Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingThis Vast Southern Empire
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreFor proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.
As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their "vast southern empire" was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slave-holding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
Matthew Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. He grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and lives in Brooklyn.
A veteran voice artist, Tom Zingarelli has produced and narrated many audiobooks in the last several years. He has also recorded books for the Connecticut State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. His voice was featured on the popular PBS children's television program Between the Lions and in the off-Broadway production of Ruthless, the Musical. Commercially, Tom has recorded for the Connecticut Department of Health, the American Heart Association, and several corporations and universities. He is the on-camera and voiceover star of the ten-part video series Greatest American Tall Tales and Legends, about legendary American heroes like Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett, popular in schools and libraries nationwide. Tom is also the voice of Maurice the mouse (and his ninety-eight grandmice) in the children's interactive audiobook series Maurice's Valises. He is a veteran actor of many live radio re-creations, including Lights Out, Suspense, and Johnny Dollar, and he is a frequent reader for dramatic and literature programs. Recently, Tom became an audio describer for the blind and visually impaired of Broadway theater through Describe!, a program of the Healing Arts Institute, and for the Yale Repertory Theater.