After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln successfully mobilized to crush the Confederacy by force. Four more states joined the Confederacy but we know that that the Confederate states were forcibly re-integrated into the Union in four years.
How much, if any, did the eleven Confederate states have a chance of defeating the federal forces and remaining independent? This victory scenario could include surviving but losing minor pieces such as West Virginia. Nearly all mainstream Civil War histories seem to assume there was a real chance of accomplishing this, but the more I read about the Civil War the more it appears to me that the entire effort was doomed from the start, and if you re-ran the war multiple times from Fort Sumter, the Union would win even earlier in most of these instances.