TY - JOUR
AU1 - Verney, Michael, A
AB - Passed Midshipman Lardner Gibbon had just sat down to dinner when he found himself subject to an interrogation. As one of two U.S. naval officers conducting an exploring expedition of the Amazon River Valley, Gibbon had split off from his commander in Peru in July 1851 in order to survey the Bolivian tributaries of the great river.1 Now, during a lively supper at a private home in La Paz, Gibbon had planted himself right next to the “lady of the house.”2 He may have wished that he had sat elsewhere; his hostess expressed great interest in U.S. expansionism, peppering Gibbon with questions about the annexation of northern Mexico and his nation’s designs on Cuba. “Turning suddenly,” Gibbon remembered, “she looked up and said: ‘What are you doing here, Senor Gibbon; do you want Bolivia, also?’” Gibbon explained that his mission was solely to help the Bolivians find an easier route to foreign markets. Though his Bolivian companion “approved of the enterprise,” she ended the conversation by exclaiming that the “North Americans will some day govern the whole of South America!”3 Gibbon had been less than honest with his hostess. As a southerner and future Confederate army officer, he had a vested interest in exploring South America.4 As he well understood, U.S. domestic opposition to the extension of slavery in the North American West triggered aggressive schemes for proslavery expansion beyond the United States in the late antebellum era. Proslavery expansionists tried to purchase Cuba from Spain and conquer other Latin American countries through private armies, or filibusterers. Most crucially for this article, they also ordered the Navy to investigate possible new slave territories in South America. Following the Amazon Expedition’s return in 1853, the Navy dispatched a second and larger mission to the Rio de la Plata watershed. Between 1853 and 1856 and again from 1859 to 1860, the officers and crew of the USS Water Witch searched for future slave states along the teeming riverbanks of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Taken together, the missions to the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata demonstrate that naval reconnaissance was more than just a passing fancy for proslavery elites; it was, instead, one of the federal government’s persistent strategies for resolving sectional tensions and southern white anxieties in the final decade of the early republic. And while the drive towards South America was always strongest in the Executive branch, both missions had considerable public support. Assuming a hemispheric perspective reveals another intriguing characteristic of the Navy’s proslavery explorations: they were formulated along lines that paralleled South American creoles’ own plans for national development. U.S. naval imperialists knew that many South American elites aspired to modernize their countries by imitating European and U.S. trajectories. Indeed, whether in Rio de Janeiro, Asunción, or Buenos Aires, South American creoles hoped to clear rainforests, remove Indians, build railroads, encourage steam navigation, and increase their nation’s agricultural output. Often, these plans had powerful racial components; many South American creoles reasoned that the best way to modernize according to Western standards was to convince European and North American whites to settle and establish colonies in their territories. Furthermore, in the early nineteenth century, the United States, Brazil, and Cuba experienced a renewed commitment to slave-based agriculture in what Dale Tomich has termed “the second slavery.”5 For countries like Brazil, importing white colonists and black slaves appeared a sure recipe for growth and power. U.S. naval officers tried to take advantage of these economic aspirations; like Gibbon, they masked their imperial missions under the guise of friendship and commerce. Yet in spite of the Navy’s best efforts, its strong backing by various presidential administrations, and rising public interest, no U.S. colonies emerged in South America. Brazilians, alarmed by the U.S.-Mexican War, were highly suspicious of U.S. goals during the Navy’s survey of the Amazon. After the expedition’s return, the mission’s progenitor let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In doing so, he confirmed Brazilians’ worst fears about U.S. intentions. In Paraguay, too, the arrogance of U.S. naval officers led to bloodshed in 1855 and a major showdown between Asunción and Washington in 1858. Officials in Argentina and Bolivia, meanwhile, were less suspicious, often encouraging naval explorers with hospitality and praise. The question of whether U.S. colonies would have developed in these countries absent the Civil War is an intriguing, but ultimately unanswerable, one. What is clearer and more striking, however, are the two fundamental theses of this piece: firstly, that the federal government tried to use the Navy to open a new front for proslavery expansion in South America, and secondly, that naval imperialists sought to disguise their intentions in ways that would appeal to their South American hosts. Ever since Whitfield Bell, Jr.’s, path-breaking article in 1939, the proslavery dimensions of the Navy’s Amazon Expedition has been well-documented.6 John P. Harrison and Vincent Ponko, Jr., were among those who reproduced and further elaborated on Bell’s findings in the mid-twentieth century.7 In contrast, twenty-first century scholars have generally given short-shrift to the Amazon mission.8 This is likely because Bell and his peers had already covered the topic thoroughly, leaving the impression that few new discoveries were possible. What both generations have missed, however, is that the Navy’s mission to La Plata was also, at heart, a proslavery venture. It is only with this enlarged view that the full gravity of the Navy’s South American operations surges into view; rather than a passing fancy or a harebrained odyssey, the Amazon Expedition was part of a concerted effort by the federal government to extend the “Slave South” into the Southern Hemisphere. This article also complements the on-going effort to globalize the Civil-War era and push its boundaries into the South Atlantic. Whereas historians used to conceive of the road to disunion primarily in domestic terms, present-day scholars have sought to internationalize that story.9 Studies of William Walker and other filibusterers have abounded, and have long since entered the mainstream narrative of the Civil-War era.10 Most recently, scholars have extended their vision beyond the Caribbean and towards Brazil. Daniel Rood, for example, has shown important economic and ideological links amongst slaveholders in Brazil, Cuba, and Virginia.11 Studies by Gerald Horne, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Matthew J. Karp, among others, have shown that masters conceived of the contest between proslavery and antislavery forces as an international struggle—one that was transatlantic as well as hemispheric in scope.12 For all that, historians’ portrait of the relationship amongst U.S. and Latin American slaveholders has varied. Some, for example, have conceived of them as natural allies, uniting together to defend the “Emperor Slavery.”13 In contrast, Gerald Horne, in The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade, portrayed the relationship as a scattershot of affinity, animosity, and greed.14 What the Navy’s surveys in South America reveal is that U.S. professions of solidarity with Latin American slaveholders were half-hearted at best; at worst, they were rhetorical phalanxes, shielding plots to steal foreign territory under the guise of friendship. By showing how the Navy masqueraded as an ally in order to seize South American nations for U.S. proslavery elites, this article seeks to restore viciousness to the U.S.-Latin American relationship on the eve of the Civil War. The Origins of Proslavery Exploration The central figure behind the Navy’s exploration of the Amazon was a diminutive naval lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury served as the Superintendent of the Naval Observatory and the Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, D.C., from 1842 until 1861, when he resigned to serve the Confederacy.15 While he is better known today as the father of modern oceanography, Maury was also a white southerner who feared for the safety and prosperity of slaveholders. Like many proslavery whites, those concerns rested on the population of enslaved African-Americans in the United States. To Maury and other masters, slaves were reproducing at a “tremendous rate,” resulting in a “frightful ratio” of blacks to whites in the southern states.16 Indeed, between the middle of the 1820s and 1860, the number of bondsmen in the United States grew from less than two million to almost four million.17 Examining such data, Maury foresaw a racial crisis in the offing: “‘Is the time yet to come when the United States are to be over-peopled with the black race?’” he rhetorically asked the Secretary of the Navy in May 1850.18 Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury was the mastermind behind the federal government’s scheme to settle Brazil with U.S. slaveholders and their slaves and eventually seize that territory for the United States. (MAURY, MATTHEW FONTAINE, U.S.N., 1917. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016867444/). Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury was the mastermind behind the federal government’s scheme to settle Brazil with U.S. slaveholders and their slaves and eventually seize that territory for the United States. (MAURY, MATTHEW FONTAINE, U.S.N., 1917. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016867444/). Proslavery concerns had Malthusian origins. Educated thinkers in the United States were well-schooled in the population theories of English economist Thomas Malthus, who postulated that human populations would naturally increase beyond their food supply and therefore inevitably foster crisis. Unlike Malthus, however, slaveholders tended to think in terms of land, not food, as the determining factor in assessing whether the slave population was too high or low. Citing history, slavery apologist Matthew Estes believed that “no improving nation has ever declined so long as it had territory to settle.”19 John Quitman, the former governor of Mississippi and an ever-eager filibuster, argued that acquiring more land was critical to slavery’s safety.20 Southern masters, he wrote, had to “guard against the possibility that a system of labor now so beneficent and productive might, from a redundant slave population confined to narrow limits, become an ultimate evil.”21 That “ultimate evil” was Haiti, the great apparition of the slaveholding class and the inspiration for many enslaved freedom fighters.22 Like Quitman, Maury believed slavery was only stable as long as it was profitable—and that meant having access to virgin land.23 The North American West was the most obvious solution, but the state of national politics worried Maury. Sitting at his desk at the Naval Observatory, not far from Capitol Hill, he saw the chances for proslavery expansion shrinking. While tension between northern and southern states over slavery dated back to the Constitutional Convention, the passage of the Wilmot Proviso in the House of Representatives in 1846 raised the stakes as never before.24 After the U.S.