From the book's publisher's page:
When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.
For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery’s most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.
As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their “vast southern empire” was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
From Fergus M. Bordewich's review in The Wall Street Journal:
Cuba was a particular obsession for pro-slavery policy makers. The island’s wealth was fabulous—in the 1850s, it produced fully a quarter of the world’s sugar—and slavery was firmly established there. American diplomats tried for years to purchase the island outright and forestall any attempt at emancipation by Cuba’s Spanish rulers. “We regard an attempt . . . to blast with the plague of emancipation that garden of the West, as a crime against civilization,” wrote the Charleston Mercury, a frequent mouthpiece for pro-slavery opinion.
Many slaveholders hoped that expansionist efforts would produce new slave states and add heft to Southern power in Congress, as well as new wealth built on the backs of the enslaved. In fact, their more extravagant hopes never bore fruit, not so much because Northerners resisted—though some did—but because the South itself was divided on the issue. Gulf Coast Democrats wanted more territory, but, as Mr. Karp acutely notes, “Upper South moderates, cautious Whigs and ex-Whigs, and even southeastern conservatives generally opposed the most aggressive schemes”—in part because the result might not be what they hoped for. Few southern leaders, he writes, “believed that the United States could digest a meal so unpalatable as a free black Cuba.”
With the benefit of hindsight, the story of America’s pro-slavery foreign policy is mostly a study in failure. Apart from the acquisition of Texas, the southward expansion that slaveholders sought didn’t take place, and slavery itself disintegrated in the heat of civil war. But Mr. Karp makes a persuasive case that we cannot grasp our country’s history without taking account of slavery’s dreams and ambitions. “We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved,” writes Mr. Karp, “but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions.”
Additional links:
Matthew Karp discuss the tensions between slaveholders and abolitionists that led to the annexation of Texas as a slave state on Texas Public Radio's show The Source (21 minutes)
A discussion between Mr. Karp and Ibram X. Kendi at Black Perspectives
A lengthy and informative review by Benjamin Park
A discussion of the book between Mr. Karp and Timothy Shenk
The book's page at Professor Park's blog
Mr. Karp answers some questions about the book
Mr. Karp discuss This Vast Southern Empire at an event cosponsored by The New School and Jacobin Magazine (45 minutes)
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