As a non-American, it's only recently dawned on me how unequal the American Civil War was. As far as I know, the Union was much more industrialized and had far greater manpower while all the Confederacy had going for it was southern spirit and good generals. Considering the country where I live, the United Kingdom, it was perhaps somewhat like what would happen if Scotland tried to beat England militarily.
I apologize if I'm going slightly off-topic, but it also appears to me that the Confederacy tried to defeat the Union in total war. Even if their ultimate goal is to get the Union to sue for peace and acknowledge their independence, fighting a conventional war under such outmatched circumstances seems foolish to me. Looking at military history as a whole, knowing full well that I'm an armchair commander at best, I would have opted for guerrilla warfare from the beginning, let alone sending major invasions into northern territory, sure to exhaust the South's scant manpower and supplies. What made the Confederacy make the decision to fight the Union as if it was a contest between Prussia and Austria rather than, more accurately, the war between the Nationalist Republic and Jiangxi Soviet? Was guerrilla warfare simply not a concept in America at the time?