Reddit reviews The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War
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The more militaristic and expansionist aspects of pro-slavery politics even spread beyond the official military policy of the Federal government to embrace private military ventures like the filibusterers of the 1850s - e.g., William Walker - and attempts at bully diplomacy in which the United States pressured other countries to cede territory in Central America and the Caribbean destined to become slave states. (The long Cuban controversy and the Ostend Manifesto of 1854 are a good demonstration of the latter.) Our memory of the Knights of the Golden Circle is tainted by their own self-aggrandizement and a bundle of conspiracy theories, but the fact of their existence - and their commitment to the idea of a slave-holding empire ringing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean - is revealing enough.
As many Southerners understood, slavery required expansion in order to survive. The chattel slavery economy did not naturally produce the demographic explosion necessary to sustain its political life in an era when the Northern population was growing exponentially in just that way. Slave-grown cotton sapped the soil, and new agricultural vistas for slavery's consumption were not just desirable but fast becoming necessary by mid-century. Slaves themselves reproduced at a rate sufficient to ensure that they would not die out as a people, but the political and geographic preconditions necessary for the institution's survival were forever uncertain.
Northerners understood this, too. The entire raison d'etre of the Republican Party was to establish a "cordon of freedom" around the institution, which anti-slavery Northerners believed would starve it into submission. (James Oakes' book The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War makes this point quite well.) Southern expansionism was politically palatable to Northerners as long as it was paired with non-slavery expansionism (e.g., the acquisition of Oregon alongside Texas). But the moment it became clear that the acquisition of new territory was not actually a bi-sectional affair, support collapsed. See, for example, widespread opposition in the North to the Mexican War and the Ostend Manifesto.
https://www.amazon.com/Scorpions-Sting-Antislavery-Coming-Civil/dp/0393351211
https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-National-Destruction-Slavery-1861-1865/dp/0393347753
The author's a sexist ass but he's an excellent historian