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Politicians at the time, and historians ever since have framed the issues dividing the north and south leading to the Civil War in moral/political terms, but really the economic issues over slavery were even greater. The ultimate issue was “who was going to settle the entire US west of the Mississippi river — were all those states to be free or slave? Clearly, the longer the South waited, the more the balance of power would shift against them. There was no reason for them to have seceded prior to 1860, because it was only in 1860 that the northern Republican party succeeded in electing a President hostile to slavery. Until then, slave owners and sympathizers (like James Buchanan) dominated US politics. But, after that point, delay would only work against them.To simplify, this is basically the U.S. in 1864:If you take a look at the map you can immediately see there is simply nowhere for slavery to go. Missouri was a slave state by legislative fiat (the Missouri compromise). But nobody could see a way to make slavery pay in New Mexico Territory or Arizona Territory. So, a westward expansion of slavery from Texas was blocked by climate (deserts with no appreciable water — blazing hot and dry) climate.In 1849 gold was discovered in CA and tens of thousands of Americans rushed westward as fast as they could travel to get in on the gold bonanza; so many that California was admitted as a state in September 1850. As a free state. The miners who swarmed westward were bitterly opposed to slavery because they refused to compete against slave wages. Lots of northern states had such restrictions. Illinois had a law that stated it was illegal for anybody to bring a person into Illinois who was 1/4 or more African ancestry. No slaves and no free-Negroes could legally emigrate to Illinois. So, it was impossible for Congress to impose a slave code over California given this intense hostility of the settlers. CA thus, became a free state and upset the “balance” of free and slave states that the South demanded to ensure the political safety of slavery within the union.Kansas was next in line for admission as a new state. However, despite all kinds of rigged elections, and the “LeCompton Fraud” — attempts by the Buchanan Administration to foist a slave Constitution over Kansas, all efforts failed because the settlers came mostly from the North in search of free land, and wanted no part of competition with slave owners for land or slave wages. They fought bitterly and resisted until they finally got a Free State constitution in 1862.So, another Free State was going to be added to the union, further outnumbering the South.The Southern pro-slavery leaders could see that the future of the entire country would be determined by the settlement of the west, but it was equally obvious that millions of immigrants from Europe would come — to the North. Few immigrants wanted to settle in the South because of the slave based economy. Nobody without ready access to lots of capital could buy land and slaves and start cotton planting. Poor whites in the South were little better of than slaves themselves, with little hope of advancement in an increasingly class stratified society of planter aristocracy (e.g. the “First Families of Virginia” and other states formed a kind of closed elite).There was free land and untapped mineral resources; thus incredible opportunity for economic advancement for poor people in the west, but clearly these states as they came in would be free states, and would violently resist any attempt to impose a slave code over them.Thus, the South would be more and more outnumbered.I’ve written extensively about their counter proposals - to fight a series of wars to seize more and more territory for slavery in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. This is a little taught or understood part of American history.Southern Leaders Expose Their Real Goals: the true history, Shorn of Myth.The South’s real purpose before and during the war, as revealed by their own statesmen, was to carve out an enormous slave empire that spanned the entire continent south of the Rio Grande to counter the expected expansion of the North across the continent of North America.Their dream state included Mexico and Panama as far south as Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as the sugar producing islands of the Caribbean — particularly Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also included the West Indies (as much of it as they could grab).