In my review of Robert E. May’s The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861, we saw how Manifest Destiny became sectionalized in the late 1840s and 1850s and how Southerners made various failed attempts during this period to acquire a tropical slave empire in the Caribbean.
The Southern version of Manifest Destiny had been the acquisition of contiguous territories like Florida and Texas which could be transformed into new slave states and where the plantation system could be extended and agricultural commodities could be produced with African slave labor for export to foreign markets.
Before the extension of slavery became a polarizing issue that destroyed the Union in 1861, there had been a much broader consensus that American expansion into the Caribbean was only a matter of time. In 1823, John Quincy Adams had described Cuba and other Caribbean territories as a “ripe apple” that would eventually be pulled by America’s gravity into the Union.
During the early nineteenth century, American expansion into the Caribbean was blocked by the European powers whose mercantile empires had long dominated the region: Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The United States expanded south and west into sparsely populated areas like Florida and Louisiana that were less important to the dominant European powers than their Caribbean possessions.
By the 1860s, the Netherlands and Denmark were marginal players in the Caribbean, Spain was considered the “sick man of Europe,” and France had been all but expelled from the Americas after its defeat by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Cuba and Puerto Rico had also been pulled under American economic hegemony.
Confederate independence was a major setback to American ambitions in the Caribbean because Southerners sought diplomatic recognition and military intervention from the European empires: in 1861, Britain and France occupied Mexico and installed Maxmilian I as Emperor of Mexico, and Spain occupied the Dominican Republic.
The South’s defeat in the War Between the States and the subsequent destruction of slavery in 1865 eliminated the biggest political and military obstacle to Yankee imperialism in the Caribbean:
(1) In 1865, Spain withdrew from the Dominican Republic after the militarized Northern-dominated Union reasserted the Monroe Doctrine.
(2) In 1865, the United States sent 50,000 troops to the Mexican border, demanded the French withdraw from Mexico, and blockaded the Mexican coast to prevent French reinforcements from landing – the French soon withdrew from Mexico.
(3) After the war, American commercial supremacy was quickly reestablished over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
This was the earliest stage of the envelopment of the Caribbean into the Yankee Empire which began immediately after the War Between the States and would climax in the Spanish-American War:
Dominican Republic
President Andrew Johnson began the ill-fated attempt to acquire the Dominican Republic, but he was soon crippled and impeached by the Black Republicans in Congress over his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1869, the president of the Dominican Republic attempted to sell his country to the United States. Ulysses S. Grant attempted to acquire the Dominican Republic in part to colonize the emerging Black Undertow problem in Northern cities there.
Grant was defeated in the U.S. Senate by Charles Sumner, the most famous Black Republican abolitionist in the Senate, who would later be the author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In spite of this, the Dominican Republic became a testing ground for a new type of Yankee imperialism that would be imposed all over the Caribbean and Latin America in the twentieth century.
This except comes from “The Rise of the American Mediterranean, 1846-1905” in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples:
“The Confederacy’s defeat brought an end to the old Southern dream of a slave-based Caribbean empire. It also prompted the emergence of a new brand of expansionism they sought not to acquire Caribbean territories, but rather to establish commercial and naval dominance over the region. This new model responded to two basic forces. First, foodstuffs and manufactures were being produced beyond the capacity of the US market to absorb them. Second, the Civil War had underscored the importance of naval power, and particularly of securing coaling stations and navigation routes, to protect what historian Walter LaFeber termed the “New Empire” (LaFeber 1963).
This New Empire sought to turn territories into economic, rather than political or military, dependencies of the United States. Under such arrangements, the United States remained free from the entanglements, responsibilities, and expenses of direct rule while reaping economic benefits through the creation of what has been called “informal colonies.” Needless to say, econmic dominance often brought with it indirect political control.”
The North’s free labor system which produced foodstuffs in the Midwest and manufactures in the Northeast was even more, not less, expansionist than the so-called “Slave Power” of the 1850s – this was a major reason why the North competed so ferociously with the South over control of the West.
Industrial economies are driven by growth and the American domestic economy soon became saturated and unable to absorb the surplus output of Northern farms and factories. Thus began the endless quest for overseas markets and the accompanying military interventions to provide outlets for American agriculture, industry, and capital to sustain “growth”:
“Much of the foreign investment came in the guise of generous concessions by the Dominican government: railroads, mines, harbor dredging, road building, utilities, even factories and sugar mills. European investors poured capital into the republic, while Dominican authorities also worked closely with, and favored, US economic interests, which in turn worked with the US government to gain indirect political control over the struggling republic.
