Southern Ambitions Exhibit Open

By Christopher Graham

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the American Civil War Museum in July 2020 opened the second temporary exhibition in the second-floor gallery of its Tredegar site. “Southern Ambitions” explores what policymakers, statesmen, and journalists envisioned for their nation in the international community after the Confederacy won its independence.

Exhibit visitors follow the transformation of Confederate ambitions over the four years of war – from their brightest hopes to their greatest fears about their nation’s place in the world – and encounter the core tenets of Confederate ideology, including their progressive view of global economic integration and their racially conservative approach to the problems of labor in their modern world. Along the way, the exhibit invites visitors to consider the place of supply chains, free trade, and constitutional republics in a radical world, and, finally, to consider whether any Confederate ambitions survived the defeat of the slaveholding republic.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded “Southern Ambitions.” A team from the American Civil War Museum developed the project, and Solid Light, Inc. of Louisville, Kentucky, designed and built it. The exhibit is based on the scholarship of Dr. Adrian R. Brettle (University of Virginia, Ph.D. 2014), Lecturer at Arizona State University, which is now published as Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World (University of Virginia Press).

One of the exhibit walls in the Southern Ambitions exhibit.

ACWM

One of the exhibit walls in the Southern Ambitions exhibit.

ACWM