With Davis in charge they might well have, but a more rational regime would have recognized that Missouri and Kentucky were indeed a Lost Cause for the Confederacy by 1864. That wouldn't preclude the possibility of a later war to win back land that had been lost or that was never actually a part of the CSA.
I wonder if the Democrats actually could have made peace. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that if McClellan won the North could have been torn apart itself in the conflict between those who wanted to continue the war and those who wanted a settlement.
Yup, I suppose that would have been possible. However, here’s an excerpt from McClellan’s letter accepting the nomination.
“f a frank, earnest and persistent effort to obtain those objects should fail, the responsibility for superior consequences will fall upon those who remain in arms against the Union. But the Union must be preserved at all hazards.
I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the army and navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain; that we had abandoned that Union for which we had so often periled our lives.
A vast majority of our people, whether in the army and navy or at home, would, as I would, hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace, on the basis of the Union under the Constitution without the effusion of another drop of blood. But no peace can be permanent without union.”
Doesn’t exactly sound like somebody anxious to march back out of the +50% of the CSA already conquered.
http://historum.com/american-history/70552-george-mcclellan-presidential-candidate.html