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

[BeyondKnowledge]

Suppose the pirates may have moved to the South after propeller-driven steam frigates destroyed their ships and port facilities in the early 1840s because there was no room in their home country to support them by giving them legitimate work.  Their home countries also lost the foreign income they had gotten from piracy. There would have been a famine unless all the people who had been supported by the pirate economy also left.  

Suppose they have returned to piracy because the US has way more coastline to hide in than, say, the Barbary States, and provided they kept their hands off USA shipping, maybe the steam frigates chasing them had to come from much further away and had to quit when they got to within 12 miles of the coast.  

If any of that happened, the nations of South America and Europe may have been offended that the USA wasn't doing enough to prevent people in their borders from practicing piracy, so they may have encouraged the South to rebel in the hopes that the US would have to defeat and occupy them.  

The US was uncommonly generous with the revolutionaries after the war.  If it had been like many revolutions, government officials would have been arrested and jailed or executed and strict control would have been extended over the people.

I think I see your problem. There were never a lage number of pirates historically. What we know of the stories of them occured over a few hundred years. You are thinking they were all ocuring once and therfore had to be tens of the thousands of pirates if you count all the land support traiders, the small nations that supported the practice, etc.. At any given time in the classic era of piracy, there were possibly up to a very few thousand individuals. The famous, known of ones were possibly between 10 and 50 at a time period.

Much like the exploits of the gunslingers, the train robbers, etc... the movies have amplified their very existance. And the books did that before movies. Pirates are exciting so they make good stories.

Dont get me wrong, the shipping nations hated them and persued them, but their take was only a very small percentage of global shipping at the time.

What you are saying is that mybe a couple of hundred pirates that moved into the Southern United States were any influence at all in the cause of the Civil War. I just don't see it.