“The Gulf of Mexico is a basin of water belonging to the United States. . . Cuba must be ours” in order to “increase the number of slave holding constituencies.” Sen. Jefferson Davis. See McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (p. 104). Oxford University Press. “Southern leaders certainly feared the North would open the entire West of the US to white settlers as soon as the Army could clear the Native American Tribes out of the way and force them either to flee further west or ultimately onto reservations and building on the transcontinental railroad was only delayed by Southern prewar resistance to permitting a northern route for the Railroad that would provide a funnel for easy access to the entire Rocky Mountains and western US to settlement. That would open vast new territories; all of which would become Free States — because the land-hungry white working class mechanics and farmers who would inevitably pour into them would never tolerate the presence of slavery in their states; because they did not wish to have to compete for wages or commodity prices against slave labor. Illinois where Lincoln was from for instance; prohibited slavery, but also prohibited free Negroes from settling in the state. The only way the South could keep up the balance of power was by adding more slave states — but the admission of CA as a free state and the pending admission of Kansas as another showed that this effort was doomed by Northern political resistance. The North wanted to reserve the entire Western territory for land-hungry free settlers.So, the South was utterly doomed to be more and more outnumbered by the Free Northern States as time passed. The election of Lincoln in 1860 proved the North’s determination to follow this policy of progressively encircling the South with more and more Free States in the belief that Slavery would wither in it’s geographically isolated and politically weaker position as more and more free states came into the Union. (Oregon in 1859; Kansas in 1861; WV 1963; NV 1864; NB 1867; CO 1876; ND, SD, MT, WA all in 1889; ID, WY in 1890 — all these territories were obviously going to become free states unless Congress or the S.Ct. forced slave codes on them prior to their becoming states. (That is what the pre-war fight over whether Kansas would be admitted with a free-state or slave-state constitution was all about).THIS Part is Almost Never Taught In American Schools but it is critically important to understand what Southern Politicians like Jefferson Davis were thinking and planning: The South’s plan to counter the expected growth in northern free states was to conquer Mexico and the Caribbean — opening all of Latin America to enslavement by Southern Whites and creating a gigantic slave empire that would dominate the entire continent.Sen. Stephen Douglas gave a speech in 1860 that openly declared the South’s agenda of foreign conquest for slavery. In an attempt to shore up support among Southern Democrats for his 1860 Presidential run Stephen Douglas explicitly embraced this agenda of attacking and conquering foreign countries to expand the number of slave states of America:“Our destiny has forced us to acquire Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. We have now territory enough, but how long will it be enough? One hive is enough for one swarm of bees, but a new swarm comes next year and a new hive is wanted. Men may say we shall never want anything more of Mexico, but the time will come when we will be compelled to take more. Central America is half-way to California and on the direct road. The time will come when our destiny, our [slave] institutions, our safety will compel us to have it. . . " So it is with the island of Cuba.... It is a matter of no consequence whether we want it or not; we are compelled to take it, and we can't help it". Stephen Douglas, New Orleans Speech, Dec. 6, 1858. Nicolay, John George; Hay, John. Abraham Lincoln, a History — Volume 02 (Kindle Locations 2319-2324).The South had a long history of trying to seize Cuba, demanding the seizure of more territory in Mexico and sending “filibustering expeditions” (basically Southern pirates) to Central America to conquer a slave empire there. But, the Northern representatives in Congress relentlessly blocked these efforts to seize more lands for slavery. Northern Antislavery newspapers denounced the “shame and dishonor” of this ‘Manifesto of the Brigands,’ this “highwayman’s plea” to “grasp, to rob, to murder, to grow rich on the spoils of provinces and toils of slaves.”Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist and future participant-historian of the Confederacy. “The path of our destiny on this continent,” wrote Pollard, lies in . . . tropical America [where] we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization . . . having control of the two dominant staples of the world’s commerce— cotton and sugar. . . . The destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (pp. 115-116).William Walker launched 4 separate expeditions to conquer Cuba, Mexico or parts of Latin America for slavery. He sailed from Mobile on his second expedition to Nicaragua. “But the navy caught up with him and carried his army back to the states. Southern newspapers erupted in denunciation of this naval “usurpation of power.”“Alexander Stephens [later Vice President of the Confederacy] urged the court-martial of the commodore who had detained Walker. Two dozen southern senators and congressmen echoed this sentiment in an extraordinary congressional debate. “A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights,” said a Tennessee representative, “than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage. . . ” “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason— for the planting and spreading of slavery.” Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, MS. . . . “With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world.” Indeed, pronounced De Bow’s Review, “we have a destiny to perform, ‘a manifest destiny’ over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies. . . .” At the 1856 commercial convention a delegate from Texas proposed a toast that was drunk with enthusiasm: “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec [i.e. all Mexico north of the Yucatan], including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore. . . .” See Battle Cry of Freedom: (p. 104).Northern politicians however, resisted all these efforts, which would have involved the United States in a series of squalid and dangerous foreign wars; all to ensure the expansion of a gigantic slave empire from the Mason-Dixon Line to Nicaragua. Thus, the South found itself blocked north and south.Kansas voters refused to endorse a slave constitution for Kansas, the Republican Party emerged and started winning elections on a platform of resisting the expansion of slavery into the U.S. territories, and finally elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860 on an explicit policy of confining slavery to its existing territory and refusing to accept any further foreign expansion for the U.S that would involve adding more slave states to the Union.It was clear to Southern politicians that the North would never agree to permit further foreign wars to conquer new slave territory and would not force settlers in the territories to accept slavery when they were bitterly opposed to it (mostly because white workers did not want to be forced to compete with slave wages). In 1860, the South had a choice of accepting that slavery would be limited and would never be permitted to expand; or rebelling and forming their own slave republic that could continue the conquest and subjugation of Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America.Had they succeeded in their rebellion they would have been faced within a few years with the opportunity to seize more territory from Mexico and expand slavery further into the Caribbean. But, instead they failed and slavery was abolished throughout the South. So, instead Southern historians were faced with the prospect of either defending a lost war for slavery (squalid) or entirely re-inventing the War as a noble “lost cause” for States Rights — even though such a theory explodes instantly upon examination. Exactly what “rights of the states” were being disputed by the North? Property rights — in slave property. The right of Southerners to take their slave property into the western territories and even the North. “Our only demand” Jefferson Davis stated bluntly, “is that slave property be treated like any other.”

Nelson McKeeby gives a very good military analysis and mentions the Jefferson Davis strategy. I have already written extensively on Southern goals; as exposed by their own public statements before and during the war — which stand in stark contrast to the Myth of the Lost Cause propaganda they engaged in for 150 years thereafter to cover-up the truth.William Walker who spent years leading militia forces to try and seize Latin America to conquer new territory for slavery. He was executed after capture when his attempted coup failed in Honduras in 1860.The South’s real purpose before and during the war was to carve out an enormous slave empire that spanned the entire continent south of the Rio Grande. It included Mexico and Panama as far south as Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as the sugar producing islands of the Caribbean — particularly Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also included the West Indies (as much of it as they could grab).The Gettysburg campaign was intended to give Lee the opportunity to seize Washington D.C. and perhaps sack the capitol and capture Lincoln — which Jefferson Davis fondly imagined would lead to peace and independence — and the chance to conquer a slave empire from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.“The Gulf of Mexico is a basin of water belonging to the United States. . . Cuba must be ours” in order to “increase the number of slaveholding constituencies.” Sen. Jefferson Davis. See McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (p. 104). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.It was a desperate gamble but the South was starting to run out or resources by Summer 1863 and Grant was already besieging Vicksburg threatening to sever the entire Mississippi.They were certainly clear-sighted and understood their danger. The North would certainly open the entire West of the US to white settlers as soon as the Army could clear the Native American Tribes out of the way and force them either to flee further west or ultimately onto reservations and building on the transcontinental railroad was only delayed by Southern pre-war resistance to permitting a northern route for the Railroad that would provide a funnel for easy access to the entire Rocky Mountains and western US to settlement. That would open vast new territories; all of which would become Free States — because the land-hungry white working class mechanics and farmers who would inevitably pour into them would never tolerate the presence of slavery in their states; because they did not wish to have to compete for wages or commodity prices against slave labor. Illinois where Lincoln was from for instance; prohibited slavery, but also prohibited free Negroes from settling in the state.The only way the South could keep up the balance of power was by adding more slave states — but the admission of