West of Slavery

The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

Kevin Waite

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469663203
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: American Civil War History

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.

PART I

From Memphis to Canton

CHAPTER ONE

The Southern Dream of a Pacific Empire

THOMAS JEFFERSON lived in an Atlantic world, but he dreamed of a Pacific gateway. From his term as the nation’s first secretary of state (1790–93) to his time as president (1801–9), Jefferson actively promoted transcontinental exploration in order to locate an American outlet to the Pacific trade. In the early 1790s, he placed his hopes in the French botanist and adventurer André Michaux, who was then preparing for an overland exploration of North America. Writing on behalf of fellow patrons, Jefferson instructed Michaux on “the chief objects” of the expedition: “to find the shortest & most convenient route of communication between the US. & the Pacific ocean, within the temperate latitudes.”¹ Jefferson’s interest in a more direct passageway to the Pacific trade was nothing new under the sun. It had been the fantasy of Columbus as he sailed from Spain in 1492, and the lure of Asian markets continued to propel the early European explorers of North America.² But with Jefferson and American independence, the search for a passage to India—or, as it were, China—took fuller form. Although diplomatic complications ultimately scuttled Michaux’s mission, it was only a momentary setback in America’s advance into the Pacific world.³

A decade after writing to Michaux, Jefferson launched another transcontinental enterprise, this time with considerably more success. His agents were Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark. Their mission, as Jefferson instructed, was to establish a deeper understanding of the continent’s geography, especially its waterways, and to locate “the most direct & practicable communication” to the Pacific slope. While Jefferson had stressed the scientific value of Michaux’s mission, his interests were now more commercial and diplomatic. Lewis and Clark were to scout for furs along the Pacific coast and determine whether trade could be conducted along this transcontinental route “more beneficially than by the circumnavigation now practiced.” Upon “your arrival on that coast,” the president continued, “endeavor to learn if there be any port within your reach.”⁴ A port, Jefferson recognized, would provide a source of contact with other maritime powers, as well as a future emporium for Asian trade. It was the lure of such outlets that would guide American policy makers through the coming decades.

Scholars have characterized the early eastern Pacific Ocean as something of a Yankee lake. To be sure, it was primarily New England traders who plied the waters off the coast of California in the early nineteenth century, transforming the tallow and hide trade into a lucrative American enterprise. Similarly, America’s whaling ships sailed for the Pacific—what Herman Melville called the “tide-beating heart of earth”—almost exclusively from northeastern harbors.⁵ Yet historians have been too quick to write slaveholders out of this story.⁶ Although some southerners did cleave to strict constructionism and agrarian parochialism to dismiss the search for Pacific commerce, they were out of step with the leading thinkers of their region. Beginning with Jefferson and continuing through the antebellum period, southern statesmen pursued a geopolitical agenda that set the United States on the path toward continental and Pacific empire. America built much of that empire in three great lunges—the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, and the seizure of New Mexico and California—each of which was orchestrated by a president from the slave states. Another southern-born executive advanced America’s maritime interests by formalizing trade relations with China and protecting US access to the Hawaiian Islands.

Reckoning with southern visions of Pacific empire opens a new window into the worldview of American slaveholders. The caricature of the antebellum planter—as a backward-looking aristocrat clinging to musty copies of Walter Scott’s chivalric romances and cloistered from the concerns of the modern world—has been upended by the past generation of historical scholarship. American slaveholders, we now know, looked well beyond the confines of their plantations and chased bold international ambitions, from commercial integration to outright conquest. The Caribbean Basin, scholars argue, was the object of their fantasies. Some slaveholders sought more territory for plantation agriculture by invading Cuba and Nicaragua; others hoped to strengthen slavery at home by protecting it across the Atlantic world.⁷

Yet for many white southerners, the most promising field of opportunity lay in the opposite direction. Asia beckoned. And so they devised a set of commercial initiatives in the belief that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers would one day clothe themselves in slave-grown cotton products. The fact that few slaveholders understood the dynamics of the Asian markets after which they lusted did little to diminish their zeal for the purported value of the Far East. From the policy makers of the early republic to the thinkers and politicians of the antebellum period, slaveholders played a leading role in America’s Pacific agenda.

