An interview with Adrian Brettle

ED: What inspired you to become a historian?

AB: I have always loved reading history back for as long as I can remember, one of my prized possessions was a historical atlas and I used to pour over it and my imagination and reading could blur. The great contest between the Persians and the Greeks perhaps was the initial catalyst and in the school library I read all the accounts I could find and drew endless maps; as a class around 10 years old we watched the (1962) 300 Spartans and I was mesmerized by the scenes at Thermopylae.  As ever inspirational teachers are crucial, Mr. Whittaker taught me on and off for almost a decade and he was crucial with his enthusiasm and provision of reading lists to enable students to explore topics further if they so wished. Whereas an unnamed awful teacher who seemed obsessed with the need for present-day empathy with individuals in the past roused my indignation: even decades ago there was bad presentist history being taught at schools and universities, at the time I just felt it to be ridiculous, and was determined not to impose our values onto the past.  

I read history at Cambridge University as an undergraduate concentrating on British 17^th – 19^th century political and constitutional history, but chose not at that stage to become a historian after all history is a brilliant preparation for all kinds of careers for which you need to craft arguments, make sure all your generalizations are supported by specific pieces of evidence, and communicate in a clear and compelling fashion; so I moved into marketing positions in telecommunications corporations, where I could use these skills in a commercial setting. In the meantime, I became a part-time historian writing articles on British political history, especially on the Conservative Party (at one point, I seriously toyed with going back to Cambridge to research a thesis on the crisis of conservatism in Britain on the eve of the first world war) but what converted me into a historian was the sparking of interest in a very different topic.

ED: What is your area of specialty, and what sparked your interest in that topic?

AB: Other than a year at a U.S. boarding school where I studied AP US history and did a research project on propaganda in the First World War, oddly in my English literature class, I had little to no exposure to U.S. history. To my regret, I did not study any U.S. history topics at Cambridge even though along with many of my generation we watched with fascination the Ken Burns 1990 documentary on the Civil War, and I had noted my older brother’s enthusiasm with the American presidency when he did a course on that as part of his own economics and politics degree at university. 

After a decade of working in telecommunications, I began to realize that opportunities to advance would demand much more of my time managing people and I am a very poor manager! Coincidentally an old Cambridge professor with whom I had kept in touch had suggested I attend a conference he was organizing on British foreign policy; this evolved into my delivering a paper on the primacy of foreign policy in British political party formation in the mid-nineteenth century. It was while researching what would later become a book chapter that I saw the American Civil War (which became my area of specialty) through the eyes of the British party leaders, and I began to share their mesmerized fascination with a conflict that in its intensity, duration, leadership, issues, even its soldiers and tactics seemed so odd and inexplicable to European eyes. 

Once this interest was stimulated, I first considered a study of British diplomacy and the war and, to my surprise and delight, encountered a reciprocal interest from the University of Virginia in supporting my return to school, but soon realized how much more important was Americans’ own assessment of the significance of the conflict and how that changed over time. Especially once at Virginia how overlooked and surprising was the Confederates’ understanding of what was at stake in the war. My dissertation advisor, Gary Gallagher, who had recently revolutionized our understanding of Confederate nationalism with his 1997 book The Confederate War, helped me to see what the practical implications of this ideology was…

ED: Explain the thesis of your book, Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. What inspired you to write this book?

AB: Because we know that the Confederacy died in 1865, it can be easy to miss the fact that not only did many Confederates anticipate victory in the war, but also that they had specific ideas about the society and polity this sacrifice in blood would conjure into being – In what became a history of the future, I investigated what these Confederates profoundly hoped would happen. I demonstrate the truly global scope of Confederate nationalist ambitions as these white Southerners envisioned the Confederacy’s imminent emergence as a world power. While these plans were constantly revised because these visions were pegged to expectations of military outcomes, I concluded that these patriotic Confederates remained convinced virtually to the end of the Civil War that their nation would survive to implement progressive programs envisioned and debated during the Conflict.

More than a decade ago my inquiry started on whether prewar southern-led schemes for the expansion of slavery continued covertly during the Confederacy. Assumed secretly because there is as much unanimity as there can be among historians that publicly at least the Confederacy, being as it was desperate for foreign recognition and fighting for its very existence, had to renounce emphatically anything remotely ambitious. I was therefore surprised to discover first in Richmond, Virginia newspapers that Confederate journalists boldly proclaimed that they were seceding and fighting the war in order to change the world. Naturally, we should use scholarly detachment about what is written in the press, but ambitious plans for the future were also expressed, and then attempted to be implemented by leading Confederates whom I term the planners. What united these range of voices and media was that they believed while the Civil War raged on, that they were on the threshold of a new great power arriving on the world stage.

ED: Many Americans have heard of “American Exceptionalism.” How would you define “Confederate Exceptionalism”?

AB: Exceptional in their confidence in the institution of slavery, Confederates disregarded indications that slavery was on the wane throughout the world and instead expected to rely on the slavery-based, staple crop-exporting economy that in their view had served the South so well. They insisted that the international abolitionist wave had crested and that the world was eager for the new southern nation to lead a daring counteroffensive to bolster slavery where it existed, inBrazil as well as the US South, reestablish it where it had been foolishly abandoned across the rest of the Caribbean including support of Spain’s attempts to recover control and reimpose slavery in Santo Domingo, and encourage its spread to all regions where it might be profitably employed—especially Mexico and Central America.

