Booknotes: The First Pariah State

New Arrival:

• The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World by Robert E. Bonner (Princeton UP, 2026)

From the description: "In 1861, proslavery secessionists severed ties with the United States, launched the Confederacy, and readied their new government to join the international community as a sovereign nation." In The First Pariah State, historian Robert Bonner "tells the story of how a transatlantic publicity campaign dashed Confederate hopes by ostracizing its rebellion as an immoral, global menace."

With the largest South American state, Brazil, and the Spanish Empire still holding onto slavery (and they would do so for more than two decades after the end of the American Civil War), and with neither shunned internationally, convincing the world that the CSA was a unique proslavery threat was an essential part of the argument. According to Bonner, "anti-Confederates as a group routinely took up this issue, though never to the full satisfaction of skeptics." The chief proponent of the claim that the Confederacy displayed "unique depravity" as a slaveholding power was Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who was also the domestic ringleader of those who wanted to alter international law in ways that would formally ban recognition of states like the Confederacy (pp. 8-9).

Regardless, the international campaign went beyond antislavery activism in its scale and sophistication. More from the description: "Improvised indictments circulated secessionists’ most incendiary words across the world. The Union and its foreign allies condemned the marauding Southern navy for disrupting high-seas commerce, violating civilized norms, and preparing for the resumption of the African slave trade. Abraham Lincoln and Senator Charles Sumner sought to convert rhetorical barbs and maritime anxieties into novel doctrines of international law designed to counter rogue regimes. And Union opinion-makers, including Black abolitionists, worked with European supporters to stymie the South’s naval expansion, war finances, and diplomatic efforts to gain formal recognition."

In the introduction, Bonner acknowledges the pitfalls of applying modern diplomatic and political constructs to the mid-nineteenth century world order, but he nevertheless maintains that the Confederacy fits the mold as a precursor. One has to wonder, however, the degree to which things might have changed had the Confederate states achieved their independence. Attempting to paint the Confederacy as a rogue state seems to have been effective wartime propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not difficult to imagine European powers, given past history, trans-Atlantic cultural ties, and the Confederacy having a form of government closely based on the USA model, forging diplomatic ties and trade agreements with a newly independent CSA. Perhaps he speculates on that in his coverage of the post-Civil War period.

More from the description: "International worries about the Confederate rebellion waned after U.S. victory, and the Southern pariahdom of the 1860s left few enduring traces in international law or overseas remembrances. In fact, over the next century and a half, the pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” mythology proved to be as powerful abroad as it was within the restored United States."