Audiobook10 hours
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Written by Matthew Karp
Narrated by Tom Zingarelli
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.
As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their "vast southern empire" was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slave-holding elites formed their own Confederacy-not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their "vast southern empire" was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slave-holding elites formed their own Confederacy-not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
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Reviews for This Vast Southern Empire
Rating: 4.552631578947368 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enslavers didn’t always object to federal power; in particular, they really liked the idea of a strong navy so that they could protect the other slave powers of the hemisphere. This wasn’t just a matter of wanting to annex Cuba; they particularly wanted to defend Brazil as a slave nation. It’s another facet of US history that was shaped by slavery.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sometimes reality is laid out clearly before you if you ask the right question. Essentially, this book starts with Britain's abolition of slavery in 1833 and the implications from the American perspective and examines how this incited a cold war in which the Southern slave-holding class refashioned the federal government of the United States into an instrument for defending the institution of chattel slavery on an international basis. The irony is that the military & foreign policy apparatus created by the likes of such Confederate stalwarts as Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin, et al, was ultimately used against the Southern slave-holding class with great efficiency. Karp's epilogue ends with a meditation on W.E.B. Du Bois' 1890 lecture on Jefferson Davis as an exemplar of contemporary culture (nothing was more modern in 1890 than empire), a reminder of how these men saw themselves as the cutting edge of progress and not some pathetic and romantic survival as "Lost Cause" ideology would leave one to believe.As Karp would put it: "We can be grateful that the slaveholders never gained the world they craved but we gain nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions."To put it another way this was the book that made me appreciate the depth of Southern commitment to slavery as an ideology.