Claire Wolnisty explores how white US southerners imagined themselves in relation to the rest of the Americas. Wolnisty argues that southerners thought they operated on a hemispheric stage, with expansionist, proslavery goals they thought defined modernity: “Nineteenth-century southern expansionists defined the South as an expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere” (xiii). The book offers a valuable contribution to two historiographic debates: first, breaking US history out of its nationalistic limitations and situating it within the broader Americas, and, second, reinforcing the notion that the hemisphere's nineteenth-century “second slavery” was “modern” and capitalistic (instead of pre-capitalistic and not connected to an emerging modernity). This, Wolnisty argues, was how southerners saw themselves.
The book is divided into three chapters. The first details how southern expansionists understood filibustering expeditions to Nicaragua, especially those of William Walker. Wolnisty argues that southerners imagined the US South's expansion into Nicaragua as part and parcel of Manifest Destiny, little different from westward expansion to California. Indeed, many of Walker's men were failed Gold Rush miners. Walker turned to Nicaragua after slavery's expansion seemed blocked in Kansas. In general, Southern expansionists thought taking over parts of Latin America, and instituting slavery in their new empire, was necessary for the survival of slavery—and their society—in its contest with the US North.
However, while Wolnisty looks at the discourse of the filibusters, their supporters, and their opponents, she does not consider how Nicaraguans or Costa Ricans understood these events. She posits that filibusters justified their actions by arguing they were to prevent further European intervention in the hemisphere. It would have been fascinating to contrast this to the vision of many Latin Americans of the time: that the southern slavocracy was the natural ally and sympathizer of European aristocrats and imperialists.
Chapter 2 examines the commercial expansion in Brazil undertaken by US southerners. These merchants and travelers thought they could spread the South's influence, not just by annexation and conquest but also by commerce. Commercial expansion was seen as blocking European intervention and demonstrating the South's economic modernity—a modernity seen as not only compatible with slavery but necessitating it, especially in tropical areas. Wolnisty convincingly argues that antebellum southern commercial expansionists’ imperial vision of US relations with Latin America prefigured general US attitudes of the 1880s and 1890s.
Chapter 3 turns to emigration from the US South to Brazil after the US Civil War. Wolnisty argues that this migration was aided materially by existing trade and migration networks, and discursively by “a long history of looking southward to resolve conflicts and create southern identities within the shifting national borders of the United States” (72). Thus, emigration to Brazil was part of a long process of dreams of hemispheric expansion, even if the southern US empire appeared to have been defeated. Emigrants could be accused of disloyalty and abandoning the South, so they had to redefine what it meant to be a loyal southerner, breaking that identity away from a fixed geographic location. They imagined a “citizenship of belonging” based on wealth, honor, international family networks, the defense of slavery, and being bearers of a modernity that transcended national boundaries (97). Wolnisty might have added the perhaps too obvious criteria of whiteness.
Although Wolnisty's interest beyond US borders is welcome for many readers of The Americas, and the author is commendable for doing research in Brazilian archives (unlike most historians of the United States), her focus, frustratingly, is still squarely on US actors, and US North American sources. Beyond a few Brazilian politicians seeking to promote immigration, Latin Americans have no agency in this story, and their ideas about and reactions to these southern expansionists are largely missing. Of course, that is not the book that Wolnisty wrote.
The strengths of this volume are nonetheless many, especially its insistence on understanding US southerners’ local visions of modernity and its nuanced gendered analysis of familial concerns, which defined Southern male identity.
