Sure, I think they had a chance. It was like Deja Vu from the war with Britain, and the colonists won then, so why can't the Confederates win now? They had pretty good generals, especially Thomas J. Jackson (I did my report on him), so I think they actually might have had a bit of an upper hand with the home field advantage. As for whether the war should have been fought, I think both the issue of slavery and keeping the Union together were worth fighting for, and the South had to prove they were independent, so it would have happened eventually.