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Jefferson Davis did not order guerrilla warfare, to which he was in fact strongly opposed.

Wrong again. I present to you the proclamation of President Davis of 4 April 1865, written in Danville, VA:

Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in Detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse....

You can read it for yourself here. You can also read here an editorial from the New York Times that was written 50 years after General Lee surrendered. The author was very clear on General Lee's decision to not follow that order was probably the one greatest saving grace for the US. To think that a New York Times editorial author had the nerve to praise the very man that you cannot even find a decent shred of anything to convict him with.

Throughout American history, killers of U. S. soldiers have come up with all sorts of reasons to excuse their crimes...

First and foremost, General Lee was never convicted of anything. Not war crimes, not treason, nothing. I have found, on the other hand, many attempts at excusing the practice of bringing wholesale destruction to non combattants and their property. It must do you proud to insult a man who court martialed two men for picking vegetables out of a garden in Pennsylvania and try to give a pass to those who not only stole food but killed livestock, killed civilians, and burned their homes. Bully for you.

If Confederate rebels had resorted to guerrilla warfare they would have been slaughtered in no time by the U.S. Army, and they knew it.

By 1865, the southern economy was no longer able to support an insurgency.

The mountainous areas of Appalachia and the Ozarks, where guerrillas would presumably run around, were predominately Unionist.

Guerrillas would have had no way to keep control over slaves, which was the reason they went to war in the first place.

The terms of surrender offered by the Lincoln administration -- no hangings, etc. -- were too tempting to decline.

Faced with white guerrillas, the U.S. Army would have turned the 200,000 blacks and 100,000 southern whites in the U.S. Army into a very effective counterinsurgency force, which backed by the rest of the U. S. Army, would have slaughtered any guerrrilla wannabes.