They did so, at first, as nationalists. Long before regional identities hardened into sectional rivalries, southern statesmen, like their northern counterparts, pursued Pacific commerce in an effort to bolster America’s position on the global stage. There was no conspiracy among slaveholders to press into the Pacific world for their exclusive benefit. Southern leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, may have coveted Pacific frontage for the United States, but neither did so as part of an expressly proslavery agenda. Such a weighty enterprise required the coordinated efforts of leaders from across the country. In 1844, when President John Tyler of Virginia sought to strengthen America’s trading position in the Pacific world, and particularly the flow of cotton into China, he turned to Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, to carry out that mission. As Cushing recognized, increased trade would shower benefits on producers and manufacturers across antebellum America’s integrated economy. In other words, the mercantile class of New England stood to gain as much from the transpacific outflow of cotton as the planter class of South Carolina did. Tracking their collective efforts helps reorient the Atlantic-centric narrative of the antebellum United States.⁸

Yet, in time, the issue of transpacific trade erupted in sectional controversy. When Congress began debating the first major proposal for a transcontinental railroad in 1845, lawmakers raised a thorny set of questions about the political costs of American development. Most crucially, where would this railroad run: through slave country or across free soil? Partisans understood that whichever section won this national highway would control not only the commerce of the American West but access to the China trade as well. Slaveholding expansionists squabbled among themselves over tactics. But they directed most of their energies against competing plans from the North, in what they viewed as a winner-take-all contest for American and Asian commerce. As a result, the railroad question gave shape to some of the major geopolitical developments of the period, including the US-Mexico War and the rush to California’s goldfields. Conflicting visions of Pacific empire were at the heart of an emerging sectional crisis.

From Texas to the Pacific

Thomas Jefferson brought the United States one step closer to the Pacific with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But another three decades would pass before Americans advanced concrete schemes for the prized deepwater harbors along California’s coast. By the 1830s, dealings with Mexico prompted US leaders to think more expansively about their nation’s geography. President Andrew Jackson attempted not only to annex Texas but also to acquire a piece of the Pacific coast. He instructed his minister to Mexico to enter negotiations in order to purchase the region surrounding the harbor of San Francisco. In Jackson’s mind, this was “a most desirable place of resort of our numerous vessels engaged in the whaling business in the Pacific, far preferable to any to which they now have access.”⁹ Again, the Pacific at this time had little connection to the question over slavery’s expansion or the South’s political future. Whaling, after all, was an industry controlled by New England, and empire-building was a national, rather than sectional, endeavor.

That began to change with the Republic of Texas, which won its independence in 1836 after a successful rebellion against Mexico (with the issue of slavery at the center of that struggle).¹⁰ Conceived in conquest and sustained by military force, Texas made several attempts at territorial expansion—albeit ineffectual—before its annexation to the United States a decade later. Like Jefferson and Jackson before them, several leading Texans set their sights on the Pacific coastline, though they did so under the banner of an independent slaveholding republic. “As a separated Power, the splendid harbours on the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, will be indispensable for us,” wrote Memucan Hunt, the republic’s minister to the United States, in April 1838. He coveted San Francisco most of all.¹¹ In his inaugural address a year later, President Mirabeau Lamar similarly looked westward across the new republic’s “vast extent of territory, stretching from the Sabine to the Pacific.”¹² The new president quickly dispatched a minister to Mexico to negotiate the extension of Texas’s national boundary into California.¹³ Although the effort failed, Lamar insisted that such a vast (and presumably expanding) republic would be ill-served by incorporation into the United States, which was haunted by the specter of abolitionism from the northern free states.¹⁴ Lamar articulated what was becoming a central tenet of American slaveholders: push slavery’s frontier westward, or fall prey to the North’s abolitionist faction.

