Adrian Brettle (Colossal Ambitions) Corrected

H-CivWar Author Interview--Adrian Brettle (Colossal Ambitions) Corrected

Discussion published by Niels Eichhorn on Thursday, August 27, 2020

Hello H-CivWar readers, last week, I erroneously posted the wrong text for Adrian Brettle's interview; therefore, I am posting the full interview this week and also with the correct title of the book in the title.

Today we feature Adrian Brettle to talk about his new book Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World, which came out in July 2020 with the University of Vriginia Press.

Adrian Brettle is currently a lecturer at Arizona State University. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Adrian, to start, can you tell us how you became interested in writing a book about Confederate ambitions?

AB: I have always been a nineteenth century historian and back in 2007 gave a paper at a conference about mid-nineteenth century British foreign policy. As part of my research on Lords Palmerston, Russell, and their colleagues, I followed their fascination, as they witnessed the Union’s break-up and then the progress of the ensuing war. Particularly interesting was charting these politicians’ slow realization that there was nothing they could to interfere in the conflict, a humbling experience for those who ran the world’s then greatest power. Palmerston, especially, started rather contemptuous about what he saw as American pretension in considering the civil war as a world-changing event, but he revised that into respect later. It was uncovering these pretensions that led me to Confederate ambitions. I was surprised that not only did Federals consider that there were global issues at stake in saving the Union, but also the rebels held that Confederate independence would change the world. Confederates had objectives for their nation that lay beyond the war and which have been subsequently obscured by defeat and the Lost Cause memory of the conflict. I set out to uncover these goals, and found them to be concrete plans. These plans changed over time, according to an evolving best guess by Confederates as to their circumstances come peacetime, together with estimates of any opportunities arising from global trends and events. 1861-5 was the self-conscious world moment for Confederates and they conceived it to be their duty to work out what that meant.

It is fascinating how you came to write about Confederate ambitions and I look forward to exploring these ambitions more as we continue. However, I wondered, your work does not strike me as a traditional diplomatic history, do you think of Confederate Ambitions as a transnational history or more like a political history?

AB: You are right! It is not a diplomatic history, Confederate diplomacy has rightly had a bad press, although the diplomats – John Slidell, James M. Mason et al – tried to tell the British and French what they thought the Europeans wanted to hear, they did not do it very well. In private and even in public these lawyers, journalists, and politicians were, at heart, boosters for the postwar nation. Moreover, the commercial agent in London and Paris, Henry Hotze, especially became very proficient in this

Citation: Niels Eichhorn. Author Interview--Adrian Brettle (Colossal Ambitions) Corrected. H-CivWar. 08-27-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/6374266/author-interview-adrian-brettle-colossal-ambitions-corrected Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-CivWar task. The politics of the Confederacy was also not business-as-usual (at least for American history) with no political parties. What struck me in my research was how the factions and personal rivalries reflected passionate differences over means, but not about an uncontroversial end. Henry S. Foote or Alexander H. Stephens or those notorious governors Brown and Vance disagreed between themselves and with Jefferson Davis, but together with consensus about the changing vision for the postwar Confederacy. It is a book about nation-building with which, with varying degrees of priority, enthusiasm, and at different times, individuals embarked upon from secession onward. Of your three historiographies, transnational is closest, because fundamentally these Confederates did not consider their new nation as one inserted into a hostile world of emancipation, protectionism, nationalism, and centralization. They instead conceived the nation as an ideological enterprise, which knew no boundaries, in a globe whose developments: industrialization, immigration, spreading labor systems, world trade, etc., appeared to these optimists to be moving in their direction.

One other aspect of your book is that you are looking at imperial ambitions of the Confederacy both toward the South and westward. Some of this has been told elsewhere by historians like Robert May. Can we study the Confederate ambitions during the Civil War without having in the back of our mind things like the filibusters?

