The thing about the Confederacy that gets overlooked is what a shitty country it was in general. They had no freedom of speech, and thousands were arrested on suspicion of Union sympathies. Within a year of forming there were riots over food shortages.
The government could have stopped this by forcing plantation owners to replace their cotton and tobacco crops with wheat, but telling plantation owners what to do sort of defeated the whole purpose of the country.
The plantation owners blocked any sort of modern economic developments like factories chemical processing plants. They kept the entire country locked in an agrarian economy while the rest of the world industrialized, and the Southern economy still hasn't caught up.
One of the reasons Robert E. Lee is venerated is because Jefferson Davis was incompetent and widely disliked. Lee worship is part of the Lost Cause effort to distract the fact that the Confederacy was a failed state.
