Mark Neely wrote two books to "prove" that thesis, but omitted consideration from the fact that the Confederacy was set upon in its cradle and was fighting for its life against a much more powerful adversary from birth. Exigency and extremity lay much more heavily upon the Confederate cause than on the Union one; in many parts of the North, the casualty lists were the only sign of warfare -- other than the great prosperity attendant on Lincoln's deficit spending and spread around through contracts, payrolls, and the recruitment-bounty program.
[Truth in advocacy: two of my own family members, great-great-uncles on my father's maternal side, accepted the bounties to stand in for draftees -- then disappeared and evaded the military police. They were serious drunkards and wouldn't have been much use to the Indiana regiments campaigning with Rosecrans; the limits of their usefulness were pretty much reached when they occasionally took the poet James Whitcomb Riley home in a wheelbarrow from one of their hotel bar drinking sessions.]
Now it's the "Screw the constitution, we've got a war to fight" defense.
And Neely did a very good job of demonstrating the excesses that occured under Lincoln and the even worse ones that occured under Davis. But once again we see the Southron hypocisy at it's best. Tyranny under Lincoln? Baaaad! Eeeeevil! Tyranny under Davis? Hey, what's the big deal?
From their belicose rhetoric at the time the southern rebels thought just the opposite. They were certain that the North was weak and could be soundly whipped before it was time to harvest next years cotton crop. I doubt you could find a single member of the Confederate cabinet who agreed (on the record) with your premise.
Now, if the original rebels didn't believe they were in such dire straits from the outset, why should historians write that into the script?