@taamvan said in British and French aid the Confederate States:
Interesting hypothetical. My research on “King Cotton” and the abolition of the slave trade indicates that England would have been very unlikely to intervene on behalf of the south. Southern media and propaganda lobbied for this, but I don’t sense the European powers were watching developments with an eye to intervene if the South did well–they had their own entanglements. They may have been rooting for the Union to lose or at least take some knocks (divide and conquer, retard a future rival), but the risks of a failed intervention were two-fold; eventual defeat of the South anyways PLUS alienating the presumptive victor.
Agreed. The leadership of Britian and France wasn’t unanimous on the subject, but for the most part Britain and France didn’t much care to get into a war with the USA to support the CSA; they had no pressing reasons to do it, and good reasons not to do it. They had no objections to making money from the conflict (e.g. by building blockade runners for the CSA), so non-intervention from a military standpoint was commercially a good strategy.