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.
Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers
Davis, who.
Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C.
It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true Nature of Confederate ideology.
Zvengrowski\'s important new interpretation of Confederate Ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition.
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.
When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession.
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.
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.
Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states.
The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence.
Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralized guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain.
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.
States\' rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power.
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.
The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites.
They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy.
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
