University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 The Slave South In The Far West: California, The Pacific, And Proslavery Visions Of Empire Kevin Waite University of Pennsylvania, kevin.com Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons, and the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Waite, Kevin, "The Slave South In The Far West: California, The Pacific, And Proslavery Visions Of Empire" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations.edu/edissertations/2627 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons.edu/edissertations/2627 For more information, please contact repository@pobox. The Slave South In The Far West: California, The Pacific, And Proslavery Visions Of Empire Abstract This dissertation rests on a relatively simple premise: America’s road to disunion ran west, and unless we account for the transcontinental and trans-Pacific ambitions of slaveholders, our understanding of the nation’s bloodiest conflict will remain incomplete. Whereas a number of important works have explored southern imperialism within the Atlantic Basin, surprisingly little has been written on the far western dimension of proslavery expansion.
My work traces two interrelated initiatives – the southern campaign for a transcontinental railroad and the extension of a proslavery political order across the Far Southwest – in order to situate the struggle over slavery in a continental framework. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing to the eve of the Civil War, southern expansionists pushed tirelessly for a railway that would run from slave country all the way to California. What one railroad booster called “the great slavery road” promised to draw the Far West and the slaveholding South into a political and commercial embrace, while simultaneously providing the plantation economy with direct access to the Pacific trade. The failure of American expansionists to construct a transcontinental railroad during the antebellum era has discouraged close scholarly scrutiny of this political movement.
Yet through their efforts, southern railroaders triggered some of the fiercest sectional struggles of the era, and carried the contest over slavery far beyond the Atlantic world. The second part of this dissertation reconstructs local political contests in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and California to highlight the long reach of proslavery interests. Never a majority in the region, southern-born leaders wielded an outsized influence within western legislatures, courtrooms, and newspaper offices to effectively transform the Southwest into a political appendage of the slave South. With the fracturing of the Union in 1861, the project of southern expansion moved to the battlefields of a continental civil war, with several initially successful Confederate invasions of New Mexico.
Even as the rebellion collapsed across the South, Confederate leaders continued to look west, authorizing yet another invasion of the region as late as the spring of 1865. The proslavery dream of a western empire almost outlived slavery itself. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Steven Hahn Keywords Arizona, Civil War, New Mexico, political economy, Reconstruction, Slavery Subject Categories History | Political Science This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.edu/edissertations/2627 person THE SLAVE SOUTH IN THE FAR WEST: CALIFORNIA, THE PACIFIC, AND PROSLAVERY VISIONS OF EMPIRE COPYRIGHT 2016 Kevin Adin Waite This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii For Dave and Mary Ann iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although I certainly don’t identify with their politics, I do share the peripatetic tendencies of the figures who populate this study. Like them, I’ve shuttled back and forth across the country and amassed a support system that spans the continent.
Without these people – the many teachers, mentors, and friends that I met along the way – this dissertation simply would not exist. The University of Pennsylvania has been my home for the past five years – enough time to accrue enormous intellectual debts to its outstanding faculty and graduate students. Steve Hahn was the ideal advisor. He gave me wide latitude to pursue my own scholarly interests and always encouraged me to think big.
Whether or not I succeeded in that task is an open question, but I’ll always carry with me the example of his humbling intellect and astounding scholarly range. And, of course, his writing will forever be the gold standard. Dan Richter was unfailingly generous with what he had so little to spare: time. The scholarly and collegial atmosphere that he’s fostered at the McNeil Center for Early America Studies simply has no equal.
As virtually everyone who’s been there can tell you, Dan is the model mentor – inquisitive, available, brilliant, wide-ranging, and deeply knowledgeable. I was honored to be part of his McNeil Center during my time at Penn, particularly this past year. Graduate students and young faculty within that community deserve special mention, including Tommy Richards, Sarah Gronningsater, Nora Slonimsky, Lori Daggar, Nicholas Glisserman, Sarah Rodriguez, and Alexandra Montgomery, along with others too numerous to name. v My intellectual horizons were broadened and challenged through my many conversations and classes with Stephanie McCurry.
Her mind is an inspiration. I would leap at the opportunity to continue taking graduate courses with Kathy Brown, who has the rare ability to make any topic fascinating. Kathy Peiss reminds me why I love this profession. Her gifts as a teacher and mentor I’ll never be able to match, but I’ll always seek to emulate.
I missed the opportunity to have her as a teacher, but I’m remarkably fortunate to now count Sally Gordon as a mentor, friend, and research collaborator. I leaned heavily on her wise counsel and careful editing this year, and her willingness to read the entire dissertation on short notice is merely the latest demonstration of her incredible generosity. I look forward to future conversations in both Pasadena and Philadelphia as we attempt to reconstruct the life and times of Biddy Mason, one of California’s most remarkable former slaves. It’s hard to overstate the importance of good administrators, and Penn’s history department has the very best.
