This Vast Southern Empire

Finished up “This Vast Southern Empire,” a 2016 book by Princeton historian Matthew Karp on the foreign policy regime and political economy of the United States in the 1840s-1861. I've been especially intrigued by analyses of the antebellum and the American Civil War (these days I like to refer to it as the American Anti-Slavery War) from a more internationalist perspective, particularly as it relates to the formation of the United States as a hemispheric hegemon (e.g. fending off British abolitionism in the Americas while building relations with pro-slavery Spain, the annexation of the Republic of Texas and the Mexican-American War, allyship and diplomatic overtures with the Empire of Brazil, and the Ostend Manifesto and repeated attempts by antebellum presidents towards annexing Cuba), the advances in the organizational, tactical, and technological capacities of the United States Army and Navy, and the ambitions of southern American slaveholders in establishing their worldview of not only a sectional slave society, but a global one.

I figured I should study this aspect of mid-19th century US history more closely after reading a passage from Du Bois' “Black Reconstruction,” Chapter III: The Planter. It is a fascinating chapter in which Du Bois examines the southern planter class; specifically, the commanding political power pro-slavery southern Democrats had at the highest ranks of the United States federal government in the decades leading up to the war, and consequentially, their global ambitions in creating a worldwide slave society, backed by the racial hierarchy in enslaving African labor and by a defense of free trade of slave-produced goods everywhere.

It's poignantly fitting that the author chooses to conclude the text with Du Bois' baccalaureate disquisition at Harvard University's commencement ceremony in June of 1890, titled “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” In this essay, which Du Bois composed and presented at the age of 22, a quarter-of-a-century since the surrender of the Confederacy to the Union Army at the Appomattox Courthouse, and in the milieu of the racist “lost cause” myth rising amongst white southerners, he provides an incisive analysis on the type of civilization that produces a man – and indeed, men – like the ex-CSA president. In his words:

“I wish to consider not the man, but the type of civilization which his life represented: its foundation in the idea of the strong man – Individualism coupled with the rule of might – and it is this idea that has made the logic of even modern history, the cool logic of the Club. It made a naturally brave and generous son Jefferson Davis – now advancing civilization by murdering Indians, now hero of a national disgrace called by courtesy, the Mexican War; and finally, as the crowning absurdity, the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free. Whenever this idea has for a moment, escaped from the individual realm, it has found an even more secure foothold in the policy and philosophy of the State. The Strong Man and his mighty Right Arm has become the Strong Nation with its armies. Under whatever guise, however a Jefferson Davis may appear as man, as race, or as nation, his life can only logically mean this: the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.”