A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South

A Continuous State of War

SERIES EDITORS

Stephen Berry

University of Georgia

Amy Murrell Taylor

University of Kentucky

ADVISORY BOARD

Edward L. Ayers

University of Richmond

Catherine Clinton

University of Texas at San Antonio

J. Matthew Gallman

University of Florida

Elizabeth Leonard

Colby College

James Marten

Marquette University

Scott Nelson

University of Georgia

Daniel E. Sutherland

University of Arkansas

Elizabeth Varon

University of Virginia

A Continuous State of War

Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South

MARIA ANGELA DIAZ

The University of Georgia Press  Athens

© 2024 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diaz, Maria Angela, author.

Title: A continuous state of war : empire building and race making in the Civil War–era Gulf South / Maria Angela Diaz.

Other titles: Empire building and race making in the Civil War-era Gulf South | Uncivil wars.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2024] | Series: Uncivil wars | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023049036 | ISBN 9780820366487 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820366494 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820366500 (epub) | ISBN 9780820366517 (adobe pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism. | Gulf Coast (U.S.)—History. | Southern States—History—1775–1865. | Southern States—Race relations—History—19th century. | United States—Territorial expansion—History.

Classification: LCC E415.7 .D53 2024 | DDC 976/.03—dc23/eng/20231108

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023049036

For My Family

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Wanting a Southern Empire

CHAPTER 1.

The Possibilities of Texas

CHAPTER 2.

The Possibilities of Pensacola

CHAPTER 3.

Making Meaning of the U.S.-Mexican War

CHAPTER 4.

Annexing the Gem of the Antilles

CHAPTER 5.

Galveston and the Fight for the Texas Borderlands

CHAPTER 6.

Launching a New Nation

CHAPTER 7.

Empire on the Run

CONCLUSION.

What Comes after Southern Imperialism?

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people and institutions helped me throughout my time researching and writing this book. First, I would like to thank my parents, Jose M. Diaz and Francisca Diaz, my brother, Joe Anthony Diaz, and my entire family for their constant encouragement and support. Without their unwavering belief in my abilities this would not have been possible. I love them all more than I can say. My dear friend Autumn L. Hanna read various drafts and always offered a clear perspective. She was also one of my loudest cheerleaders. She made me laugh when I really needed it. I am also indebted to many other friends and colleagues who read different parts of this book and offered valuable critiques. These include but are not limited to, Allison Fredette, Timothy Fritz, Andrea Ferreira, Roberto Chauca, Aurélia Aubert, R. Scott Huffard, and James J. Broomall. Peter Carmichael and Watson Jennison were two of my favorite professors at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and they both played a crucial part in helping me to realize my goal of obtaining my PhD.

The History Department at the University of Florida provided an ideal environment to write my dissertation. It provided me with the support I needed to produce what became the first draft of this book. I would like to thank my advisors, William A. Link and J. Matthew Gallman, for their guidance, patience, and kindness. Bill Link answered every question and every late-night email with thoughtful suggestions. His generosity as a mentor is extraordinary, and I hope to be as good a mentor to my students as he was to me. I still seek his guidance and am honored to count him as a friend and colleague. Matt Gallman pushed me to think more creatively about my work and our many discussions over coffee and lunches led me to consider this project in new and different ways. It would not be the study it is today without his guidance. Both of these amazing historians have taught me what it means to be a scholar. I would like to thank Paul Ortiz, who helped me to begin thinking about the important connections between Latino and Southern history. I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Sean Adams, Leah Rosenberg, and Paul Ortiz, for their thoughtful critiques and questions.

