How could the Confederacy have won the Civil War?
If the war had gone better in the West, and if (Gen. Robert E.) Lee had avoided defeat at Gettysburg, the Confederates could have fought to a stalemate until the elections of 1864, when dissatisfied Northern voters would have elected a new president who would have been willing to negotiate an end to the war. Then what? The Confederate States of America would have drawn up a constitution patterned on the U.S. Constitution with one obvious difference: The Confederate constitution would have explicitly defined slaves as property. What would have happened to slavery if the South became independent? One of the ironies of the war is that the Confederacy probably would have emancipated their slaves by the end of the century. Declining cotton prices, combined with growing political pressure from other nations, would have made Southern slave owners open to the idea of a compensated emancipation scheme in which the government in Richmond would reimburse them for the loss of their property. Howev