CA as a free state and the pending admission of Kansas as another showed that this effort was doomed by Northern political resistance. The North wanted to reserve the entire Western territory for land-hungry free settlers.So, the South was utterly doomed to be more and more outnumbered by the Free Northern States as time passed. The election of Lincoln in 1860 proved the North’s determination to follow this policy of progressively encircling the South with more and more Free States in the belief that Slavery would wither in it’s geographically isolated and politically weaker position as more and more free states came into the Union. (Oregon in 1859; Kansas in 1861; WV 1963; NV 1864; NB 1867; CO 1876; ND, SD, MT, WA all in 1889; ID, WY in 1890 — all these territories were obviously going to become free states unless Congress or the S.Ct. forced slave codes on them prior to their becoming states. (That is what the pre-war fight over whether Kansas would be admitted with a free-state or slave-state constitution was all about).THIS Part is Almost Never Taught In American Schools but it is critically important to understand what Southern Politicians like Jefferson Davis were thinking and planning:The South’s plan to counter the expected growth in northern free states was to conquer Mexico and the Caribbean — opening all of Latin America to enslavement by Southern Whites and creating a gigantic slave empire that would dominate the entire continent.Sen. Stephen Douglas gave a speech in 1860 that openly declared the South’s agenda of foreign conquest for slavery. In an attempt to shore up support among Southern Democrats for his 1860 Presidential run Stephen Douglas explicitly embraced this agenda of attacking and conquering foreign countries to expand the number of slave states of America:“Our destiny has forced us to acquire Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. We have now territory enough, but how long will it be enough? One hive is enough for one swarm of bees, but a new swarm comes next year and a new hive is wanted. Men may say we shall never want anything more of Mexico, but the time will come when we will be compelled to take more. Central America is half-way to California and on the direct road. The time will come when our destiny, our [slave] institutions, our safety will compel us to have it. . . " So it is with the island of Cuba.... It is a matter of no consequence whether we want it or not; we are compelled to take it, and we can't help it". Stephen Douglas, New Orleans Speech, Dec. 6, 1858. Nicolay, John George; Hay, John. Abraham Lincoln, a History — Volume 02 (Kindle Locations 2319-2324).The South had a long history of trying to seize Cuba, demanding the seizure of more territory in Mexico and sending “filibustering expeditions” (basically Southern pirates) to Central America to conquer a slave empire there.But, the Northern representatives in Congress relentlessly blocked these efforts to seize more lands for slavery. Northern Antislavery newspapers denounced the “shame and dishonor” of this ‘Manifesto of the Brigands,’ this “highwayman’s plea” to “grasp, to rob, to murder, to grow rich on the spoils of provinces and toils of slaves.”Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist and future participant-historian of the Confederacy. “The path of our destiny on this continent,” wrote Pollard, lies in . . . tropical America [where] we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization . . . having control of the two dominant staples of the world’s commerce— cotton and sugar. . . . The destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old. McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (pp. 115-116). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.William Walker launched 4 separate expeditions to conquer Cuba, Mexico or parts of Latin America for slavery. He sailed from Mobile on his second expedition to Nicaragua. “But the navy caught up with him and carried his army back to the states. Southern newspapers erupted in denunciation of this naval “usurpation of power.” Alexander Stephens [later Vice President of the Confederacy] urged the court-martial of the commodore who had detained Walker. Two dozen southern senators and congressmen echoed this sentiment in an extraordinary congressional debate. “A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights,” said a Tennessee representative, “than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage. . . ”“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason— for the planting and spreading of slavery.” Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, MS. . . . “With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world.” Indeed, pronounced De Bow’s Review, “we have a destiny to perform, ‘a manifest destiny’ over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies. . . .” At the 1856 commercial convention a delegate from Texas proposed a toast that was drunk with enthusiasm: “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec [i.e. all Mexico north of the Yucatan], including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore. . . .” See McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (p. 104). