“[The war] divides, separates, despoils and destroys, until it seems as if all old things are passing away and as if the Nations, North & South, and all things in them were becoming new.”
So spoke Henry A. Wise, acting major general and former governor of Virginia, in a letter to his wife written at midnight between November 13 and 14, 1863, from his headquarters near Charleston, S.C. U.S. gunboats bombarding Fort Sumter to rubble had disrupted the general’s sleep that night, the previous fortnight, Wise had been busy entertaining Jefferson Davis on his visit (including beating him in a horse race), writing public letters on the administration’s future financial policies, enjoying the active social calendar of an officer in General P.G.T. Beauregard’s command, and doing his part to hold off the Union assault on Charleston. Wise also took the time to think about the Confederacy once the conflict was over; a reassurance that somehow the present trials would be the cause of future power and prosperity.
Many other leading Confederates, including Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, and Henry S. Foote, and women including Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Augusta Jane Evans, and Varina Davis, believed that the Confederacy was on the threshold of becoming a great world power. That sentiment was also expressed in meetings of wartime commercial conventions, in the Confederate Congress, in diplomatic correspondence, newspaper editorials, pamphlets, and even a novel.
Those who believed in this Confederate vision considered that it arose logically from the events and trends from the late 1840s and 1850s. International abolitionism was apparently declining, and even antislavery powers allegedly considered large scale adoption of indentured servitude as a second-best alternative to slavery. Then there
