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WORK TITLE: A Vast Southern Empire
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BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
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https://history.princeton.edu/people/matthew-karp * https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/09/14/review-matthew-karp-this-vast-southern-empire/ * https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-slaveholders-controlled-government-matthew-karp
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Amherst College, B.A. (magna cum laude), 2003; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, and educator. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, instructor, 2011-12; Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, teaching fellow, 2011-12; Princeton University, NJ, assistant professor, 2013–, Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor, 2016-19.
MEMBER:American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Southern Historical Association, Society of Civil War Historians, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, British American Nineteenth Century Historians, Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Mellon Research Fellowship, Virginia Historical Society, 2009; M.B. Hamer Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2010-11; C. Vann Woodward Prize, Southern Historical Association, 2012; visiting scholarship, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012-13; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, New York Historical Society, 2015-16.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including Aeon, Boston Review, and the Journal of Southern History. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Matthew Karp is a writer, historian, and educator. He is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. He has also served as the college’s Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor. Previously, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Rowan University. In 2003 Karp earned a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Karp has received fellowships and awards from organizations, including the New York Historical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Southern Historical Association, and the Virginia Historical Society. He has written articles that have appeared in scholarly publications, including Aeon, Boston Review, and the Journal of Southern History.
In 2016 Karp released his first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. In an interview with Timothy Shenk, contributor to the online version of Dissent, Karp discussed the main argument of the book. He stated: “It’s easy to find sectionalism in Southern politics before the Civil War, but the most powerful antebellum Southerners—from Andrew Jackson to Jefferson Davis—were nationalists, not separatists. What John C. Calhoun really wanted, as Richard Hofstadter wrote long ago, was not for Southerners to leave the Union but to dominate it, which they more or less did in the thirty years before the Civil War.” Karp continued: “Southerners imagined—and worked to build—an American republic whose foundation was slavery. In their minds, this was a powerful state, continental in scope and hemispheric in influence, which put the preservation of slaveholding property at the center of U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy. That’s what they meant by ‘this vast Southern empire,’ and that’s the focus of the book.” In the same interview with Shenk, Karp remarked: “It’s true that in many antebellum political arguments, Southern leaders emphasized the limited powers of the federal government. But when slavery and states’ rights came into conflict, the abstract commitment to limited government vanished pretty quickly. The outstanding example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode personal liberty laws in the northern states and required federal marshals to assist slaveholders in capturing runaway slaves.” Karp added: “You can look at this and say: ‘Aha, they’re hypocrites!’ But the use of federal power to defend slavery went far beyond hypocrisy—it was a cornerstone of antebellum Southern politics. … Proslavery Southerners also served as by far the most aggressive champions of U.S. military and naval expansion. They didn’t do this because they were hypocrites, but because they believed the world’s strongest bulwark for slavery was not the weak state governments of the South, but the entire United States.”
In the book, Karp profiles powerful Southern slaveholders, demonstrating the ways in which they were able to hold sway on federal matters. They were especially important in regard to foreign affairs. These Southerners were acutely aware of the state of slavery in other countries, though Karp notes that other historians have incorrectly portrayed them as isolated and ignorant. When abolitionist movements cropped up in Britain and in parts of the United States, the Southern leaders pushed the federal government to more actively support slavery both at home and abroad. Karp discusses interventions in Texas, Cuba, and Brazil. He also explains how the Southern leaders’ actions and views led to secession and, ultimately, to the Civil War.
A Publishers Weekly critic described This Vast Southern Empire as “adept and detailed.” The same critic concluded: “Karp’s thorough and polished study will be eagerly welcomed by scholars, if not a wider public.” Benjamin Park, reviewer on the Junto Web site, suggested: “The implications of This Vast Southern Empire‘s tale are broad, besides cementing Karp as one of the leading young scholars of nineteenth century American politics.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2016, review of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, p. 63.
ONLINE
Dissent Online, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ (October 27, 2016), Timothy Shenk, author interview.
Junto, https://earlyamericanists.com/ (September 14, 2016), Benjamin Park, review of This Vast Southern Empire.
Princeton University, Department of History Web site, https://history.princeton.edu/ (May 13, 2017), author faculty profile and C.V.
Matthew Karp
Title:
Assistant Professor of History; Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor
Home Department:
History
Office Hours:
Tuesday: 11:00 am-12:00 pm
Wednesday: 1:00 pm-2:00 pm
G-27 Dickinson Hall
609-258-6858
mjkarp@princeton.edu (link sends e-mail)
http://princeton.academia.edu/MattKarp (link is external)
Curriculum Vitae
Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its connections with the broader nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (link is external) (Harvard, 2016) explores the relationship between American slavery and American power in the decades before the Civil War.
Current Project
Karp has begun work on a book about the startling rise and radical political vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s.
Teaching Interests
At Princeton, Karp teaches courses on the Civil War era, the nineteenth-century United States, and political conflicts across the mid-nineteenth-century world.
