Colossal Ambitions

Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World

Adrian Brettle

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944388
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della guerra civile americana

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic.

In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war's wake.

1

What Would an Independent South Mean for the World in 1861?

Between the election of Lincoln in November 1860 and the onset of war in April 1861, optimistic nation builders charted the future of an independent South. They spoke about the South, rather than the Confederacy, as they expected all fifteen slave states to secede. Even if they feared that war would soon break out, these optimists did not consider that this prospect would dictate the future for southerners. They may have believed that Republicans and abolitionists had driven them out of the Union; but, as optimists, they also looked forward to the South having good relations with the United States. Commercial ties would take precedence over ideological differences between nations. Therefore, it was to their northern neighbor and Britain that the Confederate government first sent commissioners in February and March 1861, rather than to Brazil and Spanish Cuba, their fellow slave powers.

The diplomatic choices reflected the priorities of the incoming Davis administration. It considered that the Union and Britain would be the Confederacy’s most important commercial partners and that this shared interest would be instrumental in preventing future armed conflict. Nevertheless, the Confederate future would be one that was emphatically proslavery, even if, after much consideration, the Confederate Provisional Congress chose not to reopen the Atlantic slave trade. That decision would not limit the ambition of the new nation. Its territorial growth would be determined by a rapidly increasing population, especially given the racial composition of the South, which meant a relatively large African American population had to urgently migrate westward and southward. Moreover, the future development of slavery required new lands to clear and cultivate. More broadly, planners of the new nation looked forward to securing it within a framework of competitive yet interdependent nation-states. New technologies—in particular steamships and railroads—stood ready to render areas of the tropics open to slavery and exploitation. Increases in staple crop production would enable the South to become a leading commercial power by being the center of an international trading economy dominated, at least in theory, by free trade. The South would not only be the leading exporter of raw materials but also the leading importer of manufactured goods. Confederate society broadly, its leaders imagined, would participate in the practical realization of this dream with every means at their disposal.

A National Mission Determined by People, Slavery, and God

In attempting the impossible task of predicting the future consequences of secession, leading white southerners drew on an interpretation of past events that suited them, then assumed these developments were both God-given and natural, and finally expected such trends to continue into the future. Moreover, they told themselves that there was no alternative, save ruin, to this course of action. The result was the anticipation of territorial expansion with a huge surge in wealth in the context of the establishment of a harmonious system of international relations—including the antislavery powers of the United States and Britain—based on increased commerce underpinned by the triumph of free trade principles.

Lewis Maxwell Stone, a prosperous Pickens County, Alabama, lawyer and state senator, seized upon continued expansion after secession as the vital condition to deliver individual prosperity and a collective advance of civilization. “Expansion seems to be the law and destiny of our institutions,” he told the delegates to the Alabama secession convention on January 25, 1861. “To remain healthful and prosperous within, and to make sure our development and power,” Stone explained, “it seems essential that we grow without.” Prior to Lincoln’s election, but looking forward to the event as certain, the author of a New Orleans newspaper editorial saw “such profitable expansion of [the South’s] territory as the natural order of things.” Southern expansion would be in the interests of virtue, civilization, and morality. Richard Thompson Archer, a wealthy cotton planter and slave owner who owned the Anchuca Plantation in Claiborne County, Mississippi, linked expansion to acts of improvement by white southerners on a vast scale because “common sympathies common necessities common origin make us philanthropists.”1

History taught that the conjunction of providential destiny, individual will, and institutional support, which together comprised civilization, not only gave momentum to expansion but also meant if the South failed to expand it would decline. “Civilization which has ceased to expand is doomed to perish,” a journalist writing in the Richmond Examiner declared. “Stagnation is the precursor of disease and death.” Progress placed great demands on the ambitions for the nation. “The idea of equilibrium is absurd,” observed the Virginian-born George W. L. Bickley, president of the Knights of the Golden Circle, adding “society must advance or retrograde, and we shall do well not to try to stop.”2

Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a member of Mississippi’s secession convention, explained why merely maintaining slavery where it already existed was unacceptable to those who supported leaving the Union. To believe in slavery was tantamount to demanding its expansion. Mississippi’s secession ordinance, drafted by Lamar, declared that the United States government “refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish [slavery] by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.” It followed that the necessity of expansion of nations in general, so as to be on the right side of the dividing line between living and dying powers, was intensified by specific attributes of slavery. “Our social system,” a Virginian journalist wrote, “must have perfect security in its present and future existence.” Additionally, slavery “must have perfect assurance of its natural expansion and development. If it wants either it must ultimately perish” because slavery has inbuilt “within it the law of growth and expansion.” Therefore, he agreed with the prominent South Carolinian Presbyterian clergyman, academic, and journalist James H. Thornwell that the Republicans “can circumscribe the area of slavery if they can surround it with a circle of non-slaveholding states and prevent it from expanding.” If the Lincoln administration succeeded in its objective, slavery “will wither and decay under hostile influences.” U.S. senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia warned about the dire consequences if slavery was to be “penned in” and “localized” within a state’s borders. Only membership of the Confederacy offered the Upper South continuation of the domestic slave trade and expansion of slavery.3

