As I've learned and continue to learn more and more about the Confederacy and the Civil War, it always comes off to me that the Confederacy never really was going to succeed, and all the Civil war was was a rebellion which was massive and had it's epic place in time, but was not one that was going to succeed for the rebels. If that's true, how we got to this place where the CSA is viewed as a serious prospect, I'm not sure; maybe it has to do with when the South returned to the Union, their thought of themselves as legitimate and with a chance came with them. Even if the CSA did manage to secede, it seems like it'd be only from the Union letting them leave without fighting or any more fighting, and it seems like the CSA would rather quickly break down and collapse, and its components and states would rejoin the Union or be absorbed up by the Union piece by piece.
So did the Confederacy really have a chance, or was it always a hopeless effort? If it was always just a major but unwinnable rebellion, then I dare say that is a major part of evaluating alternate history scenarios given how much the CSA figures into alternate history.