Southern Ambitions

War for the Future

By Dr. Adrian Brettle

Do you think the Civil War was a world war? Many leading Confederates certainly thought so.

Jefferson Davis launched his presidency and the new nation on a policy of expansion, which he hoped would be in cooperation with the United States. “The North has wanted Canada and the South wants Cuba,” Davis wrote in March 1861. Before, as sections in one Union, “the expansion of both may have been restrained by the narrow views of each.” Now, as separate entities, they will “be left freely to grow.” He also looked forward to the annexation of parts of Mexico and the rest of the West Indies.

As a native of Great Britain, the world’s only mid-19th-century global superpower, I could not help being struck by the Confederacy’s global ambitions when I first encountered them as a University of Virginia doctoral student. How could the Confederacy – the weaker side in the American Civil War, tied to the allegedly anachronistic institution of slavery – believe seriously that it could dominate an evolving new world order? Presumptuous and deluded as those ambitions may seem to us, they were not entirely unrealistic; they also underscore the global importance of African-American resistance and Union victory in the American Civil War.

The American Civil War Museum’s new exhibit will reconceptualize the Civil War to consider the imperial ambitions of the Southern slaveholders’ republic – which was, after all, the 5th largest economy in the world – and the significance of its defeat. “Southern Ambitions” is the second of the Museum’s temporary exhibits funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to introduce the best new academic scholarship on the Civil War into public history conversations.

The project is not limited to just the exhibit; there will be a variety of ways for the public to interact. An “RVA Global Tour” will be a kind of scavenger hunt designed to reveal to locals and visitors alike some surprising historical connections in the city—and catch the attention of people who may not have thought about visiting the Museum. We are also working with local schools and universities to develop project-based learning lesson plans for students on topics such as anti-slavery activism then and now and global supply chain management.

Globalization - Confederate Style

In the exhibit, visitors will see the War portrayed within a transnational context. It aims to describe competing visions about the future – competing visions among white southerners, northerners, and African Americans as well as competing visions within the white South. Confederate policy makers, intellectuals, journalists, merchants, and others engaged in a surprisingly sustained, profoundly thoughtful, and often strikingly progressive and “expansionist” discourse about their nation’s intentions and policies should it win its independence.

Confederates expected far more from their new polity than mere preservation of slavery from Federal assaults. Rather, patriotic Confederates remained convinced virtually to the end of the Civil War that their nation would survive to implement progressive commercial, territorial, diplomatic, and racial programs envisioned and debated during the conflict.

These proposals and expectations emanated from a variety of individuals, media, and settings. Moreover, the course of the War exercised a profound influence on these plans, as Confederates believed they addressed weaknesses and exploited opportunities exposed by the conflict.

Davis expected his plans for territorial expansion to resume after the conflict ceased. He believed the Confederacy must grow to earn its place as one of the great powers of the future. Expansion would not be achieved by military conquest, but by commercial penetration, the spread of slavery, and what Confederates construed to be orderly constitutional processes.

Domestically, expansion offered the most realistic path for poorer whites to become slaveholders. Expanding the footprint of slavery across the tropics under Confederate stewardship would also be the Confederacy’s contribution to world development and progress, especially rescuing economies in the West Indies rendered stagnant, Confederate optimists believed, by emancipation.

Pressure for expansion came from several directions: the jingoistic press, constant debates in the Confederate Congress. As late as the winter of 1864-1865, Jefferson Davis heard proposals to annex New Mexico, and he requested resources from the hard-pressed War Department to support the idea.

In our modern era of “Belt and Road” initiatives, you may not be surprised to learn that, in the Civil War, “internal improvements” in the Confederacy attained global significance.

For Robert M. T. Hunter, successively U.S. senator from Virginia, Confederate secretary of state, and Confederate senator, extending the James River and Kanawha Canal to the Ohio would enable the Richmond-Norfolk corridor to become “a great and commanding center of credit and commerce,” because it would link both the Atlantic and Midwest, controlling “the distribution to the world over a vast area, filled with rich and profitable consumers.” According to Hunter’s vision, the capital of the Confederacy would surpass New York, perhaps even London.

The impact of rapid technological change breaking down barriers between nations is nothing new. Wartime commercial conventions debated the consequences of technology and globalization. “The rapid increase of war steamers, the present number and length of railroads, and long lines of telegraphs are giving to the affairs of the world an accelerated motion.” This statement was from the February 1862 convention of Mississippi Valley planters meeting at Memphis, Tennessee. Their conclusion: “It is time the enlightened states and nations of the earth should cease political persecutions and war for the purpose of keeping each other down.”

