Confederate Imaginations with the Federals in the Postwar Order

When two old antebellum Democratic Party colleagues, Francis P. Blair Sr. of Maryland and Confederate president Jefferson Davis met in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1865, they found much to discuss. As historians have noted, the veteran Border State politician and journalist wished to render reunion palatable to Davis. To this end, he hoped to tempt Davis into a joint program of expansion within the United States, and, by so doing, rekindle antebellum American nationalism and the popularity of reunion. Davis had a very different agenda. Historians know well and have documented his commitment to Confederate independence, but less understood is how the president envisaged the consequent postwar relationship between the Confederacy and the United States and how he believed the political map of North America to be in flux. Davis welcomed the possibilities of mutual territorial growth, which to him superseded the proposal for reunion because it provided an enduring basis of independence for each side with improved bilateral relations.¹

The meeting between Blair and Davis was not an isolated event within the context of a continuing brutal war. From late 1863 onward, proposals for talks or talks about talks between the sides, circulated among Confederate leaders, notwithstanding the intensity of the conflict, the fiery propaganda directed against the Union, and the public stance of statesmen expressive of their determination to continue the war to the bitter end. It was precisely because the future had become so murky as a result of the progress of the war that leaders adopted what historian Thomas Bender termed, in another context, the lateral state of mind. They looked at what was going on in the Union in order to determine their own future. At the same time, Confederate observers of the United States considered that the divisions manifest among Federals provided reasonable grounds for hope that the compromise they had sought with their adversaries since 1860 would at last be possible.²

Looking to the future had become increasingly important for Confederates. The duration and destruction of the war meant that the past had become very remote while the future remained unclear. “This eleventh month of the third year of a still continuing devastating war,” the former governor of Virginia and Brig. Gen. Henry A. Wise wrote from his command outside Charleston while being kept awake at midnight amid the deafening din of Union naval guns shelling Fort Sumter, “divides, separates, despoils and destroys.” Wise also believed this destruction would continue “until it seems as if all old things are passing away and as if the Nations, North & South, and all things in them were becoming new.” On Christmas Eve 1863, another former state governor, Albert G. Brown of Mississippi—who had once been Davis’s antagonistic colleague in the US Senate and now sat in its Confederate equivalent—rose in that chamber and defiantly declared, after expounding on the travails of his home state, “I drop the curtain and refuse even a glimpse into the future.”³

Even at its outset, the war had been for the Davis administration an unwelcome interruption between the citizens of the Confederate States and the fulfillment of their destiny of commercial and slavery expansion—a goal always best achieved as an independent nation-state with a harmonious relationship with the Union. Historians of Confederate nationalism tend to overlook the importance of compromise and coexistence with neighbors in their accounts of visions of the future nation-state. By 1864, with the prospect of yet another hard campaign season ahead, the desire to end the war increased and members of the government believed their Federal counterparts shared this disposition. They interpreted such uncompromising public pronouncements of reunion and emancipation from the Federals, for example Lincoln’s December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, as both a cover for a similar disposition and a ploy to start negotiations from a position of strength.⁴

The Union and Confederate Works before Petersburg, from Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden, Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War (1866; repr., New York: Fairfax Press, 1868...