Colossal Ambitions

In the event the Confederacy won its independence in the Civil War, what was it planning when it came to foreign policy for the new nation?  Last month's speaker at the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable was Adrian Brettle of Arizona State University, who set out to answer this question in his recent book, "Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World", which I recently finished reading.

Colossal Ambitions takes us from the first days of secession through the entire war until its end.  According to Brettle, while some of the specifics of post-war plan changed with the ebb and tide of Confederate success; expansive at the beginning and during periods of apparent success like the fall of 1862, or when anticipating Lincoln's defeat in the 1864 election; more modest after the reverses of 1863 and in the dark days after Lincoln was reelected, the overall direction remained constant.  As Brettle reminded us in his talk, some of their notions seem inconsistent with each other, and others hard to believe they took seriously as we look back from the 21st century, but this is what many Confederate politicians and thought leaders really did think.

The Confederate worldview saw the anti-slavery movement losing momentum and believed that England and France were beginning to regret their anti-slavery actions.  They saw the Confederacy as part of a modernizing wave, with free trade utilizing a labor model based on slavery for those parts of the world suitable for it and providing a new world of global commerce, stretching from slavery's "natural" home extending from the Confederacy south to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Europe and even to China.

Confederates viewed their nation as providing the way towards the future as capital and labor worked together, rather than against each other, as in the North.  In their vision, the fact that the elites owned both capital and labor (in the form of slaves) was a much better solution than in places where ownership was divided.  From the Confederate perspective, division of ownership meant capital owners had no regard for the interests or welfare of labor and treated them as disposable, whereas in their system the ownership of both meant owners would take care of both.  As Brettle writes:

"the very survival of African Americans depended on their protected subordinate condition, which would only be guaranteed by Confederates granting African Americans a defined role in society.  By contrast, in an economy in which members of the races had to compete against each other for waged jobs, such as the Union envisaged by Lincoln promised, African Americans would fail and subsequently perish"

The reconciliation of labor with capital in a free trade system based on slavery, contrasted with what the Confederates saw as a ruthless capitalist system based on Yankee greed and exploitation, along with runaway individualism.  Brettle points out, Confederate leaders:

"attempted to conceive the new nation as a project confronting the unbridled individualism of the era.  Without going as far as to embrace new theories of socialism, they argued that a sense of solidarity underpinned its claim to nationhood.

One can see this theme in much of the contemporary Southern writing of the time.  For instance, Mary Chesnut's diary is filled with references to Yankee greed and the only interest of Northerners being money, while Southern life was filled with gentility and concern for all.

We encountered an interesting example of this theory in action when reading Frederick Law Olmstead's account of his travels across the South just prior to the war, published under several titles, most recently as The Cotton Kingdom.  While crossing a river in Alabama, Olmstead noticed the dangerous job of loading and unloading heavy cargo from boats was done by Irish laborers while slaves stood idly nearby watching.  Inquiring of the reason for this, Olmstead was told the Irish were used for the task precisely because it was so dangerous.  If injured they would simply be dismissed and their employer have no further obligations towards them.  Slaves were not used because the high risk of injury meant that, if they were injured, their owners would have the obligation to provide medical care, and continue to feed and house them even though they could do no productive labor while recovering or even if permanently disabled.  Slaves were a valuable asset requiring protection, Irish laborers were not.

It was also a perspective that saw the Confederacy remaining a predominantly agricultural land, whose wealth would grow as a commodity exporter, and while importing finished goods without being hampered by tarrifs, as was the current case when slave states were part of the Union.  This viewpoint was evidently held by a majority of the influential class in the seceding states,  though there was a minority view to the contrary which held that the South needed to develop a substantial industrial base, and that would not occur until slavery ended and free labor expanded.  The proponents of this viewpoint, such as John Archibald Campbell of Alabama, later a Justice of the Supreme Court who participated in the majority ruling in the Dred Scott case, did not envision social or legal equality for freed slaves, merely seeing slavery as an impediment to the growth of the white South which, for its sake, needed to be eliminated over time. 

The vision of a benevolent, free trading republic based upon slavery combined with an understanding by the black population that it was in their best interests, was contradicted by times by Confederate fears.  As Carl Paulus pointed out in his recent book, The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War, ever since the slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790s, Southerners had feared potential uprisings among their slave population, a fear enhanced by the plot of Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in the 1820s and Nate Turner's uprising in Virginia a decade later.  It's why John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, with its intent to ignite a massive slave revolt, caused such alarm.  The growing slave population was a source of constant worry (the American slave population was the only one in the Western Hemisphere with a natural growth rate not dependent on external replenishing) and expansion was seen as a way of moving that potentially dangerous population south and west, thus "diluting" it.  Holding parallel visions of slavery as a positive good, recognized by the enslaved, as well as fearing violent revolt by the enslaved is certainly not consistent, but both views existed simultaneously.

