So the DAESH is winning by constant slow loss of the territories it controlled?
Making the war so expensive that it was easier to let the Confederacy go is one option. But burning Northern cities would have made the Yankees really mad.
I’ve debated it from all angles many times and think I have an informed opinion and I agree with the consensus: barring extraterrestrial alliance, there was nothing the south could have done that would have won the war. It wasn’t even just the military impossibility of defeating an enemy who is better armed, better provisioned, better funded, diplomatically recognized internationally, wired (with telegraph wire), and with a never ending source of new recruits but political: that sense of “rugged individualism” and “never compromise!” bullshit damned any chance the south had of working together or effectively politically.
In February of 1865 when the blindest man in the south could see that the South was walking a tightrope juggling chainsaws over a shark tank (and Grant and Sherman both had their hands on the tight rope) they STILL would not entertain a diplomatic ending that would readmit them to the Union, pay for damages to southern infrastructure, and even partially compensate them for their slaves- again, this is when the Union lines are so close to Richmond that Robert E. Lee is going from the front lines to visit his wife at home on his lunch break [literally] and Atlanta, Columbia, and Vicksburg are all in ruins and the Mississippi is a Union river and Sherman has devastated the entire southeastern sea board and there hasn’t been a noteworthy victory in forever and men are deserting in such numbers that they don’t even bother hiding when they get home and defeat is inevitable for a thousand different reasons- they had the opportunity to end the war and get some money for their slaves instead of no money- they still said "Nope, we don’t negotiate with uh… terroris… uh… people we don’t agree with in every regard.
(At the Hampton Roads Conference, a bit of which is seen in the movie Lincoln, Alexander Stephens- VP of the Confederacy and generally the smartest man in the room who knew Lincoln from his one term in the House and who Lincoln admired as an orator and scholar, finally said, not in these words but words as blunt, “F*ck this, the South is never going to agree to a damned thing, doesn’t matter if the Union starts raining fire and turning the waters to blood, but my favorite nephew’s in a Union prison camp- if you can let him go then I promise I’m going to tell Jeff Davis to screw himself and go straight home from here and just wait until they come to arrest me when the South surrenders, which should be in a few weeks if that long.” (Lincoln did and Stephens did; when the Union soldiers came to his house to arrest him he invited them to eat with him and then, his bags already packed, he left with them peacefully.)
That said, alternative histories in which the south wins are done to death.
You should consider new ground: perhaps something about a Confederate general who won’t give up even though it’s 1877, or Union and Confederate soldiers in a “Lost” type landscape or fighting on camelback in New Mexico ca. 1900 because while the South never won the war never ended.
Though in full confession I’ve tried the alternative history writing route.
Wasn’t about a Confederate victory so much as about a war that starts in 1857 when a blue eyed slave develops a following when many people, including his former master and John Brown, believe he is the second coming of Jesus Christ (even though he tells them he is not- though he starts to wonder himself after a while), but, alternative history nonetheless, so I can’t judge.
Bingo. This is pretty much it- the only way the South was going to win was to convince the North that they didn’t want to fight it out. It certainly wasn’t going to do that by virtue of its smaller manpower base and drastically smaller industrial capacity, so they were going to have to do something that would cause the North to quit from a political standpoint, as they weren’t going to win militarily.
I mean, after a certain point no amount of clever generalship would have ever overcome being outnumbered in every possible category by like 5:1 to obtain an overall military victory, so the only hope was that the South could convince the North to give up the fight, or to get allies that would redress that ratio.
If his kidnapping plot had worked it might have been interesting. I don’t think it would have ended the war, but the power plays would have been intriguing.
Just to be clear, I didn’t only have the actual 1865 plan in mind; I was wondering, what happens if Southerners get their hands on Lincoln at some earlier point, which as you say would kick off all sorts of decision-making from the acting commander-in-chief and so on and so forth. What follows? Is “intriguing” all we can say?
Let’s say Mannasas was not just a rout but decimated the US Army. Johnston organizes the CS Army and not looks like he can strike wherever he wants. What happens?
Maryland joins the CSA? UK and/or France recognizes the CSA? Politicians force Lincoln to open negotiations?
Capturing D.C. would not necessarily have ended the war and in fact would have been far less unthinkable to them than to us. The beginning of the Civil War was less than 50 years from the time the British not only captured D.C. but burned the White House and the Capitol; I’m sure there were old timers there who could remember the ruins.
The Civil War, strange though this might seem to read, wasn’t decided by battles. No one battle truly reversed the tide of the war. It was a modern war, decided by campaigns. Even Vicksburg wasn’t really a battle; it was a campaign, which ended with Vicksburg surrendering.
Any number of major, blood soaked battles can be named that rather pointedly did not end the war. The Confederacy lost its biggest city a year into the war and just kept right on trucking. The war was too big, too geographically immense, for the armies involved to decide it in one or even a dozen battles.
Couldn’t the Confederates loot and garner supplies from the Northern surroundings as they went?
I disagree, if anything it was the ***North’s ***best chance to end the war quickly. Lee’s Army was divided into several parts, the North had a copy of his orders, and his forces should have been destroyed. And in the battle he was heavily outnumbered, fighting with his back to the Potomac, his left wing badly decimated, his center holding by a thread, and his left saved only by the appearance of A.P. Hills’ men.
