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 an ally and model for the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. This faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed the Republican Party 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 to receive support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, in contrast, wanted the Confederacy to become a near-equal ally of France and the protector of sympathetic northern states controlled by Democrats.
Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats who came to see Bonapartist France as a strategic and ideological ally during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Dubbed War Hawks, they supported the War of 1812 and continued to believe that any American sympathy for Britain was treacherous. The War Hawks lost power on the national level beginning in the 1820s, but regained it as Davis rose to become secretary of war and cultivated friendly relations with Napoleon III's France. Davis warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House in the next election. 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 captivating new interpretation of the ideology underpinning the Confederacy 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: Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake; Jefferson, whom may have been a Napoleon I sympathizer; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point's superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.