The confederates who left the USA

After the Civil War, while America was rebuilding itself, some Southerners made a different kind of move — they packed up and left. Today on the show: the Confederados, the American settlers who fled to Brazil chasing wealth, land, and a chance to keep slavery alive. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Randa Abdelfatah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US 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.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict, felt insecure, didn't know what to expect.

• 1:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil.

• 1:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

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• 3:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  If we look at the letters and the documents, they were desperate. You know, they felt devastated.

• 4:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the African-American population.

• 4:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  So they left the US 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. In Brazil, however, slavery was still in place.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Brazil had one of the largest slavery populations in the Americas, if not the largest.

• 5:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Civil War ended slavery in the US in 1865. But meanwhile...

• 5:26Speaker 03

  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 in a process of whitening the population. It is really important to say that the idea of white supremacy is transnational.

• 5:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  He also saw another benefit.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  The Emperor of Brazil offered very low prices for land.

• 6:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Sunny Dossi, a retired professor of geography and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Auburn University in Alabama.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:45Speaker 07

  The US had much more advanced agricultural technologies and techniques, which he hoped they'd bring with them to Brazil, especially when it came to cotton.

• 6:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Now, you might be wondering how the Confederates found out about all these perks. Well...

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Individuals who had explored Brazil during the previous decade actually wrote a book or two extolling the wonderful opportunities that lay ahead.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  There is one confederado called James McFadden Gaston. And James McFadden was a doctor during the Civil War.

• 7:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  After the South lost the war, James McFadden hopped on a ship.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Then he ran away to Brazil.

• 7:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 7:53Speaker 08

  All the requisites of a desirable home have been found in Brazil.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Talked about how wonderful the soil was, the climate.

• 8:00Speaker 08

  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.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Painted it almost as a garden of Eden.

• 8:15Speaker 08

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 08

  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.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  They would have the promise of, you know, living the same racial dynamics that they lived in the south of the United States.

• 8:55Speaker 07

  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.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And they were not necessarily plantation owners. In fact, very few of them were.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Not all the confederados had the money or came from privilege.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  So they were not the old slave-owning aristocracy. These were just ordinary farmers, some doctors, people who had a family history of always moving to a new frontier.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  But they also nurtured this hope of becoming slave owners in Brazil.

• 9:40Speaker 07

  For some Confederates, this was their chance to get rich quick, own slaves, make it big, a chance to become truly wealthy.

• 9:50Speaker 07

  The journey to Brazil wasn't easy, and you had to say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Oh, definitely. They were really surprised, really frustrated, too.

• 10:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  It turned out...

• 10:29Speaker 02

  All of the descriptions were overblown.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  The environment was not as suitable as it had been portrayed. Climate was hot and tropical. The soil was not as good. Many of the crops that they attempted to grow became infested with diseases.

• 10:53Speaker 07

  The other part that came as a shock? Race.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Because they realized that the idea that they had of preservation of poor white blood was a threat in Brazil.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  They talk about this a lot, about all in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was shocking for them.

• 11:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Whereas in the US, 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.

• 11:49Speaker 07

  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.

• 12:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 12:14Speaker 07

  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.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  In Brazil, a lot of the people who had African ancestors, black ancestors, could look white and live in Brazilian society like they were white.

• 12:40Speaker 07

  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 US.

• 12:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which brings us back to the Confederados and the government initiative to white in Brazil by inviting them to settle in the country. It was an effort to offset centuries of this racial mixing.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  Faced with this unexpected reality, the Confederados desperately tried to hold on to things they knew, things that reminded them of home.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 US during the Reconstruction era.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And so I do have a personal connection to that history.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  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 US and starting a career in academia, they set out to find it.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  We uncovered some documents, first-person accounts, and ended up hosting a conference and writing a book about the topic.

• 14:31Speaker 07

  It's called "The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil."

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Just as happened here in the South for so many generations, the whites thought of their own society, of their own culture, and really didn't interact and didn't think much about what was going, unfortunately, of course, what was going on in the broader communities.

• 14:56Speaker 07

  Eventually, many Confederados decided they'd had enough and returned to the US.

• 15:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  But a confederado enclave remained: Americana.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Obviously, that was not the name of the community at that time. In fact, there was hardly anybody there. And it took on the name Americana simply because that was where the Americans did establish themselves.

• 15:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Americana became the epicenter of confederado life.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  I often like to compare it to maybe Plymouth Rock here in the United States. It became an area that was known for being a place where the Americans were. And if you wanted to be with the Americans or the Confederates, then that was where you would go.

• 15:43Speaker 07

  In 1888, slavery was abolished in Brazil, the last country in the Western world to do so. The thing that had drawn so many Confederados to Brazil was now gone.

• 15:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  And as time went on, the Confederados who stayed began to assimilate into Brazilian society, intermarrying with Brazilians, speaking Portuguese, and redefining what it means to be a confederado.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Initially, of course, they were immigrants from the South. They were Confederates and with all of that, everything that that entailed. But as time passed, they became known as Americans. It was not named Confederados, it was named Americana because this was the town of the Americans.

• 16:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Some people in the town of Americana have started calling themselves Confederates again. They hang the Confederate flag proudly.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  So it's a romanticized, it's a fantasy about this Confederate life, of this Confederate ancestry.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  They celebrate it, but at the same time, they are fully Brazilian.

• 16:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dossi says it's not because they're advocates for slavery, but that it's an homage to their forefathers, who left the South in opposition to the nation America was becoming.

• 17:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more stories about Americans leaving the country in pursuit of a different way of life, check out the full-length episode of Throughline called "American Exile," and be sure to join us for a new episode next week.

• 17:34Speaker 09

  There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity. So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation?

• 17:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  When we travel to the Great Lakes region in Minnesota to explore how and why the Ojibwe peoples became a nation within a nation in the face of an expanding United States. That story next week. Don't miss it.

• 18:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadem and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music as always by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Rand Abdelfattah.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  And Ramtin Arablouin. Thank you for listening.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.