Below is a review of a new book that I'll be buying.  Of course many flag-waving nationalists foam at the mouth over any suggestion that the Shining City on the Hill has been imperialistic.

Note:  I didn't know that at one time we owned 80% of Mexico's railroads.  Mexico should've built a wall. 

Regards,
Mencken's Ghost

When America's Aim Was Empire

The early U.S. was more an empire than a nation, held together by the prospects of expansion. Steven Hahn's impressive "A Nation Without Borders" tells the story of America's quest to expand its territory and influence from 1830 to 1910.

By JOHN STAUFFER

Wall Street Journal, Updated Dec. 16, 2016 5:07 p.m. ET

Forty years ago, as the United States celebrated its bicentennial, most general histories of the nation focused on white men and paid little attention to the country's relations with the rest of the world. But in the past two generations, owing to the new scholarship on women, people of color, capitalism and global concerns, "the study of American history has been transformed," as series editor Eric Foner notes in his introduction to the latest entry in the Penguin History of the United States.

In "A Nation Without Borders," Steven Hahn, a professor of history at NYU, offers an impressive synthesis of the United States in the 19th century—a narrative in which blacks, Indians, and women play major roles. More broadly, he tells the story of America's quest to expand its territory and influence from 1830 to 1910. The expansionist effort was fueled, as he shows, by slaveholders' interests before the Civil War and by industrial capitalists after. The United States in the 19th century, he argues, was less a democracy than an empire: "The model of governance inherited from the British was empire." Unlike nations, empires "lack real borders"; hence the title.

Beginning in the 1830s, as Mr. Hahn describes in vivid detail, slaveholders and their allies waged numerous "rebellions" in their quest to create "a slaveholding empire spreading across much of the hemisphere." They made war on Mexico, which had abolished slavery, and created the slaveholding Republic of Texas. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas as a slave state, which became one casus belli for the Mexican-American War (1846-48). The territories acquired from Mexico at the end of that war increased America's size by a third. Except for California, they were open to slavery.

Slaveholders and their allies also sought to expand their empire into the Caribbean and other parts of Central America. Three American presidents (Polk, Pierce and Buchanan) tried in vain to annex Cuba, a colony of Spain that generated immense wealth from slave-grown sugar. Private militias, known as filibusters and funded by slaveholders, took matters into their own hands. They invaded Cuba, Nicaragua and northern Mexico in the hopes of acquiring them for slavery. Their efforts also failed.

In 1850, slaveholders made up only about 1% of the U.S. population. Yet they wielded enormous power, aligning themselves with non-slaveholding expansionists, "chiefly in the Democratic Party," as Mr. Hahn notes. As a group, they were the wealthiest Americans, the 1% of their day.

Yet slaveholders felt besieged. In 1770, human bondage was legal everywhere in the New World, but by 1850, owing to the growing moral outrage over slavery, it persisted only in the U.S., along with Brazil, Cuba and Dutch Guiana. Slaveholders sought to protect an institution that had been almost unquestioned for centuries but that was now facing vast resistance.

As a result, they led the effort to colonize Native Americans and use their land for slave labor. When Andrew Jackson, a proslavery Democrat, was elected president in 1828, "the bell of doom began to toll," Mr. Hahn writes. Under Jackson's presidency, the United States waged war against the Sauk in the Black Hawk War, launched the campaign to remove Cherokees from Georgia and battled the Seminoles in Florida. These confrontations—coupled with growing strife over the fate of slavery in the territories—culminated in the "War of the Rebellion," the term that was used by Unionists at the time and that Mr. Hahn prefers to the "Civil War."

Mr. Hahn redefines the sectional crisis that led to the Rebellion. It was "not between the North and the South," he argues, but between the antislavery Northeast and the slaveholding regions of the Mississippi Valley. When Southern expansionists abandoned their Northern allies in the Democratic Party, they lost control of national power and launched their separatist revolt.

As Mr. Hahn emphasizes, the war transformed the nation. It turned a loose union of states into a nation-state for the first time, owing to the extraordinary rise of federal power. It replaced artisans working in shops and slaves toiling on plantations with industrial capitalism, a system in which large corporations competed in global markets. Industrialists and financiers became the new 1%.

The Rebellion also remade the Republican Party. Founded by antislavery activists, it had been committed to the idea that everyone could become an independent artisan. But after the war it became the organ of financiers and industrialists who championed wage labor. Despite these changes, America retained its imperial ambitions, Mr. Hahn observes, though they now served industrialists rather than slaveholders.

Mr. Hahn characterizes the reconstruction of the South after the war as one of the nation's "imperial projects." It briefly succeeded. From 1867 to 1875 former slaves aligned themselves with Republicans and gained some control over the apparatus of government. It was, Mr. Hahn says, a social and political revolution "of the sort that few modern societies have ever witnessed." Blacks came to make up about 7% of the U.S. House of Representatives, the highest rate until the 1990s, and almost 800 blacks served in Southern state legislatures. Democrats managed to suppress this revolution only through terrorism and electoral fraud.

Industrialists, for their part, focused chiefly on "reconstructing" the West. They lent their might and matériel to the war on Native nations and "colonized" survivors on reservations in the hopes of educating them and acclimating them to the industrial economy. Spurred by Republican-led industrialists, the U.S. also acquired sovereignty over Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii and the Canal Zone of Panama.

Unlike the shapers of European empires, U.S. imperialists, Mr. Hahn argues, were less interested in creating formal colonies than in establishing "zones of authority and influence, in thrall to private investors but backed by the military arm of the nation-state." By 1900 Americans owned 80% of Mexican railroads. The Mexican Central Railway, the main artery, was incorporated in Massachusetts.

U.S. corporations produced far more than Americans could consume, and corporate leaders argued that they could not afford to produce less, owing to their enormous capital costs. America's new global markets fueled the demand for manufactured products, thus solving the problem of overproduction.

Industrialization also brought a massive demand for wage labor, which was satisfied by an unprecedented number of migrants. More people migrated to the U.S. in the final decades of the 19th century "than the entire U.S. population in 1860," notes Mr. Hahn. The steady supply of workers gave corporations powerful leverage in controlling working conditions and pay. From 1879 to 1885 there were more than 3,000 strikes involving more than 700,000 workers. "The United States," Mr. Hahn writes, "had the most violent labor history of any society in the industrializing world at this time." Business leaders referred to strikes as "insurrections" and often called in federal troops or private militias to suppress them.

"A Nation Without Borders" is a detailed, dense and at times depressing book. Depressing because Mr. Hahn begins his story in 1830, with slaveholders ascendant, and ends in 1910, with industrialists triumphant: The era of the New Deal, in which reforms and legislation would limit the power of corporations and lessen the ordeal of laborers and their families, was yet to come.

Mr. Hahn might have given more prominence to the abolition movement, which did so much to bring about emancipation in the North and which played a major role in the rise of the Free Soil and Republican parties. Still, his chronicle is breathtaking in its scope and brilliant in its subtle and original conceptualization of the nation during this period. It is often affecting, too, especially in its descriptions of labor activism.

There is a cautionary tale here for our own time. A century ago, American elites responded to global capitalism, massive immigration and imperial ambitions by exploiting workers and making war on non-whites at home and abroad. As Mr. Hahn shows, the costs of empire were not worth it.

—Mr. Stauffer teaches history and literature at Harvard University. His most recent book is "Picturing Frederick Douglass."