Selected Articles
"In the 1850s, the future of American slavery seemed bright (link is external)," Aeon, November 2016
"The New World Order (link is external)," Boston Review, October 2016
"John Brown's Body (link is external)," Public Books, May 2014
"Arsenal of Empire: Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s (link is external)," Common-place, July 2012
"Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South (link is external)," Journal of Southern History, May 2011
Field:
U.S. 19th Century
World/Global/Transnational
Area of Interest:
(In alphabetical order)
African American
Foreign Relations
Global
Imperial History
Intellectual History
Political History
Slavery
Period:
19th Century
Region:
American South
North America
United States
Publications
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Matthew Karp
Department of History, Princeton University
129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544
mjkarp@princeton.edu ▪ 215-292-8192
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University, 2013-
Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor, 2016-2019
Instructor, University of Pennsylvania, 2011-2012
Teaching Fellow, Rowan University, 2011-2012
EDUCATION
Ph.D., History, University of Pennsylvania, 2011
B.A., History, Amherst College, 2003, Magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
BOOKS
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016)
• 2017 North Jersey Civil War Roundtable Book Award
• Reviews: The Wall Street Journal (Fergus Bordewich), Foreign Affairs (Walter Russell Mead), People’s World, The Washington Free Beacon, The Junto, Publisher’s Weekly
• Book-related interviews: Dissent, Jacobin, Salon, Civil War Book Review, African-American Intellectual History Society
The Radicalism of the Republican Party (book in progress)
The Global 1860s (co-edited volume with Linda Colley, forthcoming)
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
“The Grand Strategy of the Master Class: Slavery and Foreign Policy from the Antebellum Era to the Civil War,” in Rethinking Grand Strategy, eds. Elizabeth K. Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Andrew Preston (Oxford University Press), forthcoming 2018
“The World the Slaveholders Craved,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (Routledge, 2014), pp. 414-432
“King Cotton, Emperor Slavery: Antebellum Slaveholders and the World Economy,” in The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War, eds. David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 36-55
“Arsenal of Empire: Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s,” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, vol. 12, no. 4 (July 2012)
“Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 77, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 283-324
AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, New-York Historical Society, 2015-2016 (10 mos.)
Visiting Scholarship, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012-2013 (9 mos.)
C. Vann Woodward Prize, awarded by the Southern Historical Association to the year’s best
dissertation in southern history, 2012
M.B. Hamer Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2010-2011 (9 mos.)
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship, 2009-2010 (12 mos.)
Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellowship, 2009
Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2004-2009
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Douglas Egerton, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments that Redeemed America (New York, 2016), The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2016
“The New World Order”: review essay on Ben Wilson, Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age (New York, 2016), Boston Review, October 2016
Review of Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014), Journal of American History, vol. 101, no. 4 (March 2015), pp. 1261-62
Review of David C. Keehn, Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Secession, Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2013), Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 118, no. 1 (July 2014), pp. 86-87
“John Brown’s Body”: review essay on James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (New York, 2013), Public Books, May 2014
Review of Guy Gugliotta, Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2012), Journal of Southern History, vol. 79, no. 3 (August 2013), pp.711-13
Review of William K. Scarborough, The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in the South Carolina Lowcountry (Baton Rouge, 2011), Civil War History, vol. 59, no. 2 (June 2013), pp. 248-49
Review of Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2010), Enterprise and Society, vol. 13, no. 1 (2012), pp. 228-29
Review of Hans Konrad Van Tilburg, A Civil War Gunboat in Pacific Waters: Life On Board USS Saginaw (Gainesville, 2010), Journal of Southern History, vol. 77, no. 4 (November 2011), pp. 1065-66
“The Meteor of the War”: review of Paul Finkelman and Peggy A. Russo, eds., Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown (Athens, Oh., 2005), H-CivWar, April 2008
Review of W. Stephen Belko, The Invincible Duff Green: Whig of the West (Columbia, Mo., 2006), Southern Historian, vol. 29 (Spring 2008), pp. 82-84
INVITED LECTURES AND SEMINARS
“Slave Power: How Southern Slaveholders Mastered U.S. Foreign Policy,” Cornell University, March 2, 2017 (forthcoming)
“This Vast Southern Empire”: public conversation with Eric Foner, New School for Social Research, November 2016
“The Foreign Policy of Slavery, 1833-1865”: New-York Historical Society, April 2016
“Jefferson Davis and the U.S. Army before the Civil War”: Princeton Club of Savannah, March 2016
“Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New York”: White & Case LLP, New York, February 2016
“Visions of Modernity in the American Proslavery Argument”: Department of History seminar, Sheffield University, October 2015
“Visions of Modernity in the Proslavery Argument”: Workshop in American Studies, Princeton University, February 2015
