Well if not a fully independent country in the Westphalian sense, the Canada's were by this point a de facto nation, and it was actually the Civil War and the fear of dem Yankees as suddenly Eagles with Thunderbolts in Talons Grasped in the wake of it, which incited Canadian Confederation into a formally Westphalian entity with its own Parliament, and the British were keen to hand the keys over to the Canadians, because the British did not want to have to defend it from America, they wanted Canada to be indepedent in order to defend itself.Penner wrote:Canada like Britain didn't really do anything to help the South. They may have allowed them to cross their borders but they also allowed many Union members to cross over to. In other words, Canda didn't act anything other than a neutral country (if you want to call them even a country at the time).Smitty-48 wrote:That's what I just said, see, "the South" was not an entity as far as the British were concerned, post 1833 America was in the camp with Spain and Portugal, the Slaving Empires, which the British had formed an industrialized Anti-Slavery Coalition against, and so America was on the wrong side of the line, but with Emancipation, America was basically saying that they were coming over to the industrialized Anti Slavery Coaltion and so would be Britians de facto allies instead of an adversary, and that's how the British saw it, although, they were never actually keen to get involved in the first place, the Southron's in the end were barking up the wrong tree from the begining, deluding themselves that the British gave a rats ass about Dixie when it was not in any way of British critical interest.Penner wrote:I really thought that the cynical reason was to keep the British from joining the war and to be the South's allies.
Canadians sided with Dixie, because Canadians were inherent anti-Yankee Loyalist Americans, the Yankees the great menace to the south, but back in London, nobody gave a shit, and they were not at all keen to have to come over and defend Canada from the Yankees, which is what they would have had to do, if they had sided with Dixie.
As to helping the Confederates, there's nothing Canada could do to help them in a military sense, but at the time, the Confederates were being celebrated by the Canadian Street, as the brave Southrons fighting against the Yankee invaders, which the Canada's had suffered once as well in 1812, although thankfully, we won that one and lived to tell the tale, so no Lost Cause for us, but still sympathetic to our poor cousins down South being set upon by them Yankee tyrants.