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.Northern politicians however, resisted all these efforts, which would have involved the United States in a series of squalid and dangerous foreign wars; all to ensure the expansion of a gigantic slave empire from the Mason-Dixon Line to Nicaragua. Thus, the South found itself blocked north and south. Kansas voters refused to endorse a slave constitution for Kansas, the Republican Party emerged and started winning elections on a platform of resisting the expansion of slavery into the U.S. territories, and finally elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860 on an explicit policy of confining slavery to its existing territory and refusing to accept any further foreign expansion for the U.S that would involve adding more slave states to the Union. It was clear to Southern politicians that the North would never agree to permit further foreign wars to conquer new slave territory and would not force settlers in the territories to accept slavery when they were bitterly opposed to it (mostly because white workers did not want to be forced to compete with slave wages). In 1860, the South had a choice of accepting that slavery would be limited and would never be permitted to expand; or rebelling and forming their own slave republic that could continue the conquest and subjugation of Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. Had they succeeded in their rebellion they would have been faced within a few years with the opportunity to seize more territory from Mexico and expand slavery further into the Caribbean. But, instead they failed and slavery was abolished throughout the South. So, instead Southern historians were faced with the prospect of either defending a lost war for slavery (squalid) or entirely re-inventing the War as a noble “lost cause” for States Rights — even though such a theory explodes instantly upon examination. Exactly what “rights of the states” were being disputed by the North? Property rights — in slave property. The right of Southerners to take their slave property into the western territories and even the North.“Our only demand” Jefferson Davis stated bluntly, “is that slave property be treated like any other.” This is the “mere property” theory of slavery which held that slaves being merely a species of property just like any other property, they should have no more rights than any other kind of property. I.e. none whatever. “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice, Dread Scott Case, Supreme Court, March 1857

William Walker was a hero in the South, because he spent years leading militia forces to try and seize Latin America to conquer new territory for slavery. He was executed after capture when his attempted coup failed in Honduras in 1860. If the South won the Civil War, the dreams of slavery imperialists like William Walker above would have been realized. It would have resulted in disaster.I have already written extensively on Southern goals; as exposed by their own public statements before and during the war — which stand in stark contrast to the Myth of the Lost Cause propaganda they engaged in for 150 years thereafter to cover-up the truth.In short, the South would have tried to conquer a vast territory in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean for slavery. They talked about this endlessly before they war, and made many attempts to grab more territory for slavery from Mexico and the Caribbean (especially Cuba). Independence would have freed them to begin their wars of conquest without Northern interference. They would have felt the necessity to do this because they would be competing with the North, which entered the Industrial Age around 1870. The North would still have controlled the entire continent, and millions of land-hungry European immigrants would have poured into the North, and then migrated to settle the West. Kansas and Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Colorado and Nevada, all would have joined the union linking the continent.As for the South, their chief exports were cotton, tobacco and sugar; they were commodity producers based on slave agriculture. While this made huge profits for a few people at the top, the mass of workers both white and slave were totally impoverished. During the war, Britain, cut off from Southern cotton, started investing in growing cotton in Egypt and India and after the war these enterprises expanded greatly providing competition for Southern cotton. This is inevitable. It is always possible to find other cheap sources of supply for commodities, so that today, the entire developed world is based on industry, trade and commerce (banking and finance) while the 3rd world produces commodities (coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, bananas, etc., etc.) You tell me which generates greater wealth!But, you could hardly expect Southern slavery imperialists with their dreams of recreating feudalism to have understood or sympathized with this. They would have involved the entire continent in endless wars to carve out a giant empire for slavery. Ultimately it would have failed miserably and either the South would have been re-captured by the North, or, more likely, the South, if it still existed, would be a failed 3rd world country today, like Mexico, but with lower population. And Latin America and any islands the South conquered in the Caribbean would have been impossible to hold for a rural, agriculture