After two years at my first job, I was unceremoniously let go. It was a nightmare scenario for which I was unprepared. It caused me to question everything about my life as a historian. At a time in my life when I desperately needed to make a change, I received a postdoctoral fellowship in Texas history at Texas Tech University. It was there that I was able to regroup, re-envision my book project, and complete my research. I am forever indebted to the wonderful scholars of the TTU History Department for their unending encouragement. Miguel Antonio Levario became a dear friend and mentor. He believed in me at time when I needed it most. I thank Sean P. Cunningham for offering a friendly ear and constant commitment to support my work on this project. Emily Skidmore, Jacob M. Baum, Sarah Keyes, and Catharine R. Franklin, and Erin-Marie Legacey all read parts of this book and provided helpful critiques. Our daily discussions about each other’s work allowed me space to imagine this book and its completion.

I found a wonderful home in the History Department at Utah State University. Many of my colleagues provided guidance and thoughtful critiques during the final stages of revisions. I am particularly thankful to the folks in the Works in Progress writing group: James E. Sanders, Julia M. Gossard, Tammy M. Proctor, Christopher Babits, Lawrence Culver, and Seth Archer. Colleen O’Neill, Kyle M. Bulthuis, and Kerin Holt provided me with advice on the publication process. Thank you to Mick Gusinde-Duffy and the University of Georgia Press. Thank you to the UnCivil Wars series editors, Stephen Berry and Amy Murrell Taylor. A special thanks to Amy, who worked closely with me on revising every part of the manuscript with immense patience and a careful eye.

I am indebted to the archivists such as Jim Cusick at the Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida; the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas; the Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina; Archives and Special Collections at Tulane University; the Historical New Orleans Collection; the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University; the Galveston and Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library; and the University Archives and West Florida History Center at the John C. Pace Library, University of West Florida. Lastly, if there is anyone that I forgot in this short statement, please know that I thank you as well.

A Continuous State of War

INTRODUCTION

Wanting a Southern Empire

In 1853 Frederick Law Olmsted, then primarily known for his travel writing traveled to Texas. Long before he became one of the nation’s most famous landscape architects, Frederick and his brother, John Hull Olmsted, crossed the Red River on horseback into the state. For months they lived in the saddle, making note of the vast landscape through which they passed and encountering the state’s various inhabitants, including white slaveholders, working-class and poor whites, enslaved African Americans, wealthy, and working-class Mexican Texans. As they wound their way through Texas’s cotton lands, Olmsted observed that whenever slavery in Texas has been carried in a wholesale way, into the neighborhood of Mexicans, it has been found necessary to treat them [Mexicans] as outlaws . . . and forbidden, on pain of no less punishment than instant death, to return to the vicinity of the plantations.¹ Olmsted’s observations hinted not only at the contest over territory between Anglo Americans and Mexicans but also at the racist views of white enslavers who were suspicious of Mexican Texans. It also reflected the way such views were applied to a variety of peoples of color in the Gulf South region throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Olmsted’s experiences in Texas revealed the contestation over slavery’s expansion that would draw the communities of the Gulf South into the tumult of the American Civil War.

Throughout the Civil War era, the Gulf South was in a continuous state of conflict. War existed in the far-flung borders of the Gulf of Mexico and affected communities large and small throughout the entire Southern coastal region. From the 1840s to the 1880s, white Southerners in the Gulf South fought with Native Americans, Mexicans, Cubans, the Spanish, and finally, when Americans went to war with each other, white Northerners and free and enslaved African Americans. These conflicts placed the Gulf of Mexico at the center of Southern expansionism and were an important part of expansionists’ efforts to construct a race-based imperialist fantasy that justified and perpetuated territorial conquest in Latin America. Coastal print culture engaged in a regional and national production of ideas of empire, race, and Manifest Destiny, while coastal communities hoped to benefit from this hunger for more territory. This collection of ideas and efforts framed the Gulf of Mexico and Latin America as an essential part of Southern expansion.

