When the Civil War broke out, the value of the slaves owned by plantation owners dwarfed all of the capital owned by residents of the Union. As a result, the South, as one would predict, won an easy victory in the Civil War. And thank God they did! Without American slavery, the entire world economy would have come to a standstill, and we would all be poor today.
No? You say that didn’t happen? Your teachers told you that the North won the war, largely because its industrial capacity was much larger than the South’s, and that a great boom ensued after the war even after the demise of slavery? How can we reconcile that with the assertion that slavery was the foundation of the American economy, and that we are living off the proceeds from it even today?
You can’t, and you shouldn’t try. Most Americans at the time of the Civil War were subsistence farmers with no stake in cotton markets or slavery. The industrial activity that was taking place in the North at the time was mostly small scale and for local markets. Cotton was a global industry, mostly financed by London bankers. They weren’t putting money into farms in the North.
The manufacture of cotton cloth was the first truly globalized industry, so naturally it gets more than its share of attention from economists, historians, and African-Americans with an ideological point to make. That didn’t mean it had a significant impact on most of the citizens of the Union back in the 1860’s, it didn’t mean that the world’s economy was doomed when slavery was abolished, and it certainly didn’t equate to an ability to wage war successfully against an emerging industrial colossus, albeit one that was not yet generating huge revenues through exports.