Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic.
In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.
Innehållsförteckning
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Vast World They Wanted
1. What Would an Independent South Mean for the World?
2. How War Changed the Future Nation
3. Self-Sufficiency at Home and Self-Assertion Abroad
4. Renewal Through Adversity
5. A Conservative Future
6. The Sacrifice Cannot be in Vain
Epilogue: What Are You Going to Do?
Notes
Bibliography
Om författaren
Adrian Brettle is Lecturer and Associate Director of the Political History and Leadership Program in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
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