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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.
I went digging for numbers and found:
Slavery was a much bigger deal in the South than other places that freed slaves. The only other place I'm familiar with that had a similar proportion of slaves was Cuba, where slavery was abolished in 1886. However, as with the South, this wasn't chosen by Cuba - it was imposed by an outside power (Spain).
Given the trend in when slavery was abolished across the world, I think it's quite reasonable to suppose, if given the choice, the South would've continued with slavery into the 20th century. None of this requires assuming Southerners were "uniquely horrible or monstrous" - all it requires is assuming the more reason you give someone to avoid uncomfortable moral reasoning, the more they will avoid said reasoning.
Here's are the two questions one really needs to answer to argue whether we should have postponed ending slavery to avoid a Civil War:
The Civil War resulted in ~700k deaths and free 4m slaves. If I assume a year lived as a slave is half as valuable as a year lived as a free man, the naive utilitarian answer to (1) is something like 18 years. I personally rather doubt the South would've gone along with ending slavery before 1879, so I think the utilitarian answer is to prefer the Civil War.
The non-utilitarian answer is, imo, "wtf you monster - slavery is wrong".
Why the percentage of the South that were slaves and not the U.S. as a whole? You didn't divide those other countries into the pro-slave and anti-slave factions. Seems like a stolen base, especially when it was the anti-slave half of the U.S. that precipitated the end of slavery, just like in those other countries that weren't carved up for stats.
The entire purpose of this exercise is to consider how likely the South was to either choose to end slavery on its own or consent to have it chosen for them without bloodshed. The relevant metric, therefore, is how important slavery was to the South.
More concretely, the Civil War depended on individual state governments choosing to secede, so the geographic concentration of slavery in the US is extremely relevant. If slavery was evenly distributed in the US, I
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