Interview by Connor Kilpatrick

In the years before the New Deal, the ex-Confederate states were, as Seth Ackerman put it, “a desperately poor, single-crop farm region with a per capita income roughly half the national average and a third the level of the Northeast.” And its ruling class was no exception — few would make the mistake of calling the postbellum elite “cosmopolitan.”

When history is read backwards, the continuities between the postwar and pre-war ruling classes of the Southern states are magnified and exaggerated. Suddenly, the skilled and well-traveled statesmen who sundered the United States to protect their “peculiar institution” begin to look more and more like the eccentric, reactionary rustics and provincials who dominated the region well past Reconstruction.

But Princeton historian and Jacobin contributing editor Matt Karp’s new book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy makes clear that this is a mistake. And it’s one that has blinded us to the slaver class’s far-sighted and terrifying vision that went far beyond our national borders and into direct confrontation with a British Empire they saw as a belligerent force for abolition and thus the ruination of the United States. This Southern political elite sought to preserve slavery not only as a social institution in their homes far away from DC but — with their hands on the levers of state power in Washington — as an international empire.

I sat down with Karp to discuss his new book, slaver-statecraft, and why, in some ways, it’s the early Republicans who look like the stubborn, obstinate eccentrics and fevered ideologues and not the “reasonable” Southern veterans of the national stage.