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Well, let's bring this into the present. Some say this was the start of the eroding of State powers in lieu of Federalism. I see it this way:

First American Revolution (1775 - 1783) - Good guys won
Second American Revolution (1861 - 1865) - Good guys lost
Third American Revolution (201x - ????) - Tie Breaker?

First of all, state power versus federal power is a very narrow optic. Consider liberty or self-government or public welfare and you'll get different answers than if you just focus on the powers of states.

Secondly, revolutions tend to result in more government and more taxes, even if they begin with a desire for less government and less taxes. We taxed ourselves more and maintained a larger government establishment here after the revolution than the British would have dared to before.

And who's to say that the Confederacy wouldn't have brought more government interference in people's affairs if it had lasted? Maintaining slavery or some alternate system of labor/racial control and keeping up a military establishment against the US would have gone some way to increasing the size of government.

Some people have this crazy idea that history would just have stopped where it was if the Confederates had had their way. They think that things that happened after Appomattox (as well as far worst things) couldn't have found a way to happen if only the devil Lincoln was defeated.

That's just not the way things happen in history. For one thing, there are international currents in technology, economics, and ideas that have effects on all kinds of regimes. For another, as noted above, successful revolutions produce new national elites wedded to the idea of government power and the things they can do with it. And people are more willing to give power to a government closer to home than to one further away.

Also, the big growth in federal power came long after the Civil War. You could argue that it wouldn't have happened if the country had been divided. Sure, you wouldn't have had a powerful Washington DC, but a government in Richmond could be just as willing to exercise new prerogatives.

A lot of the growth of federal power involved trying to cope with problems that the growth of industry and cities and population and the decline of the frontier brought about. You could argue that those changes were a result of the Hamiltonian policies that the Republicans carried out after the Civil War.

But the problem with that is that more agrarian countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada went further in the direction of government control of the economy than the US. We like to think now that "socialistic" tendencies are the result of elites, or minorities, or urban masses, but in fact, at various times in history, ordinary working people from the majority culture have been more than willing to have more government control over the economy. Think of the Populists or the New Deal. Plenty of Southerners supported Roosevelt.

What I've been trying to say, is that you can't just put all the blame for everything on Lincoln or the North, and can't assume that left alone, everything would have remained as it did in the South (you can't assume that everything remaining as it was in the South in 1800 or 1850 would be a good thing, either).

Finally, a lot of these conflicts between central governments and outlying areas also went on in Latin America. I don't know how every single conflict played out, but the decline of big federal projects like Gran Colombia or the United Provinces of Central America didn't make everybody freer or happier. Entrenched local elites were as unfriendly to liberty as the central government was. Maybe more.