendants clearly drifted over time, the core tendency of a great many of them towards intensely held spiteful extremism, with a sharp inclination towards fire and brimstone and apocalypse and Manicheanism and radicalism and sharpening confrontation, clearly never did.
I'm glad slavery ended, and I'm sorry that America ended up relying on the absolutely worst, most disastrous, most scarring way to end it. America certainly would be hugely better off if the South hadn't been dragged along as, essentially, a wrecked, impoverished internal colony from the time of the end of the Civil War until World War 2, with all the damaged legacy that left for people in the South, both black and white. But ignoring or even praising the role of religious extremists in bringing about the most violent, scarring way to end slavery is both unfortunate and typical, and has itself left a disastrous legacy in American politics.
It's probably no accident that the British, who wisely marginalized and broke the back of their Puritan Bolsheviks by the end of their civil war, were actually able to wind down slavery without resorting to bloodshed.
Of course, maybe I'm playing a little fast and loose with details here and slagging off entire groups of people somewhat lazily in a situation that really does demand incredible nuance, but hey, if that's what we're doing, that's what we're doing.
The British were able to end slavery because (a) many slavers (or those more broadly involved in the triangle passage) were ‘new money’ with less political influence on Parliament than their wealth might suggest and (b) the domestic slave-owning constituency was pretty limited (I think there were fewer than 10,000 slaves in Britain, and the aforementioned Caribbean plantation owning class was not hugely powerful) and the terms of manumission very generous.
I remember being struck by the grandeur of Bristol, a mere provincial English city, the first time I visited. It was all funded by the slave trade, but the Gloucestershire and wider West Country merchants who made the riches (and who lent the famous arr me hearty “pirate accent” its affect) weren’t the highest status people in the realm, and it would take another century for their descendants to climb the class ladder to the top.
The idea that Bristol's wealth (or Britain's more broadly) was "all funded by the slave trade" is a nonsense.
The slave trade never contributed more than roughly 12% of Bristol's total trade clearances, and that only for a brief period between 1728 and 1732. This may underestimate the trade's economic impact, especially indirectly, but otherwise the trade was consistently <10% of total clearances (pg.4).
To be clear, the slave trade certainly contributed to Bristol's overall trade and economic importance during the 18th century, but it did not fund all, or even most, of it. There's a really good literature review of the historiography of slavery's importance to Britain's economic growth here. (Highly recommended if this topic interests you.)
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