Northern & Southern Diplomacy
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Northern and Southern Diplomacy
What were the goals of Northern and Southern diplomacy? Why do you think the Confederacy failed to achieve their goals?
As my two classmates have said, very detailed in their responses earlier, the south was on a mission of diplomacy. They felt, somewhat overconfidently that Britain would rely solely on their cotton and could possibly come to their aid. However ironic as stated from the website Civil War Home concerning Europe and the civil war, retrieved on 04JUN06:
The war had a direct bearing on the United States foreign relations and the relations that were most important were those with the two dominant powers of Europe, England and France. Each country was a monarchy, and a monarchy does not ordinarily like to see a rebellion succeed in any land. (The example may prove contagious.) Yet the war had not progressed very far before it was clear that the ruling classes in each of these two countries sympathized strongly with the Confederacy-so strongly that with just a little prodding they might be moved to intervene and bring about Southern independence by force of arms. The South was, after all, an aristocracy, and the fact that it had a broad democratic base was easily overlooked at a distance of three thousand miles. Europes aristocracies had never been happy about the prodigious success of the Yankee democracy. If the nation now broke into halves, proving that democracy did not contain the stuff of survival, the rulers of Europe would be well pleased.
To be sure, the Southern nation was based on the institution of chattel slavery-a completely repugnant anachronism by the middle of the nineteenth century. Neither the British nor the French people would go along with any policy that involved fighting to preserve slavery. But up to the fall of 1862 slavery was not an issue in the war.