I don't understand how you could not have been aware of the wider ideology and transnational ambitions. You brought up Robert Rhett. Wider ideology and transnational ambitions is what he was all about. BTW, he did not make an address declaring S.Carolina's reasons for secession, he made an address to the other Slaveholding States (as to why they should follow S.Carolina) as the self designated spokesman and "father of secession". I have already mentioned what he said a few days after Lincoln's election: "We will expand, as our growth and civilization shall demand - over Mexico - over the isles of the sea - over the far-off Southern tropics - until we shall establish a great Confederation of Republics - the greatest, freest and most useful the world has ever seen."
Rhett's address to the other Slaveholding (southern) States ends like this:
United together, and we must be the most independent, as we are the most important among the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us in forming a confederacy of Slaveholding States.
One might come to the conclusion that Rhett was a mega-maniacal bigot who put a very clear and strict qualifier on the shangri la fantasy of his confederacy of states. Incidently, he owned two plantations, @two hundred slaves, and ran a newspaper. Do not forget for one minute that slaves were valuable property and the most efficient way to increase your "fold" was to keep your female slaves pregnant (whether by direct intervention of the Master, or by a handpicked stud).
I don't understand how you could not have been aware of the wider ideology and transnational ambitions.
I don't see how you could have been unaware of who is buried in Grant's tomb!
Robert Rhett was a congressman and known for his politicking, and NO, you will NOT find general knowledge in the body politick of his association with the Golden Circle, any more than anyone was aware Dr. Carson is a Seventh-Day Adventist (whose church was the mother stock of the Branch Davidian) until the Lamestream Media started making a big deal of it a few days ago in their cheesy campaign to score a few political points and drive Republicans toward another beatable RiNO nominee.
I came to Rhett via discussions in this forum of the causes and declarations of cause of the Civil War. Why should I have cared that Rhett was also a fly-fisherman, or a Woodman of the World? But you assign the responsibility to me retroactively, as if I'd missed a homework assignment. Which brings up another point: We don't accept homework assignments around here, especially not when some punk jumps up and announces that a) you didn't do your homework and b) the deadline was last week.
So don't do it.
As for your not finding Rhett's speech, well, I don't see how you could have missed it, since I told you to look for a speech (actually more of a pamphlet). But I believe he did give that address to the Georgia secession convention, at which fellow South Carolinian Robert Toombs also spoke, as well as (in opposition) Alexander Stephens, whose later "sense of the convention" speech on causes is very often quoted by Unionist aggrandizers and South-bashers without either context or nuance or any explanations of what the reader is looking at, which did not represent Stephens's own views, which were markedly different. Imagine the Declaration of Independence as it would look if written by a Tory dragooned to the Patriot cause by the weight of his loyalty to neighbors.
One might come to the conclusion that Rhett was a mega-maniacal bigot ....
You just stepped on your own crank, fella. Bigots are not visionaries. So which do you want, la-la fantasy or Archie Bunker bigotry?
As for "bigotry", I know a FReeper who got thrown off this board a few years ago for vigorously disputing the proposition that Lincoln was a race-relations visionary, by quoting him repeatedly and in extenso from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln used vernacular to refer to the black race and explain his own belief in strict social and political inequality.
Many of these ACW threads have run 3000 posts and more, and the ground has been plowed many times over, on the basic claims and counterclaims about the political underpinnings of our subject. And oh, by the way, we did reach elenchus, claimed and proven by appeal to the black-letter words of the Constitution and to the Federalist, fons et origo of originalism, that the South had the right and power to leave the Union and that yes, the People, acting as a State, has the final power to dissolve all ties to either the Union or the British Empire and go their separate way.