Yes, to get back to the original topic - there is a certain unreality about the idea of the South winning the Civil War. While many enthusiasts for “Southern rights” would have had difficulty in seeing this, the advantages enjoyed by the North in terms of sheer numbers, and in terms of the emphasis of their industry in developing in the “heavy” direction rather than the agricultural, gave the latter a huge advantage from the start. The North’s problem was in converting this advantage into military success - a problem to a very large extent resulting from political considerations and incompetence in the Northern military establishment.
The South’s hope of victory lay largely on political considerations. Could they make a brave enough show to convince European powers believed to be dependent on supply from the South’s “King Cotton” to intervene and impose a settlement of some sort ? In fact, this hope was undermined early on, as the European powers discovered or developed new sources of cotton, such as India (a well-established source), Egypt, and other areas of their far-flung empires. This left the South’s diplomatic strategy fatally weakened. At least one major European power - France - still considered itself to have some interest in ensuring, at least, that the Confederacy did not collapse. However, the crucial maritime and cotton power - Great Britain - with greater potential and actual cotton resources in its dominions - quickly lost interest. This left the Confederacy depending on an unlikely critical military victory over the North. To be fair, their Generals and soldiers did their best against often-blundering Northern opposition, but weight of numbers and production (and the combination of Lincoln and Grant) told against them in the end.
If, in the long shot, they had won - what then ? The Civil War was, and also was not, a “war against slavery”. This was not a war about the Rights of Man. If a referendum had been taken in 1861 on whether slavery should simply be abolished, the result would almost certainly have been heavily negative, both North and South. The governing class in the South regarded the “peculiar institution” of slavery as indispensable for the survival of their essential agrarian, plantation-based economy. Even Virginia, with its somewhat more varied economic base, had an interest in this, insofar as the sale of Virginian slaves “south” was a valuable business. As regards the North, both rural agricultural workers and urban commercial and industrial workers feared the prospect both of the abolition of slavery and that of its extension into the North, as they anticipated that this would result in their wage rates being undermined by northerly-migrant slave owners or freed slaves.
Whatever way one looks at it, the scenario here was for a war to the death, without realistic hope of compromise. A Southern “victory” would have left the core issue of the “peculiar institution” unsolved. A North defeated by some brilliant military stroke (of which Robert E. Lee, at least, might have been capable of delivering) would still have been, fundamentally, the stronger combatant. It seems very improbable that it would have tolerated any settlement that extended the “peculiar institution” north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least as far as established States and Territories were concerned. It might, under constraint, have agreed to allow slavery to extend westward as new territories were established - but only below the Mason-Dixon line. Fine - but this would seem to have been no more than a recipe for another civil war, as the fundamental issue of the territorial scope of slavery would not have been settled, and because particular difficulties would have arisen as new slave territories abutted on the already settled west coast - a “non-slave” zone.
The Civil War was, in many respects, a result of the compromise between Federalists and Jeffersonians that allowed them to adopt a “federal” Constitution in the early 19th century. It was a complex compromise between the requirements of federation and the established tradition of States’ rights. This compromise was a wonderful product, at least intellectually, of the European Enlightenment of the late 18th century. However, it left many matters “hanging in the air”, and the compromise between States’ rights and federation appears, to many Europeans, unsatisfactory to this day. Poisoned by the essentially economic issue of slavery, this unsatisfactory compromise produced a civil war. The least that can be said for that awful war is that it removed the issue of the “peculiar institution” from the American political agenda, allowing the country as a whole to proceed with its political, economic and social development on a reasonably practical basis. A fortituous Southern “victory” could not have achieved this, and may have been no more than a recipe for further civil war. Just some thoughts, JR.