This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.31 (578 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B06ZZ3NF9S |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 131 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-09-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. For proslavery leaders like John C. 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. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement again
An Important Book Christopher Leahy Matthew Karp has written a book of tremendous historiographic importance. Examining the means by which slaveholders held firm control over what he calls the federal government's "outward state"--the sector responsible for foreign policy, the military, and the role the United States assumed beyond its borders--he argues that these slaveholders waged a "hemispheric battle between freedom and slavery" (p. 70) during the 1840s and 1850s (what he refers to as the "long 1850s"). He highlights the roles men such as John Tyler, Abel P. Upshur, John C. Calhoun, Duff Green, and Henry. It's good. Jacob Christian Stergos Matt Karp does a great job examining a somewhat subtle distinction from previous historic scholarship. In addition to being extraordinarily well-researched and valuable for the new insights it brings, it's well-written and enjoyable, even for the ugliness of much of the subject matter. Furthermore, the epilogue puts a rather haunting coda on the well-worn historical narrative of slavery in America.. This Vast Southern Empire is a highly intelligent, illuminating study of slave holders and American foreign This Vast Southern Empire is a highly intelligent, illuminating study of slave holders and American foreign policy. While slave holding was abhorrent to many before the Civil War, Karp's study is not a polemic on behalf of abolitionists. Instead it traces the marked influence and ambition of prominent, slave holding southerners at the Federal level on behalf of slave holding and the expansion of same. State's rights were not on their minds as they sought to direct American foreign policy.