Publisher's Synopsis
Whatever else may be said of Southern statesmen, of the elder school, they certainly had an imperial breadth of view. They took in the whole continent in a way that their Northern colleagues were slow in doing. It cannot be said just when they began to plan for a separate Government which would have Slavery as its cornerstone, would dominate the Continent and ultimately absorb Cuba, Mexico and Central America as far as the Isthmus of Panama. Undoubtedly it was in the minds of a large number of them from the organization of the Government, which they regarded as merely a temporary expedient-an alliance with the Northern States until the South was strong enough to "assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."
