Confederate Expansionist Ambitions During the American Civil War Adrian Robert Brettle ...

465 Pages·2014·2.34 MB·English

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The Fortunes of War:
Confederate Expansionist Ambitions During the American Civil War

Adrian Robert Brettle
Charlottesville, Virginia

B.A., University of Cambridge, 1994
M.A., University of Cambridge, 1998

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty
of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History

University of Virginia
Conferred May, 2014
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© Copyright by
Adrian Robert Brettle
All Rights Reserved
May 2014
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Abstract
Southern and then Confederate politicians and business leaders possessed and
implemented expansionist ambitions during the Civil War Era from State Secession in
late 1860 until the final collapse of the Confederacy in the first half of 1865. The
Confederacy exhibited both formal ambition in the desire to annex additional territory
and informal expansion through either a pursuit of commercial exploitation or fostering
the fragmentation of neighboring states. Although the pursuit of expansion was integral
to the formation of mid-nineteenth century nation states, for southerners, the experience
of both secession and of fighting a war acted as a stimulant for such ambitions.
I chart these ambitions held for the Confederacy in terms of slavery expansion,
the nature of its future international relations, commercial growth and territorial extent. I
have identified numerous leading individuals−planters, farmers, lawyers, merchants,
politicians and soldiers−who both held these opinions and sought to persuade others. I
track the opinions and actions of these persons throughout the war, and demonstrate that
these aspirations changed over time, as did the resulting measures taken at the time by
Government and businesses to achieve their ultimate fulfillment.
The objective of my research is to build up an understanding of the postwar
expectations, held during the war, of Confederates located across the Confederacy itself,
the Border States and stationed abroad. Therefore I consulted a range of printed and
manuscript sources at archives across the U.S. The breadth of my research enables me to
prove that expansionist ambitions varied across the Confederacy together with
demonstrating that policy enacted in Richmond was often the result of intense lobbying
from the provinces. The result is to show the Civil War in its true wider context, that the
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participants at the time consistently saw its outcome as a Confederate nation with
international and even global implications. At the same time, the nature of the planned
country changed, according to the progress of the Civil War. The pursuit of expansion
was certainly both a rhetorical and nostalgic exercise, but it was also a practical part of
nation building and preeminently important for a new country dependent on slavery.
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Acknowledgements
The debts accumulated during the completion of this dissertation are large. Family
and friends have helped enormously. My parents, Harvey and Lindsay Brettle, backed my
decision to choose an academic career without reserve. Both my brothers, Oliver and
Linton Brettle, courageously volunteered to serve as readers (and their offer was
accepted). David Eisenberg has been of great help and encouragement. Dick Crampton
provided last minute reading assistance on the dissertation. While Chris Payne and Nadia
Ziyadeh were instrumental in getting me to seriously think about going back to school
and Chris has gone on to be a loyal reader of this dissertation, I am so grateful.
I have been fortunate to have had excellent teachers and mentors. Gary W.
Gallagher has provided unstinting support from choosing the topic until the completion of
the dissertation. I have also benefited from the time, advice and encouragement of
Michael Holt, Peter Onuf and Elizabeth Varon. Other history department faculty at the
University of Cambridge, the University of Virginia and elsewhere have helped me
understand the field and whether they realize it or not, this project. These people include
Brian Balogh, Sir David Cannadine, Jon Parry, Brendan Simms, Paul Halliday, John
Stagg, Joseph Kett, the late Clive Trebilcock, the late Mark Kaplanoff, Boyd Hilton, Max
Edelson, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Joan Waugh, Philip Zelikow, Paul and Adrienne
Kershaw. Finally, I thank Karen Chase; from her English Department class on Charles
Dickens I learnt the importance of ambition to the mid-nineteenth century mind.
Some aspects of this dissertation have been presented at various conferences and
in other forums. I thank Phil Williams, Barbara Wright, Sandy von Thelen, Trice Taylor,
Bryan Hagan, Robert May, Robert Bonner, Sir Richard Carwardine, Jay Sexton, Brian
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Schoen, Bruce Levine, Alan Taylor, Glenna Matthews, Adam Arenson, Daniel Lynch,
Edward Rugemer, Matthew Karp, Thomas Schoonover, Howard Jones, Paul Quigley,
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Hugh Dubrelle, Amanda Foreman, C. Wyatt Evans, David
Gleeson, Simon Keith Lewis, David Brown, Jeremy Black, Mary Warnement, Frances
Pollard, Glenn Crothers, and many others for their suggestions and encouragement.
The dissertation could not have been completed without the fellowships, grants
and assistantships I have been lucky to be awarded. The Lee-Jackson Foundation
bestowed on me an Archibald Craig Fellowship for my first year at the University of
Virginia. Subsequently I have benefited from support from the University of Virginia
history department and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The dissertation would
not have been possible without research grants from the International Center for Jefferson
Studies, the Boston Athenaeum, the Virginia Historical Society, the Filson Historical
Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Huntington Library, the Dolph Briscoe Center
for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, and the North Caroliniana
Society. I also thank the library staff both at these institutions and especially at the
Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for their patience and guidance.
Finally, several colleagues assisted in this project. Chief among them are Will
Kurtz, Emily Seinfeld, and Rhonda Barlow who have been willing readers and editors, I
have also repeatedly profited from the vibrant discussion and constructive suggestions of
both the Early American Seminar and Civil War Group at the University of Virginia. I
thank all of the many participants over the last six years, particularly Mike Caires, Jon
Greenspan, Nic Wood, Whitney Martinko, Peter Luebke, David Flaherty, Randy Lewis
Flaherty, Billy Wayson, and Adam Dean who have helped me on my way.
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Table of Contents

