American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (review)

This compelling book suggests viewing the oft-studied U.S. master class in a new way: as a culturally hybrid social group that experienced itself as an integral part of a sub-tropical, multi-lingual, Creole world drawn together by business and marriage ties, by ship, letter, print culture and above all, by a shared commitment to slave-centred plantation capitalism. The author argues that an Americas-spanning "fraternity of slaveholders" shared a "sense of singular space" not contained within the bounds of any nation-state. Many men and women of the U.S. planter elite "invested in a vision of the circum-Caribean that included their own holdings" (p. 1). Guterl has really given us something valuable here: a sonorous label for what I have awkwardly been calling "the slaveholding Atlantic world of the industrial era." "The American Mediterranean," a term which the author has adopted from an older tradition of international relations scholarship but turned to his own ends, makes good sense as a cultural, economic and geographic category, and I hope the term catches on.

One of Guterl's particularly cogent revisions is to point out how a "Black Legend" discourse typically used to disparage Spanish colonial rule was applied to the U.S. South as well. On the one hand, Northern abolitionists portrayed the plantation South as a "Latinized" tropical Other—a muggy abode of tropical indolence, unmeasured violence, racial impurity and economic backwardness. On the other hand, many Southern elites highlighted their common destinies with the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil as lands destined to be incorporated into an expanding U.S. slave-based republic, thus positing the South as a Roman (Latin) Empire-in-waiting. Yet, the dread of "another Haiti" and the example of abolition in the West Indies led Southerners to shrink from commonality. The blurred cultural, political, climatic and economic boundaries between the Caribbean and the South, noted by observers of contrasting political stripes, were thus felt to be at the same time promising and deeply threatening.

American Mediterranean is a model of effectively deployed interdisciplinary method. In service to his larger arguments, Guterl plumbs the complex depths of traditional sources like newspapers, personal correspondence and travel accounts, more surprising archival materials like the creolized fashions worn by Louisiana plantation mistresses, and even the racialized iconography stamped on southern currencies (his analysis of these money aesthetics was one of the book's highlights for me). Guterl is at his best when engaged in close textual readings. His enlightening and elegant exegesis of Martin Delany's 1859 radical antislavery novel, Blake, or the Huts of America, for example, shows convincingly how Delany unveiled "the planter's sense of slavery" as "cosmopolitan and global, and prospering...outside of the authority of the nation-state" (p. 42).

After giving the reader a general picture of the "American Mediterranean" at mid-century, Guterl analyzes the effects that the Civil War wrought on the Caribbean-oriented worldview of the southern elite. The author uses theories of nationalism laid out by such scholars as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm to build a compelling interpretation of the South's nation-building project: he emphasizes that Confederate elites had to nationalize what had been a profoundly transnational polity in the midst of violent social upheaval and all-out war. Their effort was riven with contradictions, since they simultaneously attempted to recast the South as an "Anglophone city on the hill" distinct from and superior to other slaveholding societies, while building upon their shared pasts with Caribbean slaveholders in order to fight the war, and in order to envision a future as a prosperous imperial nation-state independent from the Union.

The military defeat of the South resulted in a definitive transformation of the "American Mediterranean," pulling the formerly Caribbeanized South more closely into an increasingly racist, Anglo-American republic. The centralized nation-state into which the Confederate states were forcibly reincorporated was marked by a vanishing sense...