In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics,
Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis
and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate
States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for
the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of
equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate
government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British
abolitionists championing inequality among whites.
Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to
build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style
warfare with large conscripted armies. States' rights, they believed,
should not preclude the national government from exercising power.
Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality
among whites, favored radical states' rights, and supported
slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white
supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they
preferred decentralized guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and
hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would
willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving
independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become
an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states.
Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to
Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on
the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as
secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly
relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would
secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the
1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the
pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain
and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct
assistance from French soldiers in Mexico.
Zvengrowski's important new interpretation of Confederate ideology
situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It
also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar
South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore,
it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C. Calhoun, who
befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as
his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point's
superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.
