This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp (review)

This landmark book is one of the freshest, most provocative, and most significant monographs to appear in the past decade. Ostensibly focused on southern elites’ control of antebellum foreign policy, Karp offers an almost iconoclastic telling of the relationship between southern elites and the federal government from the 1830s through the start of the Civil War, along with an institutional and ideological history of the southern elites who directed U.S. foreign policy.

Methodologically, the book is not particularly innovative, but Karp’s work situates antebellum southern elites more fully within broader Atlantic, hemispheric, and even global worlds than have prior works. What a difference a change in perspective makes. In Karp’s skillful hands, the received wisdom of a generation’s worth of antebellum southern historiography is no longer sacrosanct. For the better part of forty years, antebellum southern historiography has been dominated by an emphasis on differences and diversity within the South; the personalities of hotheads, eccentrics, and hothead eccentrics; and the supposed romanticism of archaic slaveholders. Embedded in these historiographical emphases is an assumption that the South was backward and agrarian, out-of-step with economic and political developments in the larger Atlantic world, including natural-rights ideologies, political democracy, and industrial capitalism.

For a long time, historians accepted that southern elites’ actions, beliefs, and institutions stemmed from their defiant fight to maintain their anachronistic world in the face of modernity, industrial capitalism, and democracy. For the past decade, however, historians have begun to challenge the prevailing ideas about how southern slaveholders understood their place in the mid-century world; the national politics of slavery; the political economy of slavery; and the size, scope, and uses of state power by the pre–Civil War nation-state. Karp draws on these newer works to produce a strikingly original institutional and ideological history of the cabal of southern elites who directed U.S. foreign policy for the better part of thirty years.

British abolition in the early 1830s put southern slaveholders on the defensive. Fearing that the contagion of abolitionism would spread from the British Caribbean, southern slaveholders quickly gained control over U.S. foreign policy. Firmly in control of the State Department, southern elites adopted a policy of protecting and upholding slaveholder regimes wherever they remained in the Americas. This proslavery foreign-policy cabal also gained control of the War and Naval Departments, along with key congressional committees. Belying their reputation as advocates of small government and states’ rights, they sought an aggressive and expensive military build-up and program of modernization and claimed an expansive list of powers for the executive branch. Much like Andrew Jackson, they were sectional nationalists, not secessionists or separatists. They identified southern interests as national interests and worked to protect them by and through the Union. In the 1840s, the defenders of slavery increasingly became emboldened proslavery imperialists. Treating the Tyler and Polk administrations as more-or-less a single administration, Karp offers a novel but convincing analysis of Texas annexation and the U.S.–Mexico War, along with important U.S. overtures to slaveholding regimes in Brazil, Spain, and Cuba.

In the 1850s, southerners’ ability to force the U.S. Navy to move from sail and wood to iron and steam increased their confidence that they would be able to meet foreign challenges to slavery. Although they lost influence and numbers in Congress, they maintained control of the executive branch, including the key departments of War, Navy, and State. Seemingly secure from foreign threats, southern elites began to analyze the South’s place in the emerging global order, producing their own vision of modern political economy with slavery as its foundation. They might have been on the defensive at home, but they saw a bright future for themselves in the emerging global political-economic order.

The engine of industrial capitalism in Europe and the Northern United States was slave-produced cotton, while sugar, coffee...