At the same time, there was a distinct expansionist element to Confederate thinking, though how direct it was would depend on the circumstances.  To some extent, desires for outright conquest and annexation had been tempered by the embarrassing failure of the filibustering expeditions in the 1850s in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba, as described in The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire 1854-61 by Robert E May.  At times, it was envisioned that Mexico, in particular the northern part, would become part of the Confederacy, as well as some of the Caribbean islands.  Some even envisioned a Confederacy extending into Central America, but it seemed to its proponents to be a natural process of assimilation by a superior culture, rather than by filibustering.

The Confederacy also had a distinct view of future relations with the rest of the United States.  Annexation of the Southwest was seen as a given and the relationship of the new nations with the tribes of the Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) were considered important.  In the Confederate racial hierarchy, Indians were considered not white but had higher standing than blacks which meant, in the Southern view, Indians were regarded more highly than in the North.  The Confederacy actively sought, and successfully obtained, alliances with those tribes.  How those tribes (Seminole, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee) ending up preferring the Confederacy over the U.S., even though those very states had expelled them three decades before, is told in Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay Yarbrough.  Part of the answer is that all the tribes had black slaves; in the case of the Choctaw these amounted to 15% of the population.  Slavery among these tribes was not outlawed until 1866, pursuant to new treaties reestablishing their relations with the U.S., a year after passage of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the states.

As to the states remaining the Union, Confederates thought that once their independence had been confirmed, the U.S. would further split into its own confederacies, based on New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast.

Brettle presents ample evidence that explains how Confederate reconciled in their owns minds a coherent  vision combining slavery, free trade, and a modernizing nation.  It also further demonstrates the absurdity of the arguments made by a small subgroup of libertarians that the cause of the Civil War was tariffs, and Northern desire to economically dominate the South (as I discovered a few years ago).  It has led them to invent a narrative of the events leading to the war consistent with their ideological preoccupations.  They also argue that slavery would have naturally withered away by the end of the 19th century.  What they refuse to recognize is that the Confederacy saw slavery as essential to its economic model as an independent nation, with the elimination of tariffs as a mechanism to help that model prosper.  The peculiarities of this model would, I believe, have ensured the existence of slavery into the 20th century, and perhaps delayed its late 19th century abolition in Brazil and Cuba.

The predominance of slavery as the issue prompting secession, underlying the logic for the entire Confederate experiment, comes up over and over again.  It continually surprises me to see arguments raised to the contrary (1).  We have so much contemporary evidence from 1860-61.  Even late in the war, the critical importance of slavery to the existence of the Confederacy was frequently touched on.  Brettle gives us two examples; the first from Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina on November 28, 1864; the second from Jefferson Davis on September 30, 1864:

[the ] "proposition to emancipate them by the Confederate States government . . . would stultify us in the eyes of the world and render our whole revolution nugatory [because] our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our great political institutions the principal of which is slavery".

"The great State institution of the South was the true basis for such a government . . . [as a result of slavery] here then, and here only, every white man is truly, socially and politically equal to every other."

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(1)  Three questions sometimes get confused regarding causes of the Civil War:

First, why did states secede?  To preserve the institution of slavery.

Second, why did the civil war occur?  A more complicated question.  Once the states had seceded, the new Confederacy insisted on the surrender of Union property, including military infrastructure, and the Union refused to acknowledge secession, making preservation of the Union its primary war aim.

Third, why did soldiers fights on each side?  For many different reasons.  And don't forget that many were drafted into service on both sides. 

Once the war began, all calculations regarding slavery changed for the Union.  Democratic Senator Reverdy Johnson, who opposed abolition prior to the war, gave a remarkable speech in Congress on April 5, 1864 in support of the proposed Constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.  Johnson remarked that  if the Founders had anticipated the current condition of the country, "they would have provided by constitutional enactment that the evil and that sin should at a comparatively unremote day be removed."

He then stated that although he would have opposed such an amendment prior to the war, "now, that that war is upon us; that a prosperous and permanent peace cannot be secured if the institution is permitted to survive", later adding:

". . . as we at present are, I cease to hope that the Government can be restored and preserved so as to accomplish the great ends for which it was established, unless slavery be extinguished.  If it be permitted to remain, it will ever continue a subject upon which treason may be able to excite the madness of the southern mind."

Of course, Abraham Lincoln was closest to the truth in his remarks at his second inaugural:

"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. "