This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy

by Matthew Karp

Most leaders of the U.S. expansion in the years before the Civil War were southern slaveholders. As Matthew Karp shows, they were nationalists, not separatists. When Lincoln’s election broke their grip on foreign policy, these elites formed their own Confederacy not merely to preserve their property but to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Civil War, The United States Of America

362 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 2, 2016

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Southerners are fiery, voluptuous, indolent, unsteady, independent and jealous zealous of their own liberties while northerners are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, chicaning, superstitious, and hypocritical in their religion." ~ Thomas Jefferson

I'm from the South. I grew up around people who thought it was important for me to "know my history" and extolled that I was simply "ignorant of our history". I might call this the Donald Livingston ethic for a virtuous and blame free south. These people remind me a lot of the academics Karp talks about in this book. They live in a world where men do horrible things and they act as though they're absolved of any moral judgment.

Despite the fact that I could see on their face that they were hypocritical in their position, I felt it was important to read Calhoun for myself. I've read a Disquisition on Government twice and what most conservatives will tell you is that disagreeing with him means you've already made your mind up about him. If Karp's book does anything it puts in stark contrast this position and any reasonable person.

Calhoun was a small, pathetic man who spent his career arguing around in circles in defense of empire building and only saw success because he was filling an intellectual vacuum. That intellectual vacuum existed because southerners knew slavery was wrong, but it was too profitable to give up and they needed an academic and intellectual defense for their injustice they committed. There are many others Karp talks about outside of Calhoun, many of which are obscure now but were big names then. One narrative he tracks extensively is these slaveholders obsession with Cuba which bled into the next century after the defeat of the south and its obsession, which turned to a tradition at that point, almost lead to nuclear war.

Nobody can say I'm simply ignorant of my history. I know my history and it fucking sucks. There is little to be proud of from this history and if we ignore it or humor those who find pride in it going forward then we're doomed to repeat it.

"Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange." ~ Doug North

Slavery was an institution, a profitable one that you would have likely defended if you lived in the antebellum South and you must ask yourself as someone who says that slavery is wrong today:

What institutions do I defend today that in the future will be looked down upon like slavery.

[Porter Broyles]

This is a must read book for anybody interested in the causes of the Civil War.

The book explores the 70 year period leading up to Civil War and demonstrates how slavery was a focal point of the south. One of the more interesting aspects of the book were the analysis pertaining to the evolving differences in focus between the north and south. Karp shows how the North focused on industrialization and internal developments, while the South focused on foreign policy and military issues. How? By showing the involvement in various cabinet level positions and Congressional committees. Almost all of the Secretary of States, Secretaries of War, Secretaries of Navy, military related committees, and foreign relations committees were dominated by southerners. The cabinet positions and congressional committees that focused on industrialization and internal development were dominated by northerners.

What I was not expecting when I read the book was an analysis of slavery in Cuba and Brazil. The book goes into a significant amount of detail about slavery in those two countries, how it differed from slavery in America, and foreign relations with them.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once I started reading this book, I couldn't get it out of my head; it imbues my thinking about politics, current and past, and about people, more generally. And not in a good way. Karp does a phenomenal job of writing objectively about something monstrous. Hannah Arendt's term, "the banality of evil," just set itself on loop in the back of my mind and it continues to run back there. Karp writes about slaveholders' subordination of US domestic and foreign policy to the defense of slavery through perfectly routine capture of governmental institutions, departments, and agencies, the entire process made possible by the deference and social and political acceptance of rich white men, regardless of the odiousness of their cruel business. Even those who were critical of - or even abhorred - slavery, interacted with the slaveholders within social norms; they might have decried, criticized, even mocked, but always within the scope of accepted interactions. The book made me grateful for the Civil War and the destruction - if incomplete - of this normalization of the obscene. I fear, though, that the same kind of passive response to subversion of US institutions to the interests of a rich elite is happening again, to a lesser, but dangerous degree today, accompanied by the same kinds of othering, fear-mongering, distraction techniques, and reliance on social niceties to dampen the response to unacceptable behaviors. The book offers fair warning that there is no natural limit on many people's ability to justify the ugliest behavior towards others, cruelties rooted in self-interest and rationalized and defended with aggressive righteousness; society itself must recognize, challenge, and reject such behaviors.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karp’s book entered my life like an unscheduled confrontation with an uncomfortable family history — the kind that forces you to sit down, breathe, and face the ghosts everyone pretends aren’t there.

I wasn’t prepared. I thought it would be a niche historical study. Instead, it felt like someone pulled back a curtain and said, “Look carefully. This is how empire is made.”

Reading it, I realised how little I had understood about how deeply slavery shaped not just American domestic life, but its ambitions abroad.

The idea that U.S. foreign policy was once driven by elite slaveholders — men who imagined a hemispheric future built on the expansion of bondage — felt both shocking and inevitable. Power rarely operates innocently.

I remember sitting with passages that made me uncomfortable in a way that felt productive — the kind of discomfort that expands you.

Karp doesn’t sensationalise; he simply shows you the architecture of a worldview that saw slavery not as an aberration but as destiny.

And as someone who has spent years reading about nationalism, empire, identity, I found myself recognising patterns — the hubris, the moral blindness, the economic logic masquerading as philosophy.

There were evenings I closed the book just to breathe. History has a way of pressing itself against your chest, reminding you that the past isn’t a distant country; it’s the soil under your feet.

Karp’s narrative skill is unsettling in the best way — you start reading to understand the foreign policy of 19th-century America and end up realising you’re reading a psychological study of power.

And you can’t un-see it. You start tracing the echoes — in modern rhetoric, in global ambition, in the lingering belief that dominance equals security.

I found myself reflecting on how nations justify themselves, how they build myths to make exploitation look like mission. It reminded me of conversations I’ve had with students, the ones who ask, “Why do countries do terrible things and call it progress?”

And I think this book answers that: because the people steering the ship believe their destiny is universal.

Finishing it felt like waking from a fever dream — the kind where reality returns slowly, but you’re not the same person you were before.
Most recommended. Give it a go.

[Richard]

Onto my to-be-read shelf after my friend Professor Taw reviewed and rated it highly.

