You're talking about something that nobody else in this thread is talking about. As usual.So indeed. If you take the Union´s point of view, than the CSA would not have been not a state, but a rebellion. That´s basically the view that prevailed, but it by no means is the only view. That the CSA didn´t achieve full statehood is, however, a result of how the war progressed. Had it gone otherwise, the CSA would have been a state (failed or otherwise). An excellent example of alternative history - awful term, by the way.
The point, once again, is if you take sides - which I do not - you´ll never see the possible alternative, however remote in reality.
As a meta-posting aside, I think it's hilarious that you're accusing the most prominent althistorical writer on CFC of being blind to "alternative [sic] history". Next you'll claim that Kraznaya doesn't know anything about basketball.
You're going on and on about the "fact" that if the Confederacy had somehow achieved military victory and gained independence, that the legal issues with secession would have been irrelevant. Viewed in a vacuum, this is correct. It is also meaningless, largely because modern traitors are very keen to claim that secession was a legal right and therefore - not that this automatically follows, but most traitors assume it does - that the federal government was clearly in the wrong in fighting the Civil War. It's the mythos of the "War of Northern Aggression", and it's done pretty much exclusively to try to redirect the argument away from the fact that this was a freaking slaveholding country that was founded more or less exclusively to protect the right of rich white men to hold black men in human bondage. It's like the converse of modern Bonapartists, or rather, members of the cult of Napoleon I and his genius, who assert that the destruction of Imperial France was down to the "jealous" "Old Regime" powers that launched a "reactionary crusade" against "enlightened" France - none of this being true, but the fact that Bonaparte himself was a tyrant who could not conceive of anything other than limitless war and expansion rather overrides any thing else in question.
So yeah, modern secessionists tend to ignore the "might makes right" argument because it makes it hard for them to justify their own treason and racism to themselves. But, theoretically, it's true that the South could've won the war. They did fight, after all. But realistically, the Confederacy had virtually no chance, and frankly it lasted about two years longer than it had any right to expect. Most people would locate the Confederate problem in their smaller manpower base and inferior industrial and naval power, and that's a pretty decent argument. But the Confederacy also had much deeper problems. For instance, nobody in the CSA could figure out a plan. Forget about a unified military/political plan for gaining independence, they didn't even have a military grand strategy. There was policy coordination, but the coordination had no real object other than "stop hemorrhaging territory", "keep our armies together", and "try to hit the Federals wherever and however we can". Insofar as anybody hoped for "victory", it was supposed to come from Anglo-French mediation (never all that likely to take place, and certainly unlikely to force the Federals to the table, even in the days immediately after Second Manassas; intervention was effectively out of the question) after the Confederacy had "proved" it could survive on its own - but it could not. This was no plan.
And then. Let's presume the Confederacy had some sort of plan and unified grand strategy instead of semi-randomly hitting at anything that was within reach. It would still need a more or less unbroken chain of great victories to actually bring such a plan off. The "what next?" factor. Beat the Federals in Kentucky? (Ha!) How do you get across the Ohio River? Beat them in northern Virginia? How do you crack the fortifications of Washington? How do you invade Maryland and Pennsylvania and even keep such an army supplied? And what happens if Confederate victories merely galvanize the Federal populace even more? None of these questions could be effectively answered.
A Confederate military victory and "legal" secession at gunpoint was therefore theoretically possible, but so unlikely that it beggars the imagination to come up with a halfway plausible scenario for it occurring. This has not stopped the legions of Internet traitors from writing manifold "South will rise again!" alternate timelines that range from merely implausible to freaking ludicrous. It is not "being blind to possibilities" to state that a Southern victory was so unlikely that it does not bear mentioning, and I rather resent the slander that it implies.