[BroJoeK]

Bull Snipe: "Tredegar works in Richmond, VA was the largest manufacturing operation in the entire Confederacy.
Half of all Confederate artillery barrels were cast there....
There were some manufacturing operations in the South that could produce rifled muskets at a rate of hundreds a month."

Agreed, I'm not disputing the fact that Northern manufacturing greatly outpaced the Confederates'.
But that is not the same as saying the South had nothing, as your words seem to imply.
Indeed, your own statement that half of Confederate artillery was cast at Tredegar means that half was cast in other manufacturing facilities.
Cumberland Iron Works in Tennessee is sometimes mentioned.

Bull Snipe: "The South was not even in the ball game when it came to manufacturing."

I would say it a little differently.
By 1860 Southern states were in the manufacturing "ball game", and played it pretty well, just not at the level of the major league world series champions -- Northern manufacturing.

Bull Snipe: "...by 1860, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency were in the hands of elected officials that were not sympathetic to Southern interests.
The perception in the South was that once the Lincoln administration took control of Washington DC, that their would be significant legislation to further limit or end the practice of slavery in the South. "

My argument is that the Democrats' election defeat in November 1860 was actually engineered by Fire Eating Southern secessionists themselves, when they split apart the ruling national Democrat party.
Their goal was to make the Union intolerable for average Southerners by convincing them that the worst of abolitionist "Black Republicans" were coming to steal their wives & children.
And it worked.
With the pro-Southern voters split amongst three different parties, and Northerners highly charged up over Dred-Scott, the minority Republicans won enough to elect their first president.

But it only happened because secessionist Fire Eaters wanted it.
In a more normal election, such as in 1856, Southern & Northern Democrats allied to control all branches of Federal Government.

[Bull Snipe]

one third of all Confederate field artillery was captured Federal manufactured weapons. I never said they had nothing. The basic fact is that the Confederacy lacked the manufacturing capacity meet its military needs in artillery, rifle muskets, railroad engines, rolling stock or rail. They could make some of it but they had to capture or import the balance.

[HandyDandy]

Well said. And let's bear in mind that the Confederacy, especially in the hands of Jeff Davis and Al (Mr Cornerstone) Stephens, was from conception a tyranny. The major difference between the North and the South was that the Confederacy was constituted 100% of slave states. Free states need not apply. Slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Dred Scot had determined that the black could never be a citizen, could never vote, had no standing in court and was inferior to whitey. Taney was owned by the Slave Powers and he gave them what they wanted. Armed with that terrible decision the South began to pump up secession talk. Just whomst was going to go to the Supreme Court and cry about "State Rights"? This had nothing to do with states rights. This had to do with half of the Union, up and leaving, because they'd been frightened by the carefully planted propaganda of how Abe the Gorilla was coming to get them. This was not an issue of a single states right to leave. This was a collusion of confederated states making off with half the country.

That damn war not only produced a whole lot of iron, but a whole lot of irony. The tyrannical President of the Confederacy, who broke as many, if not more rules than Lincoln, ended up never again being a full citizen of the United States. While the blacks who Taney had just proclaimed nothing better than property, became citizens! Delicious irony. The slaves, after those four years ended up in a better place than J.Davis.

And let's stop with this "SC militia attacking a pile of rocks" fantasy. J.Davis himself, as President of the Confederacy, issued the order to tell Anderson he had so many hours to evacuate the fort. And after that time went by, the first round of shelling began. For three hours, the best artillery of the South (which had been placing artillery pieces in strategic location for weeks) began three hours of non-stop shelling, sending 3,000lbs of iron, a piece at a time at the incredibly fortified Sumter. That decision by the idiot J.Davis was a declaration of War against the United States.