Several years ago the historian David Brion Davis wrote an intriguing article in which he asked, and answered, a counterfactual question: What if the Confederacy had won recognition from Britain in 1862 and survived the war? His rather frightening answer was that the three great centers of slavery in the Americas — the American South, Cuba and Brazil — plus the smaller plantation economy of Dutch Suriname, would not have abolished slavery when they did.
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