Interesting thoughts, but I think Berman's ideas, at least as you've related them, are pretty superficial. Calling the Antebellum South a "simple way of life in the US" seems absurd given how much work and violence it took to keep down a large population of slaves that in many places outnumbered free whites. I suppose plantation owners had a simple life delighting in the leisure that slavery allowed, but most Southern whites had nothing to do with the cultural nostalgia some have for the old South. And as for the North depending on the South's cheap cotton, maybe in the very beginning of the country's founding, but by the 1830s to the beginning of the Civil War several studies I've seen have found that the North got drastically more productivity out of farmers and fields by paying laborers than the South got with slaves. Workers just work harder and more efficiently when they're being paid a decent wage. Also, the dependence on slavery and just a few cash crops for most of the South's economy kept it a backwater, and nearly every aspect of the 1860s standard of living--from furniture to tools to clothes--had to be imported from the North. The South became a slave itself to raw resources that had to be be shipped to the North for refining or any added value, and then sold back to the South. And of course once the cotton gin and other technological advancements took off when the industrial age really got going, enslaving many people was even less necessary. And on top of that, the last major country to outlaw slavery was Brazil in 1888, so when the South seceded it had at best 28 years left of enslaving people before it would be a global pariah and the rest of the world would be pretty unanimous in boycotting Southern cash crops on account of the slave labor. Also, I'm just curious, does Berman at all wrestle with the fact that the South's brutal slavery is just objectively cruel, blatantly evil, and morally wrong?