gutzmankTom, if the CSA had survived, slavery would not have come under the widespread opprobrium that it did. Rather, one of the most powerful, influential, and prosperous countries in the world would have been a slave society (not merely, as in Berlin’s typology, a society with slaves).
It is very common for libertarians to point to the economic nonsense underlying various historic social and governmental systems, and then to conclude that those systems must have ended ere now. What such analyses overlook is that the same reasoning leads to the conclusion that all government would have ceased to exist ere now as well. Slavery was a powerful, entrenched, popular, profitable institution in the CSA in 1861, and there’s little reason to assume that it would have been abolished by now.