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 Angela F. Murphy 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. 256. Notes, bibliography, index.) Amid calls to place scholarship on the Civil War Era in an international context, Claire M. Wolnisty looks southward to Latin America rather than eastward across the Atlantic Ocean, as many internationalizing studies have done. In a short, pithy book she brings together three topics that span the antebellum and postbellum periods—filibustering in Nicaragua, commercial expansion in Brazil, and Confederate emigration to Brazil— to show the hemispheric vision of White southern expansionists during this time. Southern expansionists who were interested in these regions, she argues, justified their involvement not only as a way to support the health of their slave-holding culture but also as expressions of economic and technological progress, as well as a way to battle Old World influence in the western hemisphere. Although scholarship on her discrete topics exists, Wolnisty brings her study of filibustering, economic investment, and emigration together to show the continuity of these themes in southern involvement in the region. In her first chapter, on Nicaragua, she examines how William Walker’s efforts to assert control in Central America reflected both a southern desire for a safe haven for slavery amid the sectional political conflicts that arose in response to U.S. westward expansion in the 1850s and a way to counter European interest in a region that was key to transportation and the opening of new markets. Her second chapter, on commercial expansionism in Brazil, builds on the literature about how commercial relations outside of actual territorial acquisitiveness were expressions of a desire to assert influence over new regions. Southern investors, she argues, expanded their economic ties in Brazil during the decades before the Civil [End Page 210] War, rooting their interests there in the slave system. Despite their reliance on bonded labor, their vision was one of economic modernization, and thus they promoted the development of transportation networks and mechanization of agriculture in the country. Wolnisty’s final chapter moves to the postwar emigration of southerners to Brazil. In this chapter she builds on themes in the two previous chapters by showing how southern White emigrants held many of the same goals and values as antebellum expansionists. They wanted to adapt their slave-owning society to the development of a modern economy based on trade networks in the western hemisphere. As earlier expansionists did, the emigrants to Brazil, she argues, brought a “sense of slavery’s interconnectivity, adaptability, and modernity with them” (73). Students of Texas history will be especially interested in this last chapter on Confederate emigration to Brazil because Wolnisty outlines the way that Confederate emigrants engaged in a process of step migration, moving westward first to areas like Texas and then departing through the ports of Galveston or New Orleans to relocate to southern nations. According to Wolnisty, the port of Galveston was a major hub not only for postwar southern emigrants departing the United States but also for filibusterers and slave traders during the antebellum period. Wolnisty’s concise description of the hemispheric scope of southern expansionists will be of interest to scholars and students alike. She has written an engaging study depicting the interests of nineteenth-century White southerners in Central America and Brazil, and she has made a real contribution to our understanding of their expansionist motives in her explanation of how these expansionists combined their commitment to bonded labor with a vision of building modern commercial networks in the western hemisphere. Angela F. Murphy Texas State University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association