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  • This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp
  • Brian Schoen (bio)
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.95.)

Not that long ago scholars portrayed antebellum southern planter-politicians as parochial, keen on walling themselves off from the changing world. Even as intellectual and economic historians chipped away at the image of a culturally isolated, anticapitalist South, political historians [End Page 660] continued to study their actors chiefly within their plantation kingdoms, state legislatures, or as combatants in an increasingly raucous national political arena.

Starting in the late aughts, however, historians thrust southern statesmen onto the world political stage. Building on the pioneering work of Robert E. May's The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (1973) and more fully developed nineteenth-century global histories, Edward Bartlett Rugemer's The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), Matthew Pratt Guterl's American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008), and Robert E. Bonner's Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (2009) highlight the challenges of navigating slavery through rocky waters. My own (bias alert) The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009) stresses the power that slaveholders perceived cotton gave them as they did battle in the global arena. Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire draws deeply from this scholarship, while moving beyond it to demonstrate just how crucial southern politicians were in directing federal policy toward what he calls a "proslavery internationalism" (4).

This densely researched, carefully argued, and artfully written book persuasively shows that the South's politicians were often at the helm of the federal government's core military and diplomatic apparatus during the late antebellum period. Karp reminds us of their outsized influence by showing that southerners held nearly 80 percent of the secretaryships of war and the navy. From 1847 to 1861, they also dominated the House and Senate Committees on Naval and Military Affairs, providing a majority of the committee appointments and controlling the leadership in 73 percent of the sessions. Southern influence over the War Department, from John C. Calhoun through Jefferson Davis and to John Floyd, has been long known. Karp will surprise many readers by showing that less well known southerners like Abel Upshur, John Y. Mason, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Thomas Butler King, and Stephen Mallory dominated U.S. naval policy. Nor in Karp's telling were these small government-types. Instead—like Max M. Edling in A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (2014)—he sees this era and these men as expanding and modernizing federal power, from gunboats to artillery to administrative systems. Though southern leaders were divided over the pursuit of territorial expansion, their single-minded desire to preserve slavery at home and abroad led them to expand American federal influence on land and at sea in the Caribbean Rim and South Atlantic. Far from fatalistic or recoiling at the modern arc of history, southern slaveholders applied strength to [End Page 661] bend it toward their will, believing that "slavery and progress had proved impressively congruent" (169).

Situating this story within the broader contours of global, national, and sectional political narratives is tricky business, but Karp proves up to the task. He offers nuanced examinations of singular moments, such as Henry Wise's tempestuous time as minister to Brazil, and of major events, including Texas's annexation and the Mexican-American War. He moves adeptly from the halls of Congress to cabinet deliberations to, when necessary, the broader public debates over American foreign policy. His argument that southerners' concern about slavery's stability in Cuba, Texas, and Brazil likely outpaced their desire for territorial aggrandizement is particularly noteworthy.

In a few places Karp's emphasis stretches beyond the evidence. Southerners may have agreed that "the record of U.S. foreign policy in this period forms little more than a chronicle of anxieties about Cuban slave emancipation" (61). Nationally, however, there were many...

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