And McClellan (the Union Commander) had over 20,000 troops that *were never engaged * the whole day of the battle. It is doubtful Lee could put that many men in total in the line the next day. But McClellan refused to attack. He just couldn’t make himself throw the dice and commit those men the next day (almost no fighting took place, and Lee withdrew the following day), and thus the war went on. I often wonder if McClellan had crushed Lee (and taken him, Jackson, Longstreet, and the Hills (AP and DH) prisoner…would we have had a President McClellan in 1864 or 1868? That’s my alternative history.
But back to the OP, I concur with those who mentioned the Trent incident as being the best chance the Confederacy had to establish itself as a ‘legitimate’ government and receive substantial aid from Europe (who would have no qualms about a broken and weaker United States). But I doubt even that would have changed the final situation.
As for land battles, I go with Shiloh, if Albert Johnson had been able to cut off Grants forces from the river and destroy them, he takes Grant and Sherman (dead or as POW’s) off the board and sets back the Western campaign by more than a year, which would have led to more discontent in the North and perhaps a win by McClellan in the 1864 election.
Chickamauga was too late, and the response by both sides was telling; The South sent congratulations and the hope they could get Longstreet back to Lee soon; The North sent Grant, Sherman and 30,000 of their troops and 10,000 more from the east under General Hooker to recover the situation. And that should tell you which side had the werewithall to win.
Apologies for the long post, but I like this subject (ya think? 
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Might not, sure. But it would have changed the Civil War more than any other “battle”, that we can agree on.
I forgot one- not attack Fort Sumter . Dont attack at all. Dont give Lincoln a violent casus belli .
Not a chance. At least not in the amounts it would take to keep them mobile and effective. Modern (even for the time) armies are creatures with enormous appetites.
“Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics.”
The problem was that the Confederates could never get in a position where they could strike wherever they wanted. They simply didn’t have the base. As long as the United States was willing to keep fighting, it had the resources to recover from every defeat. The Confederates did not. So the Confederates suffered more from each battle than the Americans did, even if the Confederates won. Even if Grant and Sherman had been killed, the ultimate course of the war would have been the Confederates winning battle after battle - right up to the point where they surrendered.
So the Confederates could only hope for a political victory not a military one. They were hoping the United States would quit the war and allow the Confederates to have their independence.
As silenus said, armies had grown past the size where they could live off the land during a campaign. Any significant army which tried it would run out of supplies, including food. Any army small enough to make a go out of living off local supplies would be too small to have a military effect.
There was, obviously, an apparent exception - Sherman’s Georgia campaign. Sherman left his supply line behind and marched a huge army through the middle of the CSA. But Sherman had planned out the campaign very carefully. He stocked up on extra supplies before setting out, planned a route through an area which had more supplies available than most, and created special detachments to strip the countryside of all possible supplies.
Even so, it was a big risk and Sherman and Grant recognized it as such. The American army had to keep moving. It only had enough military supplies for limited fighting. And it had to find the supplies it needed along its route.
The march could have ended in disaster. Sherman’s forces greatly outnumbered the Confederate forces left in the area. But if they had been able to bring some forces in and fight, Sherman would have been in serious trouble. Any serious fighting and Sherman’s troops would have run out of ammunition. Even if the Confederates had been able slow them down, the Americans would have eaten out the land.
And there was another possibility. The Confederates could have retreated from Sherman’s forces as they did historically - but destroyed the countryside as they retreated. If the Confederates had destroyed all the local supplies before the Americans could seize them, Sherman would have lost his army. But the Confederates didn’t do this. Even though they knew the Americans were taking the supplies and destroying whatever remained, the Confederates (many of whom were local militia) couldn’t bring themselves to pre-emptively destroying their own state.
I’d say the best chance for a quick American victory had already passed. McClellan should have won the Peninsular campaign and taken Richmond. But he was, as you note, a terrible general.
My assumption for the Antietam campaign was that McClellan didn’t receive Lee’s battle plan and therefore performed even worse than he did historically - in other words, he performed like he typically did. If that had been the case, Lee probably would have won a major victory in the campaign.
McClellan would have gone home afterwards and loudly told everyone that the defeat hadn’t been his fault. He have said that the Confederates were simply unbeatable and the American cause was hopeless. McCellan’s defeatism might have collapsed American morale and convinced the American government to seek a settlement.
Had Jackson been head general instead of Lee it could have happened. Jackson wanted to destroy the North’s industry and threaten their civilian populations. As it was almost all destruction happened in the south where as northern civilians felt safe in their beds at night because Lee only cared about the northern army. Had the south preempted Sherman’s march but instead burned Philadelphia to New York the war would have ended pretty quickly.
What effect might an 1862 assassination have had? Would Hannibal Hamlin stayed the course and prosecuted the war with the same vigor? Or would he have mucked it all up somehow?
I don’t know enough about him to guess. Have to figure nearly anything’s possible.
Food and fodder, some, but probably not enough.
Bullets and shells, not a chance.