“King Cotton, Emperor Slavery: Antebellum Slaveholders and the Global Economy”: Early American History Seminar, Columbia University, December 2014
“Arsenal of Empire: Jefferson Davis and the U.S. Army in the 1850s”: Phi Alpha Theta Society, Rowan University, March 2012
“ ‘The True Progress of Civilization’: Visions of Modernity in the International Proslavery Argument”: Annenberg Seminar in History, University of Pennsylvania, February 2011
CONFERENCE PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
“The Grand Strategy of the Master Class”: Rethinking Grand Strategy conference, Oregon State University, May 2016
Comment on paper presented by Ari Kelman, “The Dakota War”: Shelby Cullom Davis Center seminar, February 2016
“Architects of Empire: Jefferson Davis, the Proslavery South, and the U.S. Military in the 1850s”: ‘Jefferson Davis’s America’ symposium, Rice University, February 2016
“Regions, Nations, Empires: The American Civil War in Global Context”: The Global 1860s conference, Princeton University, October 2015
“William Henry Trescot and the Geopolitical Mind of the Proslavery South”: British American Nineteenth Century Historians meeting, University of Cambridge, October 2015
“American Slavery, Slaveholders, and Global History”: ‘Is Global History Truly Global?’ meeting, Humboldt University, Berlin, December 2014
“Slavery and Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century World: The View from the American South”: ‘The Congress of Vienna and Its Global Dimension’ (Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians meeting), Vienna, September 2014
“The Rod of Empire: American Slavery and European Imperialism in Africa”: Re/Framing Slavery conference, Accra, Ghana, May 2014
Comment on paper presented by Andrew Delbanco, “Some Reflections on Political Religion and Religious Politics in Antebellum America”: Shelby Cullom Davis Center seminar, May 2014
“The World the Slaveholders Craved: Global Imperialism and American Slavery in the 1850s”: Symposium in American History, Queen Mary, University of London, June 2013
“ ‘The World Will Fall Back On African Labor’: Rethinking the Antebellum Slave Trade Debates in a Hemispheric Context”: Southern Historical Association meeting, Mobile, November 2012
“ ‘There Is a Higher Law than the “Higher Law”’: Coolie Labor in the Proslavery Imagination”: ‘The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War’ conference, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, September 2012
“ ‘A Kindred Slave-Holding Republic’: Reconsidering the South’s Cuba Diplomacy in the 1850s”: Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations meeting, Hartford, June 2012
“‘There Is a Higher Law than the “Higher Law”’: Coolie Labor in the Proslavery Imagination”: Organization of American Historians meeting, Milwaukee, April 2012
“ ‘The United States, Cuba & Brazil’: Hemispheric Slavery and American Foreign Policy in the 1840s”: McNeil Center for Early American Studies Seminar, Philadelphia, November 2011
“Sectional Rights, National Power: Jefferson Davis and the U.S. Army, 1849-1860”: Society for Historians of the Early American Republic meeting, Philadelphia, July 2011
“King Cotton, Emperor Slavery? The Global Argument over Labor and the American Civil War”: ‘Civil War—Global Conflict’ conference, College of Charleston, March 2011
“Slave Trade Versus Slave Empire: Henry Wise’s Ministry to Brazil, 1844-1847”: Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations meeting, Madison, June 2010
“ ‘An Artful, Sagacious, and Bold Enemy’: British Abolitionism and the American South”: McNeil Center for Early American Studies Brownbag, Philadelphia, December 2009
“A Hemispheric Defense of Slavery: The South and American Foreign Policy, 1840-1845”: Southern Historical Association meeting, Louisville, November 2009
SELECTED OTHER HISTORICAL WRITING
“In the 1850s, the future of American slavery seemed bright,” Aeon, October 2016
Interview with Eric Foner, Jacobin (Issue 18), September 2015
“A Second Civil War,” Jacobin (online), May 1, 2014
Entries for “Henry Clay” and “Ostend Manifesto,” in Timothy J. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (Oxford University Press, 2013)
“A Confederacy of Kidnappers: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave,” Jacobin (online), November 4, 2013
“The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War: A Global History,” Conference Report, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 52 (Spring 2013)
“Dead White Reds,” Jacobin (online), April 18, 2013 (also appeared online in Salon)
“A Very Old Book: The Case for Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution,” The Junto (online), February 7, 2013
“The Plantation as Crime Scene: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained,” The Junto (online), January 9, 2013
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY
Co-organizer (with Linda Colley), “The Global 1860s,” conference at Princeton University, October 15-17, 2015
Organizer, “The Long Aftermath of Slavery: From Emancipation to Reparations in the United States and the Caribbean,” colloquium at Princeton University, April 3-4, 2015
Referee: Journal of the Early Republic, Oxford University Press, Brill Publishers, Bulletin d’Histroire Politique
Contributing editor, Jacobin
TEACHING
Assistant Professor, Princeton University, 2013-
The American Civil War and Reconstruction (Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2017)
Readings in American History, 1815-1877 (graduate school; Spring 2017)
The Rise of the Republican Party (Fall 2016)
A World in Crisis: War and Transformation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Fall 2013, Fall 2014)
American Capitalism (Preceptor for course taught by Jonathan Levy, Fall 2013)
Instructor, University of Pennsylvania, 2011-2012
Abraham Lincoln and American Politics, 1809-1865 (Spring 2012)
Slavery and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1776-1865 (Fall 2011)
Teaching Fellow, Rowan University, 2011-2012