These cases were early manifestations of what later came to be known as “dollar diplomacy”: in essence, the policy of the US government to use its diplomatic and, if need be, its military might to create conditions they allowed US financial and commercial interests to penetrate weaker countries, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America. This cycle, in turn, benefited the US government, as US financial interests made loans and acquired foreign debt bonds, displacing European financial interests and thus expanding the political influence of the United States over nations such as the Dominican Republic.”
The aim of “dollar diplomacy” or “gunboat diplomacy,” as it was later called after the arrival of the Marines, was to financially and economically dominate small Caribbean and Latin American countries in order to turn them into “banana republics” indirectly controlled by the Uncle Sam for the benefit of Wall Street and American corporations like United Fruit.
In 1903 and 1904, TR sent troop to the Dominican Republic to deter European creditors who were practicing their own version of dollar diplomacy. The U.S. took over the Dominican Republic’s finances in 1904 and established a protectorate in 1903.
Haiti
In 1903, the United States took over Haiti’s finances to deter a similar intervention by aggrieved European creditors. The U.S. would later occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
Danish West Indies
President Ulysses S. Grant attempted to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands and expanded the Monroe Doctrine to declare that Caribbean colonies could not be sold or transfered to any power other than the United States.
Denmark sold what is now the “American Virgin Islands” to the United States under President Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
Panama
In 1903, the United States engineered the secession of Panama from Colombia, established a protectorate over Panama, and used its puppet government to cede the rights to the Panama Canal Zone.
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish Virgin Islands
In 1896, the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence and defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War.
Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish Virgin Islands to the United States – in 1898, Puerto Rico and the Spanish Virgin Islands became and remain to this day an American colony, and in 1902 the American occupation ended and Cuba became a quasi-independent American protectorate.
American capital flooded into Cuba and soon Americans dominated the Cuban economy and foreign investors bought up most of the cattle ranches and sugar plantations.
By 1904, the Yankee Dream of a Caribbean Empire had been realized, and the United States had displaced Britain as the dominant power in the Caribbean and Central America. The United States controlled the Caribbean outside of the British, French, and Dutch West Indies.
During the Cold War, American influence would further penetrate Jamaica and much of the former British West Indies, and in 1983 the United States under President Reagan would invade the former British colony of Grenada in the Windward Islands.
Euros effed up big time by not dividing America. They should have been all hands on deck for the Confederacy. Too bad for them, but they were and still are idiots. For basically peanuts in casualties America became top dog while our feather hatted fool cousins killed off our best. Absolute utter idiotic morons is the best way to describe the Euros, but then again at that point the evils of ideology were creeping thru the white man’s blood. Napoleon killed off more in the March to Moscow than the CW and therefore consigned France to second tier status, Feather Hatted Fools start WWI over Feather Hatted Fool gittin blowed up kill off millions America loses 120,ooo dead and gets a say in the disarmament of half the world, WWII revenge for WW1 and from there we know the score.
Palmerston flinched.
The touble with many Americans is they follow their government’s lead when both have different objectives. And, the government’s is never in the best interest of the masses.
@ Hunter In 1860 America west of the Mississippi was an empty, and almost unexplored space. I’m sure there was some interest in Central America & the Caribbean, but, I wouldn’t overstate it. Heck, East of the Mississippi was open and much of it still is today.
I think you should revist the Jeffersonian farmer & mechanic of the South vs. the big city immigrant friendly politicians of the North. That was the most serious rub, and still is today.
Deep down something was very badly wrong with Lincoln and his immediate supporters. I find it hard to believe that anyone would kill his own coutrymen for a useless black. They can’t have seen themselves as belonging to the same country at all.
Lincoln had a deeply wicked streak to him.
“Lincoln had a deeply wicked streak to him.” The warmonger didn’t love the Constitution or the people.
@John
Didn’t your own country (Britain) betray their own kind (Rhodesians) for a useless black (Mugabe)?
Chris,
the only public press you ever hear about Mugabe and the whites down there is on the BBC these days. Tacitly the British government turned a blind eye to Smith while officially going with the international flow and condemning the rayciss Rhodesians. You also have to remember that the Labour party was hostile to the Rhodesians whilst the Tory party was pro Rhodesian. Curiously Ric Rescorla was Rhodesian cop. He was security chief for the Twin Towers.
