#filibusters

From the French edition of the Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook published in 1970.

In the lead up to the American Civil War, one of the key arenas of conflict between pro- and anti-slavery forces in the United States was the expansion of slavery. For reasons having to do both with the agricultural impact of intensive cotton cultivation on soil fertility, the impact of rising demand for slaves, and the need to maintain political equilibrium in the U.S Senate, pro-slavery advocates believed quite strongly that slavery had to keep expanding or it would die out.

Students are probably most familiar with the debates over the extension of slavery into western territories of the United States that touched off conflicts over the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so forth, but there was a good deal of political conflict over the expansion of American slavery southward especially in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

The most prominent example of this is the Mexican-American War, which was seen by anti-slavery Northerners as a war waged in order to conquer more southern territory for slavery, and which would see conflict between the "All-Mexico" movement that sought the US annexation of all of Mexico versus the Wilmot Proviso's efforts to exclude slavery from the territories gained from Mexico.

However, there were also a series of attempts by pro-slavery southerners in the mid-19th century known as filibusterers to overthrow Caribbean and Latin American governments by force in the name of annexing them to the United States as slave territories and future slave states. Many of these efforts had support from pro-Southern presidential administrations:

in 1849, 1850, and then again in 1851, there were the Cuban expeditions of Narciso López which sought to overthrow the Spanish and establish a slave state. A lot of very prominent southerners, including the Governor of Mississippi, were involved in these filibustering campaigns - and even more prominent southerners were approached but decided not to join. While López managed to land troops twice, he was never able to gain local Cuban support against the Spanish and ended up getting executed in Havana.

In 1853, William Walker attempted to conquer Baja California and Sonora, and declared these territories to be the Republic of Sonora, but was forced to withdraw by the Mexican army.

In 1854, there the infamous Ostend Manifesto, a document that tried to justify a U.S invasion of Cuba in the event that Spain refused to sell Cuba to the United States. This document leaked and caused a huge political scandal.

Most famously, there was the 1855 filibuster of William Walker, who succeeded in overthrowing the government of Nicaragua with a private army. Declaring himself to be both commander of the army and preaident of the new Republic, Walker re-established slavery and was able to win U.S recognition in 1856. However, Walker's ambitions grew larger than his grasp and when he attempted to invade Costa Rica, his forces were defeated and the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala allied together against what they saw as a hostile regime, and together with the Costa Ricans invaded Nicaragua in 1857, forcing Walker to flee the country.

In addition to these attempted campaigns, there were a number of proposed efforts that didn't come together or were called off - after his involvement with the López affair in 1850, Quitman of Mississippi made preparations for an invasion of Cuba in 1854 with support from the Pierce Administration, but abandoned their efforts due to fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

While the Confederacy was generally too busy with the American Civil War to pursue military conquest to their south, there were some exceptions to the rule and certainly there were major forces within the Confederate government who planned for southern expansion in the event of Confederate victory. For more on this, see:

The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861.  Robert E. May. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.)

The Wall Street Journal added:

Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker finds consistently strong opposition among independents to such plans for structural changes, and concludes that moderate and unaffiliated voters did not vote for Joe Biden in 2020 “to turn the government upside-down” or “remake America.” Rather, they were hoping he would bring calm and perhaps “less bickering” to Washington, he adds. …

If Senate Democrats choose to make such radical changes despite widespread popular opposition, the new survey suggests they can expect a political reckoning in 2022. Independents saying they would be less likely to vote to re-elect their senators if they “voted to remove the filibuster rule and pack the Supreme Court” outnumber those saying they would be more likely by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

Student 1: No! We're not! We're just . . .

Student 2: We're doing that thing we learned in government class today!

Me: . . . Filibustering?

Student 3: YEAH!