AB: Excellent question, it was the surprising observation of what I thought was the maintenance of these territorial expansionist ambitions in wartime that first drew me to the topic. Yet there is a more complex story to tell here, as these plans for expansion in an independent nation were entirely different from those pursued within the framework of the United States. The earlier (and later) dreams and illegal filibustering raids were the products of a minority section deprived of action. Matt Karp shows what policies could be achieved by southern influence on the Federal Government, such as a stronger navy. Now territorial growth and commercial expansion would be the requisite posture of an independent nation state and it had broadly three components. First, “regeneration” plans to revive the economies of various Mexican provinces, the Caribbean, and other parts of Latin America by planting colonies of slaveholders and enslaved people in schemes based loosely on the ‘Texas Model.’ Second, a striking shift in white southerners’ confidence in their ability to incorporate Mexicans and Native Americans into a polity composed of a hierarchy of races. Third, in this emphatically pre-imperial era, the adoption (overlooking its abolitionist credentials) of the free trade ideologies of the Manchester School, conjuring a vision of world peace, toleration of slavery, and interdependency of national economies with growing export markets. An anticipated huge postwar debt would mean export tariffs and import duties continuing to apply; but that circumstance would also enable an active commercial diplomacy to be conducted, with deals to be struck with Midwesterners and the Pacific West, as well as pacts with European trading nations. However, expansionism was part of Confederate statecraft, to be adopted or discarded as circumstances demanded. For example, in early 1864 rising hopes for peace and independence meant plans for growth were largely shelved, as Confederate diplomats sought security through alliances. By the end of the year, expansion was back with a vengeance, as would-be Confederate envoys to the Union came up with various schemes of joint plans for empire as a way to appeal to what they considered Yankee greed.

That is quite a long list of ambitions, so before we get into some of the details, let's briefly use our benefit of hindsight, who in their right mind would think the Confederacy would be able to accomplish these? You end your book in 1864-65, when even with the dismal military situation,

AB: My dissertation advisor Gary W. Gallagher talks about what he calls the “Appomattox Syndrome” –a tendency of historians to view reality during the Civil War as each day moving ever closer to the inevitable outcome of the war and so robbing battles, etc., of all their contingency. It is certainly challenging to take the later ambitions seriously! I have two observations to make. First, when identifying a group of particularly deluded individuals, the task is complicated. For example, a politician might project defiance in public during a speech on the imperial Confederacy at the eleventh hour and then admit in private letters and diaries that it is all hopeless. It is a more difficult task than perhaps we imagine to know when reality ends and delusions begin as these ambitions shift constantly, not only between private and public, but also vary according to time and place. Second, is figuring out the relationship of these ambitions to the perceived progress of the war. The wartime relationship between the fighting and the national objectives was more indirect than the lost cause memory would have us believe. At one point, the fighting would end and then negotiations between various commissioners, constitutional processes, diplomacy, etc., would begin. This politics, along with the actions of private individuals, such as the resumption of trade, slavery expansion, and the like, would determine the future Confederacy. The delusions, then, were about mistaking the ambiguous meanings of words such as independence, reunion, and emancipation, together with misunderstanding the willingness of northerners to put words into deeds.

Let's start with the free trade idea. Why did the Confederacy desire to embrace such a British political policy as free trade? What did the Confederacy stand to gain from a free-trade outlook?

AB: It is interesting that you refer to free trade as a political policy, you are right that politics cannot be separated from economics. From an economic standpoint, it does seem odd that a relatively underdeveloped economy such as the Confederacy should embrace a doctrine which has been championed in history by only the then world’s most advanced economies, Victorian Britain and then the United States after the Second World War. To be sure, during the 1850s, the British example had given impetus to trade liberalizing efforts in both Europe and America (tariff reductions, moves to abolish tolls on international rivers, etc.) and meanwhile the evident economic success of the German customs union, the Zollverein, was also attracting notice and efforts at emulation. In this promising context, free trade did two things for the Confederacy. First, it validated a simple domestic policy for the new nation to pursue: maximum production. Southern political economists, such as George Tucker and Jacob Newton Cardozo, had stressed that the act of increasing production created its own demand and opened new markets. Boosting the size of the staple crop harvest and the expansion of slavery had an apparent economic rationale.

Second, free trade offered the new nation the path to eventual international respectability and security. In the words of Richard Cobden, the productive powers of the world would be brought into mutual cooperation. Confederates pulled from the theories of Smith and Ricardo what Confederates called “twice gains by the trade.” Meaning that provided they exported as much as they could produce cheapest, it would always be more efficient to then purchase manufactured goods (regardless of cost) from abroad rather than try and develop their own industries. There was a great deal of vulgar pride to be had in imagining the expected wealth arising from the forecasts of soaring exports and imports, but Confederates also considered other, less tangible, gains from this policy.

