A portrait of the Southern slaveholders who occupied the commanding heights of antebellum politics, this book explores the intimate relationship between American slavery and American power. From John C. Calhoun to Jefferson Davis, the South's leading statesmen understood the United States as the chief defender of bound labor in an Atlantic world still teetering between slavery and abolition. Overcoming traditional Southern scruples about dangers of centralized authority, slaveholders harnessed the power of the United States to protect vulnerable slave regimes across the hemisphere, from Texas to Brazil.
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