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, 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. 2 H-CivWar ambitions were still high, are we dealing with a group of delusional individuals, divorced from reality here? 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.