Given that the secession was hurried and quite urgent, I'm actually willing to give them a pass on the lack of opposition candidates
It was hurried precisely because it was never meant to be democratic, since the Confederates knew that support for their cause was very tenuous at best in many of the areas they claimed to be part of the Confederacy.
The point about the refusal to hold a referendum is an excellent point, on the other hand.
The irony is that one area that did hold a referendum - Tenessee - had an almost landslide vote against secession despite the governor wanting so badly to secede.
They then held a second referendum after Fort Sumter and Lincoln calling for volunteers, which supposedly turned the state around and the second referendum had a massive landslide the other way.
The problem, and this is an issue that had never been truly examined, is that East Tenesee (whose voting patterns were unchanged in the second referendum) claimed that the governor had in fact engaged in a massive campaign of fraud and intimidation in the rest of the state. This resulted in East Tenesee being occupied by Confederate troops, while the Union very easily captured Nashville and the rest of the supposedly pro-Confederacy state and got 30,000 troops in these areas to sign up for the Union army.
So really this whole "the Confederacy was democractic" notion is to me an invention. People just haven't examined the issue of whether or not there really was widespread support for the Confederacy in the areas they supposedly claimed. Really, the fact that New Orleans - the South's largest city which had a population greater than the next two biggest southern cities put together - surrendered without a fight to a handful of gunboats should give pause to any idea that there was any widespread popular appeal for the Confederate cause or that they were subscribing to any notions of democracy.
The die-hard southerners saw themselves as aristocrats, plain and simple. Which also very easily explains why support for the Confederacy in the international arena came almost exclusively from similar aristocratic classes in Britain and not the working masses.
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Virginia was core Confederate territory. It was one of the largest Confederate states, it contained the capital and was the source of many of the Confederates' most prominent politicians and generals, and it contained many of the Confederacy's limited number of industrial centers and fortifications.
Except a very large chunk of Virginia became West Virginia, and the land between Washington DC and Richmond was not exactly a populous territory. Manassas for instance was just a rail road junction. It contained no great population of pro-Confederate citizens or any plantations.
It became invested in the minds of historians because so many battles were fought there (and consequently it's Virginians who ended up taking a good brunt of the fighting) but aside from Richmond (which was important not because it was the notional capital, but because it had the Tregedar Iron Works) virginia was strategically and economically insignificant.
The heart of the Confederacy was further south - where the actual plantations are. Heck, even Marx at the time accurately predicted that a collapse of the confederacy would come not with the fall of Richmond, but the with the fall of Georgia.
By the time this happened, the Army of Northern Virginia and the army fighting in Tennessee had already been badly attrited in earlier battles, and the Confederate positions on the Mississippi were already being rolled up systematically (unless you're placing the "when the North got leaders..." moment after Vicksburg, in which case they already were rolled up.
Except the battles of the Wilderness were in fact bloodier than most of the early battles of the war - Cold Harbor for instance was worst then either Bull Runs and is only really matched in single-day slaughter by Antietam and Fredricksburg. The North in fact consistently did not get leaders willing to go for attrition. Grant was the first and the Confederacy found itself unable to stop the juggernaut the moment they faced an enemy general no longer willing to show restraint.
Southern generalship was markedly superior in the early years of the war; Confederate troops systematically outmaneuvered Union forces, and did not simply out-fight them. This is very evident in the 1862 campaigns in the Shenandoah and the Peninsula.
Shenandoah is one campaign of very superflous influence, and in any case was fought almost entirely by one general on the southern side who knew the terrain. The Peninsula was ultimately about the south getting outmaneuvered because they never expected a seaborne landing in the first place, and they only defeated the Union army because of McClellan's failure of nerves.
South had "better generals" trope is simply unsupported. At First Bull Run the Union Army in fact managed to cross a significant water obstacle and flanked the Confederate Army that was greater in number, which is "systematic outmaneuvering". If the Union troops hadn't simply crushed the outnumbered Virginians at the hill where Stonewall made his stand, McDowell would be compared to Fredrick the Great at Leuthen instead of being cashiered.
The same applies in fact to most of the Civil War battles. Chancelorsville - Lee's supposedly greatest victory - actually had him attacking a numerically superior Union force under Hooker while his own retreat route had already been captured by Sedgwick (who captured Fredricksburg). If Hooker hadn't broken down and had his troops held, we'd now be talking about a reckless General Lee who got his army surrounded and wiped out.
Really, that people act all surprised that Lee only launched pointless frontal assaults at Gettysburg goes to show how little they actually study the moment-by-moment actions of most Civil War battles in the East. Lee was never that sophisticated of a commander who relied on outmaneuvering as his proponents so claim. What he instead had was a very measured understanding of how his men had general tactical superiority over the enemy, and he constantly gambled on this superiority carrying him to victory. That gambling mentality finally caught up with him - disastrously - at Gettysburg. Afterwards, in the face of a Union general who was never going to suffer a failure of nerves, he was essentially helpless.
Ultimately, I think the best Confederate General in the East was in fact Longstreet, who was the only one who really understood that this gambling was going to catch up with the Confederacy eventually and that the real way to give the enemy a bloody nose was through defensive entrenchments; something which he was ironically criticized of.
