Review: West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire, by Kevin Waite

Abstract

The past decade has seen a major shift in the historiography of slavery. Thoroughly demolishing a century of Lost Cause revisionism, recent works by Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert and others have argued that southern slavery in the nineteenth century was no relic of a pre-modern age and was instead inextricably linked to the emerging global capitalist order. Southern elites are recast from reactionary states’ rights zealots to savvy nationalists tilting U.S. federal policy to their economic advantage. In his first book, Kevin Waite adds to this literature by shifting focus to the Far West, arguing for the existence of an expansionist continental South dedicated to international trade and maintaining various forms of unfree labor. Waite contends that the sway of pro-slavery politics extended to the Pacific coast, challenging the notion that the American West was somehow united against slavery.Waite breaks from earlier historians by urging readers to look beyond Bleeding Kansas for explanations on how westward expansion contributed to sectional dissolution. Instead, he adds a new region, the Desert South, to the historical framework of “many Souths.” Comprising Southern California, New Mexico, and Utah, the Desert South was a site where southern support for chattel slavery merged with local desires to preserve other forms of race-based coerced labor, including captive Native labor and lifelong debt peonage. Waite insists that southern lawmakers’ push for federal transportation projects (designed to link the South with Asian markets) merged with pro-slavery separatist movements in the West to hasten the arrival of the Civil War. Despite vain attempts to secure a southern railroad route and the political blunder of southern secession, the collaboration between southern and western politicians later achieved a remarkable postbellum revival.Waite’s scope is unusually ambitious for a debut. He begins by demonstrating how antebellum southern politicians utilized their influence within the federal government and exploited patronage networks in the favor of the planter class. Section two shifts focus to the West, examining local office holders who adapted pro-slavery politics to their own regional contexts. For instance, California Democrats sought to overturn the state’s free-soil constitution, New Mexico legislators passed an 1859 slave code, and Utah legalized slavery in 1852. Section three posits the Desert South as a theater of the Civil War where various separatist plots stoked a popular backlash, leading to the rise of the once floundering Republican Party in the West. The section ends with western Democrats’ postwar comeback, as white solidarity against the region’s diverse population of Natives, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Hispanos—combined with antipathy towards an expanding federal government—helped fueled the demise of Reconstruction on a national level.Waite is a writer of unusual clarity, and his book is an accessible contribution to the new slavery historiography as well as the growing literature addressing linkages between free and unfree labor systems in the West. None of the information he provides is necessarily new, but he consistently reads his source material in fresh ways. Similarly, elements of his argument will be familiar to readers of earlier works by such historians as Richard White and David M. Potter, but no writer has so forcefully elucidated why the slave South cast such a long shadow in the Far West.