It's more the other way around I've found. Trade with Great Britain and its colonies controlled something like 60% of the United States trade, while imports to Britain from the US accounted for 16% of exports and 17% of imports. I've got a more detailed source somewhere, but need to track it down in my notes, but that's what I recall off the top of my head. Though I do know that in the historic war scare the European banking houses closed their doors, and until Lincoln got the greenbacks rolling confidence in the government collapsed until roughly February 1862 when the greenbacks proved viable and there was no war.
Similarly, the Union at the height of the war scare in 1861-62 discovered the uncomfortable fact they were facing a shortage of the necessary material to make gunpowder and needed a crash course to try and mitigate the disaster, and if the war scare hadn't ended they would have faced a shortage until 1863 because the British controlled, almost exclusively, the source of nitrates needed to make powder. Iron, lead, and steel were also monopolized by British trade, the iron being singularly important because the Springfield Armory actually couldn't make any weapons without a specific source of iron from Britain according to this article.
The confiscation of British property would be a short term solution resulting in a long term problem from a lack of investment and likely numerous legal challenges, and the British would most likely retaliate in kind while simultaneously driving the American merchant marine to extinction far better than the Confederate Navy could have dreamed of. Meanwhile, every soldier, rifle and cannon sent to guard the coast or attack Canada is one less man fighting the Confederate states who suddenly have open markets to sell their cotton and import weapons and powder, while freeing up their own men for the armies fighting against the North.
All of this is just the economic/strategic problems of British intervention, before a single redcoat sets foot on American soil. When it comes down to the nitty gritty of where the soldiers, cannons and ships will come from you find a series of stark and equally bad choices. The British won't win the war in 1862, but their intervention alone sees the chances of a successful independent South rise from negligible to good odds.
It's why I see some method of foreign intervention as about the only way the Confederate States could plausibly achieve independence.
You do realize that GB is an island that has to import virtually every raw material except coal while even the 19th Century US is a continental-sized Great Power? The US is so big it has to import virtually nothing. If it is a raw material on this planet, outside of tropical plants, it is almost certainly found on US soil somewhere or other. The US doesn't have to import crap to keep its economy going but GB does.
The British were simply a cheaper source for those materials so they were imported. Potassium nitrate is a very common compound, which is why countless tons were produced the world over. If potassium nitrate was remotely rare gunpowder would never have been used, it would be too expensive. Never forget the US is BIG, it has potassium nitrate, it has sulfur, it has charcoal, it has lead and iron. The US had Pittsburg for God's sake. It could produce countless tons of iron.
You expect your property to be seized in war. The US wouldn't seize it merely to pay the bills but to both deny it to GB and to discourage others from waging war against the US. It might discourage British investment in the US for some decades but so what? First short time considerations outweigh long term ones in war and there are other sources of investments including internal investments which outweighed British Investments by a ton. In 1860 the US was already rich being the number 3 industrialized country on the planet heading quickly towards number 2.
I doubt it would slow investment in the US much after the war because it would still be a profitable place to invest AND everyone would expect the US to do just that.That is one of the risks you run when starting a war with someone. Seizing enemy property in war is seen as completely different as compared to doing so with neutral property in peacetime. It would be fought in US courts and the British would almost certainly lose. The US courts are pretty reluctant to involve itself in wartime policy. I have little doubt that the court system would see it as legitimate because GB declared war against the US.
You have to realize the logistical problems with supplying an army in Canada against a country as rich as the US from 3000 miles away. The US is not Zanzibar, it won't take a regiment of Her Majesties Finest to win but a real large army and it will have to be heavily supplied. The US was already a continental sized Great Power that was entirely connected by railroads in all but its frontier land. Canada was a remote colony with a tiny population a tenth the size of the US and a logistical system to match. It isn't India where you can hire tons of peasants to do all the grunt work for you, you have to send people to do that as well.
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