A Continuous State of War examines the central role of Gulf South communities in Southerners’ attempts to grab territory in Mexico and the Caribbean and the effects that this process had on those communities. I argue that Gulf Coast communities facilitated both the physical efforts to seize territory and the construction of the highly racialized imperialist ideas that imagined Latin America as a region that could secure the South’s future. Yet the pursuit of that territory created a fluctuating and uncertain situation that shaped the choices of the diverse peoples who lived along the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico. White Southern concepts of race became more rigidly fixed through the wars chronicled here. The fantasies of expansion were not snuffed out at the Civil War’s end but persisted in the attempts of former Confederates to resettle in Latin America in the postwar period. By studying expansionist wars and the ideas used to promote them, this book traces the ways that ideas about Latin America and its peoples took shape within the complex port communities of the Gulf Coast as well as within the nation at large.

Throughout its early history, the United States obtained through war and negotiation different parts of the upper rim of the Gulf Coast. American control over the region continued to be contested even as it served as a launching pad for further expansionist projects. Indeed, the wars of expansion that occurred around the Gulf of Mexico during the mid-nineteenth century were as much about achieving authority over the region as they were about using those communities as staging grounds for conquest elsewhere. The United States may have laid claim to Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana by 1820, but conflict still raged across these states and then continued into Texas in the 1840s. This unending conflict and the militarization of the region continued right into 1861, when the Confederate States of America attempted to exert their own control over the Gulf South.

Many different worlds collided in the Gulf of Mexico. The history of expansion in the United States is usually presented as the story of westward movement. However, from the perspective of those living in the Gulf Coast, expansion happened west and south.² Placing different parts of the Gulf Coast in conversation with one another draws attention to the fact that the whole Gulf of Mexico was affected by the various conflicts of the mid- nineteenth century. Expansionists such as John Quitman, Sam Houston, and Albert Sidney Johnston, also saw the borderlands of the U.S. South, Mexico, and the Caribbean as a connected whole. The Gulf South evolved into a center for trade and cultural and political exchange between the Atlantic World, the Caribbean, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the U.S. South. It was also buffeted by a multitude of local, regional, national, and transnational forces. Gulf communities large and small continually angled for more military protection, more of the share of trade in cotton and enslaved African Americans, more access to better shipping methods, to the agricultural hinterlands, and more input into the visions that drove expansion.

The way that white Southerners constructed ideas about expansion was drawn from some of the most fundamental and far-reaching aspects of Southern society, namely race and slavery. To that end, the inclusion of Texas broadens this study for two main reasons. First, Texas was one of the main sites of expansion in the antebellum period. Second, many of the ideas about race that concerned Latin American peoples were, in part, formulated through the colonization, settlement, and annexation of Texas. For white Southerners, the annexation of Texas, and later the U.S.-Mexican War, served as prime examples of what territorial expansion could accomplish in terms of economic prosperity and the protection and spread of slavery.

As this book reveals, examining expansion’s effects on different parts of the Gulf South simultaneously makes plain that, despite the tendency in American history to separate the stories of violent conquest against Mexicans and other Latin Americans and Native Americans from that of antebellum slavery these stories are deeply connected. White Southerners dreamed of them as connected, not only to each other but to what lay even further south; they dreamed of these spaces and the peoples that inhabited them as coming under their mastery. They feared these connections as much as they fantasized about them. They feared that the failure to extend white American authority would let loose the fulfillment of other fears, such as slave rebellions, and upend the carefully constructed world around them. Territorial expansion was ultimately about the future. Americans were interested in these territories not just because they could obtain more physical land but because they were enamored with the potential of that land. That is what expansion was all about: potential. Potential could be either positive or negative, and expansionists saw both kinds of potential in the land they coveted.

I have chosen to focus primarily on American expansionist efforts in Mexico and Cuba. The combination of efforts in Mexico and Cuba shed light on how Southern slave society’s Black-white racial binary was used to shape the racism of Southern imperialism and territorial expansion and vice versa. Within this vision, Mexico with its mixed-race population would be conquered. Meanwhile, Cuba, with its slaveholding Cuban elite, could be annexed as a new state. Although Cuba’s population was just as complex as Mexico’s, the presence of slavery within that society meant that it was often viewed by white Southerners as similar to their own. Thus, while Latin American societies were far more complex than the Southern imaginary depicted, this vision helped to justify the mode of territorial expansion in the Gulf, giving meaning to Southern imperialism and later giving rise to the methods Southerners used to pursue the Civil War in this region. Eventually these early imaginings formed the basis for how the United States would engage with Latin American countries and Latin American peoples.

