What a blockade breaker had to do

Danmark's severe rolling in the Baltic makes her intended Atlantic role look particularly doubtful. Yet a force trying to break a blockade needed ships able to fight the blockading squadron outside confined coastal waters. In this counterfactual, the Union fleet, despite its rapid growth, would have lacked an answer to the Royal Navy's ocean-going ironclads if Britain entered the war. British shipyards and manufacturing capacity would also have widened the material imbalance while the Union was already sustaining a massive land conflict. Direct intervention remained politically implausible, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation, because neither Britain's ruling classes nor the wider public provided the necessary support. Isolated contrary voices, even when newspapers amplified them as evidence of a wider debate, should not be mistaken for broad British support. The type made strategic sense for blockade breaking, but Danmark was poorly suited to the mission.