Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MA
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
History
Committee Chair
James Siekmeier
Committee Member
Brian Luskey
Committee Member
Jason Phillips
Abstract
This thesis uses a series of United States foreign relations documents centered around an 1862 attempt by Abraham Lincoln to colonize parts of Central America with freed African Americans. Traditionally, these communications have been used by historians for U.S. foreign relations or Black resettlement history. Here, instead, this collection is used to display the major threats to Central American sovereignty in the mid-nineteenth century in their own words. The collection reveals that two of the threats were foreign imperialistic thought and racial instability. However, the third, and ultimately most destabilizing threat to the region, was the five nations' rivalry amongst each other. This thesis provides an image of Central American history previously overshadowed by other events in the region while explaining how both individual sovereignty and regional autonomy there began to disintegrate in the early 1860’s.
Recommended Citation
Harris, Matthew D., "Struggle for Sovereignty: An African-American Colonization Attempt and Delicate Independence in Mid-Nineteenth Century Central America" (2020). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 7600.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7600
Included in
Diplomatic History Commons, Latin American History Commons, United States History Commons