Strong circumstantial evidence supporting piracy as a cause of the Civil War.

[Solvedit]

Perhaps in addition to exploding shell guns and propeller driven steam frigates, the famine put pressure on some communities.  Much of Europe depended on potatoes for their sustenance and they probably had a little reserve money for crop failures in those days.  They may have bought up grain or chick peas or other foods in order to avoid starving.  Perhaps this put food pressure on other communities.  Perhaps pirates were among the least able or willing to sock money away for emergencies?

[Maxmars]

I think it is difficult to make a case the any military or paramilitary forces 'caused' the Civil War.

Of course it was the frenzy of tech development in naval theaters that made the Civil War all the more striking.

It is said that the development of ironclads as weapon platforms changed naval engagements for all time.

But I'm impressed by the analysis... I can't yet exactly say it's evidence of a causal kind...

Also, the idea of piracy is as vague as that of 'agency.'

A pirate is a pirate until he attack only our enemies... then he's a privateer.
It's not too much to say that the title of "pirate" depends on things... the way "terrorist" does...
if they win they were never criminals... the vanquished were.

But that is just a surface nuisance to this argument.

Please continue development...

[Solvedit]

Also, the idea of piracy is as vague as that of 'agency.'

A pirate is a pirate until he attack only our enemies... then he's a privateer.
It's not too much to say that the title of "pirate" depends on things... the way "terrorist" does...
if they win they were never criminals... the vanquished were.

But that is just a surface nuisance to this argument.

Please continue development...

This thread assumed readers had been following my occasional guesswork on ATS which is now gone.  I think I have a complete idea except the details haven't been researched.

The overall idea is that England and France granted the US so much land because the US could keep it from becoming an untaxable wasteland of pirates and outlaws.  They may have felt the US was not meeting its obligation and goaded the South into a rebellion so the US would have to take charge and restore order. 



There are signs some of the South admired or modeled the Ottomans  who continued to kidnap Europeans until their dissolution.  "Utman" is informal Arabic for "Ottoman," for example, and the way Eli Whitney got to Georgia suggests trafficking and trapping.  The Ottomans used European slaves to help administer and govern their empire. 

Suppose pirates operating from the sparsely populated South had been operating against European shipping but the US denied it and said they must be Barbary pirates.  Perhaps the pirates dressed like Barbary pirates.

Perhaps as a result, the English and French had decided the US wasn't doing enough to police the land and goaded the South into a war so that the US would have to restore order.  The South's first move was to clear an Atlantic sea port, perhaps in the hope of welcoming French or English troops.  Then they gave up when the Navy and Sherman's March captured their ports.  

Food pressure or military pressure may have caused some actual Barbary pirates to emigrate in the decades prior to the Civil War.  The Ottoman Empire held more European slaves than the US had African slaves, and the Barbary States were a vassal of the Ottomans, so it is possible the pirates were already well on their way to looking European, and perhaps the more European they looked the more they were viewed as outsiders.

[Solvedit]

There is another angle which I have been overlooking: ordinary Europeans, kingdoms, and "Bible magic." 

From historiana.eu:
 

In the 1500s, Europe was not yet overcrowded, but it was in the early stages of a demographic and economic transformation that would eventually lead to resource-related anxieties. The period was marked by population doubling, urban expansion, and economic change, setting the stage for later Malthusian concerns about population growth outpacing resources.

Besides the competition for resources, there was the fact that many may have resented royal rule.  Some populations weren't even ruled by their own king but by a foreign nation which may have led them to believe there would be no malcontention or unhappiness if they only had their own king.  

In the late 1400s, word spread of a new continent to the West, reachable by ship.  The word also spread that the place was almost empty, especially after the epidemics which reduce North America's population from about 10 million to one million.  

It's possible and likely that those who wanted their own kingdom would try to buy passage without royal permission.  Perhaps they simply bought a leaky old ship because they only needed it for a one-way voyage.  They surely could have found some disgruntled sailors who were tired of the lash or perhaps ready to retire.  Those sailors could of course operate the ship.

They may have told themselves they would be kings if they got established and filled the place with enough of their people to win wars against other claimants or their former rulers.  Then other people would have to serve them.  Come to think of it, the notion may have led to some piracy which may have offended England and France in the decades prior to the Civil War:  If kings confiscated goods from us, well, now that we're kings, we'll just confiscate goods from them.

Many of the Loyalists who fought for England during the American Revolution actually fled to Britain, Canada, or the British Caribbean after the war.  They had represented only around 15% of the official population.  These facts suggest that some of the people who wound up seceding in 1860 were not from populations which had been well-vetted for their loyalty and sent with the king's approval but got here any way they could. 

Some white supremacists today identify as the ten lost tribes of the Israelites but the belief may have had its origins in magic.  There may have been a conscious choice to try to make their kingdom-building work like Genesis and Exodus by ritually assuming the role of the Israelites, perhaps in the hope that some divine force would guide them and protect them in their quest for their own Promised Land.

[Toad of Toad Hall]

There was, to my mind, a good deal of “what gives you the right to tell me what to do on my own land!?” in the mind of the average Southern separatist landholder, which seems fairly congruent with the mindset of the average, successful, non-psychopathic pirate who took to the seas to make their name/money free from the regulation of others (other than those they themselves chose to lead them). 
so maybe that, if they had had a more nautical bent, they’d have been pirates rather than cotton plantation owners (if you will).

[Solvedit]

so maybe that, if they had had a more nautical bent, they’d have been pirates rather than cotton plantation owners (if you will).

There may have been ex-pirates in the South but there were plenty of people descended from settlers who were subject to the king.  There were also recent immigrants.  One of the Hunley's crew was from Britain, one from Denmark, and two were from Germany.

The plantation owners were probably mostly descended from English, Scotch, or Welsh settlers who had been officially granted land by their king before the Revolution.

If my amateur historical guesswork is correct, they were of a distinctly different background than some of the other Southerners.

Southerners sometimes charge that the war was conducted as a genocide because it went on so long even though it stopped as soon as they lay down their arms.  

The South had the West Point valedictorians, not the North. 

The Southern leaders had the most incentive to conduct the war as a genocide, not the North.  The plantation-owning class had been fighting for the expansion of slavery into Texas and Kansas to get more land.  If there had been people holding Southern land who were descended from pirates or other unofficial settlers who had come without royal permission before the Revolution, perhaps the big planters would have viewed them as unworthy.

The South sent some of their men into combat shoeless and dependent on forage for food, armed with obsolete European smoothbore muskets which had probably seen better days.  

Southern "vigilance committees" blockaded some Southern ports from sending out their cotton crop, ostensibly to manipulate bond prices, but perhaps they knew the planters had better not get too powerful.  There have been successful slave armies in history like the Janissaries.  

In fact, perhaps the plantation-owning class asked England to cooperate in making it look like they were rebelling and England might help them someday.  Perhaps England's Atlantic shipping and Caribbean personnel had suffered from piracy. 

Slavery had been illegalized in most of Europe and the Americas and the Brazilian planters were only 8 years away from voluntarily ending slavery when Secession happened.  This fact suggests the large planters knew market pressures were going to eventually limit the profitability of slave-made goods or materials.