Securing the Border and Expanding the Empire: How Fears of Slave Revolt and Spanish Subversion Influenced US Diplomacy in the Southwest Borderlands, 1790–1820

Enslaved and free people of color in the southwest borderlands played an important if largely overlooked role in shaping Spanish and American diplomacy in the early republic. Focusing on southwest territories acquired by the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, this paper demonstrates how enslaved and free people of color exploited long-existing Spanish slave codes and Spanish military policy, as well as the chaos unleashed by the Latin American revolutions, to stall the United States’ westward expansion. By highlighting U.S. officials’ persistent fears of slave revolts and how they linked to anxieties about Spaniards meddling in U.S. politics, it challenges U.S. historians to take more seriously the Spanish Atlantic World’s influence on early U.S. history. Moreover, it underscores the need to incorporate enslaved and free people of color into diplomatic histories. To the extent that non-European actors appear in early U.S. diplomatic histories, they tend to appear as Native Americans, not people of African descent. Centering enslaved and free people of color, however, provides a fuller and more complicated picture of the challenges early American officials faced when trying to secure and expand their western borders.