It is, of course, of increasing salience as the failure of America to atone for its original constitutional sin has become ever more apparent in the age of social media and pervasive self-surveillance. Things are, according to statistics, getting better — but they remain appallingly and inexcusably bad. Understanding how they got that way and what societal structures are firmly yet invisibly in place to replicate our societal conditions is a necessary step, albeit an insufficient one.

Some tidbits from the interwebs:

Black Perspectives asks of the author, ‘What are your principle findings, and what do you hope your readers learn?’: https://www.aaihs.org/this-vast-south...

An easy-to-read synopsis at the New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...

The Wall Street Journal’s thorough “Dixie’s Foreign Policy”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dixies-f.... (Behind the WSJ paywall, but it might be accessible if you Google this search and then click through. Do it in “private browsing mode” if it doesn’t work the first time.)

The New York Review of Books’ “The Slave Owners’ Foreign Policy” looks equally thorough, but it is also behind a paywall which none of my libraries can get me through (and the via-Google trick doesn’t work): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/...

A brief commendation at Foreign Affairs from another author covering nineteenth-century U.S. history: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/review...

Thoroughly reviewed at Reviews in History: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/revi...

Glowingly reviewed in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History — the most informative, if you can get access: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/... (academic paywall, some public libraries may provide it via Academic OneFile or Academic Search Complete. Check whether your library provides access to e-journals.)

Cited in The Atlantic’s “John Kelly and States’ Rights Revisionism”: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...

[Eric Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding addition to our understanding of the antebellum political ideology of the slaveholding elite. Most vitally, Karp illustrates that slaveholders embraced thoroughgoing nationalist rhetoric and federal policies not only when concerned over the security of their slave property, but also with an eye toward perpetuating the "modern" teleological trajectory of western civilization as they understood it with the military and diplomatic power of the young republic. The construction and security of a hemispheric slaveholding empire served as a central motivation for southern elites who were far more interested in maintaining human slavery as a global institution than in territorial expansion of American slavery as an end itself. Karp's work throws its weight into the "was the Old South 'modern'" debate in new and interesting ways. Finally, the book is beautifully written with well crafted and finely polished prose. Five stars!

[Reid tries to read · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the 20 years preceding the Civil War, the Southern slaveowning class and their Northern allies maintained a grip of power over the executive branch, the presidency, and its cabinet. The executive branch was one of many institutional sources of power the slave holding class sought to use in order to preserve systems of slavery across the western hemisphere. Particularly important to this class were the slave systems of Cuba, Brazil, and independent Texas. Preserving slavery and slaveowning institutions in the Western hemisphere consistently took top priority for the southern slaveholding class, even over the expansion of American slave owning territory.

In 1833 the British Empire outlawed slavery in its West Indies colonies. This was a monumental event which shook Southern slave owners to their core, impacting their foreign policy views/goals more than any event prior in their nation’s short history. Recognizing that an anti-slavery parliament was the mechanism that ended British support of slavery, Southern slave owners realized preserving their own slave system would require their hands on the mechanisms of national power in the United States. Up to this point, pro-slavery presidents had occupied the executive branch for 37 out of the last 45 years. Even still, the fear caused by England’s emancipation of their slaves led to extreme paranoia in the Southern planter class, which led to them attempting to stamp out even the smallest hint of anti-slavery fervor in Congress. A common theme running throughout this book is an extremely paranoid lens through which the Southern elites viewed the world. It leads me to assume that violently oppressing a slave class must bring out a paranoid outlook in the oppressors.

Internationally, the Southern slave owners feared that the freedom of slaves by Great Britain would be a beacon for anti-slave activity and revolution. Although Great Britain’s emancipation was gradual, Southern slave owners quickly felt the heat from it when slave ships which had ventured into British waters risked having their slaves forcefully freed by the British government without reimbursement. Now, the most powerful empire in history had now shown that it would act on the side of anti-slavery forces, a terrifying prospect for the elites in the American south. Many of the South’s slaveholders also believed that the British emancipation of slaves was intended to crush the Southern cotton economy and thus any competition in the global cotton trade. They argued that without the cotton provided by the Southern United States and Brazil, the entire world would be dependent on English cotton. Such views positioned the British project of abolitionism within the overarching framework of British imperialism, making anti-slavery just another aspect of British global domination.

In the 1830s and 1840s, many Southern politicians began pushing for a more advanced and expanded American navy. While not a Southern project alone, Southern elites were nonetheless the key proponents of this charge. An expanded navy was intended to help further expand the American empire while defending the vulnerable South and its slaves from coastal invasions from rival empires (mainly England). On top of this, the Slave-owning wing of American foreign policy hoped that a modernized and enlarged navy would further strengthen American influence in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the near Atlantic. John Tyler (10th president) and his Secretary of State John C. Calhoun explicitly saw the United States as the defender of slavery in the Western Hemisphere against the British aggression of anti-slavery. For them, as well as Southern leaders ranging from the elderly Andrew Jackson to the young Jefferson Davis, it was America’s job to defend slavery internationally. Tyler explicitly helped expand the navy out of fear that a “naval power” might attempt to “subvert (America’s) social systems”, especially in “the Southern portion of our country”. One of the Tyler administration’s first moves was to appease the British (and thus prevent a seemingly looming war) through the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, which gave disputed land between Maine and Canada to the British. This move placated the British by only giving up a portion of Northern land while still leaving western expansion open for incorporating potentially new slave states such as Oregon. Inter-imperialist peace was important to a slave society such as the South, which held millions of potential internal recalcitrants in the event of a war between empires. The objective, therefore, was to oppose British anti-slavery as vehemently as possible while avoiding war with the empire.

Abolitionism was presented as something regressive by pro-slavery ideologues. They pointed all the way back to Ancient Greece as an example of the human flourishing that slavery enabled. They also pointed to contemporaries in Brazil and Cuba as successful western hemisphere societies, and attributed this success to their embrace of slavery when other (supposedly failed) nations in the hemisphere had rejected it. Slavery was upheld as an inherently dynamic economic system, while British abolition and American tariff policies were abusive and restricted this dynamism. Slavery brought progress to Brazil and Cuba, allowing them to attain a state of “high civilization”, while those that abolished slavery on the hemisphere, such as “Mexico and the South American republics” were “rapidly degenerating”. This worldview fostered admiration and solidarity between slave owners across the western hemisphere.

