I agree that the best way for the Confederacy to have won the Civil War was to have never started it in the first place.
Just as President Franklin Roosevelt needed Pearl Harbor to rouse & rally Americans for war, Lincoln needed Fort Sumter to inspire Northerners to fight.
Without those, the American body-politic would remain confused & misdirected.
In such confusions lay the Confederacy's only chance of victory.
But, to wish for such things is to wish for pigs to fly -- it just ain't goin' to happen.
First of all, in Jefferson Davis Confederates had a former US Secretary of War, who well knew the US Army's strengths & weaknesses, and who judged Northerners easily beatable.
And second, Confederates had a justifiable view of their own young men as superior military material, fully capable of defeating expected larger Union forces.
And they were not so wrong, except... except.
Well, except for US Grant and a few others who could turn Northerners into a real fighting force.
In the East, Lincoln fired how many generals before he finally found one -- Grant -- who would fight and win?
Point is: it was impossible, certainly in their own minds, for the Confederacy not to chose war, even when diplomacy might have served them better.
THE SOUTH IS A GARDEN. It has been worn out by the War, Reconstruction, the Period of
Desolation, the Depression and the worst ravages of all - Modernity; yet, a worn-out garden, its
contours perceived by keen eyes, the fruitfulness of its past stored in memory, can be over time, a
time which will last no longer than those of us who initially set our minds to the task, restored,
to once again produce, for the time appointed unto it, the fruits which nurture the human spirit
and which foreshadow the Garden of which there will be no end.
- Dr. Robert M. Peters of Louisiana