This Vast Southern Empire by Matthew Karp (2016)

Book Review #4

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Matthew Karp: A historian of the Civil War Era and Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. He is also a contributor to Jacobin magazine and has worked with the DSA in New Jersey

Summary

The US emerged as a new global power after the Civil War despite the tragedy of four years of intense conflict inflicted on the nation. Karp captures this brilliantly in terms of policymaking and how influential southern leaders were before the war. The core of Karp’s argument is that the vast majority of political leaders who presided over America’s territorial and economic expansion of America up till the onset of the war, were slaveholders. Thus in a way, they shaped the ideological future of the country and what would happen during Reconstruction. This book explores the international vision and strategic operations of the southern power brokers and how their concentration of wealth and power almost helped them bring Europe into the war to defend the south and reshape the western world. Ultimately, the south would lose the war but many historians believe while they may have lost the physical war, they won the war of the minds. Karp doesn’t stray too far from the policymaking of these southern leaders and hones his focus on the period just before the war started.

The Meat

Some background is needed and Karp lays that out neatly. He notes how influential John C. Calhoun was and how he laid the ideological and legal underpinnings of a defense of slavery that would be used for decades. It wasn’t enough to defend slavery on economic and religious grounds, it needed to be defended from courtrooms and through a legalistic lens. Because many southern political leaders were slaveholders, they had an obvious economic reason to defend the system. However, the system was decaying under their noses. With about 6 million slaves by 1860 and record high cotton exports, all seemed great. However, just like in Haiti in the 1790s, a system that becomes that unbalanced in terms of the ratio of slaves to planters, is not going to last very long. The planter class couldn’t see that dynamic though and assumed that their exports of cotton to Europe (hence the nickname “Cotton Kingdom") would incentivize Britain in particular, to enter the war and defend the Confederacy. That assumption never came to fruition and the south would lose in a devastating manner. Karp tries to demonstrate that this “vast southern empire” wasn’t just made up of the southern states but the entire US. The Border States were pushing the slavery issue further into the spotlight because the south wanted them to allow slavery in their new territories as more immigrants from Europe settled in the midwest. As the US expanded its economic reach, the issue of slavery became more and more prevalent for northern capitalists. It became a war between the industrialized north that relied on cheap immigrant labor and borderline “slave” wages versus the south which relied on actual slave labor and the dehumanization of black men and women in order to treat them as the market commodities they were. The north had the railroads and the industry to help them in a long, protracted war. The south had vast plantations with very little infrastructure and military ability.

Because Karp sees these southern power brokers as nationalists and not separatists, his views strain from many historians in that regard. But he is correct in the sense that the election of Lincoln truly did break their grip on power. Because the issue became the expansion of slavery inside the Union. The south had no interest in seceding until they believed their situation was untenable and that they wouldn’t be able to expand slavery westward. They just didn’t see the changing winds of history coming. Slavery had already been outlawed in the UK (1833) and Only Brazil was continuing this barbaric economic system (and even theirs was slowing down). According to Karp, the southern planter class saw their economic system as truly transcontinental and wanted to broaden the Atlantic slave trade. Hence, why they considered invading Cuba and exploring their reach in the Caribbean. As we head further into the book Karp explores the crops including “King Sugar” and how sugar exports also grew exponentially in the 1850s leading to even more concentrated wealth. He connects the global sugar and cotton trade being controlled by the slaveholding south with the global coffee trade headed by the slaveholding Brazil. Basically the argument being that these western hemispheric slaveholding empires were very powerful and more broad in their reach than most contemporary historians note today. By focusing on the 1850s, it allows Karp to create context into how such a vicious civil war could arise in what was considered “the perfect union.” But even Thomas Jefferson said 50 years earlier that slavery would “bring America to war” one day. He was dead right unfortunately.

Conclusion

I enjoyed this book by Karp. It’s his first book and it’s a very important time period of American history that people need to understand. Because the Civil War era is highly sanitized in US history books, Karp’s policy-heavy approach is much needed. Slavery is often misunderstood as an economic system that led to a civil war, but not as the broad system of capitalistic exploitation that it was and how it influences politics even to this day. The era of Reconstruction is also looked over because it is considered in many ways a failure. Many southern politicians in the modern day still hold onto the remnants of the antebellum south in terms of how they divide social services, celebrate Confederate “heritage” and segregate people based on class. We can see these ramifications in the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that went into affect during Reconstruction and how the south (and the country for that matter) never truly reconciled with the damages caused by slavery and the subsequent Civil War. Policies like reparations are often discussed but hardly reach the true scope of what slavery did to this country. The system was replaced with a northern, industrialized version of capitalistic exploitation of immigrant labor in order to build the America we know and love today. It is more humane than outright slavery but hardly emancipates the worker entirely. Karp makes sure that the reader knows how we need to continue the fight for economic equality on the basis of human rights. This is more important than ever as we struggle through a pandemic in which the rotten underbelly of American racism is being showcased to the world. Please buy this book from your local independent book seller. It’s available in paperback and is a must read for any policy junkie and lover of the Civil War era.

5/5