Southern slave owners’ solidarity was so strong with Cuba (and further strengthened by economic and familial ties between Southern and Cuban slave masters) that it was official American policy to support Spain in the defense of Cuban slavery against the British. America’s upgraded navy would be the first line of defense for slavery in Cuba and the hemisphere. Between 1840-1844, all 4 American Secretaries of State supported an explicit policy of defending slavery in Cuba, and on occasion American warships were sent to Cuba to quell potential threats of slave uprisings. In the words of the American Secretary to the Diplomatic Office of Madrid in 1840: “The protection of Spanish power in Cuba is a fixed resolution of the United States”. Brazil and Cuba made up the front lines of what the book refers to as a “19th century domino theory” which believed that, should those two slave empires fall, slavery in
the United States would fall as well. Members of the pro-slavery foreign policy wing of America hoped to push Brazil into abolishing its international slave trade with Africa since England’s mission was primarily focused on stopping the trading of slaves. They therefore hoped that abolishing the trade in Brazil would not only protect the nation from the ire of England, but in the process it would turn Brazil into a self-sufficient and self-perpetuating slave economy.

By 1841-1842, the Tyler administration began setting their sites on the annexation of Texas. Politically this was seen as a good maneuver for his reelection campaign, while the paranoid Southern members of the foreign policy wing also feared that Great Britain would attempt to turn Texas into a free nation. A “free Texas'' could theoretically then be used by the empire to launch raids into the United States that were assisted by free Africans. The Tyler administration ultimately failed to convince Congress, especially Whigs and Northern Democrats, to annex Texas, which allowed James K. Polk to boost his popularity during the 1844 presidential election by running on a pro-annexation of Texas platform. However, right before Tyler was out of office Congress held another declaration on whether to annex Texas, which passed by a slim 27 to 25 majority. This moment in Tyler’s presidency would be the high point for the foreign policy of American slavery.

Once in office Polk pushed for annexation of Oregon, at the behest of his Northern imperialist constituency, while still avoiding conflict with Britain over the territory to appease his Southern slaveowning constituency. He also moved US troops into Texas to try and preempt any Mexican invasion of the territory since Mexico disputed that America did not have the right to annex it. Polk’s aggressive campaign in Texas was a continuation of John Tylers‘, and he spent federal funds on a massive pro-America propaganda campaign within Texas, a harbinger of future US efforts to do the same and other sovereign nations. Polk also moved the American fleet into the Gulf of Mexico to try and intimidate the Mexican government, and followed this action up by sending armaments and ammunition directly from American garrisons to Texas while instructing the army, led by Zachary Taylor, to occupy the entire nation. America then proceeded to play a game of cat and mouse with the Mexican army, trying to provoke them into an armed conflict, which eventually did break out.

With Texas fully integrated into the U.S, the South supplied virtually the entire world with the raw cotton used to develop the industrial sectors of Europe and the Northern United States. It stood to reason, in the minds of Southern thinkers, that ‘King Cotton’ was the guiding light of the world economy. The victory against Mexico seemingly confirmed to the United States that Europe’s empires would not contest the U.S. over North America. This emboldened an even more aggressive foreign policy from Southern planter elites, despite the internal friction they were facing from Free State abolitionists. Throughout the 1850s Southern foreign policy leaders continued to impose an aggressive foreign policy on South America. Southerners organized private mercenary groups to coup or invade Central/South American countries throughout the decade. One such group, led by William Walker, took control of and briefly ruled Nicaragua as a pro-slavery nation. Multiple private invasion forces were also mustered to invade Cuba after the Spanish government failed to sell the island to the United States. These invasions all failed and eventually stopped once Spain threatened to free Cuba’s slaves should they continue.

The 1850s was a decade where the South accounted for only 1/3 of the United States’ population (and only 1/5 if one only measured ‘free’ Southerners), yet held around 3/4 of all major positions that related to American military policy. Southern navalists continued their policy of expanding and modernizing the navy so that it could be both a defensive force on Southern shores while putting offensive pressure on islands such as Cuba. While Jefferson Davis was secretary of war, the United States military saw its largest expansion and biggest technological upgrades that had ever experienced up to that point. This was on top of naval technological enhancements that saw the US Navy adopt steam ships for the first time. In a historical irony, both the improved army and navy would be crucial in putting down the Southern rebellion just a few years later. When the South seceded, its leaders were made up of Southern politicians who had all held significant positions of power in America’s government, and especially in America’s military apparatus and policy making positions. Secession was often viewed by these elites in an international context. The Confederacy believed that freeing the slaves in the Caribbean had been a disaster and that Britain saw it as such. They believe that their rebellion would receive support and international recognition from the British empire due to their reliance on Southern cotton and their supposed newfound acceptance of the superiority of slave economics. In another great historical irony, many of the confederacy’s leaders believed and spoke openly about how international opinion on slavery was at or near an all-time high.

[Matthias]

Were Slaveholders Modern, the greatest thread in forums history, with over ten thousand books,

I’m a bit vaxxed up right now, which in the long term should elevate my appreciation of academic controversies and/or trains to unforeseen heights, but in the short term may interfere with my ability to provide a coherent review. BUT I shall heroically attempt to do so anyway.

Theme first, mentioned above. Consider this book another harpoon in that whale, that yes Virginia, the master class was forward-looking, scientific, optimistic, blah blah. Karp actually asterisks this quite a bit in that a minority of backward-looking paternalists certainly existed *and* that the optimism which he diagnoses in the Antebellum planter elite was in many cases unrealistic. BUT if exaggerated a bit it was not unfounded. Staple crop production in the “second slavery” was an integral part of the modern world market economy and its advocates could plausibly argue that the abolitionist empires were turning to “slavery by another name” in the West Indies, regular Indies, &c. “Proslavery internationalism” saw Brazil, Cuba, Texas for a bit, southern USA as in the vanguard of a new era of slavery, the only efficient way to produce what the modern world needed, and thus history on their side.