-Mexican War, white southerners fretted all the more when they discovered that President Zachary Taylor, a fellow slaveholder, leaned free soil. In 1850, Taylor encouraged California and New Mexico territories to apply for statehood as free states.25 When southern politicians protested, he threatened to lead the Army into the South and hang any traitors he found.26 Taylor rejected the compromise measures of his fellow Whig, Henry Clay, and seemed determined to force a showdown with southern nationalists. His sudden death on July 9 allowed his successor, the mild vice president from New York, Millard Fillmore, to sign what became known as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise may have extended the life of the Union, but it did not resolve the fundamental tensions amongst the white body politic. Many proslavery southerners despised the Compromise, viewing it as an attempt to limit the bounds of slavery, while the new fugitive slave law infuriated northern antislavery leaders. In this context, Maury hoped that naval exploration would offer another option by locating fresh lands for slavery. As he later explained to a friend, acquiring U.S. rights to settle in the Amazon River valley would “reliev[e] our own country of the slaves … [and put] off indefinitely the horrors of that war of races, which without an escape is surely to come upon us.”27 On April 20, 1850, Maury elaborated on his vision in a letter to his brother-in-law, William Lewis Herndon, a fellow naval lieutenant whom Maury hoped would carry his plans into effect. In it, he claimed to have foreseen a time when the United States had subdued the entire Caribbean basin, including its shores and major tributaries. This “universal Yankee Nation” would be a slave country, growing southern crops and exporting them east through the Gulf of Mexico and west through a bustling canal across Central America to markets in the Pacific World.28 No portion of his imagined nation would be more important than the Amazon River Valley, which Maury described as “the only remaining cotton country on this continent” and possibly the “greatest rice region in the world.”29 Herndon’s survey would stimulate U.S. and Brazilian interest in opening the Amazon to U.S. commerce and settlement. In doing so, he would initiate a “chain of events” that would “end in the establishment of the Amazonian Republic.”30 Once Brazil granted foreign vessels the right to navigate its inland waters, no power could “prevent American citizens from the free as well as from the Slave States [sic] from going there with their goods and chattels to settle and to revolutionize and republicanize and Anglo Saxonize that valley.”31 Most importantly, the settlement of the Amazon would prevent a race war by serving as the “safety valve for our Southern States.”32 Why did Maury choose Brazil? Simply put, his job led him to it. Indeed, it was Maury’s duty, as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, to harness astronomical, tidal, oceanographic, and meteorological data for the benefit of U.S. commerce. In this, Maury was much like those who headed equivalent astronomical, hydrographic, and cartographic institutions in Britain and France—they all served practical purposes for the benefit of empire.33 Maury remains famous for his sailing directions and wind and current charts, which quickened the pace of Atlantic commerce by revealing faster routes than those that were being followed at the time.34 While studying this data, Maury discovered that ocean currents brought Amazonian waters north to the Caribbean, where they mingled with the discharged waters of the Mississippi. This made U.S. Atlantic ports “the half-way stations between the mouth of the Amazon and all the markets of the earth.”35 In other words, the Amazon was simply part of the same waterscape as the Mississippi. Here, then, was a kind of oceanographic “manifest destiny,” with ocean currents providing the same justifications that contiguous territories in North America offered for the conquest of the West. Secondly, Maury chose Brazil because he knew that its planters wanted more slaves. In the late 1840s, Maury could have read popular travelogues of U.S. citizens sojourning in Brazil—including Daniel P. Kidder’s Sketches of Residence and Travels in Brazil, a “best-selling” book published in 1845 that “found a place in many southern libraries.”36 He certainly read the five-volume narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. Composed by his rival, lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the first volume described Rio, its government, and its slave population in depth.37 From such sources, Maury would have known about the Empire’s rising demand for slaves. For centuries, black slavery had helped power Brazil’s economy. In the era of the “second slavery,” however, bonded labor became more important than ever as Brazilian planters discovered just how lucrative slave-grown coffee could be.38 By the 1830s, Brazil was the leading coffee-growing nation in the world, and the U.S. was its largest market.39 Brazilian demand for slaves fueled an ongoing and illicit transatlantic slave trade in which U.S. citizens played a prominent part.40 Between 1845 and 1850, slavers dodged British (and some U.S.) warships and carried a third of a million African bondsmen to the Empire.41 Finally, Maury may have known that many other white Brazilian elites—including Emperor Dom Pedro II—feared that the slave trade would “Africanize” the Brazilian population.42 In this sense, they shared with Maury a common horror of black fertility. Pedro II and his allies therefore sought to replace African slaves with white immigrants, particularly from northern Europe. Like many other South American creoles in the nineteenth century, liberal Brazilians believed that they could improve the nation’s character through a process called ‘“whitening.”’ In Jeffery Lesser’s words, “whitening” meant that the “population could be physically transformed from black to white through a combination of intermarriage and immigration policies.”43 In 1824, Brazil began offering subsidies to encourage Central Europeans to immigrate. Brazilian agents in German-speaking countries enriched themselves by piling emigrants onto boats and publishing works that espoused Brazil as a promised land.44 To further encourage immigration, in 1848 Brazil dedicated about 275 square miles in every province for white colonies.45 Part of Brazil’s calculation was military; the Empire had vast, unsettled frontiers that were exposed to neighboring powers—especially Argentina and Paraguay.46 Thus, defining national borders through settlement was of particular concern to political elites. When the Platine War erupted between Brazil and the Argentine Confederation in 1851, for example, Dom Pedro II hired some 1,800 German mercenaries. After the war, he hoped that the Germans would settle near the Argentine border.47 Lastly, the Government also worried about indigenous and slave uprisings, of which there were several real and anticipated ones in the mid-nineteenth century. In short, officials in Rio believed that having more white subjects would decrease Brazil’s vulnerability to foreign and domestic threats. For all these reasons, Maury’s plans for settling the Amazon with slaveholding white families were congruent with the goals of many governing Brazilians. In fact, it appears likely that Maury partly concocted his Amazon scheme because he expected to win Brazilian support. He often emphasized, for instance, how U.S.-Brazilian immigration and commerce would develop Brazil’s rainforests and freshwater rivers and generally promote fraternal peace and harmony between the two slaveholding nations. “Let the South,” he wrote in 1852, “cultivate with Brazil the relations of friends and neighbors.”48 Mimicking Maury, Herndon would later promise that U.S. immigration would “prodigiously augment the power and wealth of Brazil.”49 Maury and Herndon’s intermediate goal—of acquiring the right for U.S. citizens to settle the Amazon with their slaves—was also well-positioned to interest both sides of the slave debate in Brazil. Reformers like Dom Pedro II could welcome white southerners as non-black immigrants, whereas Brazilian planters could find a novel source for slaves as well as new political allies. The crucial departing point, of course, was Maury’s private vision of revolution and future conquest—but this he secreted in private conversations and correspondence. In Washington, Maury had little difficulty securing the support of the Navy Department. This is unsurprising, considering that both Taylor’s and Fillmore’s Secretaries of the Navy, William Preston and William Graham, respectively, were southern Whigs who shared Maury’s concerns about the future of southern slavery. Indeed, Maury was quite candid about the expedition’s objectives when he wrote Preston to propose the expedition on March 27, 1850: “Would it be wise to transfer the slaves of [the] Mississippi Valley to the Valley of the Amazon?” he rhetorically asked the Navy Secretary.50 When Taylor’s death reset the approval process, Maury was similarly open with Graham; he even sent him a copy of his letter to Herndon.51 Like many in Washington, Graham was impressed by Maury’s intelligence and scientific accomplishments. He respected his opinions and frequently sought his counsel.52 He therefore had little hesitation in approving Maury’s proposed reconnaissance of the Amazon River Valley, providing $5,000 for its completion.53 Crucially, Graham’s approval made the Amazon Expedition an official project of the federal government. Whigs in the Executive branch probably thought that exploration would be an uncontroversial way to expand slavery. They knew how desperate slaveholders were to expand their institution, but as constitutional and foreign policy conservatives, they frowned on outright conquest. In the mid-to-late 