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Let's say you're redoing the Civil War and you get to play one of two characters: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis.
Would it actually be easy to win the war playing as Jefferson Davis?
Obviously, the South would never have been able to conquer the North. The North had immense economic, technological, naval, and manpower advantages. But they didn't need to. They just need to impose enough of a cost on the North that the North would come to a settlement. This doesn't appear that far-fetched. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln was no sure thing in 1864. Had the war not turned decisively in favor of the Union, its possible that McClellan could have won. In the end, he still captured 45% of the votes and won three states (NJ, DE, KY). If McClellan prosecuted the war as President like he did as a General, its likely the South could have held out for a long time. Situations like the starvation of Union prisoners in Andersonville, and the sheer awfulness of the conflict would have likely have proven intolerable without a sure path to victory.
So what could the South have done?
Fabian tactics. They should have simply refused to give battle whenever possible, and harassed Union communications. Johnston did just that as he retreated in the face of Sherman's army. But then he was replaced by the Confederate government because they preferred someone who wanted to fight. Then Sherman took Atlanta.
Lee's incursion into Pennsylvania was a fatal mistake that did more to weaken the Confederate cause than anything. He may have been a good tactician but this strategic blunder is unforgivable.
But the real weak point here is Jefferson Davis. He often involved himself in military decisions and wanted commanders who took an aggressive posture. While appropriate for a stronger force, this is entirely inappropriate for a weaker one. Confederate doctrine should have been preservation of precious manpower, avoiding giving battle, never fighting when not intrenched etc... That last part is also key since the Civil War showed some signs of a proto-WWI type environment.
In any case, in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South. Which character would you play: Lincoln or Davis?
I think the more interesting question is: the North won the war and you play as Andrew Johnson. What do you do so that 130 years later people no longer identify with the cause of the South?
Do people really identify with the cause of the South now? The Confederacy fought for a very specific slave based political economy. That economy was destroyed by the war and never came back. All political fights in the US are within the political-economic universe created by the victorious Union.
I consider modern people who use Confederate imagery as similar to Ukrainians who dress up like the Nazis; they are appropriating the dress and iconography of a previous movement despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement.
I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.
You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)
And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)
Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.
This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.
I think all of your arguments are true, and it tracks my experiences with Southern family and living in the South, and I think we may have a bit of a terminology dispute. When I read, “the cause of the South”, I interpreted it as specifically “the Confederate cause” rather than “fighting for Southern wellbeing in general.” While people fought for both the Union and Confederacy for tons of individual reasons, the Confederate leadership was pretty unified that the purpose of secession was the maintenance of the slave system and planter dominance in the South.
Tons of later Southerners viewed themselves as having kinship to the Confederacy, but almost none of them wanted the socio-political-economic system that was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. Even the Redeemers after the Civil War had a very different class and social basis than the pre-war Planter class. They may use Confederate iconography or argue for the nobility of certain Confederates or even the cause as a whole, but I don’t consider that really supporting the Confederate cause.
Your average guy who has a Confederate flag is either a Southern regional patriot or Red Tribe person who dislikes Blue Tribe and/or people who don’t like the South. I view it as similar to a Ukrainian who uses Nazi/Banderite iconography today; they don’t support Nazi Germany or probably even the politics of Stephan Bandera. They are just using the symbols of a previous fight for their use in a current fight without endorsing the politics of the previous fight.
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