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

Author: Matthew Karp

Narrator: Tom Zingarelli

Unabridged: 10 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/30/2017


Synopsis

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-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. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.

As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. 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. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. 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.

About Matthew Karp

Matthew Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. He grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and lives in Brooklyn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric

Outstanding addition to our understanding of the antebellum political ideology of the slaveholding elite. Most vitally, Karp illustrates that slaveholders embraced thoroughgoing nationalist rhetoric and federal policies not only when concerned over the security of their slave property, but also with......more

Goodreads review by Brendan

Great material analysis of the Planter class’ use of state power, specifically in the realm of foreign policy. Shows them as ruthless capitalists motivated by maintaining their class position globally. I can’t wait for Karp’s magnum opus on the Republican Party......more

Goodreads review by Joseph

Fascinating book that reframed much of my understanding of 19th century U.S. foreign policy. Karp explores something I can't believe I and seemingly every other historian missed: that the fact that in the antebellum period the majority of presidents and key U.S. foreign policy-makers (secretaries of......more