Second, the planter class saw part of their historical mission in geopolitical terms, that is, to turn the US towards the protection and promotion of slavery as the dominant mode of production in the tropics worldwide, or at least (given them realistic limits of US force projection) in the Western Hemisphere. These included your colorful filibustering fire-breathers but also boring moderates who didn’t want to turn anything into a new state but did want the US to guarantee slavery as a social system. Karp sometimes seems unconvincing in this if only because everything gets interpreted in these terms - if the US is being aggressive it’s because it wants to fight as the paladin of slavery and when it backs off it’s because it knows that slavery is vulnerable in wars - and so it’s unclear what the predictions are, but tbf he backs up each move with plenty of horse mouths: “yes we are being aggressive to protect slavery abroad,” “yes we are backing down to defend slavery at home,” &c. (If nothing else this book does represent an excellent marriage of theoretical ambition with archival shoe leather.)

Speaking of theoretical ambition the book does NOT wade into, but clear has something to say about, the whole question of geopolitical champions of particular ways of organizing labor, the relationship to free trade, and so on. Sitting as he does on the editorial board of Jacobin I don’t think there’s any doubt he means to waggle his eyebrows suggesting the more general history of US imperialism BUT since this also concerns research I’ve allowed to languish I’m still thinking through the implications for some of the existing debates on this, big states vs small states, global free trade vs little spheres, and so on - this seems to cut against some of the stereotypes the literature has imbibed here both in world-systems approaches like Wallerstein Pijl etc but also more general bourgeois social science. Anyway lots to chew on.

Also I can never normally read diplomatic history because it tends to be very one damn thing after another as a genre but I could with this, presumably because there was a narrative superior to and coercive over the raw facts, take that for what you will.

Anyway it’s, IMO, very good. The two books I recommend above all others on US history are still Post’s “American Road to Capitalism” (ruthlessly correct) and Turchin’s “Ages of Discord” (not quite *persuasive* but at least introduces a lot of interesting puzzles) but if you’re interested in reading a number of books on the Civil War era or geopolitics then I would recc including this among them. Look forward to whatever long-form work Karp produces next.

[Brendan Holt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great material analysis of the Planter class’ use of state power, specifically in the realm of foreign policy. Shows them as ruthless capitalists motivated by maintaining their class position globally. I can’t wait for Karp’s magnum opus on the Republican Party

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book that reframed much of my understanding of 19th century U.S. foreign policy. Karp explores something I can't believe I and seemingly every other historian missed: that the fact that in the antebellum period the majority of presidents and key U.S. foreign policy-makers (secretaries of war, state, navy, etc) were slaveholders would have profound effects on U.S. foreign policy. Popping in this lens opens up all kinds of fascinating angles on that period of U.S. history.

The first big insight of this book is to acknowledge that while the "foreign policy of slavery' sought to expand territory for possible slave settlement, it was more concerned with the continental and global balance of power between slave nations and non-slave nations. This became an especially important issues in the 1830s when Britain abolished slavery in its colonies and started to enforce anti-slave trade laws on the high seas and when the abolitionist movement kicked into high gear at home. This is an important distinction: while many slaveholders were land hungry, it was more important to maintain a favorable BoP in the Western Hemisphere that would keep the Brits isolated, discourage slave uprisings, and maintain existing slave nations like Brazil and Cuba as slave nations. The liberation of Cuba, for instance, might lead to a massive and wealthy nation of freedpeople of color living right off the coast of Florida, possibly sparking uprisings in the US. There's a sense in this book that slaveholders believed that slavery was safe only in a nation and world that was as enslaved as possible, that they feared the example of free societies as much as anything else. To me this confirms the insights of people like Lincoln and Seward that some day slavery would seek universal jurisdiction in the United States, or as Lincoln eloquently put it, "It will become all one thing or all the other."

Karp then shows how U.S. diplomacy, the growth of its naval power and army, and other foreign policy developments like the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War were driven in part by the slave interest and the actual slaveholders in power. He convincingly shows that their states' rights argument was very situation; in fact, when in power, they were eager to expand federal authorities in order to safeguard their essential interest and offset British power. This is just another arrow in the not-yet-slain corpse of idea that the South seceded because of states' rights; they were in fact pretty strong federalists, even in designing the Confederate Constitution (and the guys who wrote that were often the same crew as Karp's slaveholding FP elites).

I think the most interesting part of this book is Karp's exploration of the slaveholders' worldview, and I do mean WORLD-view. These were not so much romantic, archaic, myopic aristocrats and ruthless and sophisticated capitalists who thought and acted globally. As historians like Ed Baptist have shown, they believed that cotton production put them at the heart of the global economy and that this would protect them in the event of secession from the Union (a massive fallacy, it turned out). Karp, however, shows that they also believed that black slavery was the only socio-economic system that could productively harvest cotton and other "tropical" crops that formed key cogs in the global economic system. It wasn't just cotton's position in the international economy that made them believe they were the beating heart of the global system; it was the inseparable link of cotton and slavery. They truly believed in its moral, social, and economic superiority to free labor and sought to spread it as far as possible in the Western Hemisphere.

This is richly researched, vividly written, and conceptually fascinating book that all U.S. historians should read, especially those who study USFP. General history readers would also enjoy it too; it gives a flavor of the new histories of slavery but is more accessible and less jargony than Baptist.

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, excellent book covering the outward gaze of the South in years leading up to the American Civil War.

It's a well-worn adage that everyone imagines themselves the protagonist of reality, but we don't always consider how far history's villains went. In the case of Southern Slaveholders, they saw themselves at first threatened by British abolitionist fervor in the 1830s and '40s, followed by a dominant position to reap the next century's rewards in the 1850s. They truly counted racial science as of a piece with the advances in physics and the other basic sciences, and thought the technology of slave labor would become dominant after other empire's attempts with abolition inevitably failed.

The edifice of ideology they created to justify their racial domination was impressively evil, of course, and makes you glad they got smacked around in the '60s and during reconstruction; however, we still see the same sorts of justifications like efficiency or economic inevitability used to justify systems of domination or oppression throughout the world today—often treated as if they're some sort of natural law, and not an outgrowth of the artificial institutions we've built over centuries. You get the sense reading this book that many Southern writers, if pulled over a century and a half into the present, would be predisposed to writing on Substack.

[Tassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stopped reading this years ago and finally finished it this week. Stellar read with a lot of information to ponder.

[6r36.v1073t · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painstakingly researched and intriguing yet repetitive and a bit didactic. Do not write TO the thesis! Write to the history. The thesis will be proven. Hand off the tiller, m’lad!

That said, a masterful final chapter and scintillating epilogue (no spoilers) really do make the whole thing worthwhile.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book I would give 3.5 stars, but I'll bump it to four because the prose is clear and readable. Karp's argument is essentially that the early nineteenth-century presidents, their military leaders, and their diplomats viewed American foreign policy in that time period as fundamentally about preserving slavery in the U.S., expanding American slavery abroad wherever possible, and forging alliances with other slave powers in the western hemisphere. In the minds of these southern elites, the enemy was Great Britain and its (in their eyes) hypocritical stance against American-style slavery, which they believed was a form of PR to distract from colonial-agricultural ambitions in the East.

Karp acknowledges most of this was paranoia and little else, but on perhaps a few too many occasions in this book seems to believe it himself. Still, given the attention paid to abolitionists' Slave Power conspiracy, "This Vast Southern Empire" is maybe most useful as a study of a comparable psychological state existing in the South--albeit one that had some small but noticeable impact on how American power was wielded abroad.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anybody out there still thinks that white southerners started the Civil War to protect their states' rights, "This Vast Southern Empire" will help set them right.

An enlightening addition to the library that already covers the prelude to the war from a domestic perspective, Karp's account looks at how southerners in charge of the U.S. executive branch for the nation's first eight decades succeeded in using American foreign policy as a lever to bolster slavery in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

With power in Washington disproportionate to their population, the South provided or controlled every president before the Civil War except John Quincy Adams. With power over the executive branch, southern leaders in Washington promoted America as a rising world power able to compete with the great monarchies of Europe for imperial control and influence beyond the seas. The slave planters who controlled the South, and the U.S. presidency, in the 1840s and 1850s, wanted above all to protect the peculiar institution from abolitionist attacks.

Pro-slavery foreign policy had two phases. The first started when Britain emancipated its West Indian slaves in 1833. Fearing that Britain would use its military and economic might to spread anti-slavery across the globe, southerners made American foreign policy all about fighting alleged British abolitionist schemes in the Caribbean and Latin America, from Guyana to Honduras to Cuba and Mexico.

The second phase of pro-slavery foreign policy began in 1847, after the Americans conquered Texas and the southwest in the Mexican War. Since Britain accepted the result, southern leaders in Washington felt relieved from any British threat to slavery. So, they shifted U.S. foreign emphasis to protecting slave regimes in the Americas, especially Brazil and Cuba, from pressure to abolish slavery.

By defending slavery where it still existed in foreign lands, southerners hoped to make the world safe for their own peculiar institution back home. Given what they saw as the failure of British and French abolition in the Caribbean, southern politicians did not see the South's own slavery as a shameful relic of a dark past ready to wither away. Instead, southern leaders in charge in Washington presented bound labor as a profitable institution with a bright future, ready to expand across the globe as part of the march of industrialism and colonialism that seemed unstoppable in the mid-19th century.

That progressive future included modern technology, advances in medicine, and global imperialism. There, southern leaders predicted, by leveraging its superior technology the white race of Europe and North America would bring native peoples from Alaska to India under white control. Subaltern peoples would labor as actual slaves or as slaves in all but name, like the "coolies" the British imported from China and India to work West Indian plantations after emancipation there, or the peons who worked the haciendas of Mexico.

To help promote this vision of worldwide white supremacy, southerners in the White House, Congress and in charge of War, Navy and State Departments helped make America a world power by growing the army and navy and investing in the latest technology of war. Many characters in charge of militarizing the United States in the 1850s would later take starring roles as leaders of the Confederate government, from Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens to Judah Benjamin, Matthew Maury and Stephen Mallory.

Even as state politicians started to clamor for secession, national leaders from the South maintained their belief that the future of southern slavery lay with the Union. Davis, Stephens and other southerners in Washington continued to work hard to strengthen the power of the federal government abroad in every way they could, showing little concern for the states' rights they claimed to value so much at home.

Only after the election of Lincoln put the White House under control of the first anti-slavery government in American history, did southern leaders realize their mistake. Soon, they would see the modern rifles they urged the U.S. Army to buy turned against old southern muskets and the ships they procured for the U.S. Navy blockading southern ports from New Orleans to Charleston.

When southern leaders finally had the chance to form their own government as they did in early 1861, states' rights got little more than lip service. Instead, the Confederate constitution was largely a copy of the U.S. founding compact, except for two things: slavery was explicitly mentioned and strongly protected, and the president had even more power vs Congress and state governments.

But even a stronger federal state could not survive the test of war, and southern society came apart when the bet their leaders had placed on King Cotton and Emperor Slavery bringing in Britain and France as allies to the Southern cause turned out to be wishful thinking. The British bought southern cotton, but they didn't need it. And "king steel" soon dethroned King Cotton as manufacturing took the commanding heights of the global economy away from commodity agriculture.

It was only this assumption of southern leaders, that their cotton and their system of labor had so much leverage on the world stage, that emboldened them to mount their slaveholders' rebellion in the first place. And since they weren't as strong internationally as they'd hoped, their big gamble led to disastrous failure.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

When considering slavery in the antebellum South, the focus is typically on the machinations of Southern planters to either maintain, or expand their “peculiar institution” across the United States.
While certainly vile, when seen from this limited and domestic perspective, one can almost begin to form arguments dismissing its true legacy. One can almost hear the echoes of the Lost Cause as it expounds on the manly and chivalrous Southern planter and his kindness toward “his” slaves, an institution that primarily only affected domestic politics, and one that being limited in scope wasn’t even the primary cause of the war that would ultimately end it.
This book provides an important historical corrective in that it puts the institution of slavery in a far more global perspective. Far from being limited to wanting to simply maintain domestic slavery, the Southern aristocracy actively sought to promote and expand slavery abroad in an attempt to legitimize it at home.
We can see this as a Southern priority first and foremost in the early to mid 19th century through the government posts most frequently occupied by Southerners.
While Southerners made up less than 20 percent of important committees such as agriculture (shocking considering the agrarian lean of the South) and commerce, they dominated posts concerned with foreign or military affairs:

“By 1865, Southerners had occupied the Secretaryship of State for two thirds of the time; and for four fifths of the time have the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy…before the Civil War 80 out of 134 U.S. ministers abroad hailed from the slaveholding states…by 1833 slaveholding elites had occupied the U.S. presidency for all but eight of the past forty-five years.”

