West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire by Kevin Waite (review)

It has long been axiomatic that the victory of the United States in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–48 catalyzed the Civil War less than a decade and a half later. As no other than Ulysses S. Grant remarked in 1885, "The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War." In West of Slavery, Kevin Waite offers a detailed account of what rendered the seizure of new territories from Mexico so inflammatory. His answer hinges on a multi-layered excavation of how white advocates of enslavement in the mid-nineteenth century imagined incorporating the new territories of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and California into a vast slave system that Waite dubs the "Continental South." Even though the traditional crops of the Slave South—cotton, sugar, and tobacco—were not well suited to the arid lands of the Far West, proslavery southerners, Waite shows, still imagined these new territories as integral to enslavement's future in the United States.

One of the initial efforts to knit together the West and South was through the construction of what some white southerners took to calling "the great slavery road": a railroad linking the cotton-growing states of the South with the United States's newly acquired ports on the Pacific Coast and, from there, to the burgeoning markets of Asia. Waite's well-crafted discussion of white southerners' advocacy for a southern route for the transcontinental railroad in turn illuminates the larger stakes of his project, especially in relation to current historiographical debates over slavery and capitalism. White southerners may have embraced the railroad, their era's leading symbol of modernity, enlisted the power of the federal government in an effort to make their vision a reality, and shown themselves susceptible to the same profit motive and market forces as capitalists elsewhere. But they did so in the service of a political economy that remained resolutely regional and defined in opposition to what white southerners imagined to be the prevailing conditions in the North. Western expansion, according to Waite, only exacerbated these tensions by providing new stakes over which to struggle.

The transcontinental railroad, of course, would have to wait until the 1860s to become a reality. When it did, the exigencies of the Civil War ensured that the rail line bypassed the southern route favored by proslavery advocates. But throughout the antebellum period, transplanted white southerners proved remarkably adept at shaping local politics in the Far West. Although California was nominally a free state, white southerners succeeded in bringing about in 1852 the passage of a Fugitive Slave Act that stipulated that any enslaved African American brought to the West Coast before California statehood remained enslaved, so long as their enslavers ultimately planned to remove them out of the state at some later date. When African Americans challenged this law, the California Supreme Court ruled against them in a decision that, Waite notes, "prefigured the Dred Scott decision of 1857 by sustaining slaveholders' rights to carry their human property across free soil without risk" (99). In New Mexico, transplanted southern whites managed to pass laws protecting the enslavement of African Americans that were every bit the equal of slave codes in the states of the Deep South. Other white southerners readily transitioned to keeping Indigenous people in bondage, such as the Tennessee-born Cave Couts, who worked his extensive holdings in Southern California with a force of Indian debt peons, indentured apprentices, and convict laborers—all forms of unfree Native labor legal in California in the 1850s.

Couts and other elite white southerners emerge as the primary actors of Waite's narrative. One gets occasional glimpses of enslaved African Americans in California sending back money to their family members still in bondage in the South or of Black Californians hosting "Colored Conventions." But the "Continental South" discussed in West of...