PING!
Another book to take a look at.
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Cotton-Created-Fortunes-Civilizations/dp/0670033677
Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map
This author suggested that the South miscalculated in assuming Great Britain would come to its aid because British mills needed the raw material. They managed to get cotton elsewhere.
The author also suggests the South figured Northern mill owners would pressure Lincoln because of their raw material needs.
#12. Vicksburg I think was always considered pivotal. It gave the Union control of the Mississippi, plus it severed the rail line which supplied the Western states. And the psychological effect cannot be discounted.
I toured that battlefield a couple of years ago. You need to start out at the very northern part, where the bluff overlooked the Mississippi River. Then you’ll understand the why of the rest of the siege. They have a jam-up museum in the old Warren County Courthouse, too.
The "Black Republicans" were seen as a threat to the foundation of Southern society. And no, it wasn't limited government or states rights. If that were the case the GOP would also done poorly in Western states as well (and big government Whigs wouldn't have done so well in some slave states in the 1840s either). So yes, they "had it in" for whoever the Republican nominee would be.
John Brown did a lot to shape the mood of the slave states in 1859 and 1860. You can attribute a lot of the anxiety and tension to the fear of slave revolt. But if Brown had never lived and a Republican were elected in 1860, would the big picture -- secession of at least a few states and likely war -- really have been any different? He may have mattered in the Upper South, but South Carolina didn't need John Brown to make them afraid of slave revolts, abolitionists, and Republicans, or hostile to Northerners.
Frederick Douglass wasn't seen as a major figure until recently. Whether we're right or wrong in giving him such significance is something we could discuss, but I don't think many Americans knew who he was until the 1960s. That may have been different in his own day, but surely William Lloyd Garrison would have been more familiar to contemporaries.
Lincoln met with Douglass during the war, but there was no outcry as there was when later Presidents conferred with Black leaders (like when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House). Was that because people didn't know Lincoln had met with Douglass, or because they didn't know who Douglass was, or was the wartime climate different from what we might have expected?
The West was so lightly settled in those days, that it's hard to imagine the Confederacy "moving into" it in any large numbers. If there'd been railroads or waterways or more settlements things would have been different, but as it was whatever manpower they could commit to it would only be a drop in the bucket, and that drop would dry up soon enough.
If the CSA could have gotten Southerners who'd settled on the West Coast to form guerilla units or even kept the war going in the Southwest, it certainly would have changed the shape of the war, though. Wikipedia tells me that 13 Union troops faced 10 Confederates at Picacho Pass. That may be an important part of Arizona history, but in terms of the war it looks like the smallest of sideshows.
McClellan did take the battle to the gates of Richmond and Lee did suffer major losses fighting him. However competent Mac was or wasn't, however much he dawdled and delayed, the fact that he did mount the Peninsular Campaign does have to be taken into account. Also, with Burnside and Hooker in the running, McClellan wouldn't be the least competent Union commander.
The conventional wisdom is that victories in the Atlanta, Mobile, and Shenandoah campaigns won Lincoln the election. Outside of New York state, Lincoln carried cities by a large margin (except for Detroit and Milwaukee). Democrats had trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't have been seen as disloyal or a Copperhead, but if the military situation hadn't taken that upturn the election would have been a lot closer, especially in the cities.
I don't know about Shelby Foote's comment. To be sure, the South used more of its free manpower than the North did. There were a lot more Northerners who didn't fight than there were Southerners, but there was probably a breaking point as well: if it didn't look like the war was being won, Northerners might turn against it as the government tried to commit more resources to it.