Introduction
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Chapter 1: “The Destiny of Empire”: How leading Immediate Secessionists in late
1860 and early 1861 tried to counter the appeal of the Union.
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Chapter 2: “Demanding the Powers of Expansion” February to April 1861
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Chapter 3: “The Necessity of Continuing or Extending” April 1861 to February
1862
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Chapter 4: “Duty or Destiny”: Confederate Expansionist Ambitions in 1862
167

Chapter 5: "Weal or Woe": Confederate Expansionist Ambitions in 1863
229

Chapter 6: “The Bulwark Against Tyranny”: the Conservative Confederacy,
January to the fall of 1864
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Chapter 7: “Between Revolution and Survival”: the Choking of Confederate
Expansionist Ambitions, November 1864 - May 1865.
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Conclusion: What Are You Going to Do?
409

List of Abbreviations
423

Bibliography
424
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Introduction to “The Fortunes of War”: Confederate Expansionist
Ambitions in the American Civil War
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“All we ask is to be let alone”, declared President Jefferson Davis in his Message
to Congress on April 29, 1861. To that end, Confederates fought a war for independence
that they not only lost, but it also killed slavery. Confederates struggled to maintain a
contest that stretched across four years and achieved, albeit in part due to slavery,
mobilization rates and sustained casualty levels that remain unheard of in a democracy.
“The Fortunes of War” focuses on what Confederates intended to do once they had been
let alone, which was to grow their nation both commercially and territorially.
Confederates possessed expansionist ambitions in part because such aspirations were
inherent in the mid-nineteenth century Atlantic World. Expansion came naturally to
notions of the competitive system of international relations, political economy, nation
building, and the cult of progress and pursuit of perfection. Keen believers in these ideas
and reinforced by their faith, secessionists and Confederates regarded expansion as even
more of a prerequisite for their latecomer nation, which had been both endowed with the
responsibility of slavery and buoyed by the production of vast quantities of staple crops.
This work is above all a study of how secessionists and Confederates continued to pursue
these expansionist ambitions in wartime, sustained by their commitment to a revolution
and constantly adjusting to changing circumstances of the American Civil War.1
Expansion in “The Fortunes of War” meant both territorial and commercial
growth of the Confederate nation and its economy. Confederates wished to expand in the
traditional sense of annexing neighboring lands. Conscious of a need to build alliances in
order to compete against the United States, they also when necessary sought to play down
this potentially aggressive behavior in favor of more covert forms of expansion –

1 Jefferson Davis, “Message to Congress” April 29, 1861, JDC, 5:84.
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fostering the fragmentation of neighboring states or weak indigenous regimes.
Confederates also pursued expansion commercially. They wished to prevent competitors
growing staple crops, wanted to develop markets for their own products and identify
reliable suppliers of manufactured goods. Finally, Confederates sought prestige for their
nation and the enhancing of its status in the eyes of other nations and peoples.
This dissertation is about those who carried out policies and plans of expansion. It
is therefore about those leading secessionists and Confederates who were in a position to
enact legislation, make business decisions and influence others. Therefore the majority of
the individuals studied were politicians, merchants, lawyers, bankers, senior soldiers,
clergymen, planters and farmers. Most, but not all, were slaveholders. They were both ex-
Whigs and ex-Democrats and became both opponents and supporters of the Davis
administration. They were from across the Confederacy, and its supporters from the
Border States, California and those Confederates stationed abroad. Sometimes these
leading Confederates took their stances individually, recorded their views and sought to
persuade others in diaries, broadsides, correspondence, speeches, pamphlets and
newspaper articles. At other times, they debated and worked their way to conclusions
whether in Jefferson Davis’s cabinet, the Confederate State Department, federal and state
legislatures and their committees, commercial and professional conventions and the like.

The central claim of this dissertation is that Confederates had ambitious about
intentions for the post-war era. In part, they believed they had to be ambitious, as they
were struggling to build a new nation in a world governed, Confederates thought, by
competitive and consolidating nation states. From the outset, they knew that their nation