SLAVERY AT CORE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("But to deal properly with American slaveholders, a dose of contemptuous fairness required. With Du Bois, we must recognize the full magnitude of the proslavery enterprise--not only its cruelty and blindness but also its power and sophistication, In the decades before the Civil War, slaveholders organized U.S. foreign policy around the effort to defend slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. They did this not simply to guard their property rights or to solidify their social order, but because they understood slavery as a vital element of global progress. It was the appointed destiny of the United States, slaveholders believed, to uphold the institutions that nourished modern civilization. Only a political revolution that was unprecedented and unrivaled in American experience drove them from power. Even their ultimate defeat unfolded on the grandest of scales: no other slaveholding class in human history led a rebellion that claimed three-quarters of a million lives. Its triumphs, its downfall, and its legacy attest to the vast breadth and fierce confidence of the proslavery political vision. We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved, but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions." Id. at 256. QUERY: Is not this slaveholders' legacy, both in spirit and in underling policy, still very much with us in the guise of American white nationalism, Trumphlanderism, and the perverse creed "Make America Great Again"?).