Frank --

I'll go back over these posts and do my homework here. I'm guessing that you were discussing some aspect of the American System advocated by Henry Clay and the antebellum whigs, of which Lincoln was one. Before the war, Northern Whigs and the Republicans who succeeded them had been frustrated in their designs by Andrew Jackson and Southern Democrats. During and afterwards they were able to reshape the Constitution and the government according to Clay's prescription. In another post I mentioned Pat Buchanan as being the last American presidential candidate to advocate guidelines of the American System which Southerners fought successfully until the Civil War.

Hopefully I'm not out of line by picking at your post before doing your homework.

1) Industrial capacity in the antebellum South was notoriously limited. We can accept your point if you're suggesting that the little which existed had largely been destroyed, but that cannot have affected conditions to any noticeable extent.
2) I'm not an economist, but inflation seems to be a product of a failing market system rather than the cause. Wherever finished goods or services are difficult to acquire, the laws of supply and demand will place a high price on them in comparison to other markets in which they are readily available.
3) When the war ended, most banks in the South had failed and you could look in vain for cash or coin in the purse of a decent Southerner. Anyone who happened to have money was going to hold on it. Any venture capital investment would have to come from outside the region.
4) Postwar visitors from the North expressed surprise at the crowds of idle people in the streets of Southern cities. Duh! Since few natives had any ability to pay for labor of any kind, people were without work. Of course Northern investors quickly took advantage of ridiculously cheap labor in the South. To this day wages paid in this region are still below national scale.
5) Thousands of farmers who once owned their own property lost title to much of it during Reconstruction. Tenants on their own land, they became prisoners of the sharecropping system which kept people in perpetual indebtedness.

Punitive measures against the former rebel states aside, recovery for any nation under these circumstances would be challenging.

I've not addressed your point about what Lincoln may have done after the war. Many good and decent men believe that he would have enacted policies that might have aided recovery. I've yet to read anything by Lincoln that gives real support to that view.

Besides, as long as Northern markets prospered, why would political leaders from states above the Mason-Dixon line have any more interest in woe-begotten Southerners than they had in the Indian tribes of the West? According to prevailing concepts of social Darwinists, both were declining societies which would some become extinct. Why get in the way of progress?