Dynamic process v static position.

[wausaubob]

The static position of the southern states that permitted slavery in 1860 was not that disadvantageous. It was the dynamic process of population growth that was causing power to shift north and west.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/preliminary-report/1860e-06.pdf?# This primitive chart following page 119 of the Preliminary Report of the Census illustrates had happened between 1844 and 1860 in the US.

If the Confederacy existed for awhile, but did not change this process, it was going to being left trying to co-exist with a powerful and industrializing neighbor.
But the Civil War made very little difference to the population process in the paid labor states. Immigration resumed by 1863 as 100,000 people came over from England and Ireland and unspecified Britain. https://books.google.com/books?id=c...al review of immigration 1820 to 1910&f=false p.28
Which is why by the end of the Civil War decade, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab13.html there were 3.9 million people living in the Midwest.

The 1870 census confirmed this. The population of Missouri had grown about 50% in ten years. But the black population had declined slightly. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/population/1870a-02.pdf?#
Without slavery, growth took off in Missouri, and it became about as white as Illinois and Indiana. And it got railroads, at least in the northern half.

 

[wausaubob]

The same static to dynamic difference applied to the tonnage of shipping owned by northerners.
By 1860, the ship and steamboat industry of the United States was working at less than 1/2 of its maximum capacity.

Thus the Confederacy could sink some steam ships and capture some steamboats. But as long as the US maintained Portsmouth, ME, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. there were going to many more ocean going and coastal ships.
On the internal rivers, the places that could build steamboats, and supply the iron and tools where well known. Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cincinnati/Covington, Louisville/New Albany, Cairo/Mound City/Paducah, and St. Louis.

 

[wausaubob]

A static picture of the railroad mileage in the United States as of 1860 makes it appear that there was some balance in the two belligerents. Many of those maps have been posted.
However 1865 the manufacturing census of big business showed the imbalance.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/manufactures/1860c-05.pdf?# See page clxxxix. The statistics on railroad car wheels and rolled iron were approximately the same.

 

[wausaubob]

Two major railroad powers have never faced off in a continental war in which railroad logistics would determine much of the strategic results. But its hard to figure how the railroad power that produced and rebuilt its own engines would not in the end dominate the power that had to import its equipment.