Not so fast. The South did have a chance at winning this war.
Could the South have won the Civil War? In this article, you'll find answers on how the South could have changed history.
www.historyonthenet.com
"After the war, various Confederate generals expressed their views that the war had been winnable. In 1874, Joseph E. Johnston insisted that the South had not been “guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully.” Pierre G. T. Beauregard added, “No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates.” E. Porter Alexander’s retrospective assessment was more modest than Beauregard’s, but he too thought the South could have won:
When the South entered upon war with power so immensely her superior in men & money, & all the wealth of modern resources in machinery and transportation appliances by land & sea, she could entertain but one single hope of final success. That was, that the desperation of her resistance would finally exact from her adversary such a price in blood & treasure as to exhaust the enthusiasm of its population for the objects of the war. We could not hope to conquer her. Our one chance was to wear her out.
Much of Europe expected (and desired) a Confederate victory. The downfall of “the American colossus,” opined the Times, would be good “riddance of a nightmare. . . . Excepting a few gentlemen of republican tendencies, we all expect, we nearly all wish, success to the Confederate cause.” Joining in was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who cheerfully predicted: “that the dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and that men before [sic] me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.” As late as 1863, Russia’s minister to the United States declared, “The republican form of government, so much talked about by the Europeans and so much praised by the Americans, is breaking down. What can be expected from a country where men of humble origin are elevated to the highest positions?”
A Southern victory was not out of the question. After all, it had been only eighty years since the supposedly inferior American revolutionaries had vanquished the mighty Redcoats of King George III and less than fifty years since the outgunned Russians had repelled and destroyed the powerful invading army of Napoleon."