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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.
There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.
The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.
The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.
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