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The South won while Stonewall Jackson was around. Once he was shot (mistakenly by his own men) the South began losing.

The insurgents were losing while Jackson was alive.

Dr. Freehling, in "The South vs. The South" makes the point that the rebellion was doomed once MD, KY and MO were secured to the Union cause. Bruce Catton says the same thing. The slave states didn't have the industrial power oppose the north. And the slave states that had the most to offer the rebellion were early on secured to the Union, including most of Tennessee. Virginia was actually a side show to the main action in the west, and in the political realm.

Walt

The South had many opportunities to forestall the re-election of Lincoln, insuring a cease-fire and eventual recognition of the South.

Lincoln, until the fall of Atlanta, believed he would not be re-elected.

Grant's method of pouring thousands of union soldiers though a meat-grinder in order to grind up Lee eventually produced casualty lists so horrendous that the Union war Department and newspaper stopped printing them. Northern people were not willing to accept such losses.

The war was still not totally decided as late as John B. Hood's Army of Tennessee campaign against George Thomas in Middle Tennessee, November, 1864. Had Davis appointed Nathan Bedford Forrest to command that campaign instead of the opium fiend Hood, world history would have radically changed.

The Union won the War by winning it in the West.

Actually I surprised the North won.

They won because of the South's romantic notions about how war should be fought. Had Lee treated Pennsylvannia like Sherman treated Georgia and South Carolina things would have been a lot diferent. Sherman learned to burn civilian populations into submission from the example of the Indian fighting of Andrew Jackson, Architect of the Trail of Tears.

Sherman's division was defeated head to head at the Battle of Fallen Timbers by a few regiments of Calvary led by Nathan Bedford Forrest at the conclusion of the Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862. Forrest was the only man that truly scared Grant and Sherman every time his name was mentioned in connection with some military movement.

But Forrest was not a West Pointer, had been a slave trader and, as such, was ironically an embarassment to gentile Southern sensibilities and the southern Aristocracy that led the war. Consequently, he was never given command of any army greater than 12,000 despite his constant unmitigated successes against the best that the North had.