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

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp Donald A. Rakestraw This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $31.00. ISBN: 978-0-6747-3725-9. In This Vast Southern Empire Matthew Karp adds his convincing voice to those recasting the profile of southern planter elites in antebellum America. Far removed from the traditional image of myopic states' rights agriculturalists devoted to the static forms of the past, these southern power brokers were sophisticated champions of an advancing global market structure centered on the proliferation [End Page 363] of African slave labor. They were, Karp contends, "cosmopolitan in outlook" and "practical visionaries" who "warmly embraced the global dimensions of their struggle" and believed that "the growth of slavery" was intrinsic to the march of civilization (3, 2, 4, resp.). Karp notes that southern proslavery statesmen such as Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, Abel Upshur, and Jefferson Davis held the reins of both the military and foreign policy apparatus for most of the antebellum period. During these years, they were not, as commonly assumed, married to states' rights but were intentional in their application of federal power and the promotion of "a strong outward state" through which, Karp contends, they could summon "federal authority not only to secure their immediate property rights, but also to extend the power of the United States on an international stage" (6). Southerners' carping about states' rights only appeared on occasions that served their immediate interests. For much of the period, they found those interests better served by a powerful federal authority over which they exerted significant influence. These southern leaders at the national helm, Karp argues, constructed "a foreign policy of slavery," the orchestration and implementation of which was essential, in their view, not just for the South but for the entire nation. "From their international perspective," in Karp's estimation, "'this vast Southern Empire' was, quite simply, the United States" (8). In pursuit of their vision this slaveholding coterie found partners in the hemisphere with fellow slave states Cuba, Brazil, and, prior to annexation, the Republic of Texas. An obvious and looming impediment to the southern plan emerged when the British announced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, ending slavery in most of the empire. More importantly for American observers, the act promised emancipation to over three quarters of a million bound servants in the Western Hemisphere. This act, Karp notes, "would transform the way southern elites thought about foreign affairs more forcefully than any other global event between the American Revolution and the Civil War" (12). Southern slaveholders now found their vision threatened not just in theory but in action. Soon, southern slave "property" was forfeited [End Page 364] to a British determination to free any slaves who arrived on their West Indian shores no matter the circumstance or the flag of the transport---the most notable example of which involved the slaves of the Creole, whose escape from the United States to the Bahamas raised a number of festering issues of international law and property rights. Britain's commitment to abolition reflected in such affronts to the legality of bound servitude formed an adhesive for proslavery advocates across the hemisphere that southern internationalists could exploit to secure and advance their economic model. Karp notes that southern elites understood that the key to securing the future of the slave system and implementing the foreign policy of slavery was a strong U.S. military, especially its naval arm. The connection of the extension of the U.S. military footprint to the South's determination to propagate a modern capitalist structure based on slave-produced southern cotton (pre-annexation Texas included), Cuban sugar, and Brazilian coffee weaves its way throughout the book. Contrary to traditional thinking that connected the military buildup to the fetish of U.S. expansionism, Karp makes it clear that the goal was not expansion of slavery but protection of the institution itself. He notes early on and reinforces throughout the book that, apart from Texas, the southern priority during the antebellum period...