Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association
Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation's triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.

"At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail."
-Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

"Matthew Karp's illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere."
-David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books

About the Author
Matthew Karp is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

Reviews
An essential and compelling account of the slaveholding elite's grip on national and foreign policy in antebellum America. Provocative, engaging, and beautifully written, this book will endure. -- Stephanie McCurry, author of Confederate Reckoning
Matthew Karp demonstrates vividly how Southern control of the national government in the antebellum generation resulted in a foreign policy designed to protect slavery from threats both outside and inside the United States. Full of new information and original insights, this book expands our understanding of the ways in which Southern domination of the federal government provoked increasing sectional tensions that brought on the Civil War. -- James M. McPherson, author of The War That Forged a Nation
A pathbreaking work-extremely polished, imaginatively conceptualized, shrewdly organized, engagingly written, and exhaustively researched. -- Robert E. May, author of Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics
Adept and detailed...Karp's thorough and polished study will be eagerly welcomed by scholars. * Publishers Weekly *
At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail...Karp makes a persuasive case that we cannot grasp our country's history without taking account of slavery's dreams and ambitions. -- Fergus Bordewich * Wall Street Journal *
Karp has written a comprehensive history of the Davisonians that shows how a pro-slavery foreign policy dominated the executive branch from the presidency of John Tyler (1841-45) through the Buchanan administration, which ended in 1861... Combining immense erudition with an engaging style, Karp sheds light on an important but poorly understood era in American foreign policy and provides much food for thought about the ways in which the Davisonian legacy continued to influence the United States long after slavery died. -- Walter Russell Mead * Foreign Affairs *
The book is essential, if unsettling, reading. -- Ibrahim Sundiata * Public Books *
Matthew Karp's illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. Far from insular, proslavery leaders had a far-reaching awareness of the international status of human bondage, which they regarded as essential to progress and prosperity. Holding the reins of political power, slave owners largely determined American foreign policy from the 1830s through the 1850s. As Karp reveals, they were well positioned to use the resources of the federal government to push their agenda around the world...While the emancipation of the British West Indies is widely recognized as a significant event in the history of abolition, no one has described its effect on U.S. international relations as fully or persuasively as Karp does...One of Karp's contributions is to reveal ways in which the South was not isolated, either nationally or internationally. He shows that it appropriated the main structures of federal power. In this sense, through much of the era leading up to the Civil War, the South, effectively, was the United States, at least in its contacts with the rest of the world. -- David S. Reynolds * New York Review of Books *
This Vast Southern Empire is a much-needed redirection of focus away from the eccentric filibusters who dominated memory of antebellum proslavery expansion toward the actual policymakers who were more directly influential in shaping the government's relations with slavery, expansion, and America's neighbors to the south. The irony inherent in their story is that these southern policymakers were the leading proponents of the military and diplomatic power that contributed to their own destruction...Ultimately, although the Civil War officially ended slavery, the key elements of the foreign policy crafted by slaveholders lived on. -- Roger Bailey * H-Net Reviews *
Modern Americans have a false image of Southern slaveholders as isolated reactionaries who presided over and eventually lost a feudal kingdom. In his superb book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, historian Matthew Karp argues slaveholders were worldly men. The political and economic elites of their age, slaveholders worked tirelessly to build a world in which bondage could thrive. Their chosen means was the foreign policy apparatus of the federal government. -- Tim Reuter * Forbes *


Awards
Winner of Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize 2017 and John H. Dunning Prize 2017. Joint winner of James H. Broussard First Book Prize 2016 (United States). Nominated for Tom Watson Brown Book Award 2017 and Frederick Douglass Book Prize 2017 and Harriet Tubman Book Prize 2017 and Avery O. Craven Award 2017 and OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award 2017 and Ellis W. Hawley Prize 2017 and Merle Curti Award 2017 and Bancroft Prize 2017 and Lincoln Prize 2017 and Francis Parkman Prize 2017 and Jefferson Davis Award 2016.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674986770
Author Matthew Karp
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press