based economy. They would have created a stultified, backward country like 19th Century Spain.The U.S. with breech loading cannon and machine guns could have conquered the South with ease in 1900 if they really wanted to.Southern Leaders Expose Their Real Goals: the true history, Shorn of MythThe South’s real purpose before and during the war, as revealed by their own statesmen, was to carve out an enormous slave empire that spanned the entire continent south of the Rio Grande to counter the expected expansion of the North across the continent of North America. Their dream state included Mexico and Panama as far south as Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as the sugar producing islands of the Caribbean — particularly Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also included the West Indies (as much of it as they could grab).“The Gulf of Mexico is a basin of water belonging to the United States. . . Cuba must be ours” in order to “increase the number of slave holding constituencies.” Sen. Jefferson Davis. See McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (p. 104). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.Southern leaders certainly feared the North would open the entire West of the US to white settlers as soon as the Army could clear the Native American Tribes out of the way and force them either to flee further west or ultimately onto reservations and building on the transcontinental railroad was only delayed by Southern prewar resistance to permitting a northern route for the Railroad that would provide a funnel for easy access to the entire Rocky Mountains and western US to settlement.That would open vast new territories; all of which would become Free States — because the land-hungry white working class mechanics and farmers who would inevitably pour into them would never tolerate the presence of slavery in their states; because they did not wish to have to compete for wages or commodity prices against slave labor. Illinois where Lincoln was from for instance; prohibited slavery, but also prohibited free Negroes from settling in the state. The only way the South could keep up the balance of power was by adding more slave states — but the admission of CA as a free state and the pending admission of Kansas as another showed that this effort was doomed by Northern political resistance. The North wanted to reserve the entire Western territory for land-hungry free settlers. So, the South was utterly doomed to be more and more outnumbered by the Free Northern States as time passed. The election of Lincoln in 1860 proved the North’s determination to follow this policy of progressively encircling the South with more and more Free States in the belief that Slavery would wither in it’s geographically isolated and politically weaker position as more and more free states came into the Union. (Oregon in 1859; Kansas in 1861; WV 1963; NV 1864; NB 1867; CO 1876; ND, SD, MT, WA all in 1889; ID, WY in 1890 — all these territories were obviously going to become free states unless Congress or the S.Ct. forced slave codes on them prior to their becoming states. (That is what the pre-war fight over whether Kansas would be admitted with a free-state or slave-state constitution was all about).THIS Part is Almost Never Taught In American Schools but it is critically important to understand what Southern Politicians like Jefferson Davis were thinking and planning: The South’s plan to counter the expected growth in northern free states was to conquer Mexico and the Caribbean — opening all of Latin America to enslavement by Southern Whites and creating a gigantic slave empire that would dominate the entire continent. Sen. Stephen Douglas gave a speech in 1860 that openly declared the South’s agenda of foreign conquest for slavery. In an attempt to shore up support among Southern Democrats for his 1860 Presidential run Stephen Douglas explicitly embraced this agenda of attacking and conquering foreign countries to expand the number of slave states of America:“Our destiny has forced us to acquire Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. We have now territory enough, but how long will it be enough? One hive is enough for one swarm of bees, but a new swarm comes next year and a new hive is wanted. Men may say we shall never want anything more of Mexico, but the time will come when we will be compelled to take more. Central America is half-way to California and on the direct road. The time will come when our destiny, our [slave] institutions, our safety will compel us to have it. . . " So it is with the island of Cuba.... It is a matter of no consequence whether we want it or not; we are compelled to take it, and we can't help it". Stephen Douglas, New Orleans Speech, Dec. 6, 1858. Nicolay, John George; Hay, John. Abraham Lincoln, a History — Volume 02 (Kindle Locations 2319-2324).The South had a long history of trying to seize Cuba, demanding the seizure of more territory in Mexico and sending “filibustering expeditions” (basically Southern pirates) to Central America to conquer a slave empire there. But, the Northern representatives in Congress relentlessly blocked these efforts to seize more lands for slavery. Northern Antislavery newspapers denounced the “shame and dishonor” of this ‘Manifesto of the Brigands,’ this “highwayman’s plea” to “grasp, to rob, to murder, to grow rich on the spoils of provinces and toils of slaves.”Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist and future participant-historian of the Confederacy. “The path of our destiny on this continent,” wrote Pollard, lies in . . . tropical America [where] we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization . . . having control of the two dominant staples of the world’s commerce— cotton and sugar. . . . The destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States Book 6) (pp. 115-116).William Walker launched 4 separate expeditions to conquer Cuba, Mexico or parts of Latin America for slavery. He sailed from Mobile on his second expedition to Nicaragua. “But the navy caught up with him and carried his army back to the states. Southern newspapers erupted in denunciation of this naval “usurpation of power.” Alexander Stephens [later Vice President of the Confederacy] urged the court-martial of the commodore who had detained Walker. Two dozen southern senators and congressmen echoed this sentiment in an extraordinary congressional debate. “A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights,” said a Tennessee representative, “than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage. . . ” “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason— for the planting and spreading of slavery.” Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, MS. . . . “With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the productions of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world.” Indeed, pronounced De Bow’s Review, “we have a destiny to perform, ‘a manifest destiny’ over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies. . . .” At the 1856 commercial convention a delegate from Texas proposed a toast that was drunk with enthusiasm: “To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec [i.e. all Mexico north of the Yucatan], including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore. . . .” See Battle Cry of Freedom: (p. 104).Northern politicians however, resisted all these efforts, which would have involved the United States in a series of squalid and dangerous foreign wars; all to ensure the expansion of a gigantic slave empire from the Mason-Dixon Line to Nicaragua. Thus, the South found itself blocked north and south. Kansas voters refused to endorse a slave constitution for Kansas, the Republican Party emerged and started winning elections on a platform of resisting the expansion of slavery into the U.S. territories, and finally elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860 on an explicit policy of confining slavery to its existing territory and refusing to accept any further foreign expansion for the U.S that would involve adding more slave states to the Union. It was clear to Southern politicians that the North would never agree to permit further foreign wars to conquer new slave territory and would not force settlers in the territories to accept slavery when they were bitterly opposed to it (mostly because white workers did not want to be forced to compete with slave wages). In 1860, the South had a choice of accepting that slavery would be limited and would never be permitted to expand; or rebelling and forming their own slave republic that could continue the conquest and subjugation of Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America.Had they succeeded in their rebellion they would have been faced within a few years with the opportunity to seize more territory from Mexico and expand slavery further into the Caribbean. But, instead they failed and slavery was abolished throughout the South. So, instead Southern historians were faced with the prospect of either defending a lost war for slavery (squalid) or entirely re-inventing the War as a noble “lost cause” for States Rights — even though such a theory explodes instantly upon examination. Exactly what “rights of the states” were being disputed by the North? Property rights — in slave property. The right of Southerners to take their slave property into the western territories and even the North. “Our only demand” Jefferson Davis stated bluntly, “is that slave property be treated like any other.”This is the “mere property” theory of slavery which held that slaves being merely a species of property just like any other property, they should have no more rights than any other kind of property. I.e. none whatever. “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice, Dread Scott Case, Supreme Court, March 1857Like all commodity producing countries, the South, if successful would have been doomed to poverty and backwardness. They were then a backward agricultural region of the US and remain backward and relatively poor today. But, because they remained part of the union, they were granted untold billions of dollars of investment from the industrialized North and west in the later 19th and 20th to 21st centuries. As an independent country, they would have been denied all that capital infusion. And any capital that was invested would be like investment in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries — solely designed to extract commodities and ship them to market in developed countries like Europe and the U.S., leaving the commodity producing country backward and poor indefinitely.