Religious Studies at Arizona State University.He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Colossal Ambitions places the reader in May 1862 and a debate in the Confederacy about the potential building of an ironclad saltwater navy. Discussions in the Confederate Congress, in newspapers and private correspondence covered such topics as the resources needed, the impact the navy’s construction would have on the economy, and the uses these ships would be put to after the war, or even during wartime, if hostilities with the United States dragged on, inconclusively, long enough for the ships to be completed and put to sea. Politicians and businesspeople talked at the micro level about how such a plan would boost local economies around the shipyards. At the same time, these individuals considered the broader implications if such a scheme was realized, from breaking the Union’s blockade to protecting the expansion of Confederate exports and the acquisition of vital supplies from abroad.Learn more about Colossal Ambitions at the University of Virginia Press website.
Page 99 is a snapshot of a point of time, which reveals how Colossal Ambitions is a work that deconstructs Confederate long-range planning for peace as an independent country over the course of the Civil War virtually on a month by month, certainly season by season, basis. The recent fall of New Orleans to a Union flotilla, as well as military setbacks in Virginia and Tennessee, concentrated the minds of planners both in government and the private sector about military, especially naval vulnerability. While Union hostility and the refusal of European powers to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation added a sense of isolationism to this unease. Above all, peace seemed remote and the prospects of a fleet therefore the expression of a defiant vision of economic self-sufficiency, territorial expansion, and projection of power abroad that the survival of the Confederacy in a hostile world seemed to demand. The topic of the navy is a leitmotif of the book. Its existence and strength (1864 would be when naval plans recurred with even greater gusto) was needed most when the future world seemed less than ideal for Confederates. The world as it was, rather than what they wished it to be. At the same time, the navy supported objectives in peacetime that were consistently important for Confederates: increased exports arising from growing staple-crop production (especially cotton) in turn contingent on the recovery and then expansion of slavery. However, as the debates on page 99 show, the navy plans add nuance to this picture. The lumber industry (which did indeed flourish in the South after the war) was expected to grow, especially in North Carolina, while shipbuilding would necessitate a degree of industrialization and technical development that would surely be at odds with the preservation of a predominantly agricultural economy based on the labor of enslaved people.
--Marshal Zeringue
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