Southerners aggressively used these posts to lobby not only for sales of their own products, (primarily slave produced rice, cotton, tobacco, and indigo), but for the expansion of slavery abroad. One Southern official going so far as to propose what can only be termed as a kind of racist’s fever dream version of the United Nations:

“Another, still grander idea involved a transatlantic alliance against British abolitionism: ‘It is high time that a coalition was formed among civilized nations upon the plan of the Holy Alliance against Bonaparte to check Britain’s plot to break down the agriculture of slave holding countries in this section of the world.’”

Diplomatic missions to countries such as Brazil (at the time the second largest slaveholding country in the world) sought to strengthen bonds with other slaveholding countries where possible, and exert military pressure where it wasn’t.
Slavery was in many respects the single lens Southern politicians viewed the world and despite being vociferous supporters of “States Rights” were more than willing to use the military power of the federal government to prevent nations from moving away from slavery.
The Mexican-American war was in many respects, the logical outcome of a Southern government that saw slavery as vital to its survival.
Far from being local and provincial planters desperately clinging to a dying institution, the Southern elite embraced a robust power both at home and abroad that only truly began to weaken with the election of Lincoln in 1860.
Southerners correctly judged that without the levers of power that they had pulled almost uninterrupted from the start of the American republic, the only way for these men to maintain the authority they had always enjoyed was to form their own government.
Was slavery a driving force in the creation of the Confederacy? Without a doubt. One only need to read the words of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and other prominent Southerners to know this. The debate on whether maintaining and expanding slavery was the cause of the Civil War for Southerners has long since passed into established fact. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaged in a pointless game of self deception.
However one must also consider that a group of men who thrived on power suddenly found themselves out of the loop. Unable to exert diplomatic or military influence on other nations to maintain slavery, they began to fear for its demise at home. This factor undoubtedly drove many away from the union in which they had long controlled, and toward secession.
It is therefore important to remember that the men who lead the South out of the Union were not the little people fighting government tyranny that Lost Cause mythology likes to profess.
They were government tyranny.
Both before the war in the Union and during the war as an intrusive and monolithic federal government. As the author writes:

“We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved, but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions.”

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A blow to slavery is a blow to commerce and civilization”

After listening to this book, I’m even more convinced that the current movement to abolish fossil fuels has much to learn from the political realities of the abolition of slavery and the Southern leaders who, even to and through secession and the end, were convinced slavery had an unshakable place in the modern world.

Side note: Matthew Carp if you read this I’m free on Thursday night and would like to hang out. Please respond to this and then hang out with me on Thursday night when I’m free

[Tripp · Rating 5 out of 5]

19th century US history (Civil War aside) is often pretty boring since it tells the same old story. This book feels quite fresh and new. Karp asserts that the foreign policy of the US in the antebellum era was heavily influenced by the slaveowner class's world view. What's more this world view was not defensive, viewing slavery in peril, but assertive, viewing slavery as a key driver in the world economy and as forward looking.

This is repellent of course, but this is the sort of discussion that shows we should always examine our understandings and be aware that the perceptions of historical figures were often quite different than our own.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books like Cold War Civil Rights that fundamentally shifts the way you think about an entire era without actually upsetting any of your previous knowledge about it. We generally learn that the elites of the Southern plantocracy were obsessed with the preservation of slavery. This is obviously true, but what this book raises is that this effort wasn't confined to American borders in a time of hemispheric conflict over emancipation, and when American borders themselves weren't confined to American borders either. The deep and persistent control that Southerners had over all institutions of antebellum US foreign policy, civil and military, and their use of that power to stabilize and preserve plantation systems throughout the Americas, many times at the expense of American power, is extremely interesting in connection to traditional narratives of America's rise to great power status, particularly in the period following British emancipation in 1833 as the US engaged in a generation long cold war with the UK over slave and free labor in Latin America. I can't recommend this book enough

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

With This Vast Southern Empire, we see the decisions of the southern United States to ensure the safety of Slavery to the Western Hemisphere. These are the events leading up to the Civil War and those events following the Civil War. Southern Slave Owners had to be quite cosmopolitan and know world events, especially those that affected Slavery in other parts of the world. For example, when Great Britain passed legislation that abolished Slavery in their lands, the Southern United States was upset and saw threats around every corner. This came to light when a number of slave ships had their “cargo” freed by the British Naval Forces.

Southern Slave Owners had no qualms about treating their chattel slaves terribly. It is really rather sad that you could consider a person to be property, but then again, my economic success doesn’t really depend on the hard labor of a person.

Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, and I couldn’t remember why I took it out of the library. However, it turned out pretty well. I enjoyed it well enough.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fascinating. Written in a rather academic format, so it's somewhat of a slog to get through. However, it really does make a very succinct point about how the antebellum South contemporaneously perceived of themselves. Rather than the modern stereotype of the South being a backwards region clinging desperately to their 'peculiar institution', or even the deplorable 'lost cause' mythos deployed by the defeated Confederates after the war, this books shows that the antebellum South was not only self-assured about their traditions, but were in complete control of the full power of the American state. In fact, were it not for the near-revolutionary election of Abraham Lincoln and his anti-slavery Republican Party to the levers of state power, the book makes a persuasive argument that the institution of slavery may not have been extinguished for a very long time, if ever.

I highly recommend it, though one should reserve time for it as it does require a little bit of commitment.

[Ailith Twinning · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting take from the "A threat to slavery anywhere, is a threat to slavery everywhere." . . .I'm not sure what noun to put here actually. But that thesis is probably the core of this book, and thesis, well, it's the subtitle "Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy". The title is 'just' poetry.

Great read, and my new go-to recommendation for the things it covers, especially the invasion of Mexico - that has got to be the best argument in snapshot of it I've seen.

[danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been wanting to read this book ever since I learned about Matt Karp being the young attractive lefty prof at Princeton (seriously, google him), and eight or so years later I'm happy to say it was worth the wait!

This book was really interesting to read not only because of the central premise, but also because it is extremely well written and organized and provides insight into a period of American history (1830ish-1850s-ish) that I don't know much about politically, even if cultural depictions of the antebellum south abound.

The main idea of this book is a perhaps counterintuitive one - that despite loud and repeated claims to wanting states' rights and a limited central government, southern slaveholders were in fact the driving force behind an aggressive foreign policy, exercised of course through a strong executive branch. Of course in a way we all (or at least the non fash among us) know that 'states rights' was a Lost Cause fig leaf, but I do think it's really helpful to encounter the factual, historical basis for dismantling those arguments. It's also just really interesting to read about some of the ironies of southern slaveholders like Jefferson Davis himself helping to push for the stronger, more modernized navy and military that would be the downfall of their would-be white supremacist state. Also really interesting from the book is how the actual formation of the confederacy again embodied a much more centralized government than the states' rights/limited government canards would have you believe.

Another historical element I really appreciated about this book was learning more about the colonial expansions of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that took place both as part of the Monroe doctrine and also as part of what Karp identifies as slave-holding internationalism. The tensions that emerged in the Caribbean following British abolitionism were really fascinating to read about, with southern fears that the British would set off a domino of emancipation or else actively stoke slave rebellions giving way to an understanding that the British empire still relied upon a variety of racialized forced labor in its colonies and was too dependent on international free trade to do much about globalizing abolition beyond impounding some boats. Since I'm currently also reading Decolonial Ecology, which is focused on the centrality of the Caribbean as a site for understanding both empire and ecological destruction, this was a really interesting complement to engage with at the same time.

Karp clearly did his research for this one, and does a great job depicting the personalities of the southern slaveholders and cabinet or military members who propounded these aggressive visions of US foreign policy. I do feel like if I have a critique of the book it is that it does not provide much of the context for what is happening around those figures - while there is some allusion to the foreign policy of the Whigs or the opposition of John Quincy Adams to the southerners' designs, I think there was room for including more of what the alternative visions of America's role in the world was, not least because that is a place where U.S. abolitionists could have come into the story. As it is, Karp closes with a very effective story of W.E.B. Du Bois reflecting on figures like Jefferson Davis as models for the american idea of civilization, but I would have been interested to know how anti-slavery thinkers were articulating their visions of foreign policy and the future on the world stage at the same time.

In the end I think this book did what the best works of history can - give a very grounded, researched, and material account of a period in history and set of tendencies displayed within it, and stoke my interest to read much more about the period.

[David Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished up "This Vast Southern Empire," a 2016 book by Princeton historian Matthew Karp on the foreign policy regime and political economy of the United States in the 1840s-1861. I've been especially intrigued by analyses of the antebellum and the American Civil War (these days I like to refer to it as the American Anti-Slavery War) from a more internationalist perspective, particularly as it relates to the formation of the United States as a hemispheric hegemon (e.g. fending off British abolitionism in the Americas while building relations with pro-slavery Spain, the annexation of the Republic of Texas and the Mexican-American War, allyship and diplomatic overtures with the Empire of Brazil, and the Ostend Manifesto and repeated attempts by antebellum presidents towards annexing Cuba), the advances in the organizational, tactical, and technological capacities of the United States Army and Navy, and the ambitions of southern American slaveholders in establishing their worldview of not only a *sectional* slave society, but a *global* one.

I figured I should study this aspect of mid-19th century US history more closely after reading a passage from Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction," Chapter III: The Planter. It is a fascinating chapter in which Du Bois examines the southern planter class; specifically, the commanding political power pro-slavery southern Democrats had at the highest ranks of the United States federal government in the decades leading up to the war, and consequentially, their global ambitions in creating a worldwide slave society, backed by the racial hierarchy in enslaving African labor and by a defense of free trade of slave-produced goods everywhere.

It's poignantly fitting that the author chooses to conclude the text with Du Bois' baccalaureate disquisition at Harvard University's commencement ceremony in June of 1890, titled "Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization." In this essay, which Du Bois composed and presented at the age of 22, a quarter-of-a-century since the surrender of the Confederacy to the Union Army at the Appomattox Courthouse, and in the milieu of the racist "lost cause" myth rising amongst white southerners, he provides an incisive analysis on the type of civilization that produces a man -- and indeed, men -- like the ex-CSA president. In his words:

"I wish to consider not the man, but the type of civilization which his life represented: its foundation in the idea of the strong man -- Individualism coupled with the rule of might -- and it is this idea that has made the logic of even modern history, the cool logic of the Club. It made a naturally brave and generous son Jefferson Davis -- now advancing civilization by murdering Indians, now hero of a national disgrace called by courtesy, the Mexican War; and finally, as the crowning absurdity, the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free. Whenever this idea has for a moment, escaped from the individual realm, it has found an even more secure foothold in the policy and philosophy of the State. The Strong Man and his mighty Right Arm has become the Strong Nation with its armies. Under whatever guise, however a Jefferson Davis may appear as man, as race, or as nation, his life can only logically mean this: the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou."

[Lorrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this book, even though I read a lot of non-fiction and have some interest in the period.

That said, current events (statues, statements by politicians, etc.) keep dragging us back to the time of slavery, and this book was an interesting look at the foreign policy aspect of the slave states and eventually the CSA. It shows the South as dominant in international relations, with slavery being one of the main reasons. It also shows the south as politically and economically sophisticated, rather than some kind of feudal remnant. I took a few notes of things in the book that seemed surprising or at least thought-provoking and oddly contemporary:

- Politicians from the slave South were supportive of free trade and international capitalism, in fact they argued that market competition justified slavery, believing that "tropical" products like cotton could only be produced efficiently under slavery or another system of bonded labor.

- Along with this, many Southerners marshaled science to prove them right not only on the supposed differences between the races, but the economics of slavery.

- When Great Britain abolished slavery and adopted it as its international policy, the Southern media spent a lot of effort attacking it as hypocritical and accusing Britain of only supporting abolition to advantage its commercial interests over the US and other nations.