Figures such as rough-hewn Texan soldiers, Indian fighters, the great volunteer army of the U.S.-Mexican War, a protective navy, and rebellious filibusters all peopled the discourse of antebellum Southern expansionism as the slave states’ heroes. In doing so they fought against a variety of enemies, most of them peoples of color. They went to war with Native Americans such as the Comanche, the Creek, and the Seminole, Mexicans, the Spanish colonial authority, Cubans, all the while exerting their brutal authority over enslaved and free African Americans. And they were thwarted by many of these foes in a variety of ways that undermined the efficacy of white Southern violence. Where I felt I could, I have inserted the voices and stories of those who pushed back against Southern imperialism. Where I could, I have inserted the voices of the oppressed, the overlooked, the displaced, and the disrupted who were forced to do the work of expansion or were forced to get out of its way.³

In many ways this is a book about failure. It is about the failure of Southern imperialism and the failure of white Southerners’ attempts to steer American expansion southward into Latin America. Southern imperialism started out successfully but ultimately hit the disaster of the filibuster craze that began a decline that evolved all the way through the Civil War and fi-nally ended during Reconstruction. This book brings into sharp relief white Southerners’ frustration with the fact that their lived realities often failed to measure up to the fantasies they created; it is also about the failure of the Confederacy to salvage those fantasies once it became evident that the United States federal government and army no longer cared to prop them up.⁴ During and after the Civil War, the national project of expansion persisted and grew into the imperialism of the late nineteenth century, but it did so without Southern fantasies of a slave power dominant in the hemi-sphere. Even objections to a slave empire that stretched into Latin America, however, were based in racist notions regarding the peoples that lived there. Whether it was an empire based in free labor or slave labor, it was still an empire determined to take things from people of color and give them to white Americans.⁵

The work found here speaks to the transnational turn in Civil War–era and Southern studies. The work of historians to place the American South in a broader context and in conversation with other nations and spaces provides a lens through which to understand the Gulf South during the nineteenth century.⁶ A significant part of this historiography concerns the study of the efforts of Southern slaveholders in the United States to create for themselves a transnational empire based on slave labor and cotton production. Southern historians continue to make important connections and comparisons between the slave societies of the U.S. South and Latin American nations and colonies. This book builds on this important work by addressing the manner in which the region’s imperialist inclinations shaped how Southern whites related to and understood Latin American people as a race.⁷ Justifications of slavery not only racialized African American people, they were also part of how and why white Americans constructed racist images of Latin American people. Therefore, if there was any kind of kinship to be had between the slaveholding South and the slaveholding societies of Latin America, the relationship was never perceived as equal. Southern whites did not necessarily seek unification between these worlds. Rather, they fought for control and dominance over those they viewed as racially questionable or altogether inferior. Furthermore, the drive for empire and racial supremacy was also motivated by the fear of being eclipsed within the nation as well as on the world’s stage. Historians studying the creators of Southern imperialism often cast them as self-confident men—and it was especially men—leading the nation’s expansion with a cosmopolitan outlook on the world and a singular vision. However, a study of both the words of Southern imperialists and the ways that the ideas they promoted played out on the ground demonstrates that they were as much reactionary as they were visionary. They articulated nightmares as much as they did dreams, and the Civil War was born of both.⁸ Studying how white Southerners interacted with and conceived of Latin American societies in the mid-nineteenth century uncovers as much about Southern society as it does about their conception of others. As the decades passed from the thirties to the fifties, and challenges to slavery mounted, they defined themselves against the outside world as much as they did against the North. Southerners criticized the classed societies of Europe as well as those to be found in Latin American nations, especially Mexico. In so doing, white Southern critics revealed much not only about their constructions and understanding of race but also their understanding of class.⁹