In 1860, Thornwell and others across the South propagated an ambitious agenda for the proposed nation to pursue, one that blended religion, proslavery thought, and economics. Clergymen, in their sermons and published pamphlets, carefully argued that secession was not an act of covetousness but instead could bring the people closer to God. According to historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Thornwell regarded continued submission to the United States government to be an act of voluntary surrender to sin. As a result, he wrote in a widely read pamphlet that southerners would not secede due to “ambition and avarice.” In order to align the Confederacy with its providential mission, optimists had to persuade the rest that “good would spring from evil,” “cast about for considerations to reconcile [the South] to her destiny,” and think how the South “might be the gainer by the measure which the course of the [United States] government was forcing upon her.” Thornwell regarded that not only duty to God but also the more secular pursuits of honor and fame were crucial for secessionists as “motives to reconcile the mind to its necessity.” The threat of Republican Party tyranny had absolved secessionists of the charge of leaving the Union for the wicked reasons of vanity and pride; yet the ambitions of its citizens had to be realized in order to avoid a return to “enslavement” to the North.4

Benjamin M. Palmer, a close friend and protégé of Thornwell’s and the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, also strove to reconcile the future needs of the nation—peaceful southern expansion—with the demands of providence. He set out his position in the April 1861 edition of the Southern Presbyterian Review, the paper he cofounded with Thornwell and others in 1847, as “the premier scholarly religious journal in the south.” The Presbyterian Church had split in 1857 over the issue of slavery, and southern clergy not only determined to vindicate slavery but also support its expansion. He wrote in response to an article in a rival quarterly by R. J. Breckinridge, a slaveholding Kentuckian cleric and another friend of Thornwell’s, who accused secessionists of “ulterior motives” in leaving the United States. Secessionists wanted “a war,” Breckinridge claimed, “which shall end when you shall have taken possession of the whole southern part of this continent down to the Isthmus of Darien [Panama].” Palmer dismissed the charge. “If we desire territory,” he argued, “we shall not with school-boy greed pluck the apple when it is green, but will wait upon history till the time of ripeness, when it will fall into the lap.” Far from abandoning the older American mission of spreading liberty through peaceful expansion, Palmer asserted the South would embrace it. Clergy were now convinced of the desirability of slavery and its growth, but they would not support the new nation legalizing filibustering as a means to that end. George W. L. Bickley—perhaps keen to obscure his own past record of involvement in such attempts to take over countries at peace with the United States via privately financed military expeditions—pointed out that it was important that “we do not go to Mexico as filibusters to rob, burn and devastate—but as colonists.” He suggested southerners follow the earlier example of Texans instead and “go . . . in the character of a defensive colony,” “become a center drawing to itself every good citizen,” and “arrest this state of anarchy and misrule.” The process to be followed would be gradual: “plant a southern colony with southern habits and southern institutions” and “not at once ask that states of Mexico be admitted” to the Confederacy. Instead the Knights of the Golden Circle would “Americanise it, plant our institutions there and build up a separate nationality” just as had happened in Texas.5

John B. Thrasher of Claiborne County, Mississippi, a lawyer, planter, and great slaveholder, echoed the clergymen in the adoption of a high moral tone to reinforce the need for the expansion of slavery. In the future, the slaveholding class would have a moral obligation to spread slavery where possible. Electioneering for southern Democratic presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge on November 5, 1860, Thrasher explained in a speech that it was a “duty to God, to ourselves and to posterity to perpetuate African slavery, and to extend it as a missionary duty.” He regarded the Middle Passage and enslavement of Africans by white southerners as a “purely moral and religious act, and pleasing in the sight of God.” While he believed God ordained the white race to rule the world, Thrasher contrasted the careful attributes of the southern slaveholders in 1860 with those of the reckless Revolutionary French in Haiti from 1790 to demonstrate how ownership of enslaved people was a privilege, which could be mismanaged. Slaveholders had to avoid complacency—hence the utility of expansion as requiring effort and vigilance on the part of slaveholders. Such restraint did not mean setting rigid limits to the growth of slavery. Coexistence with a hostile federal government would not only lead to a Haitian-style bloodbath, but it would also deny slaveholders the chance to realize the potential of slavery. Progress, geography, and economics apparently dictated that slavery would predominate as the labor force of the tropics. With that mentality in place, expansionists debated how far slavery should expand under the tutelage of southern slaveholders.6

