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Slavery wasn’t some significant advantage for America (in a time when slavery was super common). It’s pretty widely agreed that dependency on slavery also set the south back economically by decades (look at the GDP north vs south for all of US history after 1800

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Did the dependency on slavery directly set the south back economically, or was it the destruction from the civil war?

As another comment pointed out this was the case long before the civil war (which started in 1861 and I was saying you could see this in the GDP difference even in 1800

The South was already set back economically before the civil war. The plantation chattel slavery system hampered industrialization in the Southern US very much in the same way that the serf-owning nobility system hampered industrialization in the Russian Empire. The South, in turn, ultimately lost the American civil war because the northern states were far more industrialized.

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