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West of Slavery Kevin Waite

West of Slavery By Kevin Waite

West of Slavery by Kevin Waite


Summary

Examines the threads connecting South and West America during the slaveholding era, and that undermined the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognised but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

West of Slavery Summary

West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire by Kevin Waite

When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through war, diplomacy, political patronage, and perhaps most effectively, the power of migration. By the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation--California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah--into an appendage of the South's plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners extended the institution of African American chattel slavery while also defending systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far west of the cotton fields and sugar plantations that exemplify the region.

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.

Additional information

NGR9781469663197
9781469663197
1469663198
West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire by Kevin Waite
New
Paperback
The University of North Carolina Press
2021-04-19
392
N/A
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