Matthew Karp

With This Vast Southern Empire, we see the decisions of the southern United States to ensure the safety of Slavery to the Western Hemisphere. These are the events leading up to the Civil War and those events following the Civil War. Southern Slave Owners had to be quite cosmopolitan and know world events, especially those that affected Slavery in other parts of the world. For example, when Great Britain passed legislation that abolished Slavery in their lands, the Southern United States was upset and saw threats around every corner. This came to light when a number of slave ships had their “cargo” freed by the British Naval Forces.

Southern Slave Owners had no qualms about treating their chattel slaves terribly. It is really rather sad that you could consider a person to be property, but then again, my economic success doesn’t really depend on the hard labor of a person.

Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, and I couldn’t remember why I took it out of the library. However, it turned out pretty well. I enjoyed it well enough.… (more)

Sometimes reality is laid out clearly before you if you ask the right question. Essentially, this book starts with Britain's abolition of slavery in 1833 and the implications from the American perspective and examines how this incited a cold war in which the Southern slave-holding class refashioned the federal government of the United States into an instrument for defending the institution of chattel slavery on an international basis. The irony is that the military & foreign policy apparatus created by the likes of such Confederate stalwarts as Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin, et al, was ultimately used against the Southern slave-holding class with great efficiency. Karp's epilogue ends with a meditation on W.E.B. Du Bois' 1890 lecture on Jefferson Davis as an exemplar of contemporary culture (nothing was more modern in 1890 than empire), a reminder of how these men saw themselves as the cutting edge of progress and not some pathetic and romantic survival as "Lost Cause" ideology would leave one to believe.

As Karp would put it: "We can be grateful that the slaveholders never gained the world they craved but we gain nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions."

To put it another way this was the book that made me appreciate the depth of Southern commitment to slavery as an ideology.… (more)