I voted for the last alternative but only because the Confederacy COULD have won Independence and COULD have survived. It certainly was not doomed in 1861, but it retrospect it had only a slight chance of survival since the only way it could win Independence would be if the government and the population of the North allowed it, either willingly without a war or through losing the will to continue a war to suppress the Confederacy. The stark fact facing the Confederacy was that nothing short of death, capture, or total demoralization of his supporters would ever destroy the will of Abraham Lincoln to restore the Union. When the overwhelming material strength of the North was combined with Lincoln's iron will and sound strategy, Confederate independence was possible only through superior military and political leadership, of which the CSA was lacking, or through random events that would remove one or more of the pillars of Union strength. Notably, remove Lincoln from the scene either by capturing him in a mad rush on Washington after 1st Manasses or through Lincoln's death by natural causes (say Typhoid Fever, always a threat in DC). Or with the right sequence of events and some timely deaths (this means you, Braxton Bragg, and you, Bishop Polk, among others) the CSA could have won sufficient victories when they held the strategic iniative for the only time in fall 1862 to have broken Northern morale and/or win recognition (not intervention). So the Confederacy could have won its Independence even if unlikely. Granted that, however, an Independent Confederacy would probably have survived as a separate nation to the present. Once forged as a nation and recognized internationally as a soverign state, the CSA would most likely have neither fallen victim to a war of reconquest, nor fallen apart, nor voluntarily rejoined the Union. Even weak nations can survive for a long time on a combination of inertia and balance of power politics.