Ah, and from that practical perspective I would have been in his camp. The South taking on the North was folly, as the North was industrialized and heavily populated. The South agrarian.
Nothing has really changed from that perspective. To take on the Sea Boards as I understand current political power would be folly for the internal States.
But I am very much against Washington power, pro States rights. But also very realistic that the idea of a voluntary Union was decided in 1860 at the estimated cost of 620,000 dead Americans. That was a full 2% of the population. If we lost 2% today that figure would be around 6,400,000 dead. Don’t forget this is just the dead. Does not count the disfigured, the PTSD induced suicides after the war, the folks who never regain their health, the lost limbs.
For perspective, France and Germany each lost 4% of total population in WWI. Although each reacted differently, the trauma of WWI was devastating to both countries.
Historians have been looking at the death estimates from the Civil War and there is a general agreement that they are far too low. A study was done recently that compared the men to women ratio from the 1860 and 1870 censuses, and they discovered that the actual number is likely somewhere between 950,000 and 1,200,000.