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

Historians are once more turning their attention to the slaveholder. Previously, scholars such as William W. Freehling had viewed the generation of late antebellum slaveholders as something of an anomaly, claiming that they had lived beyond their time and the society over which they presided was doomed. Although aspects of this interpretation live on, particularly in work that recognizes emancipation as the defining process of the nineteenth century, most scholars now recognize the tenacity and the dynamism of American slaveholders. Despite profound moral, economic, and political shifts in the West, slaveholders nonetheless saw a bright future, one in which slavery played a critical role in the modern world. Matthew Karp's insightful and persuasive book helps cement this case.

Karp takes as his topic the role wielded by slaveholders over American foreign policy in the decades of the 1830s, '40s, and '50s. But the implications of his argument are broader and fit into an emerging pattern in the field, one that sees slaveholders nearly triumphant before their shattering collapse in the Civil War. Abolitionists accurately reckoned with the power wielded by slaveholders in and through the federal government, and aspects of that interpretation have been resuscitated by a recent generation of historians, including Adam Rothman, Leonard Richards, and others, who show how slaveholders used the federal government to protect and even expand slavery. Karp's contribution here is essential—he shows how southern elites also directed the nation's foreign policy. In doing so, he also changes our understanding of antebellum political economy, not just for slaveholders but for the nation. Karp's research reveals the sophisticated global reach of American exports in an era supposedly defined by oceanic insulation from Europe and Asia. American slaveholders controlled the most important product in the world—cotton—and they leveraged this resource to advance their own and American national interests (which they regarded as one and the same) around the world.

As Karp shows, southern slaveholders used federal authority over trade and military affairs to promote American goods. More important still, from the perspective of slaveholders, was meeting the challenge posed by the British. After Britain's abolition of slavery on its West Indian islands in 1833, anti-slavery became a key part of British naval and foreign policy. White southerners and their allies made the United States a global rival to this threat. British abolitionism, soon supported by French abolition in the Caribbean, threatened even to take root in Texas. Although it may seem far-fetched today, southern fears of British pretensions in Texas were deeply felt. Leading slaveholders anticipated that British anti-slavery forces were planning an agreement by which Britain would assume Texas' war debts (from their independence struggle with Mexico) and Texas would abolish slavery. The ability of pro-slavery forces in the Tyler and Polk administrations to thwart this effort and instead annex Texas itself stands, in Karp's words, as "perhaps the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery" (100).

Among the important tasks undertaken by the US Navy and US diplomats was bolstering the slave regimes of Cuba and Brazil. John C. Calhoun, among others, saw great harmony in the interests of the three major slave powers of the hemisphere, what Karp calls the "proslavery fraternity." This fraternity came to the defence of slavery when it could and opposed emancipation and free labour wherever it was promoted. Karp's story joins the work of Robert May and other historians of nineteenth-century filibusters. No longer can we write their history as a colourful but anomalous adventure. Filibusters personified the global pro-slavery agenda of southern slaveholders. Slaveholders' reliance on federal power reveals the narrow reach of state rights ideology in practice. To the contrary, as Karp writes, "in foreign and military policy, more often than not, southerners could be found in the vanguard of federal expansion, activity, and enterprise" (237).

This Vast Southern Empire...