- There was also a lot of effort to characterize slavery as beneficial to "the destitute" (presumably white, but this went unsaid) as the only way that the poor and working classes could afford clothes and food.

- We already know from looking at the CSA's founders and its founding documents that they viewed slavery as essential to their formation of a state, but they also viewed it as essential to the world economy. Despite talk of "states' rights," the CSA was structured to have a strong central government and specifically a strong executive to be able to defend and project slavery outside its borders.

Although it was not as engaging as some non-fiction history, and took some effort to get into it, it is well worth a read to understand the time period and see its echoes in our time. "We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved, but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions."

Truly there is nothing new under the sun...

[Jeremy Canipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this proactive book, Professor Matthew Karp of Princeton University substantially challenges the conventional narrative of the relationship between the American South's slave holding elite and the American Federal government between 1830 and the coming of the Civil War.

Most scholars have focused on how leading southern politicians and thought leaders warily eyed the development of abolitionist sentiment in the northern and mid-western states and the notion that this sentiment and the rapidly growing white population of the free states might translate into Federal action to limit enslavement's expansion or even possible abolition in the United States.

In point of fact, these concerns did exist and still help explain much about the sectional conflict over the geographic expansion of enslavement as to United States bought, fought for, and otherwise obtained a tremendous amount of land in North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean. However, Professor Karp trains our eyes in a different direction, arguing that Southerns in leading positions in the Federal government - from Presidents to Congressmen to diplomats - had a rather different focus: directing American foreign policy, including the development of an increasingly large and sophisticated army and navy - to the service of protecting slavery in all of the Western Hemisphere's slave societies - from the perceived and actual hostility of a newly abolitionist England.

Matthew Karp makes a pretty compelling argument, based on substantial primary source research. Even as the sectional conflict flared up over the annexation of Texas and burst, metaphorically, into flames over the Mexican-American War, the South's elite remained confident in its attempts to assert a strong pro-slavery cast to the exercise of robust Federal authority in terms of America's relationships with foreign countries. One might even ask whether this instance on geographic expansion helps light a fire that became the Civil War and whether that war would have come - and slavery have ended in 1865 - has that determination not been realized as the foreign and military policy of the United States based on the decades from 1830 to 1850.

An excellent book and well-worth your reading if you are interested in the coming of the Civil War, the history of enslavement, American politics, or American foreign policy.

[Brennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this text because its narrow framing allowed it to go very deep into a specific subject and one that is largely unmentioned in the typical discourse of American history. A few bullet points of what I thought were new topics I had not heard until this reading:

1. The role slavery played in ramping up the American military budget after British emancipation, essentially turning the US from an isolated nation into one that felt it needed to defend slavery globally.

2. That Texas, now thought of as being lumped in with California and Oregon, was more lumped in with Cuba and Brazil from the foreign policy of the US because of their slave-holding status in the Western Hemisphere.

3. America's expectation of Cuban joining the US, our close affiliation with the Brazilian emperor, and how all these relationships would have lead to a decidedly "Spanish flair" of a prolonged Confederacy.

Also, early on the book dedicates a sentence or two to the idea that the British ended slavery to make their exports from Calcutta more valuable, and while it never brings it up again, a lot of the other details the book does highlight seems to support that theory (especially the good deal of ink spilled on Southerners citing the British Empires lack of humanity in Southeast Asia).

Also, the Epilogue here made a great case for W. E. B. Du Bois' commencement address at Harvard, "Jefferson Davis as a representative of civilization" highlighting a Strongman vision of history that included Teddy Roosevelt and Otto von Bismarck (and while it didn't include Trump, it could have). It was absolutely worth a read and could be read independently from the book without missing much.

My only caution for would-be readers is, again, it's a very narrow framework the book operates in. It's very specifically Slaveholders, details about their lives and how things affected them, exclusively in foreign policy. If that's you're bag, enjoy. If not, I'd steer clear.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

After Britain ended slavery in the 1830s, the slave states of the U.S. saw this as the beginning of a 19th century cold war: if other countries followed the English example, the United States would end up alone in a hostile world with the delusional doctrines of emancipation possibly winning out over the righteous realists of slavery (yes, they really did think that way).
Karp looks at how this shaped foreign policy, which was heavily dominated by Southerners (the 3/5 clause gave the South disproportionate clout in the federal government). A strong, tough-minded policy seemed essential to protecting American interests, which were assumed to equal slavery, so the South watched with concern as other countries rejected slavery, fretted that if Cuba threw off Spanish control they'd free their slaves (a black-ruled state, barely a hundred miles from Florida!!!) or that England had various nefarious plots to undermine American slavery. Karp looks at how this played out in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and makes an interesting account out of it.

[Michael Gormley · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enlightening examination of the Antebellum South’s foreign policy praxis. Karp deconstructs the modern “states’ rights” mythos of the Confederate cause by outlining not only how influential the South was over U.S. foreign policy through its sustained control of the White House via the Tyler/Polk/Pierce administrations, but how intellectuals and legislators throughout southern society coordinated to internationalize the cause of slavery.

The book struggles at times to convincingly persuade that certain actions were taken predominantly in the interest of slavery, especially in the early part of the timeline, due to a lack of primary sources supporting the author’s readings. John Quincy Adams is raised many times in those parts, but his noted antislavery passion late in his career suggests he could have been too quick to blame slavery in places where it wasn’t warranted.

Nevertheless, this is a solid read for anyone interested in the sectional influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Antebellum period.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished up this audiobook which was sitting on my phone for a while in light of current events. And Karp is another historian who destroys the idea that the South was fighting the Civil War for states rights or really any noble cause other than wanting to keep slavery.

This book focuses on how slaveowners dominated American foreign policy prior to the Civil War.

America expands its navy under Tyler? Why? To prepare for an expansion of slavery

America annexes Texas? Why? It's a big slave area

America improves relations with Brazil? Why? It's the other big slaveowning country in the world.

America wants to annex Cuba? Why? It's the best place to expand slavery to.

It goes on and on.

Nothing may top the letter that then Secretary of State John Calhoun wrote to his counterpart in Britain that slavery was a social good and the annexation of Texas would preserve it.