1840s, most Whigs, including Taylor, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln, had scorned Polk’s invasion of Mexico.54 At the same time, they disapproved of plots by private adventurers, termed “filibusters,” to conquer parts of Mexico, Central America, and the island of Cuba. When a former Spanish army officer named Narcisco López amassed a private army to invade Cuba, Taylor sent the Navy to blockade him.55 Maury, himself a southern Whig, offered another way: Brazil’s opening to commerce and colonies, he believed, should not be accomplished by the “hand of violence” or the “strong arm of power,” but rather by “science,” “diplomacy,” and “peace.”56 Brazil’s reasons for providing passports for Herndon and Gibbon are less clear.57 Following the Mexican War, Brazilian elites harbored grave suspicions about U.S. aspirations in Latin America. As Herndon admitted, the Mexican War and filibustering resulted in a “broadly and openly expressed fear of us.”58 It is unclear whether Maury’s proposals struck a chord either with those promoting white immigration or those doubling-down on a slave-based economy. What appears most likely, however, is that Brazil saw no diplomatic way to refuse. Like U.S. citizens, Brazilians wanted to appear advanced and developed according to European standards.59 In international affairs, promoting science was one of the primary means of demonstrating a nation’s cultural sophistication and modernity. Since Brazil was in no position to dispatch its own scientific expeditions abroad, the best way for the Empire to acquire a liberal reputation was by allowing outsiders in. On the practical side, too, reformists like Dom Pedro II could use the Navy’s reports to further encourage white immigration from the U.S. or Europe, as they saw fit. The Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1850–1854 Herndon arrived in Lima in the winter of 1851. By early April, he had received his orders and diplomatic papers and had been joined by his subordinate officer, Passed Midshipman Lardner Gibbon.60 Secretary Graham’s directions charged Herndon and his party to examine the mineralogical, navigational, agricultural, and commercial opportunities of Amazonia. Describing the free navigation of the Amazon as a national issue of “future importance,” Graham explained that Herndon’s mission would “enable the government to form a proper estimate as to the degree of that importance.”61 To achieve these objectives, Herndon eventually decided on splitting the surveying party, sending Gibbon and several others to traverse the Bolivian tributaries of the Amazon while he proceeded down the mighty river itself.62 After crossing the Andes, the explorers found themselves overwhelmed by the fertility of the lush South American interior. Herndon confirmed Maury’s suspicions of the rice-growing potential of the Amazonian floodplains and compared its cornfields to the richest “bottom-lands in Virginia.”63 As he approached the end of the Amazon in January 1852, he marveled at the network of arable islands that surrounded him. The banks of these, he believed, could “produce, [sic] all that the earth gives for the maintenance of more people than the earth now holds.”64 Closer to Pará, on the Amazon’s Atlantic estuary, Herndon felt “his heart [swell] with emotion” as he gazed upon the “rank luxuriance” of fields of sugar cane and cotton—classic southern crops.65 What made Amazonia’s fecundity especially valuable was its nexus of navigable rivers. Throughout their journeys, Herndon and Gibbon reported fastidiously on the watershed’s capacity for transportation. They made river-soundings, judged which rapids were passable, measured the distance between foaming waterfalls, and advised future voyagers whether to use canoes or steamboats for particular segments.66 Herndon’s writings on the navigability of the Amazon were at times contradictory, but he eventually concluded that the river was perfect for steamboats.67 Lifting a line from Maury, Herndon wrote that U.S. citizens would soon come to view “the free navigation of the Amazon and other South American rivers … as second only in importance to the acquisition of Louisiana.”68 In their letters and official reports, Herndon and Gibbon portrayed the agrarian and commercial potential of Amazonia as being completely untapped. Like other white U.S. citizens, they believed that South Americans possessed neither the will nor the energy to transform their rich holdings into pastoral paradises. In the words of one U.S. national living in Lima, the result of South American stupor was a vast region “where Nature annually wastes more than would support the population of China.”69 Maury agreed: “In the valley of the Amazon,” he wrote, “the plough is unknown; and the American rifle and axe, the great implements of settlement and civilization, are curiosities.” Steamboat navigation was “a problem almost untried.”70 The explorers’ firsthand accounts appeared to support these claims: “There is scarcely any attempt at the regular cultivation of the earth in all provinces of Amazonas,” Herndon wrote.71 White U.S. citizens were certain that race and climate explained the lethargy. In Anglo-Saxonist racial theory, the world’s productive tropical climates had long spoiled its original inhabitants.72 Their solution was to import people from the Northern Hemisphere, where the harsher environment had supposedly given rise to a more intelligent and industrious race. Maury expressed this thought clearly when he asked Herndon whether “the great valley of this mighty Amazon” would “be peopled with an imbecile and an indolent people or by a go ahead race that has energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develope [sic] and bring forth the vast rescources [sic] that lie hidden there?”73 Even before leaving Lima, Herndon had jumped to the same conclusion, promising Graham that “if Colonies of enterprising & industrious people were planted in these parts, and a free right of Navigation obtained by the Government of the U. States, that an immense impetus would be given … to the wealth and power of our Citizens.”74 “Nothing is to be had here but with immigration & settlement,” he told the Navy Secretary in September 1851. The mere “presence of the White Man,” would cause Amazonia “to spring into luxuriant life.”75 Slaves, however, were also necessary. Because the hot and humid climate would enervate white colonizers, planters would need black slaves to do the hard work of leveling forests, pulling stumps, raising houses and barns, tilling the soil, and planting and harvesting crops. “The constitution of the white man,” proslavery thinker Matthew Estes contended, “is not adapted to long continued exposure in a hot climate.”76 If white southerners lost their slaves, Estes warned, the “primitive forests” of the Deep South “would again cover our fields.”77 Therefore, white-overseen slavery was the only successful formula for exploiting the fecundity of the tropics. Naval explorers agreed; after leaving Cochabamba, Bolivia, Gibbon noted that he was “among fruits and flowers now—a congenial climate for the black man.”78 Herndon arrived at a similar verdict, observing that the “negro slave seems very happy in Brazil.”79 He further noted that Amazonian manatees “make[s] capital jerked beef for the Negroes of Brazil,” and that the vast schools of freshwater fish could feed slaves, too.80 As usual, Maury summed it up best in one of his articles: “If ever the vegetation there be subdued and brought under,” he wrote, “it must be done by the African, with the American axe in his hand.”81 In the end, Herndon and Gibbon concluded that the Amazon River Valley was a perfect destination for U.S. slaveholders and their human bondsmen. “No territory on the face of the globe is so favorably situated,” Herndon wrote of Brazil’s capacity for supporting U.S. slaveholders and their bondsmen.82 If only Brazil would permit foreign immigration, he was certain that “Southern planters,” already nervous about “the state of affairs as regards slavery at home, would … remove their slaves to that country, cultivate its lands,” and “draw out its resources … ”83 To slaveholders, Brazil’s status as one of the largest slaveholding nations in the Western Hemisphere was an added advantage. In Brazil, at least, southern settlers would not have to fight for their “liberties” against antislavery activists. As Maury assured a friend in 1851, his Amazon plan was ‘“not seeking to make slave territory out of free, or to introduce slavery where there is none. Brazil is as much of a slave country as Virginia.”’84 The Expedition’s conclusions were welcome news for Millard Fillmore’s pro-southern administration. The venture had begun, after all, as a federal proslavery project originating out of the Executive branch. Their supporting efforts had begun early; while Herndon and Gibbon were preparing to depart Lima in May 1851, Secretary of State Daniel Webster prepared a diplomatic offensive. At the time, Webster was maneuvering to be the Whig nominee in 1852 and needed southern support.85 Accordingly, he instructed the U.S. Minister to Brazil to begin negotiating with Rio for navigation rights on the Amazon.86 Other U.S. diplomats in South America joined the effort, including the U.S. Minister to Peru, who signed a treaty with Lima in July 1851 that allowed the United States free navigation of the Peruvian Amazon.87 In Bolivia, Gibbon persuaded that country’s President to declare her rivers open to international commerce.88 The goal was to pressure Brazil into embracing a similar course. After Herndon’s safe return to the United States in July 1852, the new Secretary of the Navy, John Pendleton Kennedy, put Herndon, and later Gibbon, on special assignment to draft an official report of their surveys in order to drum up public support.89 The Navy also sent Herndon’s specimens to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, where visitors could inspect the quality of Amazonian cotton and manufactures for themselves.90 In his third annual message in December 1852, Fillmore thanked Herndon for his “interesting and valuable account” of the Amazon, “which if opened to the industry of the world will prove an inexhaustible fund of wealth.”91 Proslavery Democrats in Congress, too, proved to be ardent allies. When Fillmore handed over the report, legislators voted to publish 10,000 extra copies in January 1854 and 20,000 more copies in April.92 As Maury worked feverishly to raise popular enthusiasm with letters and articles in the press, southern Democrats in Congress became his agents on Capitol Hill. Aside from achieving the free navigation of the Amazon, another of Maury’s goals was the