“For a cause that never had a chance, they came remarkably close to succeeding on several different occasions.”
They never had a chance because of the ENORMOUS manufacturing disparity between north and south.
These numbers are from the 1860 census.
Pig-iron production in Fiscal Year 1860 (short tons).
United States = 987,559
Pennsylvania = 580,049
Ohio = 117,754
New York = 74,645
New Jersey = 51,675
Kentucky = 33,471
Maryland = 30,500
Tennessee = 22,302
Missouri = 18,000
Vermont = 13,700
Michigan = 13,700
Connecticut = 11,800
Virginia = 11,645
Wisconsin = 2,500
Alabama = 1,742
Illinois = 1,300
Georgia = 1,100
Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan and Connecticut produced 87% of the nation’s pig-iron.
The same disparity existed for production of coal, textiles, copper, timber, wheat, milk, cloth, paper, boots and shoes.
On 1 June 1860 the the country possessed 128,300 industrial establishments. Of these, 110,274 were located in states that remained in the Union.
They never had a chance if the people of the Union stood by their guns and continued to support the war.
This was by no means inevitable. In a democratic society sometimes the People just get tired and give up. As we did in Vietnam.
Also, pig-iron didn’t fight the battles. Men did. And there were quite a number of battles where if things had turned out a little differently the South would have won its independence.
That wouldn’t have been the end of it, of course. There would have remained huge numbers of areas for conflict between the two new nations, and in all likelihood other wars would have ensued.
The general consensus among European soldiers was that the South would win. They based this on the sheer size of the area that needed to be conquered, the factor that had defeated George III in America and Napoleon in Russia.
But they didn’t adequately factor in the railroad, without which the North, despite its great superiority in materiel, could not have handled the logistics needed to crush the South.
And the extensive railroad net was a very recent development, really only in the decade prior to the War.