Jabarkan Diplomasi antarabangsa dari Negeri-negeri Gabungan Amerika dalam bahasa melayu

Sebaik sahaja perang dengan Amerika Syarikat bermula, harapan terbaik untuk meneruskan kewujudan NGA adalah dengan campur tangan tentera oleh Britain dan Perancis. Amerika Syarikat sedar akan hal ini dan dengan jelas menyatakan bahawa pengiktirafan ke atas NGA bermakna berperang dengan Amerika Syarikat - dan kesannya Amerika Syarikat akan menghentikan penghantaran makanan ke Britain. Ahli NGA mempercayai bahawa "kapas adalah raja" - bermakna Britain perlu menyokong NGA bagi mendapatkan kapas - anggapan ini telah terbukti salah. Britain, pada hakikatnya mempunyai simpanan kapas yang mencukupi pada tahun 1861 dan bergantung lebih kepada biji-bijian dari negeri-negeri Kesatuan.

Once the war with the United States began, the best hope for the survival of the Confederacy was military intervention by Britain and France. The U.S. realized this as well and made it clear that recognition of the Confederacy meant war with the United States — and the cutoff of food shipments into Britain.  The Confederates who had believed that "cotton is king" — that is, Britain had to support the Confederacy to obtain cotton — were proven wrong. Britain, in fact, had ample stores of cotton in 1861 and depended much more on grain from the Union states.

During its existence, the Confederate government sent repeated delegations to Europe; historians do not give them high marks for diplomatic skills.  James M. Mason was sent to London as Confederate minister to Queen Victoria, and John Slidell was sent to Paris as minister to Napoleon III. Both were able to obtain private meetings with high British and French officials, but they failed to secure official recognition for the Confederacy.  Britain and the United States were at sword's point during the Trent Affair in late 1861. Mason and Slidell had been illegally seized from a British ship by an American warship. Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, helped calm the situation, and Lincoln released Mason and Slidell, so the episode was no help to the Confederacy.

Throughout the early years of the war, both British foreign secretary Lord Russell and Napoleon III, and, to a lesser extent, British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, were interested in the idea of recognition of the Confederacy, or at least of offering a mediation.  Recognition meant certain war with the United States, loss of American grain, loss of exports to the United States, loss of huge investments in American securities, possible war in Canada and other North American colonies, much higher taxes, many lives lost and a severe threat to the entire British merchant marine, in exchange for the possibility of some cotton.  Many party leaders and the general public wanted no war with such high costs and meager benefits.  Recognition was considered following the Second Battle of Manassas when the British government was preparing to mediate in the conflict, but the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, combined with internal opposition, caused the government to back away.

In November 1863, Confederate diplomat A. Dudley Mann met Pope Pius IX and received a letter addressed "to the Illustrious and Honorable Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.” Mann, in his dispatch to Richmond, interpreted the letter as "a positive recognition of our Government," and some have mistakenly viewed it as a de facto recognition of the C.S.A.  Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, however, interpreted it as "a mere inferential recognition, unconnected with political action or the regular establishment of diplomatic relations" and thus did not assign it the weight of formal recognition.

For the remainder of the war, Confederate commissioners continued meeting with Cardinal Antonelli, the Vatican Secretary of State. In 1864, Catholic Bishop Patrick N. Lynch of Charleston traveled to the Vatican with an authorization from Jefferson Davis to represent the Confederacy before the Holy See.

No country appointed any diplomat officially to the Confederacy, but several maintained their consuls in the South who had been appointed before the war. In 1861, Ernst Raven applied for approval as the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha consul, but he was a citizen of Texas and there is no evidence that Saxe officials knew what he was doing. In 1863, the Confederacy expelled all foreign consuls (all of them British or French diplomats) for advising their subjects to refuse to serve in combat against the U.S.

Throughout the war most European powers adopted a policy of neutrality, meeting informally with Confederate diplomats but withholding diplomatic recognition. None ever sent an ambassador or official delegation to Richmond.  However, they applied international law principles that recognized the Union and Confederate sides as belligerents. Canada allowed both Confederate and Union agents to work openly within its borders, and some state governments in northern Mexico negotiated local agreements to cover trade on the Texas border.