Summary

From the Revolution through the Civil War, US foreign relations offered a stage for the clash between antislavery and proslavery forces. Slaveholders and their agents, enslaved and free Black men and women, the different strands of the abolitionist movement, politicians of all persuasions, and various groups of foreigners, among others, shaped the actions and the image of the United States in the world. The question of fugitive slaves in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 got the United States into complicated diplomatic trouble with the British Empire. When it came to abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, however, the governments of the United States and Great Britain found some common ground. Yet while the British policed the oceans to punish slavers, US nationals continued to (illegally) carry slaves to Cuba and Brazil until the 1850s. Another source of anxiety emerging for the United States was the Haitian Revolution, which raised the specter of an independent republic of ex-slaves. But an unintended consequence of Haitian liberation favored American proslavery expansionists: defeated in the Caribbean, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the Jefferson administration. Adding to the power of American slaveholders, the federal government acquired Florida from Spain and later went to war against Mexico, absorbing half of its territory. Expansionism would soon raise insurmountable tensions, however. The slaveholders’ plans to expand into Latin America, which materialized as filibustering expeditions, failed to accomplish their goals. The failure of proslavery expansionism after the Mexican–American War contributed to the coming of the Civil War, which completely transformed US diplomatic and trade relations along with its image before the broader world.