Download or read book This Vast Southern Empire written by Matthew Karp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most leaders of the U.S. expansion in the years before the Civil War were southern slaveholders. As Matthew Karp shows, they were nationalists, not separatists. When Lincoln’s election broke their grip on foreign policy, these elites formed their own Confederacy not merely to preserve their property but to shape the future of the Atlantic world.