Debating slavery through the memory of Mexico and Central America

This essay illustrates how slavery supporters and abolitionists, through their use of the popular press, invoked the recent histories of Central America Texas, and Mexico to justify their views on the United States' peculiar institution. Slaveholders cast the historical legacy of post-independence Mexico and Central America as the story of floundering countries, comprised of unproductive people and incapable of self-government. Slavery opponents, on the other hand, invoked these same histories to highlight Mexico and Central America's success at creating peaceful slave-free societies following emancipation. Abolitionists also invoked these republics to question the morality of the South's plan to re-introduce slavery into Mexico and Central America after the conquest of these countries. This essay's larger theme is to depict both the sectional and transnational elements of the battle over slavery in the United States and to demonstrate how historical memory became a new front in the battle over slavery.