establishment of a steamship line between a southern port and Brazil’s Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River. If enacted, the line would have provided the means of transporting southern settlers and their slaves to Brazil.93 Southern representatives were eager to help; they shared memorials from Maury and his allies pleading for a mail-line, and, in June 1852, introduced a bill to put the measure into effect.94 All of these efforts created significant public interest in the Amazon. Scientific American called Maury’s plans “A Great Project.”95 The New York Times thought that the Amazon would prove “even more precious than … the mountains of California and the Islands of Japan.”96 In Cleveland, Ohio, New American Magazine recirculated Herndon’s and Maury’s boosterish statements about the commercial capabilities of the Amazon. It “is indeed the garden of the earth,” the Magazine asserted, adding that “to the United States … rather than to any other people, does the wealth of the Amazon belong.”97 Reviewers of Herndon’s narrative, meanwhile, applauded his exploits and his expansionist vision. Herndon “has done his part, and has done it well,” The Daily Globe declared; “the rest he must leave to his countrymen.”98 In June 1853, delegates from across the South met in Memphis, Tennessee. There they approved Maury’s proposal for a mail steamship line between the United States and Brazil and sent Congress a memorial praying for the same.99 In Washington, a group of slaveholders even approached the Brazilian Minister to the United States “with a proposal to settle with one thousand slaves in the Amazon Valley.”100 Brazilians, however, were too wise. While they had granted permission for Herndon and Gibbon to explore their territories, they strongly suspected what the explorers were really after.101 Upon learning of the expedition, Rio immediately dispatched diplomats to conclude exclusive navigation treaties with its Spanish-speaking neighbors. These agreements were designed to block the United States from gaining access to the Amazon through treaties with neighboring nations.102 In Cochabamba, Bolivia, for example, Gibbon reported that the Brazilian minister gave an impassioned speech to Bolivia’s president and his cabinet at dinner, urging them to give Brazil the sole right to navigate foreign ships on Bolivian waters. When a friend of the President’s opined that Bolivia’s economic development would be better served by letting the United States have that right, the Brazilian diplomat reminded him that the “North Americans had already annexed a large territory from Mexico, and he considered such a proposition an invitation for them to come to South America.”103 Maury soon justified the Brazilian minister’s concern. One of his articles, “The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America,” proved so popular that he published it as a pamphlet in 1853. When translated and reprinted in the Rio press, this overtly imperialist pamphlet caused a sensation in Brazil. When Brazilians later heard rumors of a filibustering expedition assembling at New York “to force the opening” of the Amazon, they panicked.104 In a spirit of crisis, patriotic Brazilians picked up their pens. In late 1853, the Brazilian minister to Peru composed a booklet assailing Maury’s plans and pledging to resist U.S. annexationism.105 The following year, a member of Dom Pedro II’s royal court, Pedro de Angelis, published a refutation of Maury’s writing in French. Citing U.S. filibustering operations against Spanish Cuba, de Angelis accused Maury of stirring up “that fever of expansion, of which the unfortunate expeditions against Cuba are the most recent examples.”106 “The Valley of the Amazon,” he continued, “appears to him more worthy than Texas of the honor of an annexation to the United States.”107 Another Brazilian writer agreed: ‘“This nation of pirates,”’ he wrote, “‘wish[es] to displace all the people of America who are not Anglo Saxons.’”108 Brazilian resistance frustrated Maury to no end. He had orchestrated a plot designed to appeal to their interests, only to be discovered as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In desperation, he assailed Brazil as another Japan, which the Fillmore administration had already committed to opening with a fleet of modern warships under Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in March 1852.109 Brazilians stood their ground; they would not open their empire’s freshwaters to international shipping until September 1867.110 By then, the question of whether or not U.S. slavery could be expanded into Amazonia had been rendered moot by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Rio de la Plata Expedition, 1853–1860 Although Maury and Herndon had failed to open Brazil to southern settlers, they had been successful at amassing considerable federal and public support behind them. By the start of the Franklin Pierce administration in March 1853, prospects for the further exploration and colonization of South America looked as bright as ever. There were several reasons for this: first, proslavery expansionists had strong allies in the White House. Both Pierce and his presidential successor, James Buchanan were “doughfaces” who won the presidency by promising to lead an aggressive foreign policy. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the focus of proslavery exploration shifted south after the Amazon Expedition, towards the fertile watershed of the Rio de la Plata. Here, naval personnel encountered creole leaders who admired the United States and were desirous of attracting white immigrants. If proslavery expansionists were ever to establish slaveholding colonies in South America, the period from 1853–1860 represented their greatest opportunity. Like the Amazon Expedition, the Rio de la Plata mission was born Whig. It was the brain-child of Millard Fillmore’s new Secretary of the Navy, John P. Kennedy. Kennedy was an accomplished fiction writer and a prominent Whig from Maryland.111 While a slaveholder himself at times, Kennedy does not appear to have ranked slavery as the primary reason for organizing the La Plata expedition.112 As an Upper-South Whig from Baltimore, Kennedy sought to transcend sectionalism in his politics. He believed slavery to be morally wrong but could suffer neither proslavery fire-eaters nor abolitionists, both of whom he saw as extremists.113 As an antebellum nationalist, however, he recognized that slavery was deeply engrained in the nation’s laws, society, and economy. Thus, Kennedy may have been willing to extend the institution alongside other commercial and scientific pursuits. In this context, he likely saw the La Plata expedition as a perfect marriage for both northern and southern interests as well as an opportunity to advance Whiggish notions of science and progress.114 He was certainly excited about it, planning in his journal “with obvious zest” and skirting around Congress to set aside $220,000 of the Navy’s operational budget to the expedition.115 Kennedy was well aware that the Expedition had significant backing by northern commercial interests. Indeed, much of the popular impetus for the mission can be credited to northern businessmen. Most prominent among them was a Rhode Island native named Edward Hopkins. Hopkins was a failed naval officer and diplomat whose assignments had caused him to spend time in South America. During his brief tenure as James K. Polk’s special agent to Paraguay in the mid-1840s, he became a born-again believer in Paraguay’s economic opportunities.116 In New York, he won over the American Geographical and Statistical Society in New York, which sent a memorial to Washington urging the federal government to send the Navy to reconnoiter the La Plata and its tributaries.117 Alongside Hopkins, other northern businessmen also supported the La Plata Expedition in both words and deeds. In 1857, after diplomatic difficulties with Paraguay had interrupted the Navy’s cartographic work in the Platine region, the Boston Board of Trade sent a petition to Washington urging the completion of the survey.118 George W. Blunt of New York and Robert Bennett Forbes of Boston were avid supporters as well; Forbes, a China Trader and shipwright, even made two new steamers for the Platine survey in the late 1850s.119 The second he personally delivered to Montevideo from Boston in January 1859.120 The precise relationship between these northern merchants and the proslavery dimension of the Navy’s missions in South America is unclear. Hopkins, at least, was antislavery enough to hope that a white Platine republic would take shape in Paraguay on the backs of European immigrants. This would ensure that the region would be free of slavery, which he called “the only plague-spot to be found upon our own incomparable body-politic.”121 With the onset of the U.S. Civil War, Forbes would be a fierce supporter of the Union, dedicating his shipyard to producing vessels for the Navy.122 On the other hand, Boston and other industrial and shipping centers in New England profited enormously from slavery. With the notable exception of Hopkins, it is therefore possible that the merchants who backed the La Plata Expedition were northern “cotton Whigs” who foresaw an opportunity to benefit from the extension of slavery as well as U.S. commerce in general.123 Whatever Yankee merchants thought, Kennedy’s choice to lead the Expedition speaks volumes. Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Page was a Virginian who would later serve the Confederacy as a naval officer and diplomat.124 Crucially, he was also a mentee of Maury’s, with whom he had worked at the Naval Observatory. In that capacity, Page would have been abundantly familiar with Maury’s plans for the Amazon, as well as his published statements regarding the fertility of La Plata.125 Maury even advised Page on scientific instruments and “several” unnamed “important portions of our work”—perhaps slavery.126 Regardless of Maury’s precise advice, Page’s later writings would strongly suggest that he envisioned an extension of his mentor’s original Amazon scheme into the La Plata region.127 As before, South American politics played an important role in the genesis of the Platine expedition. In 1853, the Argentine Confederation was emerging from an era of brutal authoritarian rule under Juan Manuel de Rosas. In 1851, Rosas had been deposed by an alliance comprising Brazil, Uruguay, and two breakaway Argentine provinces. One of Rosas’s own generals, Justo José de Urquiza, took his place at the head of the Argentine Confederation.128 Kennedy saw Urquiza’s ascension to power as a major opportunity for U.S. commercial expansion. Whereas Rosas had barred foreign vessels from the Rio de la Plata and the Parana, one of its major tributaries, Urquiza threw the great river open to international shipping.129 “The seal of many navigable waters,” Page would later write, “was thus broken.”130 In December 1852, Kennedy reported to Congress that the La Plata Expedition “has grown out of the recent decree of the Provisional Director of the Argentine Confederation,” which had opened “a vast territory of boundless resource.” Argentines and their neighbors, he promised, were “ready to welcome the first messenger of commerce and throw their treasures into his hands.”131 Kennedy was right that many elites in the Confederation would celebrate an influx of U.S. nationals. Liberal Argentines aspired to French and U.S. models of development and hoped that Urquiza would modernize Argentina along similar lines. One of the future presidents of modern Argentina, for example, Domingo Sarmiento, believed that the United States formed the preeminent template for his country's development. He especially praised U.S. immigration policy, writing wistfully of the “human torrents … pouring into the primitive forests” in what he called the “newest,” “youngest,” and “most daring republic on the face of the earth.”132 One of Sarmiento’s intellectual and political rivals, Juan Alberdi, also had high encomiums for the United States. Like Sarmiento, he believed that South America’s “chief foe” was the “vast, unpopulated territory, which [kept] the scattered inhabitants isolated and unsuccessful.” 133 He argued that Argentines should “yield to the foreigner” and witness “what intelligent immigration can do in promoting the civilization of the country.”134 Pierce’s election in November 1852 cut Kennedy’s tenure at the Navy Department short, but it may have actually accelerated U.S. plans for La Plata. The incoming Democrats of the Pierce administration harbored little of that party’s moral misgivings about militant foreign policies. To many white southerners, in fact, Pierce’s election in 1852 seemed a Godsend. When the results of the election became known, slaveholders feted his election “with bonfires and torchlight parades.”135 In his inaugural address on March 4, the new president thrilled proslavery imperialists by pledging not to “be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.”136 Furthermore, Pierce was a major supporter of Maury’s plans for opening the Amazon. In his first annual message, Pierce urged Brazil to join its Spanish-speaking neighbors and open the “great natural highway” of the Amazon River to foreign navigation.137 In December 1854, Pierce returned to the Amazon in his second annual message. While crowing about new commercial treaties with Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Argentine Confederation, he admitted that “the same success has not attended our endeavors to open the Amazon,” and pledged to continue negotiations.138 Yet for all their promises, sectional animosity crippled both Pierce’s and Buchanan’s efforts to extend slave territory. Above all, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 hamstrung Pierce’s expansionist agenda. Northern backlash against the Act convinced Pierce to abandon the pro-southern foreign policies that he had earlier supported.139 Politically, it was too little, too late: the Democratic Party bore deep losses in the mid-term elections. In late November, the publication of the Ostend Manifesto further embarrassed the administration.140 In sum, northern anger ensured that the only territory that either Pierce or Buchanan acquired was the meager Gadsden Purchase from Mexico in 1853.141 With intransigent Yankees blocking forceful diplomacy in Central America, expansionists had to look for alternative ways to extend slavery. One such method was filibustering, which achieved some notable successes in the middle of the 1850s with William Walker’s subjugation of Nicaragua and re-installation of slavery in 1856.142 Yet despite popular support for Walker and his comrades, filibustering never overcame the stigma of its illicit nature amongst elected officials.143 For some southern Democrats, such a “positive good” as slavery could only be extended through noble and lawful means.144 In 1858, for example, Congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi claimed that he not would let slavery be expanded by “the hands of marauding bands, or violate [its] sanctity by identifying [its] progress with the success of unlawful expeditions.”145 Page agreed, arguing that filibustering would neither “promote our commercial interests nor advance civilization.”146 The solution was exploration. Naval reconnaissance offered a legal alternative to the brash violence of filibustering, especially if exploration resulted in treaties favorable for U.S. immigration and colonization. Even better, it promised to promote science and commerce—thereby appealing to transnational ideals of progress in the nineteenth century. Proponents therefore emphasized the scientific and commercial goals of the expedition over its proslavery agenda. When Page finally reached Asunción on October 1, 1853 and held an interview with Carlos Antonio López, Paraguay’s dictatorial president, he explained that his goals were to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce and “to extend and enlarge the bounderies [sic] of Science.”147 On learning that the U.S. chargé d’affaires to the Argentine Confederation had already negotiated a commercial treaty, Page flattered López as an enlightened patron of natural history and claimed that Paraguay was too remote for the United States to have any interests in it besides science.148 Humbly, he asked the President’s permission to explore the Paraguayan tributaries of the La Plata.149 López was inclined to gratify Page. Like his South American neighbors, López desired to modernize along western lines. He had come to power following the isolationist regime of a brutal doctor-turned-dictator named José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. Francia was censured time and again in the court of global opinion, and López desired a different reputation—even if his own suppressive policies did not depart significantly from Francia’s.150 Promoting scientific discovery, he believed, would increase Paraguay’s cultural clout in the eyes of foreign governments. López probably also thought that the U.S. survey would bolster Paraguay’s defensive capabilities. In 1853, Paraguay was a nation surrounded by enemies. The Argentine Confederation had long refused to recognize Paraguayan independence, viewing the country as a rebellious province. The Empire of Brazil, meanwhile, seemed eager to expand westward into Paraguayan territory. As a result, López concluded that he had to jumpstart the nation’s military arsenal by investing in European arms, equipment, warships, and especially training.151 Thus, López may have viewed Page’s expedition as an opportunity to learn more about the strategic contours of his riparian country and to forge closer ties with a nation capable of providing military training and technology. In fact, Pierce tried to capitalize on this interest directly by instructing Page to give López “howitzers and boxes containing Shrapnell Shells and canisters.”152 Finally, López hoped that the United States would become a main trading partner. For all these reasons, he assented to Page’s mission in and around Paraguay.153 As the Water Witch trudged up the La Plata and its tributaries, Page found himself overawed by the region’s agricultural promise. “Nature,” he wrote, “seems to have exhausted her bounty upon these Argentine States.”154 The fertility of Platine soil was such that, with proper equipment, the “labor of one man would be equal to that of ten in regions less favored.”155 Best of all, the soil and climate appeared well adapted to traditional southern crops like cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and indigo, but they could also produce wheat and corn. Its Chaco grasslands, meanwhile, made for fine grazing land for cattle and sheep.156 Such findings confirmed the predictions of Page’s mentor Maury, who claimed that the La Plata region “has all the agricultural capacities … of India.”157 Just as important, the Rio de la Plata and its tributaries would allow steamboats to bear agricultural products to market. Through his publications and official correspondence with the Navy Department, Page argued that South Americans were ill-equipped to take full advantage of La Plata’s bounty. “The people of the Country are not at this time prepared to encounter labor,” he told Dobbin, adding that “energy and enterprise form no part of their Character.”158 In March 1854, he predicted that “until immigration shall have reached such a point as to produce an agricultural population,” the Paraguayan cotton industry would continue to languish.159 From the Argentine state of Corrientes in August 1854, Page again commented that “the Soil is not cultivated because laboring men are not to be had,” and bemoaned the “natural apathy and want of energy of the landholders.”160 As Page’s use of the term “natural” suggests, the solution to unlocking La Plata’s commercial promise was a racial one. Like many whites in the mid-nineteenth century, Page believed that race was an inherent biological category that shaped a person’s physical and mental capacities. In this context, the creole elites and mixed-race farmhands who managed landed estates would have to be joined by Anglo-Saxon land owners who had the ambition and determination to cultivate La Plata’s rich soil. “Until the introduction of a foreign, laboring population,” Page assured Dobbin, “the resources of the country must remain dormant.”161 While La Plata may have been “blessed by nature,” only an “agricultural population” could reap Heaven’s reward.162 Intriguingly, Page did not discuss slavery openly, either in his correspondence or publications. The closest that he came to directly broaching the subject were those occasions when he mused that local Indians might form “a useful population.”163 Yet while he appears to have contemplated some form of coerced Indian labor, Page anticipated that most of the manpower in La Plata would come from black slaves. Yet he knew that he had to keep his proslavery ambitions quiet in order to cultivate northern commercial allies and South American creoles. Page’s silence on slavery was therefore strategic. He had learned from Maury’s mistakes in regards to Brazil. Despite his caution, Page’s vision for La Plata surges into view when contextualized in a larger body of proslavery thought. Like other Anglo-Saxonists, Page believed that blacks were