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

In This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, Matthew Karp argues that a cadre of elite white southerners attempted to seize control of U.S. foreign policy between the 1830s and 1860s as a means of transforming the United States into the leading patron of slavery in the Atlantic world. In so doing, these southern leaders revealed themselves to be committed nationalists, rather than latent separatists, whose vision for the United States included a strong central government, so long as that government dedicated itself to defending and promoting slavery both at home and abroad.

Karp's story begins with Great Britain's passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which represented for white southerners "a literal sea change in the balance of power between slavery and freedom in the Atlantic World" (p. 17). British moves to emancipate their own slaves in the Caribbean signaled, for U.S. southerners, the beginning of a British-led assault against slavery worldwide that would surely culminate in an attack on the southern United States, the wealthiest and most influential slave society of the era. The only way to meet this threat, white southerners believed, was to wield the power of the U.S. government as a proslavery counterweight against the British. Using logic similar to what drove the twentieth century's Cold War, these southern leaders believed that the world was dividing between proslavery and antislavery forces and that the United States must therefore serve as the global leader of proslavery nations.

That required seizing the levers of U.S. foreign relations to serve a distinctly proslavery agenda, creating what Karp calls the "foreign policy of slavery" (p. 7). These efforts began with a drive to expand the size and capacities of the U.S. Navy, which men like Abel Parker Upshur, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and John C. Calhoun believed necessary to defend the southern coast and to serve as a deterrent against any British attack against U.S. slavery. The logic behind this proslavery foreign policy soon expanded beyond its anti-British origins, and by the 1840s it drove southerners in positions of authority within the U.S. government to support proslavery regimes in the Republic of Texas, Cuba, and Brazil. In this agenda, southern leaders sought to position the United States at the head of an alliance of like-minded and mutually supportive proslavery governments. By the 1850s these southerners believed that recent world events, such as the supposed failure of British emancipation and that decade's economic boom, vindicated the superiority of slave labor, further encouraging elite southerners to continue securing positions within the U.S. government that could promote slavery abroad. Yet their undoing came in 1860, when the powers of the U.S. government fell into the hands of the Republicans, who could now turn the nation's robust apparatus of foreign policy against slavery.

Karp traces with deft precision the arc of this strain of thought among prominent white southerners so that we may reorient our understanding of the late antebellum southern worldview in three interrelated areas. First, he argues that southern leaders saw their proslavery vision as key to the future of the entire United States and, indeed, the world, not just the South. These southerners were therefore nationalists with an international agenda who were entirely comfortable with the idea of a powerful central government, so long as that government promoted slavery in all directions. Second, Karp asks scholars to look beyond the recent profusion of works on the cotton kingdom to see that mid-nineteenth-century U.S. slaveholders did not support slavery simply as a means to wealth in cotton. Rather, their global perspective reveals their commitment to slavery as the key to wealth in all endeavors, including rice, tobacco, sugar, and anything...