Audiobook10 hours
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Written by Matthew Karp
Narrated by Tom Zingarelli
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
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.
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.
Related to This Vast Southern Empire
Related audiobooks
American Slavery, American Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRiver of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOverthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road to Disunion: Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5To Make Our World Anew: Volume II: A History of African Americans from 1880 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Union War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bound for Canaan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Comanche Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freedom National: The destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shattering: America in the 1960s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
History For You
Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swingtime for Hitler: Goebbels’s Jazzmen, Tokyo Rose, and Propaganda That Carries a Tune Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/577 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Razorblade Tears: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Small Mercies: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An American Marriage: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Story of Art Without Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Secret History of the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Restaurant: A History of Eating Out Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for This Vast Southern Empire
Rating: 4.552631578947368 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enslavers didn’t always object to federal power; in particular, they really liked the idea of a strong navy so that they could protect the other slave powers of the hemisphere. This wasn’t just a matter of wanting to annex Cuba; they particularly wanted to defend Brazil as a slave nation. It’s another facet of US history that was shaped by slavery.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sometimes reality is laid out clearly before you if you ask the right question. Essentially, this book starts with Britain's abolition of slavery in 1833 and the implications from the American perspective and examines how this incited a cold war in which the Southern slave-holding class refashioned the federal government of the United States into an instrument for defending the institution of chattel slavery on an international basis. The irony is that the military & foreign policy apparatus created by the likes of such Confederate stalwarts as Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin, et al, was ultimately used against the Southern slave-holding class with great efficiency. Karp's epilogue ends with a meditation on W.E.B. Du Bois' 1890 lecture on Jefferson Davis as an exemplar of contemporary culture (nothing was more modern in 1890 than empire), a reminder of how these men saw themselves as the cutting edge of progress and not some pathetic and romantic survival as "Lost Cause" ideology would leave one to believe.As Karp would put it: "We can be grateful that the slaveholders never gained the world they craved but we gain nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions."To put it another way this was the book that made me appreciate the depth of Southern commitment to slavery as an ideology.