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Notes -
That's pretty much the opposite to the opinion I've come to. In my view, the South bet a slightly better prepared soldiery (in 1860) and wish-and-a-prayer magic-thinking diplomacy against.........everything else. Confederate diplomats made a mess of things, their greatest triumph was getting arrested off a British boat, thereby creating an incident. Britain was heavily anti-slavery and had already turned the Royal Navy against the slave trade. They weren't going to finance a pack of slavers, and in fact might have invaded/blockaded if the Union failed to defeat the Confederacy. Nobody else in Europe was going to piss off the Royal Navy for Jeff Davis.
Lincoln meddled as much as Davis did, but he could afford to fuck up several times, and Davis couldn't. Could a perfect storm of events and unstinting genius on the part of 100% of the confederate officials and generals have hypothetically given them a result that could be called victory? Yes. Was it ever likely? Not even for a nanosecond. The confederacy lost the minute they seceded. It just took the Union a bit of fumbling and a quarter million casualties to make it happen.
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