far better equipped than whites for agricultural labor in warmer climates. Proslavery apologist Matthew Estes expressed this theory perfectly in his Defence of Negro Slavery in 1846: “The genuine Caucasian race has never pursued agricultural labor successfully in very hot climates,” he wrote. “Wherever this race has flourished in hot countries, they have had the African to till the soil.”164 In his Sociology for the South, George Fitzhugh, one of slavery’s greatest champions, declared that blacks were “admirably fitted for farming.”165 When Mississippi secessionists sought to justify their parting from the Union in 1861, they portrayed secession as an attempt to protect slavery’s agricultural productivity: “by an imperious law of nature,” they wrote, “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”166 Familiarity with the ideology of environmental racism reveals Page’s true intentions; when he wrote about La Plata’s need for importing “laboring hands” and an “agricultural population,” he meant slaves and their white masters.167 Indeed, the aggregate of Page’s writings during and after the expedition reveals that he envisioned La Plata as the future scene of southern colonialism. His letters to the Navy Department, official report, and final published narrative in 1859 read as booster literature for enterprising merchants and slaveholders. After climbing the Pan de Azucar in Brazil in November 1853, Page gazed out from its summit upon the steamy jungle and imagined a “great predestined future” for what he called the “fairest unbroken extent of cultivable land in the world” outside the Mississippi River Valley.168 If only Bolivia, Paraguay, the Argentine Confederation, and Buenos Aires could unite under a federal government, guarantee religious liberty, and invite “new populations—above all, … cultivators and artisans,” the result would be a “South American Republic, which would advance to a zenith of unprecedented power.” Neither filibustering nor violent revolutions would be required to “place the inhabitants of these regions under the beneficent influences of a great republican civilization.” Instead, white immigrants and their slaves would gradually transform the landscape, people, and institutions of this imagined nation until U.S. annexation.169 Like Page, Argentine officials also understood that the establishment of U.S. colonies within their nation’s borders would fulfill their progressive visions and facilitate the development of the Platine watershed. When Page first arrived at Buenos Aires in May 1853, for instance, Urquiza ordered all Argentine statesmen to aid the expedition.170 Later on, the Governor of Corrientes told Page that he believed that white immigration was the “only remedy for the existing evil” of laggard economic development.171 He hoped that Page’s surveys “would stimulate immigration and commercial enterprise toward La Plata.”172 Similarly, the Governor of Santa Fe informed Page that the “resources of this productive Country can be developed only by the introduction of a foreign population.” Therefore, he was prepared to offer immigrants the “most liberal inducements.”173 Page’s arrogance soon spoiled that invitation. At the time of Page’s visit, López was facing steep boundary disputes with Brazil. He was determined to enforce territorial control over Paraguayan rivers. Accordingly, he asked Page not to extend his surveys beyond the country’s territory during his journey up the Paraguay River in the fall of 1853. When Page ignored these directives and sailed as far as Corumbá, Brazil, López fumed that it had set a dangerous precedent that Brazil could use against him.174 Later on, when Page intervened in a feud between López and a U.S. businessman-turned consul, the dictator exploded in rage. In response, Page ushered the consul and other U.S. nationals to the Water Witch and fell back downriver to the Argentine Confederation. Relieved, López forbade all foreign warships from entering Paraguayan waters.175 Once again, Page disregarded the President’s edict; he directed Lieutenant William Jeffers to take the Water Witch and complete the survey of the Paraná River, which formed Paraguay’s southeastern border, while he explored another tributary of La Plata in Argentina. Jeffers’s exploration would have to pass by the Paraguayan fort of Itapiru on its way upriver. On February 1, 1855, while looking for a safe channel, the Water Witch brazenly crossed into the Paraguayan side of the river right under the guns of Itapiru. Paraguayan defense forces hailed her repeatedly, but Jeffers ignored them.176 Itapiru opened fire. The shots blasted the ship’s wheel and mortally wounded a quartermaster.177 As the Water Witch beat a hasty retreat, Jeffers fired back, estimating that her cannons killed as many as fifteen Paraguayan defenders.178 Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide The U.S.S. Water Witch under fire from the Paraguayan fort of Itapiru (Thomas Jefferson Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay (New York, 1859), 306). Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide The U.S.S. Water Witch under fire from the Paraguayan fort of Itapiru (Thomas Jefferson Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay (New York, 1859), 306). The immediate U.S. response to Itapiru was mixed. Page, of course, was outraged, but the commanding officer of the Brazil Squadron refused Page’s pleas to grant him additional guns and men to “knock down Itapiru” and make independent war on Paraguay.179 Pierce’s Secretary of State, William Marcy, may have been convinced by the testimony of Edward Palmer, a tar who had been on the Water Witch at Itapiru. The “conduct of the W. Wich [sic] was wrong,” Palmer admitted to Marcy, calling “the attack upon her … justifiable.”180 Pierce, for his part, was feeling increasingly paralyzed by the nation’s growing rift over Kansas. Thus, while U.S. newspapers carried headlines like “A SPECK OF WAR,” no war clouds seemed imminent in the affair’s immediate aftermath.181 James Buchanan set a different course. In December 1857, he told Congress that he would dispatch a special commissioner to Paraguay and asked for congressional authorization for a fleet of warships to accompany him.182 In October 1858, a massive U.S. armada consisting of nineteen vessels, almost 2,500 men, and more than 200 guns sailed south for the Rio de la Plata. It was, noted Harper’s Magazine, “the largest naval force which our Government has as yet fitted out”—larger even than Commodore Perry’s famous mission to Japan.183 Page sailed as its flag-captain. In the winter of 1859, Buchanan’s special commissioner persuaded López to apologize for the Itapiru affair, provide $10,000 to the family of the slain quartermaster, and sign a new commercial treaty.184 The restoration of diplomatic relations reopened the rich inland nation to reconnaissance. Page returned to La Plata, and, between March 1859 and March 1860, completed his survey.185 The Paraguay Expedition of 1858 showed how proslavery expansionists had come to view naval exploration as a potent tool. Given the federal government’s extended interest in opening the La Plata region to southern settlement, it seems likely that Buchanan hoped to unfreeze the process of exploration and colonization. The naval composition of the Expedition itself shows that it was more for show than actual force. Most of the fleet’s guns were mounted on deep-draft warships, which would have been unable to reach Asuncion if diplomacy had failed. Only about 20 or 25 guns could actually penetrate into Paraguayan waters, and these could have been outmatched by Paraguay’s Navy and river fortifications—including Itapiru.186 Even Buchanan’s cabinet was pessimistic about the Expedition’s chances if it came to war; they privately admitted that “the Expedition will be defeated, should President López determine to fight.”187 But López was not the audience; white southerners were. Buchanan’s massive armada may have sought to reunite a fracturing nation, as Gene Smith and Larry Bartlett have argued, but it was also meant to reassure white slaveholders that Buchanan, despite his failures to acquire new slave territory, still had their interests at heart.188 As this article has contended, the 1850s witnessed the genesis of a third, previously unrecognized method of proslavery expansionism. With conquest unpalatable, and the diplomatic purchase of Cuba unlikely, proslavery elites in the Executive branch turned to naval exploration. Domestic affairs, including northern obstruction to slavery’s extension in the North American West and fears of racial warfare at home, also fueled the Navy’s surveying missions in the South Atlantic. Yet from the start, there were also powerful international trends at work that inspired confidence in the Navy’s potential to secure new slave territories. Prime among these was the fact that U.S. exploration appeared poised to meet a warm reception in South America. While this may seem counterintuitive today, many South American creoles and governing elites in the nineteenth century sought to develop their nations along European lines, especially through white immigration and colonization. Expansionists like Maury, Kennedy, and Page knew this; they designed their strategies and missions to hijack South American ambitions. Yet for all their calculations, diplomatic missteps summoned significant opposition from South Americans themselves, especially in Brazil and Paraguay. While the Amazon Expedition may have influenced the post-war exodus of defeated Confederates to Brazil, these exhausted, war-weary immigrants were a far cry from the confident throngs of slaveholding families and their human chattel that Maury had foreseen subduing the Amazonian jungle.189 Similarly, the one watershed most thoroughly mapped by the United States outside its own borders—the Rio de la Plata and its tributaries—never became the arteries of the “South American Republic” that Page had envisioned from the top of Brazil’s Pan de Azucar.190 The failure of U.S. naval exploration in South America owes much to the disruption of the U.S. Civil War. Yet it was also South American opposition that stymied Maury’s dreams for a slave empire extending from Kansas to Tierra del Fuego. Writing of the post-bellum white South, W. E. B. Du Bois once observed that “it is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt.”191 Such was to be Maury’s fate; there would be no “universal Yankee Nation” after all.192 The author would like to thank Eliga H. Gould and W. Jeffrey Bolster for their early efforts in encouraging and advising what became this article. My friend and colleague, Amanda C. Demmer, also offered early constructive criticism. Isadora Moura Mota provided access to some very helpful documents from Brazilian archives. A National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia allowed me to conduct much of the research to revise this article from my dissertation. I am grateful to Michael Barsanti, James Green, and all the other staff at the Library Company for their assistance during my fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank the editorial team at Diplomatic History and the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful suggestions. Michael A. Verney is an assistant professor of History at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of New Hampshire in 2016. His first article, “An Eye for Prices, an Eye for Souls: Americans in the Indian Subcontinent, 1784-1840,” appeared in The Journal of the Early Republic in 2013. He is currently at work on his first book, which examines the federal government’s early embrace of global imperialism through the exploring expeditions of the antebellum U.S. Navy. Footnotes 1 William Lewis Herndon and Lardner Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon: Made Under Direction of the Navy Department (2 vols., Washington D.C., 1854), 1: 32–33, 90–91. 