Guys,
I cannot help but think that had the South won the war, it would have just become another Banana Republic, like Argentina or Columbia. A huge agricultural economy, ruled by a very small number of rich people, with little or no industry. An entire people dependent on either subsistence farming, or the returns of mass plantation growth of cotton and tobacco.
Inasmuch as the South could barely make a cannon during the Civil War, does anybody believe that just 35 years later, they would have had the industry, engineering skills or wealth to built the fleets of huge dreadnaught battleships that dominated world power and affairs in the 1890s? The northern U.S., England, Spain, Germany, France and even heck Japan had such fleets. The South plainly would not.
Accordingly, they would at best have been a second or third rate world power, such as Argentina, with their future tied through trading treaties to one of the true world powers. The slave population, freed or not, would have been a major economic drag.
The North would have gone on to become the England of the Western Hemisphere. There is nothing, cotton included, that they could not have bought on the world market.
The South would have gone on to become, at best, the poverty stricken Ireland of the Western Hemisphere.
Mannyrock