The American Civil War and Reconstruction (Spring 2012)
American Slavery in the Wider World (Fall 2011)
Teaching Assistant, University of Pennsylvania, 2005-2007
War and Diplomacy, with Professor Bruce Kuklick (Spring 2007)
The American West, with Professor Phoebe Kropp (Fall 2006)
War and Diplomacy, with Professor Bruce Kuklick (Spring 2006)
The Third Reich, with Professor Thomas Childers (Fall 2005)
UNIVERSITY & DEPARTMENT SERVICE
University Committee on Discipline, Princeton University, 2014-2015
Executive Secretary, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 2014-2015
Graduate Committee, History Department, Princeton University, 2013-2014
Finance Committee, History Department, Princeton University, 2013-2014
MEDIA
Television
Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
CBC News Network with Michael Serapio
Radio
To the Point with Warren Olney, KCRW/PRI
The Source, Texas Public Radio
Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen, Portsmouth Community radio
Media Mornings, Vancouver co-op radio
LANGUAGES
Reading competence in Spanish, French
ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS
American Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
Southern Historical Association
Society of Civil War Historians
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
British American Nineteenth Century Historians
REFERENCES
Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Stephanie McCurry, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University
Robert E. Bonner, Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Jonathan I. Levy, Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago
James M. McPherson, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus, Princeton University
QUOTED: "It’s easy to find sectionalism in Southern politics before the Civil War, but the most powerful antebellum Southerners—from Andrew Jackson to Jefferson Davis—were nationalists, not separatists. What John C. Calhoun really wanted, as Richard Hofstadter wrote long ago, was not for Southerners to leave the Union but to dominate it, which they more or less did in the thirty years before the Civil War.
Southerners imagined—and worked to build—an American republic whose foundation was slavery. In their minds, this was a powerful state, continental in scope and hemispheric in influence, which put the preservation of slaveholding property at the center of U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy. That’s what they meant by 'this vast Southern empire,' and that’s the focus of the book."
"It’s true that in many antebellum political arguments, Southern leaders emphasized the limited powers of the federal government. But when slavery and states’ rights came into conflict, the abstract commitment to limited government vanished pretty quickly. The outstanding example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode personal liberty laws in the northern states and required federal marshals to assist slaveholders in capturing runaway slaves."
"You can look at this and say: 'Aha, they’re hypocrites!' But the use of federal power to defend slavery went far beyond hypocrisy—it was a cornerstone of antebellum Southern politics. ... Proslavery Southerners also served as by far the most aggressive champions of U.S. military and naval expansion. They didn’t do this because they were hypocrites, but because they believed the world’s strongest bulwark for slavery was not the weak state governments of the South, but the entire United States."
Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp
Timothy Shenk ▪ October 27, 2016
George Washington and slaves in Virginia (Wikimedia Commons)
Booked is a monthly series of Q&As with authors by contributing editor Timothy Shenk. For this interview, he spoke with Matthew Karp about This Vast Southern Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Between 1789 and 1850, the United States had twelve presidents. Ten of them owned slaves; the only two that didn’t were both named “John Adams.” The United States was a pioneering democracy, but its democracy was shaped by the demands of a slaveholding elite that had immense—and often decisive—authority over its government. Princeton historian Matthew Karp explores the consequences of this arrangement in This Vast Southern Empire. He focuses on the influence Southerners wielded over foreign policy, but Karp’s inquiry opens up new perspectives on much more, including the dynamics of proslavery ideology, the world-making ambitions of Southern elites, and the origins of a Civil War that broke American democracy in two. It is a history driven by the intertwined forces of white supremacy, state power, and coerced labor—and it is a history that would persist long after the Confederacy’s demise.
Timothy Shenk: When Americans talked about a “vast Southern empire” before the Civil War, what did they have in mind?
Matthew Karp: The short answer is that they weren’t talking about an independent Southern republic, but the entire United States.
It’s easy to find sectionalism in Southern politics before the Civil War, but the most powerful antebellum Southerners—from Andrew Jackson to Jefferson Davis—were nationalists, not separatists. What John C. Calhoun really wanted, as Richard Hofstadter wrote long ago, was not for Southerners to leave the Union but to dominate it, which they more or less did in the thirty years before the Civil War.
Southerners imagined—and worked to build—an American republic whose foundation was slavery. In their minds, this was a powerful state, continental in scope and hemispheric in influence, which put the preservation of slaveholding property at the center of U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy. That’s what they meant by “this vast Southern empire,” and that’s the focus of the book.
Shenk: Especially in popular discussions, slaveholders are often seen as advocates of small government and states’ rights. What does looking at the foreign policy visions promoted by leading proslavery figures do to that image?
