If the South had won the Civil War, where might our two countries be today? Would slavery have been phased out, and if so, how soon? Would the South have erected tariffs and immigration quotas? Would Disney World have been located in Florida, and Dollywood in Tennessee? Would there be unified currency for the U.S. and CSA, and would it be any stronger than the Euro? The Confederate States of America would currently be the world’s fourth-largest economic power if the Civil War had turned out differently and the rest of history had gone the same. That’s the conclusion of Demographics Daily, an online newsletter for businesses that released its analysis of economic data pertaining to Alabama and the other 10 states that seceded from the Union. G.
Scott Thomas, editor of Demographics Daily, said he decided that April, the month the Confederacy fell in 1865, would be a good time to do the economics and demographics equivalent of alternate history – an increasingly popular genre of literature that imagines what would have happened if key historical events had gone the other way. But assuming economic development preceded the same, the CSA would have had a gross domestic product of $2.6 trillion in 1999. Only three countries would have had a larger GDP – the United States (shortened to 39 states and the District of Columbia), China and Japan. The CSA would have edged out Germany.
In population, the CSA would rank 12th in the world with 84.3 million residents, based on Demographics Daily’s analysis of 2000 population statistics. Texas and Florida alone would have counted for almost 37 million people. The CSA would be more racially diverse than the USA, Thomas said. Non-Hispanic blacks would account for 19 percent of the CSA but only 9 percent of the United States. The laws and regulation of the CSA would be different then what laws we have now in the USA.
Speaking hypothetically some laws that might be different are driving laws and the, legal age to buy tobacco products would most likely be 13 or 14, the drinking age would be the age that one could start driving so you could smoke at 14 and be drinking by 16. The gun toting laws would also be different one could buy a shotgun at the age of 10 and one could also buy semi-auto hand guns at 12 or maybe 14. The mind set of the southern states if total different. Today there would only be Coke products and no one in the south would want to or drink any Pepsi products.
Things would be cheaper down south. Gas prices in the southern states would be close to a dollar a gallon. Gas would be that low because the southern states have more “black gold” flowing around under their cities and off their shores near Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. The state of Texas is rich in oil and the CSA would have numbers of ports to ship the middle eastern oil too.
