How long could slavery in the South have persisted without the war or a different outcome?

[Kleine Scheiße]

i genuinely believe it would still de jure exist but in practice it would've undergone a decline into being something much smaller-scale and much less industrial; take for example the modern use of forced prison labor in the Louisiana state capitol and the various enslavement scandals found still occasionally in the south until the 1950s

public opinion would be on the scale of how english foxhunting is understood today: an antiquated tradition for pretentious bluebloods and nouveau riche posers. i do not think most people's opinions on slavery being right or wrong would change; many in the real-world south believed that slavery was morally wrong but that it was unacceptable for one reason or another to oppose it

slavery would still exist in the south on paper to this day in at least a couple of states, and it would still exist in practice in the sense that we actually have not even yet "abolished" slavery in our real world timeline, but it would have ceased to be the essential basis for the entire southern economy by some point in the early 20th century at the absolute latest

look into fitzhugh if you believe slavery just would've kinda ended. these people wanted to enslave not only the peoples they had already stolen, but also to expand slavery to include other economically disadvantaged groups. there were a non-zero amount of significant and influential people in the united states who believed that slavery needed to be saved by (among other things) enslaving impoverished whites, whose laboring potential they saw as being wasted on having individual liberty

there is actually a serious possibility slavery could have dissipated as described and then come back under another name. i don't even necessarily think that a majority of people today in our actual real world country would say they morally oppose slavery if slavery were described to people in the abstract rather than being called "slavery."

i think people would be very surprised at the percentage of americans who could freely be convinced to support "an economic system where individual laborers are directly owned and managed by private interests, to be paid in sustenance rather than currency" -- people would claim that opposition to this proposal was sensationalism, that companies would never be dumb enough to do that so clearly you must be misunderstanding something, that actually this is a good idea because how else are you going to solve homelessness, that actually this would be good because it would mean fewer people getting "useless" education, that it would be effective in keeping poor people from voting themselves transfer payments, that actually it's not really enslavement if you can technically buy freedom for millions of dollars -- we could keep going, the point is these are not abstract ideas i am coming up with, these are real things i have personally heard right-wingers say in discussions about this topic in our era. these people are out there and you, individually, dear reader, need to be paying very close attention to them.