Karp: It’s true that in many antebellum political arguments, Southern leaders emphasized the limited powers of the federal government. But when slavery and states’ rights came into conflict, the abstract commitment to limited government vanished pretty quickly. The outstanding example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which overrode personal liberty laws in the northern states and required federal marshals to assist slaveholders in capturing runaway slaves.
You can look at this and say, “Aha, they’re hypocrites!” But the use of federal power to defend slavery went far beyond hypocrisy—it was a cornerstone of antebellum Southern politics. Looking at U.S. foreign policy makes this especially clear. On many important questions of foreign relations—the annexation of Texas, for instance—supposed small-government ideologues suddenly morphed into bold advocates of federal power. Proslavery Southerners also served as by far the most aggressive champions of U.S. military and naval expansion. They didn’t do this because they were hypocrites, but because they believed the world’s strongest bulwark for slavery was not the weak state governments of the South, but the entire United States.
Shenk: One of the most fascinating characters in this book, and in all of U.S. history, is John C. Calhoun. He was the most incisive thinker the plantation elite had—Richard Hofstadter called him “the Marx of the master class”—and he’s a central figure in your account. What do we learn about Calhoun by bringing his foreign policy into the spotlight?
Karp: We think of Calhoun as the quintessential antebellum Southern sectionalist. But from the perspective of foreign and military policy, he was much closer to a bold proslavery nationalist. As Secretary of State, he pushed aggressively for Texas annexation, bypassing Congress (and cutting constitutional corners) to offer military aid to Texas in 1844. Through the antebellum years he remained a relatively consistent advocate for army and navy expansion.
Sometimes we imagine Southern slaveholders like Calhoun as isolated elites, barricaded in the parlors of their plantation homes. But Calhoun was also a bold proslavery internationalist. He paid close attention to the politics of slavery and abolition in Europe and in Latin America, and he was very assiduous about directing U.S. power to sustain slavery in Cuba and Brazil. For him, the international strength of slavery and the international strength of the United States were tightly bound together.
Shenk: Recent historians have paid a lot of attention to the commercial relationships that bound the United States and the United Kingdom before the Civil War. As you note in the book, during this period “Britain was the world’s largest consumer of goods produced by American slaves.” But you also observe that this was the same period when the UK both abolished slavery and embarked on a renewed drive to establish a global empire. From the perspective of the American South, this combination seemed like a total jumble of ideological, cultural, and economic issues that the UK would have to sort out if they wanted to develop a coherent vision of their country’s place in the world. And it gets even more confusing when you remember that figures like Calhoun had spent most of 1812 pushing for a disastrous war with Britain. How did slavery’s defenders make sense of all this?
Karp: Southern elites saw Britain as both a vital commercial partner and a potentially dangerous strategic enemy. That’s not necessarily incoherent, but it is confusing. It helps to approach Southern attitudes toward Britain from a chronological perspective.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the British abolition of slavery in 1833. Overnight, the policy of the world’s most powerful empire was now distinctly hostile toward one of America’s most fundamental institutions. In the early 1840s, Southern leaders in and around the administration of President John Tyler believed that defending slavery against British abolitionism should be a top strategic priority for the United States. There were many dimensions to this effort, from naval expansion to Cuba diplomacy, but in some sense it culminated with the U.S. annexation of the Republic of Texas, which was in 1845 the fourth largest slaveholding society in the world.
By the 1850s, after the Texas annexation and the U.S.-Mexico war, the strategic situation had changed. Slaveholders were cheered by the apparent “failure” of emancipation in the West Indies—obviously, it wasn’t a failure for the emancipated slaves, but sugar production in Jamaica and elsewhere plummeted after abolition. Across the 1850s, slaveholding leaders eagerly reprinted evidence that Britain had soured on abolition, and was ready to accept the dominance of slave-produced staples (from the United States, Cuba, and Brazil) in the world market. This was a somewhat optimistic view, but by 1861, Southerners sincerely viewed Britain much more as a commercial partner than as a strategic rival.
Shenk: For a long time, historians tended to think of the antebellum South as an almost feudal holdover from the past that could not stand up to the forces of modernity. In the last decade or so, however, scholars have become much more likely to depict it as thoroughly modern. Where does your research fall in that debate?
Karp: You’re right about the tendency of the recent scholarship. In a lot of ways, my book is congruent with that work, although I do think there are limits to a social or economic interpretation of slavery that concentrates entirely on its modern characteristics.
Really, though, the book is less about whether slavery was or was not “modern,” and more about the fact that leading slaveholders believed it was. I like what the historian Frederick Cooper says: scholars should stop “shoehorning political discourse into modern, antimodern, or postmodern discourses” and instead “listen to what is being said in the world.” What slaveholders said, over and over again, was that “modern civilization” and African slavery were fundamentally compatible. Economically, they argued, slave labor was necessary to produce vital agricultural staples. And ideologically, slave labor fit in very well in a world increasingly dominated by free trade, expanding European empires, and hardening racist science. I think the most powerful slaveholding politicians—Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and so on—believed this most of all. We have to understand that belief to understand antebellum politics.
