West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

In this impressive book, Kevin Waite establishes both slavery's substantial influence in the far West, and southerners' view of the West as essential to their financial and political future. Proslavery politicians wielded indirect and direct political power about and in present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Utah. Historians know about close ties between antebellum westward expansion and slavery, but Waite complicates this story geographically and temporally. This book deeply engages with both older and very recent historiography, melding others' insights into the mid-nineteenth-century West's importance to slavery and sectionalism with novel perspectives and profuse evidence. Slavery was national, and so were its consequences. Central to Waite's argument is the inescapable power of the “Continental South,” how “proslavery partisans transformed the southwest quarter of the nation … into an appendage of the slave states” (p. 2). He begins with southern thought and politics regarding the West. Southerners' goal of claiming the West for slavery suffused numerous policies, and Jefferson Davis was among the most ambitious architects of an imperial vision. Infrastructure was a key tool of proslavery imperialism, and some southerners tried to harness federal power to reach and cross the Pacific, ideally incorporating a southern transcontinental railroad route. With vibrant case studies, including competing mail routes and Davis's camel corps, Waite places contests over the Pacific (and access to it) at the center of rising sectional tensions. He next reverses the perspective, showing westerners' varying proslavery and separatist propensities. Building on scholarship about western unfree labor, Waite argues that bondage pervaded and influenced the region. Former southerners such as William Gwin shaped western politics; California in particular was a prosouthern Democrat stronghold, with the notable exception of tenuous Republican and Union party rule between 1860 and 1867. Proslavery southerners had stalwart western allies in their slavery expansion agenda. In wartime, Southern imperialism was stronger than ever. Abraham Lincoln's election was an existential threat to slavery's need to expand; preserving it where it already existed was insufficient. Struggles over the West and what it represented influenced Confederate war aims; Waite takes seriously Davis's coveting of Pacific trade. Long-standing southern sympathies and separatist tendencies help explain not only southern California's rampant Confederate support but also Arizona's secession and western Civil War battles. Waite reveals that even with Confederate defeat, southern influences in the West lasted through and extended beyond the war and Reconstruction, affecting politics, bound labor, Chinese immigration policies, and human rights there. Remnants of these interregional links persist even in the twenty-first-century West.

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