The confederates who left the USA
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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.
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.
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