Shenk: By 1861, elite Southerners were no longer convinced the United States could serve as the agent of their interests, and so they break off to form the Confederacy. You argue that we should see the launching of the Confederate States of America as their “boldest foreign policy project.” What do we gain by thinking of the Confederacy in this way?
Karp: Slaveholding leaders didn’t want to abandon the Union. But their grip on the federal government was overthrown by the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party in 1860. Suddenly the power of the national state—which they had spent decades building up—could be used to not to strengthen slavery, but to undermine it.
All the same, I don’t think Southerners would have seceded without the confident belief that a slaveholding Confederacy could thrive on the world stage. In the book I look at two of the most famous Southern documents from early 1861—the Mississippi declaration of secession and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone address.” Both are very candid about the central importance of slavery, and in contemporary discussions they are often brandished as clear evidence that slavery, not state rights, drove Southerners to secede (like the way Jon Stewart cites the Mississippi declaration in this episode of the Daily Show).
That’s all true, but what’s most interesting about these documents is that they make a fundamentally international case for slavery. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world”: that’s the second sentence of the Mississippi declaration. It wasn’t just that slaveholders believed Britain and other European powers would come to their aid in a war against the North, although they did believe that. It was that their entire ideological and strategic worldview depended on a belief in the global necessity of slave labor. European states might oppose slavery in the abstract, but they could not escape the deeper principle of racial inequality upon which slavery rested. “The truth of this principle may be slow in development,” Stephens admitted in his famous address, but so was the case with the controversial principles of Galileo or Adam Smith. Ultimately, he and other Confederate leaders were confident that the fundamental ideas of racial hierarchy and coerced labor would receive “full recognition . . . throughout the civilized and enlightened world.” That international confidence, I think, was a true ideological cornerstone of the Confederate project.
Shenk: The book’s epigraph comes from Karl Marx—“In the foreign, as in the domestic policy of the United States, the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star”—and its footnotes are studded with classic works of Marxist scholarship, but your methodology here doesn’t follow the standard practice among Marxists. Your concern is with policymaking elites, and while you’re clearly aware that their work isn’t taking place in a vacuum, you’re not trying to write a history from the bottom up. Is there a contribution that you’re trying to make by shifting the angle of focus?
Karp: Part of the issue here is that the literature on slavery and the Old South is, in some ways, the richest literature in U.S. history—the crown jewel of American historiography, as I’ve heard it described. And the best books on Southern politics, from the 1960s to the 2000s (many of them written from a Marxist or Marx-ish perspective), have been grounded very firmly in the social world of the antebellum South.
I would say that my book’s focus on elite actors and elite sources should not be seen as a criticism of that literature, but an indirect appreciation of its richness. Historians are so accustomed—as we should be—to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society, that for a long time, we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites. Done right, I think, these approaches don’t contradict each other—they complement each other.
Shenk: You end the book by discussing a speech by that W.E.B. Du Bois gave at Harvard’s 1890 commencement, when he was twenty-two. In his address, Du Bois portrayed the Confederacy’s president Jefferson Davis as not just a successful politician but as the representative product of a whole civilization. Thirteen years after he made this argument, Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Do you see a connection running from the history you examine here and the world that Du Bois saw at the turn of the twentieth century?
Karp: Du Bois titled his 1890 address “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization,” and by that he meant, provocatively, not just the civilization of the Old South, but all contemporary Western civilization itself. Davis’s life and career, according to Du Bois, prefigured the major world developments of the turn of the twentieth century—the destruction of indigenous populations, the strengthening of a global color line, the extension of Euro-American empires over Asia, Africa, and Australia. It’s an incredibly powerful and ambitious speech for anyone to give, let alone a twenty-two year old undergraduate.
Many historians would object to Du Bois’s intellectual genealogy here. Davis’s side, after all, lost the Civil War: the Confederacy was destroyed and slavery was abolished. The leading players in the world of 1890—from industrial tycoons from to European imperialists—seemingly owed little to Jefferson Davis or the slave South. U.S. President Benjamin Harrison was himself a Union Army veteran, who had marched with General Sherman into Georgia.
But what I like about Du Bois’s speech is that he refuses, unlike so many later writers, to consign Davis to a distant and departed past, entirely walled off from the twentieth-century future. Davis and other slaveholding elites thought and acted as power players in a rapidly modernizing world. Their battlefield defeat should not blind us to the ways in which many of their core ideas—about racial hierarchy, coerced labor, and imperial state power—survived long after 1865.
That doesn’t mean that the Civil War, Confederate defeat, and slave emancipation were irrelevant. If anything, it underlines their significance. The larger point, though, is that when we look back at Davis and his ilk, we should not regard them as antiquarian curiosities, but as ambitious contenders for power in an uncertain mid-nineteenth century world.
