Had the Confederacy freed the slaves, they probably would have had Britain as an ally...
...maybe, who knows...but it would never have happened, the southron economy was too heavily invested in unpaid labor, which was expensive enough as it was without the doling out of wages...as for the brits aiding the cause, the only real possibility was for help in running the Union blockade, a bandaid remedy at best, and a fleeting one at that...
...hopefully people aren’t sitting around here in 2013 thinking that Victoria was going to dispatch entire British divisions to the fields of Virginia and Tennessee, in order to influence an internecine conflict having no real impact on her country...after all, cotton could be had from Egypt and other areas as well...
I hope the bloody Gippos give the CSA credit for really putting their cotton industry in high gear!