In recent years work in transnational history has demonstrated that debates concerning secession were not only battles to determine the fate of the nation; they also concerned the goals of the United States in terms of its position in the hemisphere.¹⁰ This book is a reminder that the Civil War, in part, answered these questions of empire. Much work that has been done on the transnational connections of the Civil War focuses either on the level of the wealthy planter class or that of government officials and diplomats. The U.S. federal government laid out a plan for westward settlement and colonization even as its armies marched on Southern locales and men died by the hundreds of thousands. Historians have understood these policies as efforts on the part of politicians in the Republican Party to gain during the war what they failed to attain in the antebellum years. These policies also reflected a decision concerning the process of expansion that veered away from more Southern attitudes toward empire. Centering Gulf South communities gives us a window into how local communities dealt with these same connections throughout this period in U.S. history.¹¹

Borderlands history and its unique perspective proves essential for understanding the Gulf South in the nineteenth century. The Gulf South is usually treated as a borderland during its colonial period, when French, Spanish, and English colonial authorities tried to exert their power over the region, often times against Native American nations and enslaved African Americans. As Samuel Truett and Pekka Hämäläinen noted in their essay On Borderlands, this perspective speaks to the promise and the challenges of exploring nontraditional borderlands such as bodies of water. Viewing the mid-nineteenth century Gulf South through a borderlands lens highlights the complex and often interwoven nature of cultures, races, and violence in these communities. It also highlights the fact that though a large swath of the Gulf South had come under U.S. authority during the first half of the nineteenth century, that authority was still heavily contested and fragile. Additionally, examining the manner in which members of these communities helped to construct racism as it pertained to Latin American peoples demonstrates that it was not just Anglos in the southwest who were doing this work. It occurred in multiple spaces along the borders of the United States simultaneously, as the nation pushed west and south.¹²

The Civil War, though seemingly outside of this story must be situated within it. Even with the transnational interventions, it is often still largely understood as a different kind of war than those that came before or after it in the nineteenth century. Examining the experiences of communities in the Gulf South helps to put the pieces together. While the war was a fight over the fate of slavery and the nation, it was also about the way that the nation would expand in the West as well as its imperialist interests in Latin America. Recentering the region puts these complex aspects of the war’s central narrative in focus. We see the way that the South’s imperialism split from the larger story of American expansion by examining how these communities were shaped by both sets of ideas.¹³

A Continuous State of War begins with the Texas Republic just after its establishment as an independent nation in 1836 and examines the different sides of the annexation debate within Texas. It explores the way that violent conflicts in the Texas Republic shaped ideas about statehood, independence, and race. The process of annexation stalled before President John Tyler’s administration and this encouraged those in Texas who sought independence. Annexationists concocted a powerful story of an imperiled Texas engaged in fighting off Mexicans and Native Americans that galvanized support for their side and helped bolster the eventual outcome of statehood. Chapter 2 examines Pensacola and West Florida and that territory’s parallels with the violent tensions that existed in Texas. It explores the ways that Pensacolians used a similar discourse to advocate for improvements made to coastal defenses in West Florida amid the continued resistance to Indian Removal, the Second Seminole War, a Creek rebellion, and the outbreak of the Mexican War.

Chapter 3 focuses entirely on the U.S.-Mexican War and traces several key aspects of the discourse associated with that conflict. At the end of the chapter the words of soldiers and sailors are used to understand how expansionism shaped their experiences. What comes out of an examination of the war is an image of Mexico and Mexicans as a people who required violent control both in the United States and Mexico.

These ideas about both race and class would be used in the filibustering craze that took over after the war and is discussed in chapter 4. The U.S.-Mexican War was followed by a rash of filibuster expeditions and increased efforts to obtain further Latin American territory. This chapter addresses the Narciso López expeditions to achieve Cuban annexation and focuses on New Orleans as a point of connection between the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast communities. After serving as the major jumping-off point for thousands of soldiers headed for Mexico, New Orleans became a hotbed of filibustering and a growing Cuban exile community. An analysis of the ideas used to justify the filibusters reveals that white Southerners’ imagining of Cuban society was framed against the backdrop of both the U.S.-Mexican War and Southerners’ past relationship with white and Black Creoles in the Gulf South. The failure of both Cuban expeditions as well as the failed attempt to negotiate with Spain over Cuba revealed chinks in the armor of Southern expansionism.

