Your argument as presented earlier (Confederate offensives tended to fail) has five possible readings:
1) The Confederacy tended to fail because of structural problems relating to a lack of resources (men, guns, rifles).
2) The Confederacy tended to fail because the Confederate Army was incompetent.
3) The Confederacy tended to fail because Confederate generals were incompetent.
4) The Confederacy tended to fail because the areas over which they attacked were highly defensible.
5) The Confederacy tended to fail because all offensives are hard.
My argument was not that Confederate offensives
tended to fail. My argument is that Confederate offensives
virtually always failed.
Let's look at Robert E Lee, arguably the Confederacy's best commander.
* West Virginia - failure
* Peninsula Campaign - success
* Maryland Campaign - failure
* Gettysburg Campaign - failure
That's the Confederacy's best general succeeding one out of four times, which makes Lee notably above average for a Confederate general on the offensive.
You attempted to dismiss this with the old Lost Cause argument that the Union only won because of superior resources:
But that's largely because of the greater force the Union could concentrate against them.
Your argument appears to be that "The Confederacy tended to fail because of structural problems relating to a lack of resources (men, guns, rifles)" with the other factors being largely unimportant. Even if that were true, the Union would still have that advantage in an OTL.
Really? How?
We do have returns for the size of the Union Army in early-mid 1862, and we know how many small arms they had in store on 30 June 1862 (which included large numbers of imported British Enfield rifles, most of them arriving in 1862). The numbers simply do not add up.
If you feel they do, then please explain what number you feel that "almost twice as many forces" is - complete with some indicator of what you think the realistic British commitment would be, and preferably what you view the strength of the Confederacy as at the same time.
This is an extraordinary claim by you, and as such demands at least ordinary evidence.
Of course, if the Union could field the number of troops you suggest, then they should have won the war rather easily in 1862 by launching attacks all across the Continent at over 2:1 odds everywhere.
Self-evidently, they did not.
You're asking me how the Union could raise the number of troops they raised in actual history? You're demanding evidence that the Union could achieve things they did achieve in actual history?
In fact, this point of yours directly contradicts the argument you made above (which was that the Union did not rely on superior numbers) - both can be false (in the case where the Union had a slight advantage in early 1862 which expanded as the war went on), but both cannot be true unless the Union was OTL commanded by fools.
I was pointing out that even if your argument were true, the Union advantage in numbers would still exist, and thus the Confederates should lose most of their offensives in an ATL.
That's certainly your opinion, but it doesn't really address the point which I was making - which is that we're discussing the idea of a successful Confederate secession.
Robert E Lee failed every time he took an offensive into Union territory. It is more than an opinion that the Confederacy needs to do better than that to achieve independence.