During Sherman’s march, most of Georgia’s soldiers were away fighting in Tennessee, so the guerillas he encountered were way outnumbered.

I don’t see how an invasion of the north would have gone well. From a psy-ops point of view, it would have been a bad move, antagonizing the large portion of northerners who either supported the south or didn’t care either way.

The early tactics of the revolution worked fine, but Washington and some others had notions of being grand commanders in the old European style. I’ve read that they ended up alienating a lot of enthusiastic militiamen with their heavy-handedness. A guerilla war doesn’t mean a disorganized war — it can mean an organically organized one, a more efficient, capitalist approach than what Davis undertook with his conscription, trade regulations and paper money.

I’ll just reference Sherman’s march through the south as an answer to the suggestion that guerrilla warfare would have worked. You don’t win wars with that tactic, not even the American Revolutionary war was won with that tactic but with large fielded armies and a lot of help from the French, otherwise we’d have been toast and still saying God save the queen.

Personally, I think that the Souths mistake was not invading the North. You can’t win on just defense and that’s all the south really did for the whole war. If they had caused enough damage (read economic pain) to the elites behind the war they might have forced Lincoln to accept the break away of the south.

Such a fighting force is harder to chase down and slaughter or starve, and their morale and motivation are higher, much higher than that of Lincoln’s poor conscript army.

As an aside, its kind of funny that people from the south form the core of Americas armed forces, especially in the areas of combat. Don’t know why that is but it does seem strange.