As white Southerners in New Orleans pushed for Cuban annexation, city boosters in communities along the Texas coast, especially in Galveston, the state’s largest port city, sought to encourage the influx of settlers into the Texas hinterlands. Accordingly, chapter 5 revisits the area covered in chapter 1 on the eve of the Civil War. It examines the rising tensions between Anglos and Mexicans in the years following the U.S.-Mexican War and suggests that the war actually settled very little for Texans. This chapter also covers the way that city officials in Galveston proceeded to make their city an important site of trade, both of slaves and cotton, and immigration for Texas.

Chapter 6 examines the outbreak of the Civil War and its effects on the Gulf Coast. Southern interests in Latin America evolved with the creation of the Confederacy. Though most secessionist discourse focused on the North, the Republican Party, and the threat Lincoln posed to slavery, the imagery of Latin American nations and peoples that expansionists cultivated was also deployed to articulate the hopes and anxieties connected to secession and the Confederacy. Secessionists used ideas about the African slave trade in Cuba and bandits in Mexico to emphasize the necessity of separation. When the war began, coastal communities, especially Mobile, served as important sites of blockade running to the Caribbean to retrieve supplies in an effort to sustain the infant Confederacy.

The final chapter explores the transformation of connections between the Gulf South and Latin American nations. After the fall of New Orleans to Union hands in 1862, the Gulf South became a center for white refugees, both Confederate and Unionist, as well as to refugeed enslaved African Americans. In the aftermath of the Civil War, many Southerners fled to Latin American countries such as Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. In a dramatic end of a long period of expansionist fantasies, Confederates did not arrive as leaders but as refugees, desperate to escape a failed South. Ideas about Latin America again changed during the debate that ensued over the movement of ex-confederates to these nations. In examining these ideas, chapter 7 links the efforts of the colonies of Southerners with developments in the South during Reconstruction. But even here they could not escape the forces of emancipation. In the end, Southern imperialism died in the spaces that Southern whites thought would sustain it in perpetuity.

CHAPTER 1

The Possibilities of Texas

In June 1844 the New Orleans Daily Picayune published a satirical letter by a fictional character invented by the humorist C. M. Haile, named Pardon Jones. Jones declared, I’m for annexation, only conditionally. If Texas wants to come to us (and I know she duz) we’d ought to take her. If Texas would strengthen the South, (and I know she would,) she’d strengthen the Union, and we’d ought to have her . . . if England wants to abolish the niggers in Texas, (and I know she duz,) then she wants to abolish ’em in the South, and to abolish our Glorious Union. As to Santy Anny and Mexico, he added, we can’t wait a hundred years for them to whip Texas, and you know, as well as I do, that they can’t du it, no how.¹ Jones’s letter touched on several different elements that summed up expansion in the 1840s. It reflected the complex geopolitical contest over Texan annexation and recalled the string of conflicts that existed between the Republic of Texas and Mexico in 1830s and 1840s.

As a slaveholding republic, Texas stood between the United States, another slaveholding republic, and Mexico, an antislavery republic far larger than the United States. References to Antonio López de Santa Anna (Santy Anny) recalled the Texas Revolution in 1836 in which Anglos and Mexicans in Texas gained their independence; they also touched on the continued tensions between these two groups of Texans. Mentions of Britain as an abolitionist country signaled its continued presence in the Gulf of Mexico and in Latin American politics and the danger it posed to the United States and the Southern slaveholding states in particular. Indeed, Jones’s conflating the interests of the nation and the interests of the South recalled the history of U.S. expansion into the Lower South along the Gulf Coast that