West of Slavery

Kevin Waite's new book is broad in geographical and chronological scope, extending from Washington, DC, across the continent to San Francisco and from the early 1840s through Reconstruction to twentieth-century memory of the Civil War. It is also broad in ambition, seeking to integrate original research with new literatures on empire and the Civil War–era West to create a new understanding of the South during the Civil War era. Far from viewing the South as a traditional, inward-looking society trying to protect old ways, Waite portrays an energetic, outward-looking society looking to create a new transcontinental empire.The book is divided into three generally chronological and topical sections. The first starts with examining the desire of southern leaders to expand to the Pacific coast both to gain more land for agriculture and to acquire California's deepwater Pacific ports vital for new markets in China. The development of a transcontinental railroad was central to this vision, with Waite commenting on the eventual irony that the “railroad, a great national project designed to bind together the American East and West, had triggered a rupture between North and South” (39). There is also a chapter on what Waite calls “the lesser slavery road,” how southerners secured a large federal subsidy for the nation's overland mail route and Jefferson Davis's plans for a camel corps to tame the West. Waite nicely shows how slave owners embraced broad construction of the Constitution and called for a massive mobilization of state power to aid their dreams of a continental empire.The second section focuses on the “southernization” of the West. Though a minority of the population, southerners dominated western states and territories through a combination of effective local politics, patronage from national Democrats, and anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism. Waite ably shows how “the view from the Desert South also throws new light on the so-called Slave Power, illuminating how it operated thousands of miles from the nation's capital” (125). In western states and territories the racism was intertwined with various forms of unfree labor, ranging from slavery to coolie labor to debt peonage. The southernization of the West meant that during the secession crisis in 1861 “as federal authority deteriorated across the continent, the Southwest had become a vast borderland of conflicting loyalties,” with some even fearing a military coup or the West splitting from the United States (176).The last section explores the fate of a southernized West in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and memory. Confederate sympathizers in California tried to cause problems, though Waite acknowledges that they never came close to overthrowing the US government, and a Confederate force of 2,500 soldiers tried to capture parts of the Southwest. Still, Waite is probably too enthusiastic when declaring in the epilogue that “Confederate grand strategy evolved from slaveholders' antebellum ambitions” (245). He is more measured analyzing how Reconstruction in the West greatly paralleled and to a lesser extent affected Reconstruction in the East. The few pages on Confederate monuments and memory in the West, including the Jefferson Davis Highway, are a nice coda to the book.Waite's book provides new ways to understand the antebellum South, the Confederacy, and the Civil War–era West by putting all three into conversation with each other. The southern interest and energetic pursuit of a continental empire using national power make the idea of an “old South” even more quaint than the last generation of scholarship has shown. Along the way, Waite gives insights into the thinking of southern leaders and tells some good stories. I have already used some material, including Davis's camel corps, from his book in my classes

Ancient history · Archaeology · China · Constitution · Economic history · Empire · Irony · Manifest destiny · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society