Expansionist Texans knowingly risked collisions with Mexico and the United States, whose leaders also maneuvered to claim outlets like San Francisco. When the Congress of Texas passed a resolution extending its jurisdiction to the California coastline, Daniel Webster warned that the republic “was too grasping and might excite the jealousy of other nations.”¹⁵ Still, Texan expansionists would not bow to the foreign policy objectives of the United States or to the legitimate territorial claims of Mexico. On the contrary, some Texan policy makers assumed that they could redraw the North American map at the expense of their much larger neighbor to the south. The republic’s leaders organized several invasions of Mexican territory, including the failed 1841 effort to seize New Mexico and the valuable Santa Fe trade. Such defeats hardly dimmed the expansionist ambitions of certain Texans. Even two-time Texas president Sam Houston—who proved less jingoistic and more pro-annexationist than Lamar—entertained flights of imperial fancy up until the final years of the republic. In his farewell message of December 1844, Houston sounded a familiar note. “If we remain an independent nation, our territory will be extensive—unlimited,” he proclaimed. “The Pacific alone will bound the mighty march of our race and our empire.”¹⁶

Although such boasts often bordered on self-caricature, especially given Texas’s deepening budgetary problems and repeated failures to secure international recognition, they anticipated the visions of continental destiny that would guide slaveholding leaders over the coming decades.¹⁷ Texas expansionists and American southerners alike shared an unwavering faith in the power of cotton in the international marketplace, a hunger for more Mexican territory, and a gnawing fear of abolitionism. They were also among the first to promote the development of transcontinental infrastructure.

Few slaveholding expansionists matched Thomas Jefferson Green for his vision, ambition, and mobility. Green was a proslavery partisan with a transcontinental résumé. Both a soldier and a politician of fortune, he chased various opportunities in a long career that took him westward across North American and back again. Born in North Carolina in 1802, Green first came to international attention in 1836 as a brigadier general in Texas’s revolutionary army. Over the next two years, he won seats in both houses of Texas’s Congress before attempting to extend the republic’s borders through force of arms. In 1842, as second-in-command of the ill-fated Mier expedition into northern Mexico, Green was captured along with more than 200 other Texan invaders. He was confined to a Mexican prison but managed to escape after tunneling through eight feet of volcanic rock over the course of six months. By the time he retired from public life, Green had served in more legislatures—North Carolina, Florida, California, and the Republic of Texas—than perhaps any other figure of his era.¹⁸ (Although he spent as much time drinking as he did legislating, Green earned his place in western history as the first lawmaker to propose the formation of a public university in California.)¹⁹

Green devoted his energies to two mutually reinforcing projects: the westward extension of slavery and the construction of railroads. In 1836, he helped organize the first chartered railroad in Texas and continued to play a leading part in western transit operations over the next two decades. Back in the United States by 1845, Green published a memoir of his failed invasion of Mexico that doubled as an appeal for continental conquest and commercial integration. He called for the seizure of Mexican California and the establishment of American control across this terrain, “the most desirable portion of this continent.” Particularly enticing to Green were the natural harbors that dotted this long coastline: Guaymas, San Diego, San Gabriel, Monterey, and San Francisco, among others. With an eye to America’s continued commercial expansion, Green argued that “the port of San Francisco, or some other port in the south, is absolutely necessary.”²⁰ And he rightly noted that Texas occupied a central position to channel this North American and Pacific trade—a natural thoroughfare between the slave states and the ports of California. Soon, Green predicted, a series of railroads and canals would unite the two halves of the continent, via the Lone Star Republic.²¹ Here was the slaveholding vision of Pacific empire taking shape. The Deep South, Texas, the Pacific West, and Asia naturally invited commercial integration that, once achieved, would grant America’s slave economies a substantial share of global trade.

John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most...