Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle (review)

Colossal Ambitions explores how Confederate policy makers “engaged in a surprising degree of sustained and often strikingly progressive planning to secure their nation’s emergence as a world power” (1). Adrian Brettle, currently lecturer and associate director of the Political History and Leadership program at Arizona State University, offers a deeply researched account of Confederate planning and the “surprisingly resilient optimism” that informed how planners understood the Confederacy and its place in the world (1).

What did an independent South mean for the world? In the short amount of time between secession and the start of the U.S. Civil War, planners foregrounded commercial ties and dispatched commissioners to the United States and Great Britain in February and March 1861. They optimistically believed that “the Union and Britain would be the Confederacy’s most important commercial partners and that this shared interest would be instrumental in preventing future armed conflict” (11). At the same time, planners made the extension of slavery and territorial expansion national priorities in order to increase the production and export of staple crops. Planners could be inconsistent and vague, but, Brettle argues, they nevertheless undertook “concrete steps with worked-out implications” (41). Once the war commenced, widespread expectations of a brief conflict deeply influenced Confederate planning. Planners enacted an expansionist agenda and intensified their vision of free trade. The experience of war led the Confederate press and government to assert the Confederacy’s right to be a great power.

Union successes in early 1862 forced planners to reassess some of their ideas, although they remained intensely ambitious. The second half of 1862 and the first half of 1863 seemingly vindicated this optimism. Ideas about economic planning began to shift. Planners argued that the Confederacy should not just supply staple crops to other nations, but should also become a competitive industrializing nation. Confederates sought to dominate the American continent. They eyed a possible commercial union with the midwestern states. The Confederate government strove to develop an oceangoing fleet to support Confederate industrial and commercial ambitions. By the end of 1862, many Confederates believed their destiny rested on a more solid foundation than in 1861. Military failures in the second half of 1863 led planners to different, but no less optimistic, ideas. Indeed, “the paradox of a weaker power in the world that stood for broader, more universal objectives emerged” (111). Claims that the Confederacy fought for republican self-government and the interests of humanity, while laughable, nevertheless resonated with many Confederates during the Civil War.

Confederate planners continued their ambitious planning in 1864. Planners did not see slavery as doomed, Brettle contends. Rather, they considered the peculiar institution the foundation of their ambitions for the postwar years and, moreover, the source of their power. Furthermore, many Confederates believed themselves enlightened visionaries and aspired to global leadership. The first two-thirds of 1864 gave Confederates some reasons for optimism, but the last third did not. Still, many planners and officials continued to develop colossally ambitious plans. Unsurprisingly, however, “detached from the need for these plans to be moored in present-day reality, some of these internationalist visions once more anticipated slavery and territorial expansion and global free trade, which resembled the most optimistic predictions made in 1861” (179). As the war drew to a close, the predictions and ambitions became increasingly vaguer, fainter, and less coherent. Confederates mourned the outcome of the war but nevertheless adjusted to new conditions.

Brettle correctly notes that “embracing the ‘Lost Cause’ memory of the Civil War required a painful readjustment by optimistic planners who had looked forward to founding a slaveholding empire” (219). Planners and policy makers clearly did not think God was only on the side of the largest battalions. None of them understood the war as an exercise in futility in which they were doomed to be overrun by Lincoln’s myrmidons. In some senses, Confederate ambitions echo the arrogance the slave oligarchy manifested during...