usertron2020
Donor
Ah yes, but in this timeline the French have also decided that the CSA are such splendid folks that its worth the blood and treasure to help them win a war they couldn't win OTL.
Admittedly, if Britain goes in, France is going in as well, no question.
Also, this is looking past the point of what a small army the British used in OTL to hold down their territorial possessions.
Just forget everything you've ever learned about supply lines, LOCs, logistics, and above all, the financial costs of a transatlantic war against a continental power on their own home soil. It didn't take the USA very long to forget all about the "insult to our flag" when the casualty lists came in from First Bull Run. After that, it was just about saving the Union (for the next year anyway).
How long would the British folk back home be cheering on a war over "insulting British sovereignty" when their own casualty lists start coming in? Not long, I would think. But again, that any casualty lists short of WWI levels
Consider this: In the US Civil War, the Union is fighting for its existence. The British Empire has other alternatives.
But generally in a Trent timeline that isn't a problem, because there's a certain blindness to the amount of force needed to hold chunks of entire continents as resource colonies. British troops can be shipped halfway around the world from India, and India won't rebel again. It shows a blindness to other cultures outside of Western Europe as well, in that Anglophilia was very much an upper-class Southron thing. The United States at the time has a founding story of kicking the British out, a story we're still kind of obsessed with and at the time were very obsessed with. But a British army will show up, and everyone will either be supine, or actively welcoming it.
EDIT: Ah yes! The United States Army is entirely equivalent to the Maori or the Zulus! The US may have railroads, but they're really the equivalents of a bunch of indigenous peoples with pointy sticks!
Remember that hubris is everywhere, utterly world wide. And the humiliations of Afghanistan and the Zulu War have mostly not happened yet in the ACW. So, pointy sticks. Yeah.