Imperialism and the Slaveholding South

Following the end of the Mexican-American war in February of 1848, Mexico’s defeat handed much of the west coast of North America to the United States, prompting slaveholding factions within the antebellum South to dream of spreading slavery across the continent and beyond. A year later, after the discovery of gold in California, slaveholding Southerners began moving to the territory in large numbers, bringing with them an estimated 500 to 1,500 African American slaves to work the gold fields of the high Sierras and beyond, prompting proslavery expansionists like Henry Wise to wager that his home state of Virginia would make a billion dollars on the sale of slaves into the territory, which was hastily made a free state on September 9th, 1850.

Western Slavery

Wise’s prediction proved patently wrong when Southern slaveholders discovered a second form of slavery in the American west, including Native American captives and indebted mestizo peasants, which enslaved thousands into multiple forms of bondage or peonage in the newly-acquired territories of Utah, Arizona, California and New Mexico, employing systems of forced labor far less costly than plantation agriculture and chattel slavery. Still holding immense political sway in Washington during the years leading up to succession and war, every time Whig or Republican abolitionists attempted to outlaw peonage in the American west, Southern legislators pushed back against every attempt in the 1850s, knowing full well that any law against peonage out west would eventually point the finger at their own form of slavery in the South.

Slave-based Imperialism

Despite the growing abolitionist sentiment within the northern states, Southerners held fast to their expansionist visions for the American west, supported in large part by the formidable spread of Euro-American imperialism abroad, which relied heavily on indigenous coercive labor—from the British in India to the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia—prompting slaveholding Southerners to question why slavery couldn’t be a part of white imperialism. With the hope of expanding their cotton markets into China, Southern legislators argued in congress for a southern route to the transcontinental railroad, pointing to a terminus in port cities in Southern California to build up their Pacific trade, yet when Abraham Lincoln took office on March the 4th, 1861, Southern dreams for slavery in America collapsed in the face of untenable bloodshed during the American Civil War.