A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty Cane West A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 159. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0790-6.) In the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans looked westward across the continent, many white U.S. southerners also pursued expansion projects southward into Central and South America. Southern commentators such as Matthew Fontaine Maury felt that the future of the slaveholding U.S. South rested on the success of this sectional expansion into Latin America. Claire M. Wolnisty highlights "multiple southern expansionistic ideologies" pursued by filibusterers, commercial expansionists, and southern emigrants who developed increasingly hemispheric formulations of manifest destiny (p. xiv). She argues that these southern expansionists created political and economic networks between the U.S. South and South America through which the U.S. South could serve as the model for an "expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere" (p. xiii). A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America builds [End Page 382] on recent scholarship by historians such as Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brian Schoen, and Matthew Karp emphasizing southern slaveholders' engagement with other nineteenth-century slaveholding societies in the Western Hemisphere. Wolnisty's study into the various nation-state and non-nation-state formulations of power in Central and South America demonstrates the possibility of "far more fluid spatial concepts" of an independent South than the eventual Confederacy (p. xv). The book's three chapters follow distinct groups of southern expansionists, primarily between the 1850s and 1870s, as they responded to European imperial projects in the hemisphere and domestic tensions over slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the shifting rhetoric among military filibusterers in Nicaragua. Wolnisty draws from the writings of leading filibusterers, particularly William Walker, who first appealed to widespread anti-European sentiment before shifting to explicitly proslavery arguments that drew more sectional support. In chapter 2, her strongest chapter, she discusses the "economic infiltration" of commercial expansionists in Brazil (p. 37). She draws on letters and business ledgers from Americans in Brazil who created nonterritorial economic networks as an alternative to more high-profile military-backed territorial annexations. In chapter 3, Wolnisty follows newspapers and diaries of former Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. She argues that these immigrant communities carried their proslavery southern identity beyond the borders of the United States by adopting prewar southern expansion models. Readers of the Journal of Southern History will be drawn to the implications of a much more geographically fluid southern identity. Wolnisty's border-transcending southerners "became proslavery, modern economists within southern–South American networks" (p. xvii). Whether in Brazil or Nicaragua, these southern expansionists tied their identity to the promise of modern slave labor societies and settler-colonial communities modeled after the U.S. South. Wolnisty's conclusions also decenter cotton as the source of U.S. southerners' power. Cotton rarely appears in the text as Wolnisty focuses on themes of anti-European sentiment, slavery-driven capitalism, and geographic mobility. Though the study ostensibly covers the time frame of 1808 to 1877, to examine nearly a century of southerners looking toward South America, the study is largely focused on the years 1850–1877. This narrower time frame leaves readers with a limited understanding of how "expansionistic visions adapted to the shifting hemispheric environments" of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of the post–Civil War emigrants to Brazil (p. xv). Material fluctuations in the volume of U.S.-Brazilian trade or the number of postwar southern emigrants to Brazil might provide some understanding of changes in hemispheric relations, but much of this evidence is listed only in the endnotes. A Different Manifest Destiny is helpful for scholars interested in the international dimensions of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and hemispheric case studies of southern, proslavery manifest destiny. The forms of non-state expansion show how southerners sought to develop global trade networks in the nineteenth century, and the attempted settler-colonies in Nicaragua...