Here I found an optimal strategy pretty quickly and found I could ignore just about everything else. This felt unfortunate given the interesting sounding dynamics between foreign and domestic actors, marxists and slave owners, etc. Also, I landed myself 2 ironclad producing cards which felt ridiculously overpowered, and allowed me to further focus my play.
It made it so when the card "abolish slavery" came around, I was like, "That sounds interesting, butttt right now I need to guns so I can fend off the confederacy and amass enough to do a series of surprise attacks."
But maybe that's part of the lesson? When you've got a violent force that's constantly threatening to move in on your land and shut down your economy, and stop you from defending yourself (cotton -> legitimacy, legitimacy -> conscription -> guns), the push and pull of domestic and international interests is largely irrelevant.