The South should have freed the slaves and then voted to leave the Union. They would have won the war.
No, they wouldn’t have won. The North had the technology, factories and supply lines and the South had something that the North wanted.
Imho, the Civil War was more about money than anything else. Ending slavery was used as the “cause” and is a great outcome, but ultimately, like every war, it was about power and money.
The old saying about South Carolina was that it was too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum. They tended to produce the most extreme pro-slavery politicians in the antebellum period.
I read somewhere that the very first week of the 1st Congress in 1789, a representative from South Carolina threatened to secede. So they don't seem to have thought that their ratification of the Constitution was an irrevocable step.
If it had not been for secession and the Civil War, slavery would have continued for decades more, at least. Even the Republican Party in 1860 did not assert the right to interfere with slavery where it was already established.
LOL. That's like saying that John Dillinger should have deposited $20,000 in the bank before he had the shootout with police.
Dillinger was all about robbing banks and the Confederacy was all about preserving slavery.
If they had freed their slaves then what would they have had to secede over?