But there is no evidence that the south wanted to. No doubt the overwhelming majority of the southern leadership would have agreed with Louis Wigfall when he was speaking to William Howard Russell of The Times shortly after the war began,
"We are an agrarian people; we are a primitive people. We have no cities - we don't want them. We have no literature - we don't need any yet. We have no press - we are glad of it…We have no commercial marine - no navy - we don't want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce and you can protect your own vessels. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides."
In short, the south wanted nothing more that for some foreign power to take on the economic obligations that they had depended on the North to provide prior to the war.