Shenk: Historians know you as a specialist in the antebellum South, but in the wider world you’re better known for your writings on contemporary politics, especially for your essays in Jacobin, which were some of the sharpest analyses of the Bernie Sanders campaign in this entire election cycle. On the surface, at least, those two don’t seem to have a lot in common. Do you see any common threads running through the two? What was it like wrapping up this book while also spending so much time with your feet planted in 2016?
Karp: I’m not sure they do have much in common! I turned in my final draft of the book in January, just as the Democratic primary really got underway and Sanders emerged as a surprising contender for the nomination. It was fortunate timing, because after working on the book for years, I now had some free time to get involved in contemporary politics.
To the extent that there is a connection between these things, it might have to do with my sense of slaveholders as a nineteenth-century ruling class. Our most powerful elites today are very different, and I don’t want to make a serious analogy between the two. But in the very general sense that slaveholders were a small and self-conscious class, nationally powerful, internationally sophisticated, and totally confident in the future of their system—despite various warning signs all around the globe—their outlook is, in some ways, comparable to the outlook of today’s big capitalist class. And control of the American national state was—as it remains today—absolutely fundamental to the operation of ruling class power.
I agree with other historians and commentators, like Manisha Sinha and Chris Hayes, that the contemporary left could stand to learn from the anti-slavery movement. The key, though, is not only to isolate and weaken the gun lobby or fossil fuel industry, for instance, but to develop a popular and more comprehensive critique of the political-economic system—a twenty-first century version of the “Slave Power” argument. Slaveholders, after all, didn’t just represent a sector of the economy; they controlled the government. For all its weaknesses, I do think the Sanders campaign represented a major step forward in this larger project, and I’m probably unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities going forward.
QUOTED: "adept and detailed."
"Karp's thorough and polished study will be eagerly welcomed by scholars, if not a wider public."
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Publishers Weekly. 263.30 (July 25, 2016): p63.
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This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Matthew Karp. Harvard Univ., $29.95 (360p) ISBN 978-0-674-73725-9
In this adept and detailed scholarly work, Karp, assistant professor of history at Princeton, examines the international politics of slavery in the antebellum era alongside the outlook and influence of proslavery Southern statesmen. Karp reveals how, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Southern slaveholders disproportionately controlled the levers of federal power, particularly in the realm of foreign affairs. They closely followed the international balance between slavery and freedom with "feverish attention" and "ideological confidence and worldly sophistication," rather than isolated, reactionary defensiveness. Faced with a rising domestic movement against slavery and what was deemed Britain's "imperial abolitionism," these proslavery statesmen largely abandoned traditional conservative qualms against federal power, using their influence to forge the American state into "the chief hemispheric champion of slavery" while defending and preserving black servitude domestically and in such diverse places as Brazil, Cuba, and Texas. Karp further argues that this aggressive approach was a major factor in the Mexican-American War, the secession of the South, and the Civil War, as these leading policy makers were unwilling to relinquish their chance at constructing "the global order they envisioned--based on racial hierarchy, coerced labor, and aggressive state power." Karp's thorough and polished study will be eagerly welcomed by scholars, if not a wider public. (Sept.)
QUOTED: "The implications of This Vast Southern Empire‘s tale are broad, besides cementing Karp as one of the leading young scholars of nineteenth century American politics."
Review: Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire Sep
14
by Benjamin Park
This review is cross-posted from Ben Park’s own blog, “Professor Park’s Blog: Musings of a Professor of American Politics, Culture, and Religion.”
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
This isn’t your grandparents’ antebellum South. A generation ago it was common for historians to talk about the “regressing” southern states in the decades preceding Civil War. The advent of democracy, the spread of enlightenment, and the triumph of free labor left slaveholders reeling and the slave institution crumbling. Secession, this narrative emphasized, was the last-ditch effort of a flailing boxer on the ropes. But scholarship from the past couple decades have put that myth to rest. Michael O’Brien demonstrated that southerners were intellectuals who contemplated the most sophisticated issues of modernity. Edward Baptist showed how the slave institution increased in strength as the financial staple in America’s capitalistic order. Walter Johnson and Sven Beckert displayed how slaveholders were at the forefront of an increasingly global economy. These and many other works all point to the same crucial revision: slaveholding southerners were “modern,” and their ideas and actions cannot be merely dismissed as remnants of an antiquated age.
