Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes Classical Music Happy Hour, a new podcast hosted by me, Pianist Maniacs. Each episode will speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abdulkadah.
Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the country was being rebuilt. Slavery was abolished. Black men had won the right to vote. And the rights and protections outlined in the Bill of Rights were starting to include more and more people.
For some people, the changes happening in the country were just the start. But for others, they felt like a step in the wrong direction. They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict. Felt insecure, didn't know what to expect.
Many American Confederates who didn't want to rejoin the Union after the war left in search of a place where they could recreate what they had lost, a world that still had slavery. Slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian Empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil.
Today on the show, Ramtin and I bring you the story of the Confederados, the white settlers from the Confederacy who brought the antebellum South to southeastern Brazil, forever changing the country's landscape. All that, after a quick break. Thank you. The story of the Confederados goes back to the Civil War. After years of bloody fighting, the Confederate states were forced to surrender.
They'd suffered massive losses. Their land was in ruins. Their future looked grim. If we look at the letters and the documents, they were desperate. They felt devastated. This is Luciana Brito. She teaches history at the Federal University of Reconcavo de Bahia in Brazil. Luciana says the end of slavery completely disrupted the economic and social way of life in the American South.
Farms were overgrown with weeds. Railroads were torn up. Southern banks had no money. The price of cotton was dropping on the world market. And nearly 4 million formerly enslaved people were now free, which created panic among white Southerners. They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the African-American population. So they left the U.S.
in search of another slave society where they could continue their way of life with white supremacy as the social order and slavery as the economic system. The thing is, By this point in the mid-1860s, slavery had been outlawed throughout much of the Western Hemisphere.
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Chapter 2: What led some Confederates to leave the U.S. after the Civil War?
In Brazil, however, slavery was still in place. Brazil had one of the largest slave populations in the Americas, if not the largest. The Civil War ended slavery in the U.S. in 1865. But meanwhile... Slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian Empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil. Brazil was living a process of whitening the population.
It's really important to say that the idea of white supremacy is transnational. The emperor of Brazil thought the country had become too dark and was hoping white Americans and Europeans would tip the scales in the other direction. He also saw another benefit. The emperor of Brazil offered very low prices for land.
This is Sonny Dossi, a retired professor of geography and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Auburn University in Alabama. He paid for travel tickets for them to get to Brazil. He provided a hotel in Rio de Janeiro for these people to stay.
He thought it would be very beneficial to his country to receive these people from North America because they, and in fact they did, introduce new technology, establish schools. The U.S. had much more advanced agricultural technologies and techniques, which he hoped they'd bring with them to Brazil, especially when it came to cotton.
Now, you might be wondering how the Confederates found out about all these perks. Well… Individuals who had explored Brazil during the previous decade actually wrote a book or two extolling the wonderful opportunities that lay ahead. There is one confederado called James McFadden Gaston. And James McFadden was a doctor during the Civil War.
After the South lost the war, James McFadden hopped on a ship. Then he ran away to Brazil. He spent six months traveling around the country, meeting people and taking notes on what he saw. And in 1867, he published those observations in a book called Hunting a Home in Brazil. All the requisites of a desirable home have been found in Brazil. Talked about how wonderful the soil was, the climate.
The dark reddish or brown color of the earth is found to be especially well adapted to the culture of coffee and corn and beans. The cotton plant promises also an abundant yield. Painted it almost as a Garden of Eden. To our southern people, the Empire of Brazil embodies the character and sentiment among the better class of citizens, very much in keeping with our standard of taste and politeness.
Though slavery may be destined to cease in Brazil at some point in the future by gradual emancipation, yet the elements of society which have resulted from the mastery of the white man will never be erased entirely from the people. They would have the promise of, you know, living the same racial dynamics that they lived in the south of the United States.
Similar accounts of Brazil were published in newspapers throughout the southern U.S. And for many, the promise of a better life in an idyllic, faraway place was too good to resist. Thousands of people packed up their bags and decided to cash in on the opportunity. And they were not necessarily plantation owners. In fact, very few of them were.
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Chapter 3: Why was Brazil considered a destination for Confederates?
The journey to Brazil wasn't easy. And you had to say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known. I think you really had to make a decision that you were leaving the old world behind and going to a new place, going to a new world. Up to 10,000 Confederates heeded the call and left for Brazil to start a new life.
But when they got there, they quickly found out the wonders they'd been promised weren't exactly true. Oh, definitely. They were really surprised, really frustrated. It turned out... All of the descriptions were overblown. The environment was not as suitable as it had been portrayed. The climate was hot and tropical. The soil was not as good.
Many of the crops that they attempted to grow became infested with diseases. The other part that came as a shock? Race. Because they realized that the idea that they had of preservation of poor white blood was a threat in Brazil.
Chapter 4: Who were the Confederados and what was their journey like?
Pure white blood. That's what the Confederados had traveled thousands of miles to preserve. A way of life. And a racial dynamic the Civil War had upended. But they soon learned race meant something entirely different in Brazil. They talk about this a lot, about all in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was shocking for them.
Whereas in the U.S., if you were of African descent, you were considered black, full stop. In Brazil, it's not that simple. And this has to do with the incredibly mixed history there. When Portugal colonized Brazil in the 1500s, the settlers who came over were overwhelmingly white and male. They lived alongside millions of indigenous people.
But then Portugal began taking over more and more land for agriculture and imported a lot of African slaves to grow crops, especially sugarcane. So the settlers were vastly outnumbered by people of color. And the colonial authorities figured the only way to ensure their authority was for white settlers to form relationships with indigenous women.
With each generation, the population of Brazil became more and more racially mixed. And as a result, by the 1800s, Brazil had a new racial category, mestizo, that reflected that reality. In Brazil, a lot of people who had African ancestors Black ancestors could look white and live in Brazilian society like they were white.
That's because race was determined partly by your physical characteristics, but also by how much money you had and who your family was. In other words, it was possible to move between races because being white was more subjective than it was in the U.S. Which brings us back to the Confederados and the government initiative to whiten Brazil by inviting them to settle in the country.
It was an effort to offset centuries of this racial mixing. Faced with this unexpected reality, the Confederados desperately tried to hold on to things they knew, things that reminded them of home. They spoke English at home. The kids grew up speaking English. They provided education, homeschooling. There was also the question of religion. The Americans were Protestant.
Brazilians were Roman Catholic. Sonny grew up in Brazil, not far from where the Confederados originally settled. His grandfather was a missionary, sent to Brazil in 1914 to do his work, decades after the Confederados decided to leave the U.S. during the Reconstruction era. And so I do have a personal connection to that history.
Sonny and his two brothers would hear stories about this strange place, a town of expats from the Confederacy, where seemingly opposite worlds collided. After all, they themselves were Americans growing up in Brazil, speaking English at home, Portuguese with everyone else. And they couldn't shake that feeling that there was a deeper story there. So after going to college in the U.S.
and starting a career in academia, they set out to find it. We uncovered some documents, first-person accounts, and ended up hosting a conference and writing a book about the topic. It's called The Confederados, Old South Immigrants in Brazil. Just as happened here in the South for so many generations, the whites thought of their own society, of their own culture,
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