Golden Circle (slavery)

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This article is about the proposed large unified territory in the Americas. For the Australian company, see Golden Circle. For the Icelandic tourist route, see Golden Circle (Iceland).

The Golden Circle was a pan-Caribbean political alliance proposed by in the 1850s that would have included many countries into a US-like federal union. The Golden Circle is centered in Havana and is 2400 miles in diameter. It includes northern South America, most of Mexico, all of Central America, Cuba, Haiti, most Caribbean islands, and the southern half of then-existing US states. The circle's border roughly coincides with the Mason-Dixon boundary, and it includes St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Mexico City, Panama City.

Many supporters of the Federal Republic of Central America that had failed in 1840 saw the Golden Circle as its natual extension ^{[citation needed]}. Never realized as a political unit, the Circle was competitive with and threatened the establishment of strong Federal governments in the US and in Mexico. In the years after the Republic of Texas' war of independence and the US' Mexican war and before the US Civil War, many Americans felt that the largely weak and corrupt governments in Latin America should be reformed into democracies, by conquest if necessary.

One of the political arguments in favor of the Golden Circle involved slavery. European colonialism and the African slave trade had declined more rapidly in some countries than others, and by 1850 several US states had outlawed slave importation and ownership entirely. Slavery was however still practiced across most of the Caribbean and Latin America. In the years that led up to the US Civil war, abolitionism was one of several bitter issues that were in dispute between US States. In the Caribbean, slavery was being largely eliminated through attrition: the 4.7 million Africans imported to the Caribbean over the centuries had dwindled to about 2 million by 1880. In the US, however, the number of slaves continued to increase through internal growth.

The delicate balance of power between the culturally northern and culturally southern US states was threatened by the proposed Golden Circle. Federalists feared that a new Caribbean-centered coalition would align the new Latin American states with the southern or 'slave state' camp. This would tilt the balance of power southward and weaken US Federalism in favor of the pan-American confederalist union. This issue was already raging in the West with California, Deseret (later Utah), and other potential new states west of Missouri. Gold Circleists believed that an alignment with the still-slave Caribbean states would reinforce their political base, and increase their voting power.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was the US organization formed to promote and help create the pan-American union of states. It was organized in 1854 by George W. L. Bickley, a Virginia-born doctor, editor, and adventurer living in Cincinnati. It grew slowly until 1859 and reached its height in 1860. The membership, scattered from New York to California and into Latin America, was never large.

After the civil war, many Americans moved their US slave-based operations to Latin America including British Honduras (later Belize), Cuba and Brazil (see Confederados) where slavery remained legal into the 1880s.

Other American adventurists in Latin America echoed some of the ideals of the Golden Circle; William Walker was the most successful of those individuals who attempted to build a Latin American empire. Some historians and anti-American politicians think that the Spanish-American War was a continuation of these policies (see details at American Empire).

[edit] In fiction

The fictional seculative movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America which looks at a Southern victory in the Civil War, was inspired by a brief mention of the concept of the Golden Circle in Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War (see section on 'Directors Comment)' - though it is interpreted in the film as a plan enacted after the war, rather than one that ended in 1860 before the war started.