Yeah, Lonesome, you may be right. The thing that fascinated me in those wargames was...what if the South could win dramatic enough victories early on...maybe even capture Washington in the first year. If so, the North might have sued for peace, and there would have been 2 countries, not one, south of Canada.

It would have been an extraordinary situation, and would probably have led to further wars later on.

Similarly, in World War II, the Germans had 2 crucial windows of opportunity...one was the Battle of Britain in 1940 (which they very nearly won)...and the other was the approach to Moscow in the summer and fall of 1941...which fell short by just a hair of defeating Stalinist Russia. World history would have been radically different if they had won either of those campaigns.

You may also be right that slavery was crucial to the Southern economy. I'll have to look further into that.