Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World

A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

by Adrian Brettle

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 Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets,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 not only of 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 towards 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.

Genres: Civil War, History, American Civil War

328 pages, Hardcover

Published July 10, 2020

Reviews

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have heard it said that the best way to measure the value of your worldview is the extent to which it assists you in predicting future trends and events. In an extreme example, it is likely that the few people who showed up in Dallas last November for the reappearance of John Kennedy, Jr. could benefit from an alteration in their worldview that would recognize the impossibility of such an event.

In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle has gathered the public pronouncements, diary entries and personal correspondence of the Confederate leadership preceding and during the American Civil War to show what they thought the results of secession from the Union and formation of the Confederacy would be. Admittedly, Professor Brettle and I enjoy the benefit of hindsight in evaluating these writings, however many of their expectations are clearly unrealistic. Their psychological need to not only defend, but to glorify slavery led the Confederates to predict slave societies prospering throughout the tropical world with their leadership and moral example. Even as they are escaping Richmond with Lee's army, Confederates are arguing over how tough their negotiating stance should be in the peace talks they thought would follow.

It is easy to dismiss all this Confederate foolishness, but many of these people were obviously intelligent and accomplished. We would be wise to learn from their example and, to the extent possible, objectively evaluate the information to which we are exposed and avail ourselves of the opinions of people with whom we disagree.

[M B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adrian Brettle’s study on Confederate imperial ambitions will satisfy readers who are interested in examining the American Civil War in a global context. From how to conduct a pro-slavery foreign policy in coordination with Brazil, to expanding the racial caste system to incorporate Native Americans and mestizos, Confederates envisioned how their nation would take its place on the global stage. Despite the ongoing civil war, Southern leaders did not rule out postbellum cooperation with the United States, seeing a mutually beneficial relationship based on trade and joint enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. These plans would ebb and flow with the tides of war but were never far off the radar of Confederate statesmen. Appomattox might’ve been the end of any grand designs, but not fully. When Confederates like Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler took part in the Spanish American War, they were in some respect realizing a longstanding Southern dream of empire, albeit not in the way they might have hoped.

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I fail to understand how such a fascinating and little-known topic could be turned into such an absolutely deadly boring and poorly edited book!

For starters, the word "planner" (or "planners") - as in "Southern planners" or "Confederate planners" - is used literally dozens (MANY dozens) of times. It becomes a mind-numbing "nails-on-the-chalkboard" phrase.

Secondly, not every single word or thought of every single person is important. Page after page becomes a litany of "This person said this," and then "This person said this," to the point of being meaningless. There is little flow to the narrative, just a chopped up at of "essays" on numerous topics.

I was so disappointed as I still believe this is a neglected subject ready for analysis. As a lifelong Civil War amateur historian, I have always thought, "How could the Confederates really believe what they were fighting for? What on Earth was their end game?" I suppose if you distill this "dumpster fire" of words down to its essence you get the answer to those questions. But honestly the same could have been achieved in a 20 page essay.