2 Ibid, 2: 115. 3 Ibid, 2: 115–116. 4 Vincent Ponko, Jr., Ships, Seas, and Scientists: U.S. Naval Exploration and Discovery in the Nineteenth Century (Annapolis, MD, 1974), 92. 5 Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD, 2004); Tomich, ed., The Politics of the Second Slavery (Albany, NY, 2016). 6 Whitfield Bell, Jr., “The Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration of the Amazon to North American Slavery,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 19, no. 4 (1939): 494–503. 7 John P. Harrison, “Science and Politics: Origins and Objectives of Mid-Nineteenth Century Government Expeditions to Latin America,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 35, no. 2 (1955): 175–202; Ponko, Ships, Seas, and Scientists. 8 Matthew J. Karp and Gerald Horne are two important exceptions. Karp discusses the Amazon Expedition briefly in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 144–145, while Horne documents the plan for the Amazon mission carefully in The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007). 9 Don H. Doyle’s edited volume American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s (Chapel Hill, 2017) is an example of this trend. 10 See: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988); Robert May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1973); Robert May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013). 11 Daniel Rood, “Bogs of Death: Slavery, the Brazilian Flour Trade, and the Mystery of the Vanishing Millpond in Antebellum Virginia,” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (2014): 19–43; “An International Harvest: The Second Slavery, the Virginia-Brazil Connection, and the Development of the McCormick Reaper,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert et al. (Philadelphia, PA, 2016), 87–104, and The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Race, Technology, Labor, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (New York, 2017). 12 Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (Westport, CT, 2003); Horne, The Deepest South; Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Karp, Vast Southern Empire. 13 Guterl, American Mediterranean; and Karp, Vast Southern Empire. The phrase “Emperor Slavery” comes from Karp, Vast Southern Empire, 141. 14 Horne, The Deepest South. 15 Norman J.W. Thrower, “Matthew Fontaine Maury,” American National Biography, accessed October 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1301072. 16 Matthew Fontaine Maury, Commercial Conventions, Direct Trade: A Chance for the South (United States, c. 1852), Library Company of Philadelphia (hereafter LCP), 25. 17 Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, FL, 2005), 80. 18 Maury quoted in Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon's Exploration,” 495. 19 Matthew Estes, A Defence of Negro Slavery, As It Exists in the United States (Montgomery, AL, 1846), LCP, 171–172. 20 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 307. 21 Guterl, American Mediterranean, 24. 22 For more on the U.S. reaction to the Haitian Revolution, see Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early American Republic (Baltimore, MD, 2010); Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York, 2015); James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia, PA, 2016). 23 Maury, Commercial Conventions, Direct Trade, 22. 24 Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). 25 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 59–66. 26 Ibid, 69. 27 Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration,” 500. 28 Matthew Fontaine Maury to William Lewis Herndon, April 20, 1850, reprinted in Donald Marquand Dozer, “Matthew Fontaine Maury's Letter of Instruction to William Lewis Herndon,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 28, no. 2 (1948): 217. 29 Ibid, 217–218, 225. 30 Ibid, 217. 31 Ibid, 217. 32 Ibid, 217. 33 See, for example, Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (Chicago, IL, 2008). 34 Millard Fillmore, “Second Annual Message, December 2, 1851,” in The State of the Union: Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1966), 1: 829. 35 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America (Washington, D.C., 1853), 48. 36 William Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan's Confederate Colony in Brazil (Austin, TX, 1987), 15. 37 Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA, 1844). 38 Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 56–71. 39 Leonardo Marques, “The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of U.S. Participation, 1831–1856,” Journal of Latin American Studies 47, no. 4 (2015): 663–664. 40 See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York, NY, 1896); Horne, The Deepest South; and Marques, “Contraband Slave Trade.” 41 Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present (New York, 2013), 34. 42 Horne, The Deepest South, 12. 43 Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 12. 44 Ibid, 29–30. 45 Ibid, 33. 46 Ibid, 27. 47 Ibid, 34. 48 Maury, Commercial Conventions, Direct Trade, 19. 49 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 337. 50 Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration,” 495. 51 Matthew Karp, “Slavery and American Sea Power,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 2 (2011): 319. 52 Ibid, 318. 53 Harrison, “Science and Politics,” 191. 54 For more on Whig reactions to the Mexican War, see Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York, 2012). 55 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 182. 56 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 63. 57 Graham to Herndon, March 8, 1851, Letters Sent by the Secretary of the Navy to Officers, Record Group 45 (hereafter RG 45), M 149, Roll 47, National Archives (hereafter USNA). 58 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 406–407. 59 Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford, CA, 1988), 236–237. 60 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 20. 61 Ibid, 1: 21. 62 Herndon to William A. Graham, March 8, 1851, Letters Received by the Secretary of the Navy from Commissioned Officers Below the Rank of Commander and From Warrant Officers, RG 45, M 148, Roll 201, USNA; and Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 90 and 2: 1. 63 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 146 and 160. 64 Ibid, 1: 276. 65 Ibid, 1: 364. 66 Ibid, 2: 170, 205, 303, and 313–314. 67 Herndon to Graham, Barra du Rio Negro, January 20, 1852, RG 45, M 148, Roll 206, USNA. 68 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 189; Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 63. 69 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 188. 70 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 6. 71 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 281. 72 For more on antebellum Anglo-Saxonism, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981). 73 Maury to Herndon, April 20, 1850, reprinted in Dozer, “Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Letter,” 217. 74 Herndon to Graham, February 8, 1851, RG 45, M 148, Roll 200, USNA. 75 Herndon to Graham, September 26, 1851, RG 45, M 148, Roll 204, USNA. 76 Estes, Defence of Negro Slavery, LCP, 159–160. 77 Ibid, 160–161. 78 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 2: 183. 79 Ibid, 1: 337. 80 Herndon to Graham, Lima, March 8, 1851, RG 45, M 148, Roll 201, USNA. 81 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 301. 82 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 277. 83 Ibid, 1: 337. 84 Maury quoted in Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration,” 499. 85 Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 635–636. 86 Daniel Webster to Robert C. Schenck, May 8, 1851, Diplomatic Instructions of the Department of State, 1801–1906, Record Group 59 (hereafter RG 59), M 77, Brazil, Roll 23, USNA. 87 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 58; and Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 362. 88 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 362. 89 Ponko, Ships, Seas, and Scientists, 89; Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 351; Herndon to Kennedy, January 26, 1853, RG 45, M 148, Roll 213, USNA. 90 Alfred Hunter, A Popular Catalogue of the Extraordinary Curiosities in the National Institute (Washington D.C., 1855), LCP, 62. 91 Millard Fillmore, “Third Annual Message, December 6, 1852,” in The State of the Union: Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1966) 1: 847–848. 92 Ponko, Ships, Seas, and Scientists, 91. 93 Maury, Commercial Conventions, Direct Trade, 21–26. 94 Senate Journal, 32nd Congr., 1st Sess., May 10, 1852, 400; House Journal, 33rd Congr., 1st Sess., March 3, 1854, 447; S. 458, Bills and Resolutions, Senate, 32nd Congr., 1st Sess., June 15, 1852. 95 “The River Amazon—A Great Project,” Scientific American, June 5, 1852, American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 3, 1838–1852 (hereafter AAS HPC 3), 299. 96 “The Navigation of the Amazon,” The New York Times, December 18, 1854. 97 “The River Amazon,” New American Magazine, September, 1852, AAS HPC 3, 85–86. 98 “New Book,” The Daily Globe, January 30, 1854, America’s Historical Newspapers, http://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers (accessed April 12, 2016). 99 Martin, “The Influence of the United States,” 150 ; House Journal 33rd Congr., 1st Sess., March 3, 1854, 447. 