Ooooh, I just love playing “What If,” the forbidden fruit of the budding historian.
Know what I think would have happened? You’d see a second war within twenty years, a world war. Why?
That c**ksucker Karl Marx, that’s why.
A divided America would have made the remaining United States a perfect target for communism, exactly as Marx planned it (Russia was too backward for Marx’s plans, but that’s where the chips fell). The North was exactly what he was looking for, an industrialized nation controlled by the will of the people. Without the conservative South to temper their aspirations, I believe the North would have moved to Owenite socialism quickly, Marxism soon afterward, and, as history shows, communist dictatorship shortly thereafter.
Canada, Queen or not, and the CSA would be forced by circumstance to jump 'em, and it would have been a mighty tangle. The participation of the Brits would probably be the deciding factor. A world war in America may well have served to partially unify Europe, still stinging from the revolutions of 1848, while the CSA would fall increasingly under the influence of other nations.
Slavery? Forget it. South Africa figured out how to keep it in spirit while profiting from the lack of name. The CSA would have fallen to the same conclusion.
World wars advance technology in leaps and bounds, and with the Reds focusing their efforts on North America instead of Europe, folks like Tsiolkovsky, Einstein, Maxwell, and others might have had a lot more toys to play with than they did. Since I’m pulling this out of my ass, I’d say we would have had dirigibles twenty years sooner, internal combustion engines fifteen years sooner, heavier-than-air flight fifteen to twenty years sooner, and space travel by the time Flash Gordon started hitting the silver screen in our universe.
It also would have been a shitty world in which to live. As a Virginian, I’m so glad those bastards lost it makes me smile in my sleep. There would be no room for the likes of me in a world where America was divided.