[ken5050]

One of the lesser known stories of the Civil War is the letter that Seward drafted to send to France and England at the start of the war, just about threatening war with the US if either country interceded, via arms shipments, or trade, with the CSA. The leter was personally rewritten by Lincon, to tone it down. Seward's idea was to provoke a war with a European country, with the ideaa that the Confederacy would rejoin the Union to fight against the common enemy.

[RightWhale]

That is interesting. The European powers divided up to support either the rapidly growing Northern industrial powers or the Southern agricultural basis through commerce depending on their interest. The South had a terrible time with the blockades affecting trade. It might be that the War resulted from the aggressiveness of the corporate industrialization and the Southern blocking of that industrialization.