American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation [Paperback]

How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Matthew Pratt Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers. He traces the links that bound them to the wider fraternity of slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, and charts their changing political place in the hemisphere.Through such figures as the West Indian Confederate Judah Benjamin, Cuban expatriate Ambrosio Gonzales, and the exile Eliza McHatton, Guterl examines how the Southern elite connectedby travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquestwith the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world. He analyzes why they invested in a vision of the circum-Caribbean, and how their commitment to this broader slave-owning community fared. From Rebel exiles in Cuba to West Indian apprenticeship and the Black Codes to the labor problem of the postwar South, this beautifully written book recasts the nineteenth-century South as a complicated borderland in a pan-American vision.In an ambitious and compelling book, Matthew Pratt Guterl asks us to rethink accounts of race, slavery, and national identity within a framework of the Americas. In revealing the hemispheric underpinnings of the South's master class of slaveholders, he sheds important new light on American history. This is also a wonderful book to read. Guterl is a remarkably elegant, at times virtuosic, writer.A model of transnational history that reconceives the era of emancipation from a truly exciting hemispheric perspective. Guterl decisively demonstrates that the post-emancipation South cannot be properly understood unless it is viewed in connection with those parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America that also confronted labor problems in the aftermath of abolition.With this elegantly written study, Guterl powerfully re-situates the U.S. South within the 'American Mediterranean,' and in the process he uncovers the story of a So