Chris,
You do realize that your own national, state, and municipal government landed a Mugabe style regime on your sorry city? Right? Any white in the middle of Africa is gonna be embattled. Uncle Sam allowed Mogadishu to land in your backyard.
Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery … All annihilated in a pattern very similar to that of Salisbury. And now you have your Mugabe– All without resistance.
It’s not looking good.
@John
You forgot London, too. Hell, and the rest of the UK for that matter. I mean, why else would you be living here in America, among all the “deaply wicked”, Lincoln-worshipping damnyankees? And the only thing in America that it’s not looking good, would be the delusional hopes of all the Obama supporters on here, yourself included.
I don’t live among Yankees.
London has always been a bit foreign. Writers in the 1700s and 1800s all suggest it was chock full of strangers. It’s the main entrepôt to the UK. Places like Leicester or Luton or Leeds are a worry though.
I’ve previously suggested a close Romney victory is the preferable outcome.
The same group of moralizing hypocrites in the Northern states and Britain who waged the jihad against the slave trade and slavery in the name of “human rights” are the ones who brought down the Black Undertow on their own cities in the twentieth century.
The North had it pretty good before the war:
– Free negroes were banned in Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and Ohio at various times.
– Blacks were not citizens nor did they have voting rights outside of New England.
– Under the Fugitive Slave Law in the Constitution and Compromise of 1850, Southerners could come to the North to retrieve their slave property, thereby removing free blacks from the North.
– The huge plantations in the South imported Midwestern food and Northeastern manufactures while the Southern cotton exported to Europe built up the commerce of New York and funded the federal government.
In theory, the Union should have worked to the advantage of all parties, and there shouldn’t have been a problem much less a war over slavery which was unquestionably one of the largest drivers of the American economy.
The unbelievable stupidity and fanaticism of Britain and the Northern states destroyed the South and the Caribbean colonies and set in motion the disastrous train of events that led to the arrival of the Black Undertow in both areas.
Missouri isn’t part of the South — geographically or culturally.
Alternatively, abolitionism could have withered and died like it did in the 1790s when it was discredited by the Haitian Revolution, and a few decades later slavery would have become anachronistic after the mechanization of agriculture, and the blacks could have been safely sent back to Africa in the early twentieth century.
Instead, there was an absurd war over slavery in the territories, where the plantation system would have never taken root anyway for climatic reasons after having already failed in the much more hospitable climate of California.
I disagree Chris.
St Louis was a confederate city. A German garrison kept it on the Union ledger. Only just.
I like this idea that the war was an “Anti-slavery Jihad.”
it fits Lincoln’s wackadoddle philosophy.
One city doesn’t define a whole state. Detroit is full of niggers and looks like a picture of the third-world, but Michigan is one the whitest states in the country, and at times, looks and feels like the America of the 1940’s.
The majority of whites in the state of Missouri wanted no part of slavery or the CSA, and as such, the place became the site of the bloodiest partisan clashes of the war.
I’ve done a few battlefield visits. One occurred between what is now SLU and the Arsenal. German militias arrested a confederate encampment made up of Missouri and St Louis locals. There’s some back country action that ended up nearer the border of Arkansas as the confederate militias were pushed back by Union troops under Sigel.
They beat him black n blue once he extended his reach.
“Missouri isn’t part of the South — geographically or culturally.”
Actually it is. Missouri was deeply divided but there was almost no sympathy for not letting other states exercise their right to secede. Due to the skill of the US Army commanders there, primarily Col. Ulysses S. Grant and Captain (later Brigadier) Nathaniel Lyon a pro Lincoln government was forced on the region despite armed resistance. There were dozens of Confederate regiments raised in Missouri and the government in exile was admitted to the Confederacy as the 12th state.
If you ever visit the Ozark region of the state (Branson for example) you will have absolutely no doubt that you are in Dixie.
The civil war wasn’t over til 1882. For many a Missouran.
Oct. 5, 1882 Frank James surrenders himself to the governor of Missouri, and stands trial for robbery and murder. He is acquitted. This is considered by some to mark the end of the Civil War in Missouri.
It’s Dixie alright.
“..a pro-Lincoln government was forced on the region despite armed resistance.”
Just the opposite. Claiborne Fox and a small group of pro-Confederate assemblymen, hastily passed the Ordinance of Secession and got chased out of Missouri by their own constituents for it.
313Chris says:
September 2, 2012 at 11:15 pm
Missouri isn’t part of the South — geographically or culturally.
