guterl2008

@Book { guterl2008,
    author = {Matthew Pratt Guterl},
    title = {American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation},
    publisher = {Harvard University Press},
    address = {Cambridge, Mass.},
    year = 2008,
}

p. 8: “After the war—after slavery—the masters of the Old South reacted to the freedom of their former slaves like cultural amputees, bewildered by the phantom sensations of something lost and by the failure to recognize, or believe, in the permanence of its removal. For those few who left the postwar South, and for those great many who stayed behind, the nostalgia for the past, the melancholic pathos of the presents and the determination to shape the future were thus suffused with the ghostly remembrance of the American Mediterranean.”

On masters’ dreams of a Caribbean empire, p. 26: “Cuba was, then, the next Texas,” the Caribbean extension of the impulse to migrate noted on p. 25 (citing oakes1982).

See p. 76 for Judah Benjamin’s use of prewar social networks in the American Mediterranean to escape from Cuba after the war.

p. 80: “A sense of dislocation, diaspora, and exile settled across the depopulated and destroyed South. The world after slavery was much more frightening and potentially less profitable.”

Focuses on Brazilian experiences of Andrew McCollam and Eliza McHatton, and notes that those who went to Brazil and Cuba were “the few” and were atypically wealthy (84).