4 - Slavery and Statecraft

Summary

In 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois devoted part of a single chapter of a slim biography to the “dazzling dream of empire” pursued by “slave barons” more than half-a-century earlier. His vignette of Southern expansionism heroicized John Brown’s victory over those who had launched “an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development.” Dubois’s Southern villains realized as early as the 1820 brawl over Missouri statehood that to “hesitate or pause” was to yield to Northern supremacy. A quest for parity in the Union drove the barons’ fixation on “the spoils of raped Mexico” and their efforts not just to “enslave all territory of the Union” but to look abroad for even more. Political defeats hardly lessened the slave South’s rapacious thirst for land. The pro-slavery vanguard of the 1850s gazed toward the Caribbean, as headline-grabbing filibusters encouraged Deep South Congressmen to push for tropical acquisitions.