Increased commerce had a moral purpose, for example cotton civilized the world as it enabled the production of clothes. Even more important was the strategic gain Confederates believed was there for the taking. International collaboration driven by economic interdependence would replace international competition driven by economic independence. Governments would in future be able to scale down expensive military establishments as the risks of war decreased. Above all, the biggest gain for the Confederacy would be international respectability for slavery. Diplomats considered that the simple act of doing business with the slave power would undermine abolitionism, not only in Britain and France, but also in what remained of the United States.

As with every other theory, confrontation with reality would complicate this Confederate attachment to free trade, as politicians became compelled by the search for revenue to consider both export tariffs and import duties, and at the same time diplomats pursued commercial pacts with a variety of potential partners. Protectionism also always had its supporters in the Confederacy, even though they were in a minority. Nevertheless, free trade remained a consistent ideal future goal for the new nation that Jefferson Davis considered to be integral to its identity and mission in the world.

For the next question: I think it is interesting that the Confederacy embraced free trade for respectability purposes and at the same time also held ambitions about empire. If I read your book right, these were intimately connected as the Confederacy seemed to argue for something akin to an informal empire at times. However, there was also the more formal imperial goal. How far did the Confederacy intend to expand and how would have the dream Confederate empire have looked like?

AB: The topic of empire and its relationship to slavery is an engrossing one for historians at the moment on both sides of the Atlantic and empire was certainly very important to the Confederates. Why was it important? Four reasons: Ideology, identity, the need to territorially expand, and saltwater imperialism. There was the imperative of an ideological empire of liberty. Postwar constitutional conventions in states in the United States, especially in the Midwest, would be expected to reject the tyranny of the majority-rule Republican Party and elect to join the Confederacy. At the same time, especially later in the war, Confederate planners conceived of a joint empire of liberty in alliance with the United States, that might cover—or at least vigorously implement the Monroe Doctrine--across the entire western hemisphere. Confederates also believed their mission to preserve and expand republicanism would coexist with ruling subject peoples of different ethnic backgrounds. They considered that their management of enslaved people had qualified them to be tolerant cosmopolitans (unlike, they believed, the Federals) and so the incorporation of Native Americans and Mexican Confederates in colonial dependencies would follow.

At the same time, Confederates, with some reluctance, visualized that their nation would have to compete with others (especially the United States but also Britain and France, especially if they remained incurably abolitionist) for land, population, and power. Hence traditional territorial expansion would be pursued, requisite for a new-entrant great power, not by military conquest, but the southward planting of colonies of slaveholders and enslaved people. This process would lead to peaceful annexation of Mexican provinces and eventually the rest of Central America. They would be “invited” to “regenerate” former slave-economies in the Caribbean and shore up the existing ones of Cuba and Brazil. This expectation of invitation is important, for visions of the Confederate empire relied on the machinations of “people on the spot,” as much as direction from Richmond, for its impetus. Finally, they would also pursue saltwater free trade imperialism. Northwestern Mexico

What would the empire look like? Impossible to say. There was no rise and fall of the Confederate empire and no single dream and besides the notion of demarcating its boundaries would have been an anathema to the planners. All I will say is that at times when peace seemed remote, the empire was extremely abstract and limitlessly expansive; whereas at other times—such as in the early summer of 1864—when peace seemed near, something akin to a map of the fifteen state Confederacy, together with southwestern territories, various Mexican provinces bolted on, and a tight web of alliances or pacts with various partner and subordinate nations would come into view.

I am glad you already mentioned Native Americans, both in your answer and the book; a topic often overlooked in traditional nineteenth-century diplomatic studies. I had a student who worked on the Dakota War of 1862 and saw evidence of people claiming the Dakota were in league with the Confederacy. How far west did Confederate ambitions extend when it came to using Native Americans? Considering Georgia was primarily responsible for the removal of the Cherokee, why would Native people, mistreated obviously by both North and South, be willing to join forces with either side?

