Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West

2016

This dissertation rests on a relatively simple premise: America’s road to disunion ran west, and unless we account for the transcontinental and trans-Pacific ambitions of slaveholders, our understanding of the nation’s bloodiest conflict will remain incomplete. Whereas a number of important works have explored southern imperialism within the Atlantic Basin, surprisingly little has been written on the far western dimension of proslavery expansion. My work traces two interrelated initiatives – the southern campaign for a transcontinental railroad and the extension of a proslavery political order across the Far Southwest – in order to situate the struggle over slavery in a continental framework. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing to the eve of the Civil War, southern expansionists pushed tirelessly for a railway that would run from slave country all the way to California. What one railroad booster called “the great slavery road” promised to draw the Far West and the slaveholding Sou...

The American Historical Review, 1998

California History, 2020

California once housed over a dozen monuments, memorials, and place-names honoring the Confederacy, far more than any other state beyond the South. The list included schools and trees named for Robert E. Lee, mountaintops and highways for Jefferson Davis, and large memorials to Confederate soldiers in Hollywood and Orange County. Many of the monuments have been removed or renamed in the recent national reckoning with Confederate iconography. But for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they stood as totems to the "Lost Cause" in the American West. Despite a vast literature on the origins, evolution, and enduring influence of the Lost Cause myth, little is known about how this ideology impacted the political culture and physical space of the American West. This article explores the commemorative landscape of California to explain why a free state, far beyond the major military theaters of the Civil War, gave rise to such a vibrant Confederate culture in the twentieth century. California chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) carried out much of this commemorative work. They emerged in California shortly after the organization's founding in Tennessee in 1894 and, over the course of a century, emblazoned the Western map with salutes to a slaveholding rebellion. In the process, the UDC and other Confederate organizations triggered a continental struggle over Civil War memory that continues to this day.

Southern and then Confederate politicians and business leaders possessed and implemented expansionist ambitions during the Civil War Era from State Secession in late 1860 until the final collapse of the Confederacy in the first half of 1865. The Confederacy exhibited both formal ambition in the desire to annex additional territory and informal expansion through either a pursuit of commercial exploitation or fostering the fragmentation of neighboring states. Although the pursuit of expansion was integral to the formation of mid-nineteenth century nation states, for southerners, the experience of both secession and of fighting a war acted as a stimulant for such ambitions.

A Continent in Crisis: The U.S. Civil War in North America, 2022

In the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War, sectional con ict frequently took place in overlapping continental, hemispheric, Atlantic, and international contexts. Within these broader geographies, northern and southern whites used conceptions of empire to construct a hemispheric, Manichean struggle pitting free labor versus slave labor, democracy against aristocracy and monarchy, and popular sovereignty versus slaveholder sovereignty and the Slave Power. By the late 1850s, Democratic and Republican imperialists advocated the imposition of their particular forms of sovereignty, race, labor, and republican government onto their sectional rivals as well as onto borderland regions in the trans-Mississippi West, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In the 1850s the United States became an empire increasingly divided by antagonistic imperial visions for the broader Americas; by 1860, Democrats and Republicans had become de facto imperial rivals. In the months preceding the election of 1860, newspapers were ablaze with stories that the Knights of the Golden Circle-a quasi-secret society of proslavery expansionists-sought to establish a proslavery protectorate in northern Mexico. Like many Southern papers, the Daily Louisville Democrat advocated for the colonization of northern Mexico through processes deemed "Americanization" and "Southernization." By 1860, "Americanization" and "South ern ization" had become euphemisms for imperialist processes by which Anglo-Americans moved into a territory and established plantation slavery while the "Spaniard mongrel" population was forced to "retreat or perish." In the process, republican government replaced anarchy and despotism while a biracial social order consisting of superior Anglo-Americans governing inferior African American slaves supplanted the "mongrel" population of Native Americans, Spaniards, and Downloaded from by Univ of Calgary Lib user on 13 March 2024 Africans. The Daily Louisville Democrat agreed on the necessity of Southernization in Mexico, but it denounced the Knights. A Stephen Douglas organ, the Daily Democrat charged that the Knights had broken up the Charleston convention and divided the Democratic Party as part of its larger scheme to sever the Union and bring Mexico into a Southern empire for slavery outside of the Union. The Daily Democrat did not object to the immorality of the conquest of Mexico, the forced expulsion of its population, and the establishment of racial, plantation slavery. Like the Knights, Douglas Democrats advocated conquest and empire. Unlike the Knights, they insisted that it be done by, within, and for the existing Union. 1 Such disputes were common on the eve of the Civil War, as proslavery newspapers, politicians, and pundits celebrated their preferred scheme for Southernizing California, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and even Brazil. Proslavery expansionists di ered over exactly what regions to the south and west would be Southernized in the immediate future. They disagreed on the means by which these regions would be Southernized, just as they di ered over whether a particular place would become a territory, a state, a protectorate, or a colony. By 1860, they increasingly split over whether these places would be added to the present Union or to a separate Southern confederacy. Regardless of their di erences, and even when they dismissed the Knights themselves, in uential Southern and Democratic politicians endorsed the "Southernization" of "the tropics" and perhaps even "South America." And Southernization had to come sooner rather than later; Republicans allegedly stood ready to annex "Cuba, Mexico, and Central America" so that "Free Soil States may be erected South of us." Re ecting the urgency of empire but indi erent as to means, a Memphis paper cared little whether it was "the United States, Sam Houston, or the Knights of the Golden Circle" who would "take all Mexico"; it simply wanted it done.

Western Historical Quarterly, 2017

HAHR, 2023

the friendship of the US military as a way of defeating their traditional foes while also attempting to preserve their homelands and ways of life. Ironically, as Raat underscores, US government officials eventually tended to break their promises, and their Native allies ultimately faced similar outcomes, if not the exact same ones, as their brethren who chose to resist colonial expansion. While the research for this book comes mostly from secondary sources, Raat drew from his extensive experience as a history professor and docent at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, to conduct a vast inquiry in several libraries, museums, and Indigenous institutions in the Southwest. His broad analytical framework based on information from historical, archaeological, and ethnographic sources effectively helped him achieve his ambitious goals. A minor issue with his evidence, however, is his reliance on unvetted online sources from Wikipedia, especially in the book's first section when citing information related to pathfinder John C. Frémont. Written in a clear and straightforward style, the broad geographic scope and periodization ofLost Worlds of 1863 make it appealing to a general audience while also of interest to students and scholars specializing in ethnohistory, the Spanish borderlands, and early America. josé manuel moreno vega, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2012

In this revision of his 1996 publication, Mark Stegmaier has polished up an already comprehensive history of the Compromise of 1850 as it unfolded from the perspective of Texas and New Mexico. Whereas most histories have focused on the compromise from the standpoint of the national question about slavery, this work illuminates the significance of the part that fixed the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. Stegmaier argues that the boundary dispute acted as the linchpin for the entire block of compromises the 31st Congress passed in 1850. More so than any other issue-including statehood for California, the new fugitive slave laws, and the slave trade in the capital-the clash between Texas state authorities and those of the federal government over Texas\u27s claim to all territory east of the Rio Grande could very well have led to armed conflict and potential civil war

Western Historical Quarterly, 2006