The great question of the war was really whether the Union would choose to pay the price of victory or seek a negotiated settlement. The Confederacy had essentially no way to recover militarily, but its land mass was still vast, and continuing the war until the South was entirely overrun was a costly and difficult enterprise. But starting in 1863, the Union began seizing serious amounts of territory along the Mississippi, in Tennessee, and along strategic swaths of the Atlantic coast. The Confederate forces held up very well throughout 18, with territory mostly moving back and forth in the politically conflicted slaveholding border states of Kentucky and Missouri. If you don’t want to read a whole lot about the Civil War, this animation offers a good quick summary of the course of the fighting.
