What an embarrassment you are.
Turn in your historian card.
At one time I thought you had a brain but really you know nothing."
Again, you're playing word games because the difference between "conquer" versus "defeat", "destroy", "vanquish", "dismember" "demolish" & "ruin" are all fine points of definition, and they all mean the same thing: downfall of the United States.
Lincoln himself said Kentucky was the difference between Union victory & defeat.
Lose Kentucky, and Union also loses Missouri & Maryland.
Lose those and the Confederacy has a powerful argument that mid-western states like Iowa, Illinois & Indiana should secede & join to use Mississippi river transportation.
Consider: in early 1861 Democrats in New York City cheered on their Southern brethren, and wanted to join them.
A victorious Confederacy could reopen that discussion.
So the United States would be defeated, carved & dismembered.
And war would never end until the Confederacy was the dominant military power in North & Central America.
For central_va to suggest otherwise is simply not to understand the mindset of leaders like Jefferson Davis in early 1861 and beyond.
central_va: "Never was the war sold as "we in North are going to be conquered by the South".
That is simply preposterous.
Find one newspaper article from the time period that even insinuates that.
Find one letter."
Many Northerners turned defeatist whenever Confederate armies invaded Union states, which happened frequently.
I count 14 of 30 remaining Union states & territories invaded by Confederate military forces.
For a discussion of Confederate strategy, I suggest:
Steven Hardesty: Confederate Origins of Union Victory, Culture & Decisions in War
You may remember Jefferson Davis' 1862 preparations to invade Illinois were set aside when Grant defeated Confederates at Forts Henry & Donelson.
Well, as late as 1864, Davis' strategic plan was for Confederate John Bell Hood to defeat Union George Thomas in Tennessee and then march on to... Chicago!
Davis wanted to split up the Union and bring mid-western states into the Confederate orbit.
Hood had a somewhat different idea.
He wanted to first defeat Thomas then march to Richmond, join Lee and defeat Grant.
As it happened, such dreams were extinguished at Franklin (Schofield) & Nashville (Thomas), but they demonstrate Confederate leadership was not short of big ideas.