This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy

Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-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. For proslavery leaders like John C. Fortified by years at the helm of US 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.. 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. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the US military while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic o

"An Important Book" according to Christopher Leahy. Matthew Karp has written a book of tremendous historiographic importance. Examining the means by which slaveholders held firm control over what he calls the federal government's "outward state"--the sector responsible for foreign policy, the military, and the role the United States assumed beyond its borders--he argues that these slaveholders waged a "hemispheric battle . It's good. Jacob Christian Stergos Matt Karp does a great job examining a somewhat subtle distinction from previous historic scholarship. In addition to being extraordinarily well-researched and valuable for the new insights it brings, it's well-written and enjoyable, even for the ugliness of much of the subject matter. Furthermore, the epilogue puts a rather haunting coda on the well-worn historical narr. This Vast Southern Empire is a highly intelligent, illuminating study of slave holders and American foreign This Vast Southern Empire is a highly intelligent, illuminating study of slave holders and American foreign policy. While slave holding was abhorrent to many before the Civil War, Karp's study is not a polemic on behalf of abolitionists. Instead it traces the marked influence and ambition of prominent, slave holding southerners at the Federal level on behalf of slave hol