AB: That is fascinating regarding the Dakota, I suspect it was an accusation often flung during the war at Native American tribes in order to justify land seizures etc., somebody should write a book about that! Confederates claimed control over the Native Americans of the Southern Plains only, but were always interested in learning about the Union’s difficulties with Natives elsewhere, especially with the Sioux in Minnesota. The McGirt vs. Oklahoma Supreme Court decision reminded us that the Creeks owned 7,000 enslaved people and there was certainly some pro Confederate feeling among slaveholding Native Americans in Indian Territory on that score. But the civil war overlay complex disputes between Native American tribes and these local quarrels determined the overall loyalties, if your opponents backed the Confederacy you would back the Union. This resembled Native American responses in earlier wars, rival tribes backed the opposing sides in the French and Indian Wars, the War of Independence, and the War of 1812.

For their part, Confederates distinguished between what they deemed to be “settled” tribes, the five nations of Indian Territory, and the “savage” or nomadic tribes further south and west. They emphasized this diversity of the Native American population as part of a divide and rule strategy; but Confederates themselves differed on how to treat the Native Americans. Indian Agent Albert Pike, who later defected to the Union, saw an opportunity in 1861 to garner Native American support for the Confederacy in exchange for protection from supposed harsher rule of the United States and the devolution of good deal of local self-government to the chiefs. This approach won support in Richmond. But according to Pike, his strategy of benevolence was frustrated during 1862 by Confederates from western states, Arkansas—which tried to annex Indian Territory—and Texas. Politicians from these states, together with some army officers, sought a more coercive strategy, denying promised supplies to the Natives, ending protection, and drafting their men into Confederate

Citation: Niels Eichhorn. Author Interview--Adrian Brettle (Colossal Ambitions) Corrected. H-CivWar. 08-27-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/6374266/author-interview-adrian-brettle-colossal-ambitions-corrected Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-CivWar regiments. By 1863, with much of Arkansas in Union hands, the conciliation approach won by default. Until its final recess in March 1865, Native American representatives, such as the Cherokee Elias Boudinot, sat in the Confederate Congress and its politicians debated territorial appointments, subsidies, and treaties with the tribes. Beyond the small Native American contingent at the battle of Pea Ridge on the Arkansas-Missouri borderlands on March 7-8, 1862, and the later exploits of Boudinot’s uncle Brigadier General Stand Watie, direct Native American aid to the Confederacy was minimal. But they loomed large in Confederate planning for the future, Jefferson Davis posed as the Great Father and his stewardship over Native Americans was part of the imagined social structure of the Confederacy with its hierarchy of races and expansive territorial ambitions.

Further west the policy in practice was less benign. Davis was angered by Governor John Baylor of Arizona’s reprisals for raids by Native Americans in the borderlands because this aggression complicated the closer relationships agents tried to develop with the Mexican provincial governors. Texans complained that Sibley’s Brigade diverted men from their true vocation of Indian fighting. Meanwhile, the proposed Confederate “regeneration” of the Mexican Northwest, and the later colonial schemes of ex Californian Senator William Gwin, were both justified on their ability to protect the mining, agricultural, and infrastructure projects from the supposed depredations of the Apache. Confederates, for all their claims for superior tolerance, were imbued with the “civilizing” impulses shared by other Anglo-Americans of the day.

So, as we slowly draw to a close, let's imagine the implementation of your work. Assuming I am going to teach the Civil War and Reconstruction class, how do you think I should incorporate your scholarship and how would it change the way I teach the Civil War era?

AB: Colossal Ambitions is a work that deconstructs Confederate long-range planning for peace as an independent country over the course of the Civil War, virtually season-by-season, if not month-by- month—with all the variances and contradictions (and often vagueness) this strategic thinking naturally entailed—and that takes account within a very nuanced narrative both of government officials bearing the responsibility for planning and the anticipations of private citizens. There is no book out there like it. It truly marks out original terrain, which is not easy to accomplish in the now well-ploughed realm of Confederate nation historiography.

