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BJK: "...total US cotton production rose from $74 million in the 1840s to over $207 million (tripled) in 1860."

This brings us to my humble opinion on how the Confederacy could have won their independence.

In 1861 there was yet another bumper crop of cotton -- at least $200 million worth -- sitting in rail cars and at docks from Galveston Texas to Norfolk, Virginia.
For reasons which defy logic, that $200 million worth of cotton never shipped, was never sold and so far as I know was lost to the Confederacy.

Had it been shipped, sold & banked, $200 million in 1861 would have purchased hundreds of thousands of repeating rifles, with ammunition (circa $100 each), plus the latest equipment to produce more, plus dozens of state-of the art war-ships ($500,000 each), field artillery, plus steel for rail & engines, copper for telegraph wires, etc., etc.
So right away, the Confederacy would start with a huge material / technological advantage.

Next, it required patience, patience and diplomacy -- take all those Fire Eating hot-heads and put them in political straight-jackets until the time is right.
Delay the start of war until the first blows can be overwhelming and decisive.
Wait, wait, wait... until the new Confederate army is equipped, trained, lead & supported logistically (railroads) like none ever seen before.

Under no circumstances pick a fight until you're certain you can win, and in the mean time be as nice, as diplomatic and legalistic as humanly possible.

Indeed, if you really wanted to win, don't ever start the war.
If you have $200 million in the bank in 1861, how much does your average Congressman cost in those days?
Why not just buy off a bunch, and get them to approve your secession, legally, constitutionally, peacefully?

US states with the highest cotton production in 2007:

Don’t be too mystified about the cotton sitting on rail cars. The effect was like OPEC: The North was the South’s market for that cotton. With the cessation of trade, the price of cotton went up five-fold, MORE than making up for lost volume. Also, keep in mind, the cotton wasn’t owned by the government, but by the wealthy plantation owners whose fortunes the war was being fought to protect. They could no more have requisitioned the cotton cost-free than they could have requisitioned more rifles or warships cost-free. Finding alternative markets for cotton would have meant sea-faring, but the South’s PROBLEM was a lack of an industrial base to build up a navy.

The South’s problem wasn’t a lack of cash; They couldn’t simply buy more guns, more steel, etc.

The doom of the South was that they were insanely quick for war. Confederate apologists always take Lincoln’s talking down war and interference as insincere politics, but that’s absurd: if he were planning an invasion, the last thing he would do would be to politically undermine the case for war. The Union was withdrawing from nearly all southern bases. The notion that Ft. Sumter was some sort of effort to build a single, stronger base is belied by the utter failure to defend it.

A strategy for the continuation of the Southern cause would have been to build economic strength while exhausting all political and legal avenues to defend the notion of the States’ political autonomy.

Had it been shipped, sold & banked, $200 million in 1861 would have purchased hundreds of thousands of repeating rifles, with ammunition (circa $100 each), plus the latest equipment to produce more, plus dozens of state-of the art warships ($500,000 each), field artillery, plus steel for rail & engines, copper for telegraph wires, etc., etc. So right away, the Confederacy would start with a huge material / technological advantage.

Speculation in commodities markets can be a risky business. A lot of factors can affect the price and it's easy to go wrong. The British were stockpiling raw cotton and unsold fabric was building up in warehouses. Just what the optimal solution would be could be difficult to figure out.

If you were the Confederacy, you'd have to choose between selling as much as you could now and possibly deflating the price, or waiting until cotton was in greater demand (which would involve greater risk for your investment). You had the Union navy to worry about, and also, as we now know, the UK would turn to other suppliers of cotton soon enough.

Also, I'm not sure you'd want to be committing your money and labor power to building railroads when war loomed. You'd need those resources for other things, and it would be surprising if the lines were actually built by the time you did go to war.

But certainly, patience (which was in short supply) could really have helped the Confederate government. Maybe their best hope was to call Lincoln's bluff. If they didn't attack federal positions, there wouldn't have been support for federal action against the rebel states. Lincoln would have been bound by his word not to strike the first blow. If he went back on it, Northerners wouldn't have supported him.

In any case, the more time passed without war, the more secession and Southern independence would become irreversible real world facts. The problem was that Davis and the other secession activists wanted a border that was substantially further north than what they had in early 1861, so they were willing to make aggressive moves that would eventually have led to war even if Fort Sumter weren't an issue.