West of Slavery
The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire
Kevin Waite
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 04/2021
Pages: 392
Subject: History, Social Science
Print ISBN: 9781469663180
eBook ISBN: 9781469663203
DESCRIPTION
When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth
century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued
that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By
the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the
southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico,
Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the
plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white
southerners defended the institution of African American chattel
slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This
surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far
beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations.
Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.
Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.
RELATED TITLES
