Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about "Manifest Destiny," Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico, condemned Americans invading Latin America, and warned that Douglas's "popular sovereignty" doctrine would unleash U.S. slaveholders throughout Latin America. This book internationalizes America's showdown over slavery, shedding new light on the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry and Lincoln's Civil War scheme to resettle freed slaves in the tropics.

Author: Robert E. May
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/12/2013
Pages: 310
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780521132527

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 629

About the Author
May, Robert E.: - Robert E. May is a Professor of History at Purdue University. He is the author of Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (2002); John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (1985), winner of the Mississippi Historical Society's book prize; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire (1973). He is editor of The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (1995).