The Irony of Confederate Diplomacy: Visions of Empire, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Quest for Nationhood

Lincoln's election, by undercutting that dominance, necessitated secession so that southerners could continue to benefit from slavery's hemispheric rebound.4 FBuoyed by such understandings, many disunionists anticipated that their new nation might pursue its particular manifest destiny southward and acquire tropical territory after secession, and that such acquisitions would further bolster their slave economy. Since 1800, Americans had been aggressively pushing their nation's sovereignty southerly, a process insufficiently addressed in the standard narrative of American history that invariably interprets U.S. territorial growth as inexorably toward the Pacific. Yet once we recognize how imperial ambitions fed the secessionist vision at the war's inception and how these ambitions transitioned into unanticipated foreign policies and public opinion trends under Confederate governance, we unavoidably become receptive to internationalizing our comprehension of the entire flow of the war.51 Finally, at a time when Americans are bitterly contesting the legitimacy of public displays of Confederate flags, monuments, and other Dixie memorabilia, we should reflect on how the preceding narrative reveals the southern embryonic nation founded in Montgomery in February 1861 as actually more committed to slavery than is usually acknowledged, even by the flag's most vitriolic critics.