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So serious did the Lincoln administration regard the threat of intervention that the fiery secretary of state, William H. All other international disputes paled in comparison with the threat that either British or French (or both) involvement in the American war posed to the republic, whether divided or united in the war and afterward. The most sensitive issue in foreign affairs during the Civil War, for both North and South, was outside intervention. Thus did the destruction of the American war attract as well as repel foreign intervention and make Union and Confederate diplomacy a vital part of the outcome. Instead, northerners and southerners had engaged in a vicious struggle that threatened to inflict a lethal blow onto both the United States and the Atlantic economy. Why not let the erring southern sisters go? Southern independence was a fait accompli, concluded many outside observers certainly the North could not subdue a people numbering in the millions and inhabiting eleven states. The two chief powers, Britain and France, had assumed that the sectional conflict centered on slavery and not some vague concept of union yet both President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy and Union President Abraham Lincoln had denied that slavery was the issue, leading Europeans to believe that morality played no role in their differences and made their quarrel open to compromise. The Civil War raging in America made no sense to European observers.