Rhetoric aside, international leaders and world markets—Confederates contended – craved the stability, productivity, and profitability that slavery when properly managed by southern slaveholders, provided. Even during the war’s final stages, when Confederates sought negotiations with the Federal Government including terms of reunion, Confederate planners never accepted slavery as doomed, and all visions of the Southern future rested securely, they thought, on the cornerstone of slavery. Remarkably they continued to believe that emancipation and reunion were still negotiable even into 1865.

AB: They looked in other directions as well as the south, especially to the West with access to the Pacific Ocean, upon which the full realization of the Confederacy’s trade potential rested; to Indian territory where they expected (based on their assumption that they were racially more tolerant than northerners) to find ready Native American allies perhaps to be incorporated as subordinate states; as well as inviting disaffected border and even midwestern states then in the Union to join the Confederacy once the war was over.

Confederate exceptionalism embraced the cult of free trade shared with middle-class liberal English and no one else. Commerce would lead to the other world powers, including the United States, to willingly do business with the slave power thriving in a free trade system. The production of cotton and other agricultural commodities would be expanded by not only a greater geographical area but also productivity would be boosted by internal improvements and the adoption of better technology. As a result, southern exports, protected by a powerful navy, would flow freely to hungry markets across the globe, cementing the Confederacy’s vital place within the community of nations through bonds of mutual self-interest.

ED: How did the ongoing Civil War impact the Confederate government’s ability to maintain and develop foreign relations, particularly as the conflict progressed?

AB: Historians habitually condemn the Davis administration’s diplomacy as incompetent because the Confederacy lost the Civil War and therefore its diplomacy failed. If the Confederacy had secured its independence through military means, as it nearly did, then its diplomats would have been celebrated as persons of genius in international relations. The military conflict therefore was central to the success of its foreign relations, especially as the most important power in Confederate eyes was the United States. The war effort was to compel an armistice and then peace negotiations and these goals remained in place even into 1865; it was a shock when the Lincoln administration declined to deal with the Confederate government, as it secured the surrender of each army and then dealt with the several states separately. 

Earlier, successive Confederate secretaries of state sent commissioners to countries and peoples and individuals deemed to be sympathetic: Native Americans, Mexico, Brazil, Britain, France, the Pope in Rome, Spain, Belgium, and Denmark. It only planned delegations to the remaining great powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia because each was assumed to be hostile and pro-Union and this shows the parameters in which Confederate diplomacy operated. The commissioners did not practice diplomacy as we would understand it, they were enthusiastic boosters for the territorial, slavery and commercial ambitions of the slaveholders’ republic and other than proposing commercial agreements tended to assume that the self-interest of these various nations would dictate, without much effort on the diplomats’ part, a recognition of Confederate independence. 

The impact therefore of the Civil War on Confederate foreign relations was how it changed the expected date when peace would come and what form of independence the Confederacy would have from the United States. From the autumn of 1864 Confederates were prepared to surrender control of their foreign policy to some sort of federal authority and in so doing ditch their previous policies such as ending the Monroe Doctrine and supporting the regime of the emperor Maximilian in Mexico. 

ED: In retrospect, how did the foreign policy decisions made by the Confederacy influence its ultimate failure and the post-war relationship between the United States and foreign nations?

AB: I think the main consequence was to ensure that Reconstruction was a shock for which ex-Confederates were ill-prepared. The main foreign policy decision by Davis and his colleagues was to act out their delusion that both Lincoln and the Republican party and the northern Democrats would have been prepared to tolerate any form of disunion.  Hence the long-term enmity that followed in Reconstruction. 

AB: Britain did almost join the war on two occasions unconnected to any Confederate diplomatic efforts, once when the mail steam packet Trent was seized by the US Navy in late 1861 and again in the fall of 1862 when the Confederates militarily appeared, in the words of British Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston, “to be carrying all before them.” Perhaps the greatest mistake then was Lee’s decision to follow up his two earlier victories at Second Bull Run and the Seven Days Battles outside Richmond in the summer of 1862 to attempt a third victory outside Virginia on northern soil. The British were poised to intervene in the wake of the Second Bull Run and only paused when they received news that Lee had invaded Maryland. However, Union diplomacy contributed to the Confederate failure: Secretary of State William Henry Seward and Minister in London Charles Francis Adams made it clear to the British that any recognition of Confederate independence or even an attempt at mediation would be treated as an act of war by the U.S.

ED: Given your background in British and Atlantic World history, do you plan on engaging these topics again in the future?

AB: Certainly. My current project will be a comparative study of the Civil War as a military conflict. American and overseas observers compared each side’s grand strategy, operations, and tactics to the contemporary wars in the Crimea, Italy, Austro-Prussian, and Franco-Prussian wars, as well as the Mexican-American War. I believe the outcome of this project will be a deeper understanding of the nature of American leadership in war, together with the unique role of the citizen-soldier in the U.S. armies, and the challenge to individual liberty in wartime.  It seems that many Europeans disparaged the US volunteer soldier as untrained, impossible to command, and therefore ineffective on the battlefield. 

