The Natural Order: Race, Space, and Expansion in the Post-Civil War United States

This cultural history of foreign relations examines how “natural” thinking influenced territorial and commercial U.S. expansion in the aftermath of the Civil War. It uses expansionist case-studies in three contrasting geographies (the Alaska Purchase, the Santo Domingo debates, and the 1871 Korean expedition) to argue that Americans formed their policy positions based on what was understood to be natural, both racially and spatially. In this thesis, natural thinking—or naturalism—is thought of in terms of space, and in terms of race. Regarding space, this thesis argues that a significant portion of Americans remained sceptical of the wisdom behind territorially expanding their nation into the abrasive Far North (Alaska) or the enervating tropics (Santo Domingo). A feature of its association with the construct of the Far North, Alaska was imagined by a meaningful number of Americans to offer little to the average “civilised” American—and perhaps, to exist outside of the national domain. Santo Domingo, meanwhile, unambiguously positioned within the tropics, tested Americans who still—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—viewed tropical climates as incubators of inferiority. The overlapping theme of race likewise played an important role in circumscribing, or sometimes licensing, post-Civil War expansionism. In the nineteenth century, there were two key ways in which Americans positioned race within nature, each being examples of racial naturalism. Climatic determinism posited that race was itself fashioned by climate, and that certain races were best suited to certain climatic spaces. Racial essentialism, meanwhile, which grew popular through the mid-century, posited that race was a biological, internal feature rather than an incident of environment. Americans across the political spectrum were influenced by these two, sometimes imbricating, ways of viewing race. Racial essentialism, positing “inferiority” as a fixed racial trait, influenced the palatability of welcoming new nonwhite populations into the body politic, and it shaped the way that Americans engaged with unfamiliar populations outside of the Western Hemisphere. As a whole, racial naturalism helped establish the geographical parameters of acceptable territorial expansion—namely temperate climates—and it conditioned the way that Americans interacted with non-white peoples. Situated after Appomattox, this thesis spotlights the historical continuity of climatic and racial ideas that historians have traced convincingly through the Civil War. It demonstrates that after the Civil War, climatic convictions continued to circumscribe expansion envisaged as “national.” Furthermore, in examining episodes in territorial and commercial expansion together, this thesis challenges the notion that racism consistently limited post-Civil War imperialism. It shows, rather, that racism—removed from its national constraints—underwrote commercial expansion.