Examines the roles that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe played in the saga of Gulf Coast territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny. Focusing on expansion into the south and southwest, the authors describe the relentless official and unofficial federally sponsored efforts and filibustering expeditions used to encourage Americans to fulfill their goal of landownership. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Different Manifest Destiny traces the way southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor from the antebellum to the Civil War era.

This book documents the potency of Manifest destiny in the antebellum era.

In the mid-nineteenth century, some of Cuba's most influential writers settled in U.S. cities and published a variety of newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Collaborating with military movements known as filibusters, this generation of exiled writers created a body of literature demanding Cuban independence from Spain and alliance with or annexation to the United States. Drawing from rare materials archived in the United States and Havana, Rodrigo Lazo offers new readings of works by writers such as Cirilo Villaverde, Juan Clemente Zenea, Pedro Santacilia, and Miguel T. Tolon. Lazo argues that to understand these writers and their publications, we must move beyond nation-based models of literary study and consider their connections to both Cuba and the United States. Anchored by the publication of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in the United States, the transnational culture of writers Lazo calls los filibusteros went hand in hand with a long-standing economic flow between the countries and was spurred on by the writers' belief in the American promise of freedom and the hemispheric ambitions of the expansionist U.S. government. Analyzing how U.S. politicians, journalists, and novelists debated the future of Cuba, Lazo argues that the war of words carried out in Cuban-U.S. print culture played a significant role in developing nineteenth-century conceptions of territory, colonialism, and citizenship.

This fascinating study sheds new light on antebellum America's notorious "filibusters--the freebooters and adventurers who organized or participated in armed invasions of nations with whom the United States was formally at peace. Offering the first full-scale analysis of the filibustering movement, Robert May relates the often-tragic stories of illegal expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries and details surprising numbers of aborted plots, as well. May investigates why thousands of men joined filibustering expeditions, how they were financed, and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. Surveying antebellum popular media, he shows how the filibustering phenomenon infiltrated the American psyche in newspapers, theater, music, advertising, and literature. Condemned abroad as pirates, frequently in language strikingly similar to modern American denunciations of foreign terrorists, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny. May concludes by exploring the national consequences of filibustering, arguing that the practice inflicted lasting damage on U.S. relations with foreign countries and contributed to the North-South division over slavery that culminated in the Civil War.

Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. “At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail.” —Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “Matthew Karp’s illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.” —David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books

Jackson's Sword is the initial volume in a monumental two-volume work that provides a sweeping panoramic view of the U.S. Army and its officer corps from the War of 1812 to the War with Mexico, the first such study in more than forty years. Watson's chronicle shows how the officer corps played a crucial role in stabilizing the frontiers of a rapidly expanding nation, while gradually moving away from military adventurism toward a professionalism subordinate to civilian authority. Jackson's Sword explores problems of institutional instability, multiple loyalties, and insubordination as it demonstrates how the officer corps often undermined-and sometimes supplanted-civilian authority with regard to war-making and diplomacy on the frontier. Watson shows that army officers were often motivated by regionalism and sectionalism, as well as antagonism toward Indians, Spaniards, and Britons. The resulting belligerence incited them to invade Spanish Florida and Texas without authorization and to pursue military solutions to complex intercultural and international dilemmas. Watson focuses on the years when Andrew Jackson led the Division of the South—often contrary to orders from his civilian superiors—examining his decade-long quasi-war with Spaniards and Indians along the northern border of Florida. Watson explores differences between army attitudes toward the Texas and Florida borders to explain why Spain ceded Florida but not Texas to the United States. He then examines the army's shift to the western frontier of white settlement by focusing on expeditions to advance U.S. power up the Missouri River and drive British influence from the Louisiana Purchase. More than merely recounting campaigns and operations, Watson explores civil-military relations, officer socialization, commissioning, resignations, and assignments, and sets these in the context of social, political, economic, technological, military, and cultural changes during the early republic and the Age of Jackson. He portrays officers as identifying with frontiersmen and southern farmers and lacking respect for civilian authority and constitutional processes-but having little sympathy for civilian adventurers-and delves deeply into primary sources that reveal what they thought, wrote, and did on the frontier. As Watson shows, the army's work in the borderlands underscored divisions within as well as between nations. Jackson's Sword captures an era on the eve of military professionalism to shed new light on the military's role in the early republic.