Go
 

  Get this audio book:




Learn More About
Find More Titles by
This Author: Matthew Karp
This Narrator: Tom Zingarelli
This Publisher: Tantor Audio

This Vast Southern Empire by Matthew Karp

This Vast Southern Empire

Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy

by Matthew Karp


Video About This Audio Book



Title Details

Author
Narrator
Publisher
 
Unabridged Edition
Running Time
10 Hrs. 30 Min.

Description

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-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 US 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 US 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.


People Who Liked This Vast Southern Empire Also Liked These Titles:
  Vietnam: A History
by Stanley Karnow

  The Sewing Girl's Tale
by John Wood Sweet