Confederate President Jefferson Davis wanted a tropical empire

The re-writers of history would have us believe that slavery was not the issue that drove the nation to a tragic civil war. It was state’s rights and federal power they say. A few weeks after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Jefferson Davis said: “all we ask is to be left alone,” which fans the flames of the “state’s rights” belief.

According to The Economist, in 1848, just after the acquisition of California and New Mexico, President James Polk was “decidedly in favor of purchasing Cuba and making it one of the States of the Union.” Cheering him on was Jefferson Davis, then a senator from Mississippi. “Cuba must be ours,” he said, to “increase the number of slave holding constituencies.” Once the plan to buy Cuba failed, Mississippi’s other senator, Albert Gallatin Brown, started drooling over Mexico. “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.” So Davis and Brown may have wanted the federal government to leave them alone, but don’t mistake that plea for principle: Cubans and Mexicans deserved no such shield from federal interference.

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.” Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.

William Walker was an American physician, lawyer, journalist and adventurer, who organized several private military expeditions into Latin America, with the intention of establishing English speaking coloniesunder his personal control, an enterprise then known as “filibustering.” Walker became president of the Republic of Nicaragua in 1856 and ruled until 1857, when he was defeated by a coalition of Central American armies. He was executed by the government of Honduras in 1860.

Well before the civil war, Walker convinced many Southerners of the desirability of creating a slave-holding empire in tropical Latin America. In 1861, when U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden proposed that the 36°30′ parallel north be declared as a line of demarcation between free and slave territories, some Republicans denounced such an arrangement, saying that it “would amount to a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and State owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego.

The South had expansionist plans. During the Civil War itself, the South attempted to conquer areas outside of the Confederacy: New Mexico and Arizona, as well as Kansas and Kentucky. In Kentucky’s case, the state formally declared neutrality at the start of the Civil War – then it was invaded by a Confederate army of conquest. The state then had to call on Union forces to protect its citizens from the invading Confederate forces.

Slavery was embedded in the Confederate Constitution, and they had no intention of seeing it dissolve. Read the Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens to see what the entire motivating factor of the South was: chattel slavery supported by an overwhelming and systemic ideology of white supremacy.

