And the transition would have been made much easier with the Industrial Revolution, which had been going on in England and other parts of Europe decades before the Civil War.

It was the South that couldn't live without the North. In fact, I'd suspect that England would use economic sanctions to try to force the South out of slavery, as they did with the Ottomans and Eastern Europe, so I think they would have had a much harder time surviving without the lucrative trade agreements of that era.
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