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Book

This vast southern empire : slaveholders at the helm of American foreign policy

Call Number

  • 306.362 K1874 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016.

Physical Description

360 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Summary

A new portrait of the southern slaveholders who occupied the commanding heights of antebellum politics, this book explores the intimate relationship between American slavery and American power. From John C. Calhoun to Jefferson Davis, the South's leading statesmen understood the United States as the chief defender of bound labor in an Atlantic World still teetering between slavery and abolition. Overcoming traditional southern scruples about dangers of centralized authority, slaveholders harnessed the power of the United States to protect vulnerable slave regimes across the hemisphere, from Texas to Brazil.--

Contents

  • Introduction: The world the slaveholders craved
  • Confronting the great apostle of emancipation
  • The strongest naval power on earth
  • A hemispheric defense of slavery
  • Slavery's dominoes: Brazil and Texas
  • The young Hercules of America
  • King cotton, Emperor slavery
  • Slaveholding visions of modernity
  • Foreign policy amid domestic crisis
  • The military South
  • American slavery, global power
  • Epilogue: the rod of empire.

Subjects