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The North won despite being burdened with some of the most incompetent or timorous generals ever to wear American uniforms from George Washington's day to our own: Pope, Burnside, McClellan, for example. The Battle of Fredricksburg was one of the darkest days the United States armed forces have ever seen. The superior numbers and industrial base belonged to the North, but then again the 13 Colonies faced the full military force of Britain, the lone superpower of the late 18th Century, virtually alone. Yet they won American independence. What prevented the independence of the South was, above all things, the indomitable will of Abraham Lincoln. A lesser man would have sued for peace after the repeated setbacks of 1862. The second factor was the the Union's overall strategy, devised by Lincoln and General Winfield Scott: taking the border states, blockading the Southern ports, and seizing control of the lower Mississippi from New Orleans to Cairo. The third factor was the higher degree of competence of the Union command in the western theater. In the end, it was the western generals, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan who finally led the Union forces to victory.

I wouldn't compare the American Revolution to the Civil War, vis-a-vis your comment on Great Britain. The British were operating at the end of a very long, Trans-Atlantic supply line, while being burdened by the defense of the rest of the Empire (and embroiled, literally, in world war against France, Spain and Holland). The American colonists most certainly did not face the full force of the British Army and Navy. Not quite the same thing as a Northern army enjoying interior lines of supply and the ability to move masses of men and materiel vast distances at speed, due to the extensive rail network and along navigable rivers, mostly across friendly territory (particularly the Mississippi in the later stages of the war).

True, the Union was saddled with mediocre senior commanders, but once the right ones had been found (Grant and Sherman) and the philosophy of total war had been agreed upon, the result was more or less a foregone conclusion. The war, technically, was over when the Mississippi had been closed to the South, and New Orleans taken (most other ports of comparable size having been blockaded by Union Naval power), and it is a tribute to the Confederate army that they continued to fight for as long and as well as they did.