I’m deeply grateful to Joan Plonski, Octavia Carr, and Bekah Rosenberg for keeping the ship afloat and steering me to safe passage. Graduate school can be a grind. But the grad student community at Penn ensured that the ups always outweighed the downs, and consistently reaffirmed my belief that there’s no better place to pursue a PhD than Philadelphia. Sam Lacy, Jessie Regunberg, Robert Hegwood, Holly Stephens, Janine Van Vliet, Salar Mohandesi, Sam Casper, Jim Ryan, Matthew Kruer, Katie Hickerson, Camille Suarez, and Kristian Taketomo will always remain dear friends.
Thanks to our long-running text thread, I sometimes forget that an ocean now separates me from Alexandra Montgomery, Tina Irvine, and Evgenia vi Shnayder Shoop. I’d prefer if Tina and Evgenia’s adorable babies, Charlotte and Abby, would place a moratorium on growing while I’m away. But they provide powerful incentives to come back to the U. early and often.
Since our first year in graduate school together as fellow nineteenth-century Americanists, Emma Teitelman and Roberto Saba have been the perfect partners in crime. Coursework, chapter drafts, job letters, and happy hours wouldn’t be the same without them. And of course, I’ll persist in my campaign to convince Roberto that California is God’s country. I miss my Penn friends dearly.
There is no better place to research and write than the Henry E. The setting is stunning, of course, but it’s the people that make the Huntington such a special place. More than anyone else, Bill Deverell deserves the credit (or the blame) for getting me into the business of history. When a cheeky high school student sauntered into his office with a few questions about the Civil War, Bill had no idea what was in store.
More than a decade later, he remains a tireless letter writer, a careful editor, and a dear friend. I’ve now accumulated a debt to Bill that no amount of beer at Lucky Baldwin’s can ever cover. I’ve known Hally Prater in the Huntington’s development office for just as long, and she is almost equally to blame for setting me down this long academic road. No trip to Pasadena is complete without a lunch with Hally.
The same goes for Juan Gomez in the Munger and for Chris Bronson in security, who belongs in an endowed chair in an elite history department. Peter Blodgett, Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts, truly has a mind like fly paper. He cheerfully directed me to some of the most important sources for this dissertation. vii Perhaps the best editor of my work on the nineteenth century U.
is a historian of early modern England. That’s because Steve Hindle, Director of Research, is intellectually omnivorous and painstakingly thorough in his reading. I probably won’t ever understand how he does it all, and does it all so well. The fact that we’ve now swapped homelands will hopefully serve as the excuse for plenty of future transatlantic visits.
Because of all these people, returning to the Huntington means coming home. Well before I reached graduate school at Penn, I was shaped by transformational teachers. Barbara Sheinkopf’s English class convinced an academically lazy sixth-grader that literature could be more fun than kickball. More than anyone else aside from my parents, she inspired me with a love of words.
Garine Zetlian made AP U. I’m yet to come out of that trance. At Williams, I had the great fortune of studying under Charles Dew. Now, as an advisor of undergraduate thesis students myself, I consistently find myself asking, “What would Dew do?” Charles’s scholarship, generosity, and kindness place him in a league of his own.
My Williams friends and I still speak of our experiences in Steve Fix’s English classes in tones of reverential awe. He has the pedagogical ability to make Samuel Johnson thrilling and Thomas Pynchon comprehensible. I only wish I could take his classes forever. My two years spent studying European history at Cambridge still shape the way I think about the American past.
Peter Mandler was a model dissertation advisor as I muddled through the history of masculinity and Napoleonic-era English public schools. Tom Stammers brought profound energy and intellect to eighteenth-century English cultural history. I was deeply fortunate to have him as a tutor at Cambridge. I’m even viii more fortunate to count him among my colleagues at Durham.
The MPhil in Modern European history also introduced me to great friends, chief among them Charlie Wells, Sarah Stoller, Rachel White, and David Anthony. In their willingness to mentor a humble grad student, friends from other institutions have taught me the meaning of collegiality. Stacey Smith’s brilliant work on unfree labor in nineteenth-century California has shaped my own project in innumerable ways. From the time that my dissertation was no more than a half-baked proposal, Stacey has shared sources, offered advice, and given constructive feedback.
I’m equally indebted to Ari Kelman, who has become my counsellor on all things career-related. Ari’s generous mentoring and his blindingly fast editing makes you wonder if he ever sleeps. Nick Guyatt at Cambridge has been my knight in shining armor, as I’ve negotiated my re-entry into the (sometimes perplexing) world of British academia. I’m also deeply indebted to Greg Downs, Elliot West, Dan Lynch, Steve Kantrowitz, and Michael Parrish.
Generous grants from a number of institutions have made this research possible. My thanks to the University of Pennsylvania, the McNeil Center, the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library, the Virginia Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Thanks also to the good people of the Western History Dissertation Workshop, particularly Andy Graybill, John Mack Farragher, and Josh Reid. During an early phase of research, I spent a productive and pleasant year at Stanford, largely thanks to Alex Stern, Andy Hamman, and the staff at the Green Library.
ix I’ve had the immense good fortune to begin my professional career at Durham University. I still pinch myself, in fact. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the outgoing and incoming heads of department, Stephen Taylor and Jo Fox.