The confederates who left the USA

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being rebuilt. was abolished. For some people, the changes happening in the country But for others, they felt like They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict, felt insecure, didn't know. Expecting A world.

And at that point supporting Today on the show, Romteen and I bring you the story of the Confederados, the white settlers for Brazil, forever changing the country's landscape. Quick break. These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well NPR has a podcast that does that too. NBR News Now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day with the latest, most important headlines. In episodes

That are clear, fact-based, and easy to digest. Listen to NPR News Now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 like a good idea. looked grim. If you look at the letters and the documents, they were desperate.

You know, 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, and Railroads were torn up, southern banks had no money, the price of cotton was dropping on the world market, and nearly four million formerly enslaved people were now free.

Which created panic among white Southerners. They were really afraid of a wave of violence. From the the African American population. 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.

the best slave population in the Americas, if not the largest. The Civil War ended slavery in the US in 1865, but meanwhile, slavery in Brazil was really stable. And até o Brasil. supporting European De white Americanos. Brasil livre na of whitening the population. 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.

The Emperor of Brazil offered uh very low prices for land. This is Sunny Dossy, 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. 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, established schools.

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

Well individuals uh who had explored Brazil during the previous decade actually wrote a book or two extolling the wonderful opportunities that lay ahead of There is one confederado James McFadden And James McFadden was a doctor durante Civil War. After the South lost the war, James McFadden hopped on a ship. 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. The dark reddish or brown colour of the earth is found to be especially well adapted to the color. Painted it almost as a Garden of Eden. Those slavery books. by gradual emancipation. dynamics that they lived in the south of the United States. Similar accounts of Brazil were published in newspapers throughout the southern US, 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, uh in fact they very few of'em were. Not all the Confederados had the money or came from privilege. So they were not the old slave. owning aristocracy. These were just uh ordinary farmers, uh some doctors

People who had a family history of always moving to a new frontier, but they also nurtured this hope of becoming slave owners in Brasil. For some Confederates, this was their chance to get rich quick. Own slaves, make it big, a chance to become truly wealthy. And you had to say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known. 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. 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. Climate was hot and tropical, the soil was not as 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 on threat in Brazil. 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. But they soon learned race meant something entirely different.

They talk about this a lot, about all in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was a Whereas in the US, if you were of African descent, you were considered black, full style. 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.

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. And as a result by the eighteen hundreds, Brasil had a new racial category mestiço that reflected that reality. 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 US.

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, uh Homeschooling. There was also the question of religion. The Americans were Protestant. Brazilians were Roman Catholic.

Sunny grew up in Brazil, not far from where the Confederados originally settled. His grandfather was a missionary, sent to Brazil in nineteen fourteen to do his work. Decades after the Confederados decided to leave the U.S. during the Reconstruction era. And so I I do have a personal connection to that history. Sonny and his two. A town of everyone. Confederacy, where seemingly opposite worlds collided. After all, English at home.

And they couldn't shake that feeling that there was a deeper story there. After going to college in the US and starting a career in academic We uncovered some diamonds. First person account. Hosting a conference and writing a book about It's called the Confederados, Old South immigrants in Brazil.

Uh, 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. Eventually, many Confederatos decided they'd had enough and returned to the US. But a Confederato Enclave remained. Americana. Obviously that was not the name of the community at that time. In fact there was hardly anybody there.

took on the name Americana simply because that was where the Americans did establish themselves. And Americana became the epicenter of Confederado life. 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 weren't, if you wanted to be with the Americans. by the Confederates, then that was where you would go. 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. 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. Initially, of course, they were immigrants from the South. They were Confederates with all of that, everything that that entailed.

But as time passed they became known as Americans. It was not named Confederatos, it was named Americana because this was the town of the Americans. Some people in the town of Americana have started calling themselves Confederates again. They hang the Confederate flag proudly. So it's a romanticize, it's a fantasy. About this Confederate life of this confederate uh uh ancestre. They celebrate it, but at the same time they are fully Brazilian.

Dossy 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. And that's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more stories about Americans leading And be sure to join us. There was no such thing as So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe. To explore how to do it. That story. Don't miss it. And edited by the Music as always by Romteen and his band.

Special. Rena Gucci, Beth Donovan, Casey More. And Lindsay McKenna. These days it feels like the news changes every hour. Well NPR has a podcast that does that too. NPR News Now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day with the latest, most important headlines. In episodes That are clear, fact-based, and easy to digest. Listen to NPR News Now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.