You don’t know your history. Of course there are regional differences but Missouri as a whole considered itself on the Southern side and was only overtaken by force in KC, Stl. L. and St. Joe.
I lived in KC for eleven years and traveled Missouri extensively. White Missourians recognize that they are no longer considered Southern but they behave much more like it than not.
@John
The Civil War ended in 1865. For pretty much ALL Missourans. Frank James was a cowardly, murdering, thief. And the actions of that criminal do not speak for the feelings and beliefs of the rest of the state’s population.
No, it’s not Dixie. Never was.
Fox was not chased down by “constituents.” He was cornered by imported Union thugs. The ancestors of whom we might call ‘the mafia’.
But it doesn’t matter now. It is done.
Your kind has turned KS into a Detoilet.
Chris, you are a completely delusional fool. Local sentiment was strongly pro confederate. The largely German Union forces ethnically cleansed huge numbers of ethnically Scottish, Welsh, French, Irish, English farmers from Missouri. The whole thing was pretty foul.
The locals called them “lop eared Dutch”
Oops, that’s KC as a Detoilet, not KS as a whole. KS is too barren for flushers to concern themselves with.
“Just the opposite. Claiborne Fox and a small group of pro-Confederate assemblymen, hastily passed the Ordinance of Secession and got chased out of Missouri by their own constituents for it.”
As usual you don’t know what your talking about as shown by my post and others in this thread. They were chased out by the United States Army. You obviously have never been there or you wouldn’t be talking your usual smack.
Go watch Winter’s Bone since you don’t seem to be able or willing to travel outside of Oakland County. It was filmed on location and lots of Missouri Ozark locals were used as actors and extras.
@Nancey
Awww, have I touched a nerve? Must have. You can’t deal with historical FACTS, so you start with the insults.
And BTW, Missouri held a Constitutional Convention and voted, decisively, AGAINST secession. As in, to STAY IN THE UNION. Stupid fuckwit. They also voted for Claiborne to vacat his office for a pro-Union guy. And the petty little tyrant refused and conspired with Jefferson Davis to rip Missouri from the Union in a military coup. All this AGAINST THE WILL of the people of Missouri.
@Rudel
I know plenty and I don’t watch movies to collect facts. And I live in Wayne County, you dolt.
Say, how is that Northwest War of Independence coming? Have you guys succeeded in organizing a picnic yet?
They voted to stay in the union conditionally for fear of being devastated by local US Army units.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Constitutional_Convention_(1861–63)
The Union functioned as a government of occupation under martial law and loyalty oaths during hostilities. Most of the reps who voted for the Union at this time ran off and became confederate officers.
@John
You’re not even from here, so mind your own business and be happy Eric Holder hasn’t decided to deport all white NON-CITIZENS. Yet.
Chris,
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Price
this chap lead the pro Union vote. He immediately regretted it when Nathaniel Lyon massacred 23 St Louisans and attacked camp Jackson. He then threw in his lot with the Confederacy. When he died years after the war St Louis gave him a massive state funeral. It was an outpouring of true love for a Confederate son of Missouri. The Union was ultimately accepted at the point of a bayonet here, and under a tyrannical system of oaths and loyalty tests.
Chris, you talk like a simpering fool and your analysis is shallow. You are a propagandist of the worst sort. You delude yourself and seek to delude others.
Hunter,
chris is just another version of Joe. He ought to be in the Jewlag.
Hunter,
jewlag Chris. He’s a troll.
The Union had to cleanse the state with “General Order 11.” you don’t do that to a friendly population.
Somewhere deep inside the bowels of the inner offices of the ADL, a bunch of Jewish co-intel researchers are reading this thread and laughing their damn asses off, as you guys continue (and continue, and continue) to re-fight some ancient 19th-century war in your heads, instead of standing up like sensible men and stopping them as they steal your entire country from you, which they are carrying right out the front door in plain sight, in broad daylight. While they fuck your women and send your sons off to die in their pointless wars.
F#ckin’ chumps.
Say what you like about the Jews, at least they’re smart enough to be fighting this year’s war, not one from friggin’ 1860.
God what a waste of talent and energy.
So Oscar, what does that make you? A critic of the critics?
I doubt any Jews care. They are all reading Occidental Observer.
“So Oscar what does that make you?”
Well, for one thing, a predictor of leadenly obvious and useless snipey questions.
Don’t you mean predicator rather than predictor?
