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,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.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. 2627. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2627 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2627 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 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 emainr 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.