...even if Western Europe did cut economic ties with the South, which it never would have done, the South would have had the leeway to jack up the price of its sales to the North as an independent country. With independent political sovereignty, the South would have been able to extort great sums of money from the North, possibly sending them into an early recession and putting a hault to, or at least slowing down, overall northern industrialization.

But we could sit back and debate the "what if's" all day.