Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp

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Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp
A new book.
Author seems to think the secessionists were nationalists as long as slavery was protected. They also saw slavery as the basis for national wealth.


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: 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?
 
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