I'm not a "Lost Causer" by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that actual racial parity probably would have come sooner in the South had it not been for the outcome of the Civil War, for any number of reasons.
Can you give any of those reasons?
There would have been no incentive for preserving slavery, past a couple decades after independence. That might not sound like much, but prior to the Civil War, the abolitionist-don't care-pro slavery ratio was probably 30-50-20 in the North and 30-40-30 in the South. There really was not that much of a difference. Most of the major Southern generals were anti-slavery, while most of the politicians were the most adamantly in favor of it. The opposite was the case in the North. Many of the leaders in a post war South would have been military men, Lee, Longstreet, Stuart. The extreme animosity that the average Southerner felt toward blacks after the war was by and large do to their focusing their anger for the way the war ended on blacks. If the war ends well, that doesn't happen.
Slavery was an extremely inefficient system, from an economic standpoint, and would never have survived the inevitable industrialization of the South. The idea that the South would have turned to back to pre-war status quo anti-industrialism is ridiculous. Once the war created Southern industry, they wouldn't have dove back under the bed... there was too much money in it. The Southern Constitution prohibited tariffs, which many have used as a means to show that the South wouldn't be able to have industry due to lack of protections. That's a 1920's-1950's economic argument, and its crap (I mention it because it has been used in academic works evaluating this question in the past). To believe that, you have to believe that tariffs work, and they don't. American industry was not created by high tariffs. It occurred because of close proximity to a wealth of natural resources. Tariffs were only there to line the pockets of the government. So, living in a post-tariff age, we can see that that argument makes no sense, in hindsight. The South had many of the resources needed to spur industrialization, and given the opportunity, it would have developed. With that, slavery simply becomes obsolete. And having white workers laboring alongside black workers in the factories, just like having them side-by-side in the fields, would have facilitated the break down of racial barriers.