100 Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration,” 498. 101 Graham to Herndon, March 8, 1851, RG 45, M 149, Roll 47, USNA. 102 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1: 352–356; Matthew Fontaine Maury, “Shall the Valleys of the Amazon and the Mississippi Reciprocate Trade?” De Bow’s Review 14, no. 2 (1853), AASHPC 3, 138–141. 103 Herndon and Gibbon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 2: 150. 104 Daniel P. Kidder and J. C. Fletcher, Brazil and the Brazilians, Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches (Philadelphia, PA, 1857), LCP, 579. 105 Martin, “The Influence of the United States,” 153. 106 Pedro De Angelis, De La Navigation de L’Amazone. Reponse a un Mémoire de M. Maury, Officier de La Marine des Etats-Unis, Par M. de Angelis (Montevideo, 1854), 5, Camara dos Deputados, Palácio do Congresso Nacional, Praça dos Três Poderes, Brasília, DF, Brasil, http://bd.camara.gov.br/bd/handle/bdcamara/18162. 107 De Angelis, De La Navigation de L’Amazone, 5. 108 Quoted in Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 53. 109 Ibid, 21. 110 Martin, “The Influence of the United States,” 161. 111 For a biography of Kennedy that marries his literary and political histories, see Andrew R. Black, John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman and Ardent Nationalist (Baton Rouge, LA, 2016). 112 Black, John Pendleton Kennedy, 72; and Henry T. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York, 1871), 348. 113 Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy, 348. 114 Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire, 97; Harrison, “Science and Politics,” 192. 115 Tuckerman, Life of Kennedy, 223; Harrison, “Science and Politics,” 196; and Kennedy to Page, January 31, 1853, RG 45, M 149, Roll 50, USNA. 116 Gene Allen Smith and Larry Bartlett, “‘A Most Unprovoked, Unwarrantable, and Dastardly Attack’: James Buchanan, Paraguay, and the Water Witch Incident of 1855,” The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 19 (2009), 274–277. 117 Harrison, “Science and Politics,” 195. 118 Senate Journal, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess., February 7, 1857, 172. 119 Thomas J. Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay: Being a Narrative of the Exploration of the Tributaries of the River La Plata and Adjacent Countries During the Years 1853, ’54, ’55, and ’56, Under the Orders of the United States Government (New York, 1859), xxi. 120 Robert B. Forbes, Personal Reminiscences by Robert B. Forbes (2nd ed., Boston, MA, 1882), 224–239. 121 E. A. Hopkins, “The La Plata and the Parana-Paraguay,” De Bow’s Review 14, no.3 (1853), AASHPC 3, 249 (accessed July 1, 2016). 122 Finding aid for Robert Bennet Forbes papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. N-49.70, http://masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0039. 123 For more on this subject, see Kinley J. Bauer, Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–48 (Lexington, KY, 1967); Thomas O’Connor, Lords of the Loom, the Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1968); Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York, 2005). 124 Ponko, Ships, Seas, and Scientists, 133. 125 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 11–16. 126 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, xxi. 127 Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire, 114. 128 Joseph Criscenti, ed., Sarmiento and His Argentina (Boulder, CO, and London, 1993), 109. 129 Thomas J. Page, Report of the Exploration and Survey of the River “La Plata” and Tributaries by Thomas J. Page: Commanding United States Steamer Water Witch, to the Secretary of the Navy (Washington D.C., 1856), 4. 130 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 25. 131 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 26; John Pendleton Kennedy, Political and Official Papers (New York, 1872), 507–508. 132 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Sarmiento’s Travels in the United States in 1847, trans. Michael Aaron Rockland (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 124. 133 Juan Bautista Alberdi, The Life and Industrial Labors of William Wheelwright in South America (Boston, MA, 1877), LCP, 208. 134 Ibid, 7, 9. 135 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 107. 136 Franklin Pierce, “Inaugural Address, March 4, 1853” in My Fellow Citizens: The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, eds. Arthur M. Schlesinger and Fred L. Israel (New York, 2005), 123. 137 Franklin Pierce, “First Annual Message, December 5, 1853,” in The State of the Union: Messages of the Presidents, 1790-1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1966) 1: 860. 138 Franklin Pierce, “Second Annual Message, December 4, 1854,” in The State of the Union: Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1966) 1: 882. 139 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 108–109. 140 William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago, IL, 1996), 151–152. 141 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 108. 142 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 366–370; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 113. 143 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 165; and Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), 81–116. 144 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, VA, 1857), LCP, xiii. 145 Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Nicaraguan Affairs and Lecompton Constitution: Speech of Hon. Lucius Q. C. Lamar, Of Mississippi, on Nicaraguan and Kansas Affairs, Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 13, 1858 (Washington, D.C., 1858), LCP, 2. 146 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 287. 147 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 114; Page to Carlos López, October 1, 1853, Miscellaneous Records of the Office of Naval Records and Library, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 148 Page to López, October 1, 1853, RG 45, T–829, USNA; Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay , 118–119. 149 Page to López, October 1, 1853, and October 13, 1853, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 150 E. Shippen, “Recollections of the Paraguay Expedition,” United Services: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs 2 (1880), 333; James Schofield Saeger, Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism (Lanham, MD, 2007), 41. 151 Saeger’s biography of Carolos López’s son and heir, Francisco Solano López, describes how father and son imported European war technology and expertise in the 1850s and 1860s. 152 Page to López, October 12, 1853, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 153 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 119. 154 Ibid, 97. 155 Ibid, 98. 156 Page, Report of the Exploration and Survey of the River “La Plata” and Tributaries by Thomas J. Page, 12. 157 Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America, 11. 158 Page to Dobbin, March 10, 1854, RG 45, T 829, roll 445, USNA. 159 Ibid. 160 Page to Dobbin, August 13, 1854, RG 45, T–829, roll 445, USNA. 161 Ibid. 162 Page, Report of the Exploration and Survey of the River “La Plata” and Tributaries by Thomas J. Page, 23. 163 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 85. 164 Estes, Defence of Negro Slavery, 159. 165 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA, 1854), 149. 166 “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 167 Page, Report of the Exploration and Survey of the River “La Plata” and Tributaries by Thomas J. Page, 23. 168 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay 164. 169 Ibid,165. 170 Page to Kennedy, May 21, 1853, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 171 Page to Dobbin, August 13, 1854, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 172 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 100. 173 Page to Dobbin, Steamer Yerba, Santa Fe, August 7, 1855, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 174 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 200. 175 Ibid, 281. 176 Jeffers to Page, February 2, 1855, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 177 Jeffers to Page, February 2, 1855, RG 45, T 829, USNA; Page to Dobbin, February 5, 1855, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 178 Page, La Plata, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 307. 179 Ibid, 314; Page to William Salter, April 1, 1855, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA; Page to Dobbin, April 16, 1855, RG 45, T–829, Roll 445, USNA. 180 Testimony of Edward Palmer, dated June 20, and enclosed with José Falcón’s letter to U.S. Minister of Foreign Affairs, Asunción, Paraguay, February 5, 1855, Notes from the Paraguayan Legation in the United States to the Department of State, 1853–1906, RG 45, M 350, Roll 1, USNA. 181 “A Speck of War,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, April 18, 1855. 182 James Buchanan, “First Annual Message, December 8, 1857,” in The State of the Union: Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York, 1966) 1: 954–955. 183 “La Plata,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 18 (Feb. 1859), AASHPC 3, 327 (accessed July 1, 2016). 184 Smith and Bartlett, “‘Unprovoked, Unwarrantable, and Dastardly Attack,’” 286–287. 185 Ponko, Ships, Seas, and Scientists, 130–131. 186 “The Paraguay Expedition,” The New York Times, November 3, 1858, The New York Times Archive online (accessed July 17, 2019). 187 Ibid. 188 Smith and Bartlett, “‘Unprovoked, Unwarrantable, and Dastardly Attack.’” 189 Bell, “Relation of Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration,” 503. For more on the post-Civil-War Confederate exodus to Brazil, see Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson, MS, 1985); Frank J. Merli, ed., “Alternative to Appomattox: A Virginian’s Vision of an Anglo-Confederate Colony on the Amazon, May 1865,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94, no. 2 (1986): 210–219; and Griggs, The Elusive Eden. 190 Page, La Plata,, The Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay, 165 191 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint Mineola, NY, 1994), 47–48. 192 Maury to Herndon, April 20, 1850, reprinted in Dozer, “Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Letter,” 217. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “The Universal Yankee Nation”: Proslavery Exploration in South America, 1850-1860
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhz067
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-universal-yankee-nation-proslavery-exploration-in-south-america-5na1v7HHjo
DP - DeepDyve
ER -