Now Matthew Karp, in his new book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, teases out how this reviled cast of characters were also at the center of modern international relations and foreign affairs. It is important, he notes, “to fathom [Southerners’] intentions and to take an accurate measure of their strength” by providing “not only an ideological but also an institutional account of proslavery internationalism” (4). Representing the slave power had global implications, and so we must grapple with the imprint they left on state power in the international world. A vast majority of Secretaries of State, Secretaries of War, and foreign diplomats prior to 1860 came from southern cultures and maintained southern interests. The desire to not only preserve but expand the slave power was central to how they cultivated international relations. After Britain announced emancipation in 1833, a move that would send shock waves throughout the Atlantic World, American southerners groped for an appropriate response. The British Empire now posed a serious thread to both the global system of slavery as well as their economic stronghold, and a number of skirmishes involving slave ships stoked the rumors, but it would have been a mistake to wage war on the imperial power. Instead, they came up with what Karp calls the “foreign policy of slavery”: forcefully represent their interests on the national stage, bolster its military capacity, and support fellow slaveholding nations throughout the Western Hemisphere. Prepare for battle, but avoid war at all costs. Whereas southern states-rights-focused politicians expressed wariness over federal power, some were leading the charge for centralizing policies like expanding the navy—a reversal John Quincy Adams rightly identified as coming “reeking hot from the furnace of slavery” (34). America’s pro-slavery empire required a robust defense.
But this argument over the expansion of naval power, the focus of chapter two, hints at a deeper current throughout this book: how large and coherent was this body of southern elites devoted to foreign supremacy? Like any good historian, Karp hedges his language with language like “a vigorous military wing of he southern foreign policy,” but the extent of pervasiveness is still in limbo (33). Virginian Abel Parker Upshur, the Secretary of the Navy, did indeed have these grand visions, but almost none of it was accomplished in his few years in office. Karp may be right that this “emergence of southern navalism,” though short-lived, helped “to broaden their view of federal powers” (48), but the question remains “who” and “to what extent?” This international mission of slaveholding imperialism never seemed to be as widespread as the book’s most provocative passages seems to let on, as a tight circle of participants are almost always center stage. And even amongst this cadre of elite politicians, their ideas and policies seemed neither fully consistent nor cohesive. In trying to make these southern internationalists exceptionally modern, it is tempting to impose our own sense of modern coherence. But even if there was no systematic “foreign policy of slavery,” the underlying tensions were clearly apparent and require this type of analysis.
This problem of cohesion fades as the book moves more into the late 1840s and 1850s, when more concrete events and initiatives force a more collaborative slaveholding response. Even as they held the threat of abolitionist Britain at bay, they sought to strengthen ties with an bolster the slaveholding chops of Texas, Cuba, and Brazil. The latter two countries were especially important, because if the global emancipation efforts ceased slave labor in those locations, many believed America was soon to follow. Such a prospect had to be stopped at all costs. Even diplomat Henry Wise’s attack on the African slave trade in Brazil, according to Karp, was centered on his efforts to preserve slavery within the nation. The annexation of Texas, identified as “the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery” (100), is cast as a play to save a “slaveholding republic” from Britain’s abolitionist intrigue. The Mexican/American War is also seen as the staging ground for pro-slavery imperialists testing the power of a federal army. (To do so, of course, Karp has to spend a lot of words explaining why Calhoun, an otherwise stalwart figure of the pro-slavery expansionists, verbally denounced President Polk’s actions in Mexico. The result is not fully persuasive.) With the strength of the federal structure and the wealth of the cotton system, the slaveholding empire seemed strong indeed.
Even in the 1850s, when domestic debates and divisions seemed to doom southern slaveholders, many grew increasingly optimistic. The growth of free trade, Britain’s economic troubles, and South America’s slave profits were interpreted as good omens for slavery’s future. To elite southerners, coerced labor was not a antiquated relic under siege but the foundation for a modern, global industry—it was interwoven with new scientific progress, not antagonistic toward it. One reason they were so frustrated with the sectional battles was that it took attention away from the imperial scene–they were much more interested in extending state power through the purchase of Cuba than the divisive topic of Nebraska. The latter was a small potato compared to the former. What made Lincoln’s election in 1860 so threatening was not just that southern slaveholders, for the first time, lost control of state and foreign power, but also because the powerful system they had spent decades building could now be turned directly back on them as a global antislavery force. Their scheme had backfired. In response, southern states seceded and aimed to create a new centralized state that revolved around slavery and embraced the global capitalist order. “Secession did not produce a flight away from central authority,” Karp explains, “but the eager embrace of a new and explicitly proslavery central authority” (244). The myth of a states-rights agenda has never appeared so vanquished.
The implications of This Vast Southern Empire‘s tale are broad, besides cementing Karp as one of the leading young scholars of nineteenth century American politics. Pro-slavery southerners were not opposing modernity as much as they were trying to shape it. In reading Karp’s book I kept think of the closing and haunting line of my PhD advisor’s magnum opus, wherein he claimed historians have consciously rejected “the insight that the Old South had chosen its own way with clarity of mind, had even understood things about the intractability of the human condition, and had done much consistent with the later trajectory of the American Republic, which usefully flattered itself that aristocracy, illiberalism, and rapacity had died in 1865 and could be killed” (202). Indeed, especially in the election year of 2016 we should be well aware that notions of progress and modernity are unstable. And so grappling with the quixotic confederate south once again forces us to deal with trenchant tensions within our culture that still refuse to die.