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

In American Mediterranean, Matthew Pratt Guterl recasts the rise and fall of elite slaveholders of the Gulf Coast states to show their investment in, fears of, and travel to slave societies elsewhere in the Americas. Guterl persuasively argues that this charmed if not charming class of wealthy, racist Americans found their identity as much or more in their economic ties to counterparts in Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, and British Guiana as in their ties of U.S. citizenship to antislavery Americans. Comfortable with neither the liberal reforms of northerners nor the ethnic and racial diversity of landholders, slaves, and peon laborers in the Creole societies of the Western hemisphere, Deep South planters uncomfortably straddled national and cultural borders as their world of slaves and leisure was coming apart. Similar to Sean Goudie's Creole America (2006) and Brian Schoen's Fragile Fabric of Union (2009), Guterl seeks to resituate Southerners as Americans by showing their immersion in transnational developments.

American Mediterranean develops over five chapters, each utilizing the letters and memoirs of selected planters, male and female. Chapter one focuses on antebellum planters' view of the Western hemisphere "with a mixture of fear and excitement," drawn as they were to the region at the prospect of annexing Cuba or perhaps Santo Domingo as a slavery safety valve, yet repelled by the collapse, through different means, of slave regimes in Haiti and Jamaica (p. 33). Chapter two describes the complications of the Confederate States of America. On one hand, Confederate visionaries hoped through secession to facilitate the recovery of slavery through annexation of Cuba and alliance with Brazil and, at least momentarily, Mexico under the pretender Maximilian. On the other hand, it was necessary for Confederate nationalism to assert the region's distinctiveness as the quintessential herrenvolk regime, alone maintaining the distinct virtues of the early American republic. Chapter three journeys with planter expatriates to Cuba, chased offshore by the Civil War's arrival in the Deep South. Seeking refuge beyond U.S. borders, that is, in areas not subject to attack by the conquering U.S. armies of emancipation, well-off Southerners were discouraged to find societies previously stabilized by assumptions of white supremacy to be suddenly unpredictable: Slaves escaped to Mexican authorities as soon as Confederate families crossed the Rio Grande; more alarming, the Ten Years' War against Spanish rule in Cuba showed that there might be no escaping violence in the Americas in the name of liberation. However, the turn to Chinese coolie labor in Cuba educated American expatriates about the possibility of forced labor alternatives. Chapter four returns to Southern shores in the era of Reconstruction when racist attitudes fostered in the slavery era manifested in the Deep South's Black Codes, designed to force the freed people to work and to severely restrict their civil rights. The "failures" of Haiti and Jamaica to remain the world's sugar-producing centers in the post-slavery era, punctuated by Jamaica's Morant Bay uprising of October 1865, reinforced white Americans' assumptions that, absent coercion, blacks would not work and much less were they capable of self-government. Chapter five explains the end of the Reconstruction in the context of the cosmopolitan southerners' failure to replicate the bound agricultural labor of Europeans or Chinese they had encountered elsewhere in the Americas.

Throughout the narrative, Guterl emphasizes that his selected individuals' personal connections with the Caribbean and West Indies not only show the limitations of the nineteenth-century nation-state's power to regulate human experience and define citizenship. Those same connections, he asserts, betray the conclusion among previous studies of the U.S. South that it was distinctive, in comparison to "other Souths" in South Africa, Brazil, and Cuba (Peter Kolchin, Sphinx on the Land, 2003, p. 74). "Comparisons," Guterl writes, "no matter how well conceived, can hide connections" (p. 10). Thus, Southern creoles sought in their exchanges of goods and...