The book engages the theories not only of modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Thomas Malthus and Thomas Carlyle. The book’s most important arguments are as follows: (1) that Confederates did not discard their ambitions for territorial expansion westward and southward after the outbreak of war with the Union, even though they beat temporary strategic retreats on the issue; (2) that few Confederate planners conceptualized an independent Confederacy as based on anything but slave labor; (3) that Confederate self-confidence deriving from staple crops, increasing industry, transportation and communications improvements, and enhanced naval power led to visions of postwar global power and influence; (4) that through much of the war, even after Lincoln announced emancipation as Union policy and after Union forces triumphed at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, many Confederates continued planning for a postwar independent nationhood, and continued doing so as late as the late fall of 1864; (5) that in their planning for independence, Confederates remarkably envisioned achieving a concert with their Yankee wartime enemies in world affairs, especially in upholding the Monroe Doctrine; (6) that despite wartime blows to their slave labor system, Confederates expected slavery to

There are some specifics that should also engage with your students. We have already discussed about plans for Native American relations in the Confederacy. Classes might also consider the following: the divergent Confederate perspectives regarding prospective relations with the Old Northwest as compared to New England, Confederate attitudes about other slave regimes; and fluctuating Confederate perspectives on relations and trade with Mexico. Throughout, there are arresting reflections to pique the curiosity of students, that Confederates found ways to conceive themselves as more racially tolerant than Yankees were, especially regarding African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Catholics in New Mexico, and that they sincerely believed their version of white republicanism represented the world’s best hope for future progress. Classes on international relations of the era might be intrigued by Confederate hopes for plebiscites in border slave states to determine their postwar affiliations. (This idea seems to herald twentieth-century international plebiscites, were the Confederates truly ahead of their times?) My information on Confederates looking to the German Confederation and Zollverein for postwar models would be valuable for the same reason. The manuscript is full of original insights into Confederate congressional discourse on issues often ignored in Confederate historiography, for example homesteads and plans to develop programs in technical education to support industrialization. Students may be fascinated that Confederates were so confident that Lincoln would fail of reelection in 1864 that they debated how magnanimous they should be in extending peace to a hapless Union. Sometimes, my exploration of the Confederate mindset is simply shocking, as when John Reagan wrote Davis at the end of the war blaming the Confederate people, not southern politicos, for driving the South into a disastrous war. Talk about fake news!

To close, Adrian, I know your first priority is finding job security, but what are your scholarly plans moving forward?

AB: At this very moment, I am responding to an external review of my chapter in a volume of essays, Reconstruction and Empire, edited by David M. Prior and to be published by Fordham University Press. The chapter, entitled “‘Their very sectionalism makes them cultivate that wider and broader patriotism’: Southern Free Trade Imperialism during and after the Confederacy,” as its title suggests, was intended to be a kind of epilogue to Colossal Ambitions. I follow former Confederates from Virginia (Robert Hunter, John Letcher and others), now mostly conservative Democrats and disciples of their titular sectional leader, Lucius Lamar, later President Grover Cleveland’s Interior Secretary and Supreme Court Justice. After an initial period of being shot to pieces by defeat, together with experiencing exile, imprisonment, and proscription, these individuals—before the end of Reconstruction--seemed to snap back into espousing eerily identical policies to those planned during the Confederacy. One could further make a claim that a legacy of these beliefs can be found in the Open-Door Notes of the turn of the century, together with earlier stances on the Newfoundland Fisheries, Hawaii, and Venezuela during the Cleveland administrations. But on reflection there is something rather sterile to be found in such repetition in a transformed context. The old free trade expansionism, instead of being tied to a vision of future progress, was now—shorn of its ideological

For my next project, the topic is one that has a tangential relationship toColossal Ambitions. It is about the relationship between gold rushes and state formation; how the former was not only disruptive, but also constructive in terms of establishing order both on the ground and internationally. I will start with the 1848 Californian Gold Rush and then extend it to its counterpart a decade later in British Columbia and perhaps—this is still at an early stage--even make the proposal part of a much bigger enterprise encompassing the rushes in Alaska, Australia, and South Africa. The sudden arrival of huge numbers of diverse people imposed drastic changes on the lives of Natives, and upended local economies and societies. In what was often a power vacuum, natives and newcomers established extraordinary, often revolutionary institutions of popular sovereignty to govern themselves. While these events occurred on the ground, these parts of the world became zones of great power rivalry for the first time. Often national governments had to respond militarily in the first instance to reports of chaos and appeals for help from the dispossessed; while the remoteness and nature of these disturbances compelled international collaboration as well competition in carrying out these initiatives.