Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle Mark Grimsley Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World. By Adrian Brettle. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 313. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4437-1.) Because we know that the Confederacy died in 1865, it can be easy to miss the fact that not only did Confederates anticipate victory on the field of battle, [End Page 150] but also they had specific ideas about the society that the blood sacrifice of their solders would conjure into being. This lucidly written, historically imaginative, and deeply researched study by Adrian Brettle weaves these ideas into a valuable picture of the postwar world envisioned by Confederate policy makers and opinion makers. Confederate ambitions fell into four main categories. The first was territorial expansion, which would carry slavery into the New Mexico Territory and parts of Mexico, replace Spain as the overseer of Cuban slavery, and resurrect southern dreams of a Caribbean empire. In a quixotic corollary, some Confederate expansionists believed that both the border states and the states of the Old Northwest would exit the Union to join them. Second, Confederates recognized the importance of internal improvements and better technology. Third, they disregarded indications that slavery was on the wane throughout the world and expected to rely on the slavery-based, staple-exporting economy that, in their view, had served the South so well. Finally, they believed that, despite the war’s carnage, interwoven economic interests and a common foreign policy goal of maintaining the Monroe Doctrine would lead the Union and Confederacy to forge an informal or even formal confederation, perhaps extending to include Mexico and Canada. Underpinning the Confederate program as a whole was confidence in the institution of slavery; an exalted view of southern history, culture, and religious faith; and a desire to play a major role on the world stage. The book’s subtitle, which speaks of “planning” for a postwar Confederate society, is a bit extravagant, since the word implies meetings and concerted thought by specific groups, and Confederate policy makers and opinion makers did not do this. Nonetheless, Brettle teases out strands of ambition from the writings of these Confederates. Some of these thinkers made extended arguments, but many of their ideas appeared here and there in correspondence, speeches, and so on, suggesting that such thinking was not fully fleshed out. It is nonetheless notable that the same basic ideas cropped up repeatedly and depicted a coherent worldview. The extravagance of Confederate ambitions is striking. Even given a victorious war of independence, it is difficult to see how many of their goals could have been achieved. By mid-1863, the military manpower necessary for territorial expansion had been squandered on the war’s battlefields. Plans for an economy based on specie derived from the export of cotton failed to recognize that during the war, Great Britain discovered major cotton sources in Egypt and elsewhere. And a slaveholding society badly disarranged by the advance of Union armies, even if those armies were beaten back, could not be easily stabilized—although Confederate thinkers convinced themselves otherwise by fantasizing that “African Americans would have a better future in the Confederacy than anywhere else in the world, especially that to be had in the United States” (p. 181). As the war progressed, the declining fortunes of the Confederacy forced a reimagining of these ambitions, but not nearly to the degree one would expect. Confederate thinkers apparently overlooked key issues such as an overhaul of the financial system, which failed the Confederacy so miserably during the war, and the expansion of higher education, on which the construction of a [End Page 151] modern infrastructure depended. Indeed, based on the skillful portrait the author creates, one would not be far wrong to argue that Confederate thinkers looked backward to a perfected antebellum world rather than forward to a realistic postwar world. Mark Grimsley Ohio State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association