Globalization, in other words, by bringing nations together, would lead to slavery’s acceptance around the world. For these slaveholders: “The prosperity of our thorough amiable relations adds to the welfare of others.” Meaning slavery’s success at home would benefit nations abroad.

The “Southern Ambitions” project team includes (L to R) Guest Curator Chris Graham, graduate research assistants Ana Edwards and Meika Downey, undergraduate intern Cadence Wilmoth, and Postdoctoral Fellow Adrian Brettle, as well as undergraduate intern Michael Warren (not pictured).

ACWM

Former treasury secretary, president of the Provisional Congress, and general Howell Cobb presented to his fellow cotton planters a plan for a southern telegraph connecting together the slaveholders’ world: Spain, West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Confederacy. The Confederate commissioner in Brussels, Ambrose Dudley Mann, wrote to Secretary of State Judah Benjamin that the cable was part of something even bigger: “a timely and well-matured policy to make the Confederate States a great telegraphic and traffic highway between the old world and West Indies, Mexico, central and south America and the ports of the south seas.”

Confederate planters, politicians, and merchants understood the Civil War to be a decisive event determining the future of the world economy. They believed their national economy would remain focused on staple crops harvested by enslaved people in an ever-growing area and exported to the United States and Europe. The Confederacy would therefore be economically interdependent on other countries to provide the manufactured goods it needed.

Robert M. T. Hunter saw no irony that the Confederacy born in the midst of war would become afterwards the guarantor of global peace. “It is manifest,” he told the commissioners to Europe “from the nature of its interests, that the southern Confederacy, in entering as a new member in the family of nations, would exercise not a disturbing, but a harmonizing influence on human society, for it would not only desire peace itself but to some extent become a bond of peace amongst others.”

This sense of destiny remained to the end. On January 30, 1865, Confederate House member Daniel De Jarnette told his fellow representatives that to possess trade meant national strength. After all, “commerce has been the great Archimedean lever which has moved the world…The highest hopes and aspirations of all nations have been to possess and control it, because they know that no wealth can be acquired, nor power preserved, without it.”

“The Age of Emancipation?”

The exhibit will show the visitor how the end of slavery was contingent, not inevitable. Reading backwards in history, the 1860s was the Age of Emancipation, with the Russian Czar’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861 coinciding with events in the United States and following the British and French abolition of slavery in the Caribbean 30 years before.

Yet from an 1850s and Confederate perspective, this retreat of forced servitude was not so clear, especially as Confederates believed other nations, especially the British, were simply hypocrites establishing what they termed “coolie” labor systems that transported millions of Chinese and people from the Indian sub-continent to work in plantations across colonial empires. Moral disapproval expressed by the international abolition movement, Confederates insisted, was simply cover for envy at the apparent success African American slavery under Confederate stewardship.

Many Confederate treasury notes featured locomotives, ships, and commercial scenes that spoke to the fledgling nation’s “progressive” self-image.

ACWM

Indeed, they hoped that the U.S. would be the first nation to officially recognize their independence. Confederates even debated during the Civil War’s last year how “magnanimous” they should be to the Federals once this happened.

Confederates also came up with their own plans for reconstruction and reunion. Vice President Alexander Stephens wanted a reformed Union with a weaker central government and committed to southern expansion and in which the Confederate States would retain slavery. Henry Hotze, commercial agent and propagandist-in-chief in London, expected a reversion to the Articles of Confederation of the Revolutionary War Era as the basis of a modus operandi with the United States. Former U.S. representative, planter, and lawyer Henry Hilliard looked to the late South Carolinian politician and thinker John Calhoun for inspiration with his idea of a dual presidency.

Alexander H. Stephens

ACWM

Several Confederate treasury notes bore this vignette of enslaved people working in the cotton fields. Ironically, the engraving was the work of the National Bank Note Company, New York.

ACWM

They also examined European models for international relations. Representative John Gilmer of North Carolina expected something akin to the German Confederation to emerge in North America including Mexico and Canada and complete with an assembly and vetoes for member nations.

All elements of the “Southern Ambitions” project will show how individuals in the past believed they were engaged in something larger than themselves. Lucius Lamar, once nominated to be Confederate minister to Russia, presented to president and people a vision for a transatlantic federative league of nations, joining Europe and America, in which stronger powers act as guardians of weaker ones. Once again reaffirming the state of mind that, even when in a position of weakness, Confederates continued to think of their future plans in global terms and worldwide significance.

Dr. Adrian Brettle was the Andrew MellonPostdoctoral Fellow at the American CivilWar Museum 2017-18 and is now Lecturerin History at Arizona State University.