For example, according to a dispatch to London on April 2, 1848, from the (acting) British minister in Washington, Sir John Crampton: the Marquis de Radepont, a French intelligence officer, had accompanied the U.S. army’s march to Mexico City in 1847 and had subsequently furnished the French Government with a report on the campaign. If Crampton is to be believed (presumably his French colleague let him see a copy of this report) “without expecting to find among the American forces anything resembling the order and efficiency of a European army, [Radepont] seems to have been struck by their total want of all that unity of action which is deemed indispensable for the success of military operations, more especially in an enemy’s country. The absence of control by the Commander in Chief [Winfield Scott] over the Volunteer Troops was particularly remarkable—and had not the resistance of the Mexicans been utterly contemptible in a military point of view, M. de Radepont is of [the] opinion that General Scott’s army might have, on more than one occasion, been thrown into irretrievable confusion.” However, given Radepont was later to be an advocate of Napoleon III’s adventure in Mexico, one does not have too much confidence in his judgment! Perhaps Radepont gained his ‘intelligence’ from newspapers. 

I am also interested in trans-Atlantic Conservative political thought in the nineteenth century. I have discovered to my horror in recent academic conferences historians today regard conservatism as simply white supremacy but from their differing perspectives southern slaveholders, conservative Republicans, and the British opposition Conservative Party did try and formulate barriers to change in this time of political and industrial revolution. However, unlike their radical and liberal opponents, they were reluctant to reduce these to abstract principles that had universal application.

ED: What has your research taught you about America’s founding principles and history?

The Civil War was consciously a renewed contest over the legacy of the founding fathers both sides considered themselves to be the sole representative of the principles of 1776 and the opposing side a tyranny dedicated to their overthrow. Both the Union and Confederacy to the respective supporters represented the last bastions of liberty in the world. To both the future of republican self-government for the world was at stake and would be determined by the contest.

For the Confederates, the Union, or rather the Lincoln Administration represented what they called mob democracy or government by numbers in which the majority exercised absolute control. The centralizing tendencies and protectionism of the Union, and the denial of local popular sovereignty to determine slavery in the territories represented the creation of a consolidated government determined to conquer the world. Whereas for the Republican party, the slave power conspiracy remained potent: the slaveholders represented an aristocracy or an oligarchy that tyrannized over both enslaved African Americans and non-slaveholding poor whites and were not content with their dominance of federal institutions and privileged position in the republic were dedicated on creating an empire of slavery dedicated to expansion and enslavement of northern whites. Importantly to defend liberty against these threats, the citizen and the nation at large had to be prepared in theory to surrender it in terms of war hence the willingness of many to abridge free speech or self-censor while volunteering to serve in the army. These were of course ideals and in practice, the exercise of the amendments to the Constitution especially the First Amendment were bitterly contested if they infringed upon the operation of the draft: a pacifist preacher for example posed a bitter dilemma for those who cherished the founding principles but feared that their exercise weakened the ability of the republic to preserve itself. 

ED: What’s one thing you wish that every student knew about American history?

Students today do not understand what “Union” meant to individuals living during the Civil War Era and before, it was not simply the territorial integrity of the nation or even the national identity of the people living in it but rather the purpose of the nation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the purpose still displayed remarkable consistency with the preamble of the Declaration of Independence: republican self-government, the right to rise from nothing to be everything, the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor, and so forth. 

Students can be taught by means of evidence. For example, Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1861, insisted the Union was perpetual and closed on a lyrical note. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” In Lincoln’s first Message to Congress, in July 1861, he addressed the meaning of Union not only for the United States but also for the world. Secession “presents the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” Then at the Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, he celebrated the dead United States soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion” at the battle of Gettysburg so “that this nation, Under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Finally in his Message to Congress, on December 6, 1864, Lincoln stated: “In a great national crisis, like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable—almost indispensable. . . In this case, the common end is the maintenance of the Union . . .” Emancipation, added Lincoln, stood “among the means to secure that end.” 

Not only Lincoln but also the soldiers who, against the odds (the Confederacy had a greater chance of victory than the colonies had against Great Britain in the Revolutionary War), defeated secession. A Massachusetts Infantryman wrote, “I do feel that the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend, and if we are overcome then farewell to freedom.” Whereas an Ohio Cavalrymanfelt theUnited States victory was necessary because of “the great principles of liberty and self-government at stake. . . for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century, and Monarchs, Kings, and Aristocrats will be more powerful against their subjects than ever.”

And finally, a Connecticut Infantryman: 

“[If] traitors be allowed to overthrow and break asunder ties most sacred–costing our forefathers long years of blood and toil, all the hope and confidence of the world in the capacity of men for self-government will be lost . . .”

ED: Fascinating insights, thank you for your time!

Elliott Drago serves as the JMC’s Manager of the History Initiative. He is a historian of American history and the author of Street Diplomacy: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820-1850 (Johns-Hopkins University Press, 2022).