Leonidas W. Spratt, a prominent South Carolinian journalist, claimed before the 1859 Vicksburg Commercial Convention that the slavery-based society of the South was ideally suited to move on with a measured dignity of power and progress. By the time of the formation of the Confederacy, Spratt had moved away from paternalism toward profits in a public letter addressed to John Perkins, a delegate from Louisiana to the provisional congress, who happened to be one of the largest slaveholders from that state. Spratt believed slavery had to remorselessly grow because of its potential as a labor force ideally suited to the cultivation of staple crops in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world—providing white southerners were there to manage it. “The system of domestic slavery, guided always by the best intelligence, directed always by the strictest economy,” he insisted, “can underwork the world.” Spratt portrayed slavery as an inexorable force because it was cost-effective, and he declared that “there is no other human labor that can stand against it.” In this context, the role of the new nation was simply to allow slavery to expand of its own accord, provided slaveholders remained conservative in ideology and pursued ambitious individual and national programs. The language of Palmer was similar to that of Spratt. Both agreed that slavery connected the South to global commerce. The future of civilization and world progress depended on slavery’s survival; it was threatened by “the decree of restriction and ultimate extinction” promised by the incoming Republican administration. “It is the duty of the south in the discharge of a great historic trust,” Palmer preached, “to conserve and transmit the same.” This duty meant allowing slavery to achieve its natural limits, a feat only achievable outside the United States.7

Once independence had been achieved, where these “natural limits” of slavery—under white southerners’ auspices—extended was open to debate; but they agreed that forces beyond their control would drive the expansion of slavery in the future. An expert in tropical diseases, Dr. William H. Holcombe of Natchez, Mississippi, and Tensas Parish, Louisiana, based his calculation on the alleged immunity of African Americans to those endemic fevers of the lower latitudes. “It is the means,” he predicted about slavery, “thereby the white man is to subdue the tropics all round the globe to order and beauty and to the wants and interests of an ever-expanding civilization.” Southerners had “to succeed in establishing as we shall a vast opulent, happy and glorious slaveholding republic, throughout tropical America.” It was important for optimists to identify providential, historical, even progressive, factors that would determine the extent of slavery; doing this enabled them to undermine the arguments of opponents while identifying themselves with a grand global vision and confirm slavery as an eternal institution. Palmer agreed that geography itself would dictate slavery’s reach. “If African slavery exists at all, its limits must be determined by climate and soil,” he considered, and he believed “that precisely where it ceases to be profitable there it will inevitably cease to exist.” Joseph Eggleston Segar, a Virginian Whig politician who, in earlier years, had stressed the possibilities of internal improvements to foster a commercial revolution, nevertheless put the future of slavery on a more elevated basis. “No human legislation can prevent” its expansion, and “slavery will go wherever it is profitable just as sure as water finds its level,” he insisted during a speech before the Virginia House of Delegates on March 30, 1861, “because the instincts of the human constitution and the laws of soil and climate are stronger than any law-giving of finite man.”8

Finding a Place for Surplus People

The influential slaveholder and U.S. senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, with plantations across three states, believed it was the natural growth in numbers of enslaved people that had driven the rapid expansion of the South since the Revolution. Familiar with the arguments of the disasters that awaited societies suffering from overpopulation by Thomas Malthus via Harriet Martineau, he determined that continued territorial expansion would solve the problem. “What shall be done with them?” Toombs asked his fellow senators about African Americans—“We must expand or perish.” Crucially, the Georgian then dismissed the argument made by his opponents that expansion was simply a means to obtain additional slave state votes in Congress, and furthermore, he insisted that expansion was vital whether or not the Atlantic slave trade was reopened. “Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slave trade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the past sixty years.”9

Census data appeared to corroborate these arguments and pointed toward future acceleration in the rate of growth in numbers of enslaved people. The Richmond Examiner believed the population of enslaved people was doubling every twenty-five years; others put the period of increase at twenty. In this context, expansion enabled slaveholders to “diffuse” slavery southward and westward in order to disperse the apparently dangerous concentrations of numbers of enslaved people and indeed render that population growth an advantage rather than as something to be feared. Senator Robert Hunter, who owned over one hundred enslaved people in his home state, stressed the advantages for Virginia, and other Upper South and Border States, of joining an expansive southern confederacy. In a letter published in both the Richmond Enquirer (December 1860) and De Bow’s Review (January 1861), he averred that independence would provide those states with “an outlet for their surplus population of slaves,” who would go either into “these co-states,” or “in whatever territory might be acquired by that Union.”10

The mission to expand with its emphasis on providential destiny and individualism together with the impetus of population growth and increased mobility was something that southerners shared with other peoples, especially northerners and the British. What transformed this sentiment into something mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Vast World They Wanted
• 1. What Would an Independent South Mean for the World in 1861?
• 2. How War Changed the Future Nation: April 1861 to February 1862
• 3. Self-Sufficiency at Home and Self-Assertion Abroad: Confederate Ambitions for the Remainder of 1862
• 4. Renewal through Adversity: Confederates Reboot Their Ambitions in 1863
• 5. A Conservative Future: January to the Fall of 1864
• 6. The Sacrifice Cannot Be in Vain: The Future in a Transformed World, November 1864 to May 1865
• Epilogue: What Are You Going to Do?
• Notes
• Index