Oscar believes that the Jew is the real enemy and that we are wasting our time arguing about these issues. The Southrons here have a longer memory and know that our racial situation is much more complicated.
The Yankee was forcing the negro on us long before the Jew started doing it. Yankees abolished slavery, made blacks into citizens, passed civil rights laws, and literally invited tbe Black Undertow to move into their own states.
They have been pushing this shit for 150 years now. They will do it again in November when they will vote en masse to reelect Obama. We all know that they can’t stop themselves from taking the negro side and the Jewish side and that if they would simply stop doing it the situation would improve.
If we don’t get out of their Union, we are going to be destroyed by it. It is really that simple. They want to drive off the cliff of world history and take us down with them.
BTW, I will add here that there is a parallel problem in Britain and France.
We have spent months on these Caribbean threads. Everyone should have learned by now that the British and French destroyed their own colonies in service to evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment ideology.
But before there was the “service to evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment ideology” there was the service to the religion or ideology of Mammon that imported them.
“We have spent months on these Caribbean threads. Everyone should have learned by now that the British and French destroyed their own colonies in service to evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment ideology.”- HW
Careful, Hunter. You’re inserting religion into politics. Mr. Ryan won’t like that…. oh, wait. It’s evangelical PROTESTANT Xtianity you’re talking about. You get a pass…..
But, seriously, again it is instructive to note that your posts clearly show that Manifest Destiny is the outworking of the older “Europe as Christendom” mentality – unique to White Christian Europeans. And that such a worldview was in place, before certain (errr… shall we say, “religio-political interests on the Tiber”) groups sought to ‘claim’ ALL land -that had never before belonged to them- as their own?
In the wake of America taking the world (or at least Cuba, Panama, the Carribean, the Phillipines, etc. ) as their own, we see Europe backing off, over time. And certain errr, Tiberian land speculators being routed by the Protestant heirs of Great Britain, in the entire Western continent… for a time.
But then, if your analysis is correct (and I think it is) it was the Yankee Supremacists, enamoured of their nigger lovers (whether in person, or merely as fetishistic totem/idol), and the Gnostic Abolitionists (darn, there’s that religion interfering in politics, again….) who literally stopped American conquest of the entire continent, (as we should have) to have avoided the problems we have now saddled ourselves with; via a porous border, and a non-unified racial citizenry, even as far north as Minnesota.
If we ever gain power/Dixie/Hegemon again, I (for one) would be happy to ‘finish off the Carribean vision’ of our Southern White citizenry, and cleanse the Carribbean of the rabble that now infect it…. mon.
We must not leave out that factor of greed in following the history of this tragedy of the white settlement of the New World to its very beginning. Despite their apparent or proven utility (under strict control) to create wealth over several centuries, and the sanction (in the beginning) of the Papish, Jewish and ape-Papish (main Protestant) religions, it was still a deadly mistake to import them into our colonies in the first place.
Hunter has pointed to the weakness of the colonists’ “racial awareness” due to centuries of limited contact experience with Africans, but also there was moral weakness allowing them to overlook the obvious while focusing on money.
Let’s imagine another history, without the Africans: Perhaps the colonies would not have advanced so far so quickly without the use of slaves to create the wealth that attracted more settlement, more investment. The most southern, hot tropical colonies, at least, would probably have had much fewer white settlers, and everywhere the native or “land bridge Asian” Indians might have had more time to adjust, and begin to resist the weapons and diseases of the Europeans, limiting the extent of European settlement, and the Moravians’ and William Penn’s peaceful, missionary approach might have led to a mixed Indian X European present-day population.
The imported Africans probably had the net functional effect (but only in the beginning) of another “weapon” for the conquest, along with the guns, diseases, alcohol, horses, ships and machinery, etc.
“who literally stopped American conquest of the entire continent, (as we should have)”
Point of clarification in my bad sentence above. I meant, we should have taken the entire North American continent for Anglos, and driven all Indians into Columbia, on the other side of the Panamanian border…. we also should NEVER have given up the Canal. Oh well. We’ll take it back, once Dixie is her own sovereign nation, again…
“(I)f your analysis is correct (and I think it is) it was the Yankee Supremacists…and the Gnostic Abolitionists (darn, there’s that religion interfering in politics, again….) who literally stopped American conquest of the entire continent (as we should have) to have avoided the problems we have now saddled ourselves with; via a porous border, and a non-unified racial citizenry” seems correct. We need to learn from history not to repeat its mistakes.