“This vast southern empire” The South and the foreign policy of slavery, 1833–1861

This project traces American slaveholding attitudes toward international affairs from British emancipation in 1833 until the start of the Civil War. Slaveholding southerners, as presidents, cabinet officers, diplomats, and powerful journalists, exerted disproportionate influence on American foreign policy throughout the antebellum period. Of course, not all southern politicians agreed about international affairs, but I argue that an elite consensus, embracing leaders from John C. Calhoun to Jefferson Davis, evolved around what might be called a “foreign policy of slavery.” A sustained look at this foreign policy of slavery challenges our traditional association of proslavery politics with states’ rights conservatism; it also revises the way we see southern slaveholders in the broader context of world history. Not merely isolated reactionaries, crying out against the transformations of the nineteenth century, proslavery leaders constructed their own vision of modernity, and acted boldly to adavance it. In their larger effort to protect and propel the cause of slavery—not only within American borders, but across the Western hemisphere—slaveholders pursued aggressive, centralizing foreign policies, from military expansion to territorial acquisition. This dissertation traces uses a variety of manuscript records, government documents, and published periodicals to trace both the theory and practice of the foreign policy of slavery across the antebellum decades. Beginning with the southern reaction to British abolitionism, I go on to consider the struggle to defend slavery in Texas, Cuba, and Brazil; the Mexican-American War; and, in the 1850s, the evolution of an international proslavery argument. The elite push for secession in 1861, I suggest in conclusion, must be understood both as attempt to salvage the southern slave system and an ambitious bid for overseas power