Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil by Alan P. Marcus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil by Alan P. Marcus Kent Mathewson Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil. Alan P. Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. xviii+252, map, black & white photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4962-2415-6. $60.00, eBook, ISBN 978-1-4962-2526-9. Confederate Exodus surveys a somewhat neglected topic that at first blush may seem recondite, or at best, left to the retrograde ranks and enthusiasms of Lost Cause partisans. Geographer Alan Marcus is at pains [End Page 115] to disabuse both notions, and he largely succeeds. While he has been exploring the topic for the better part of two decades, the book's timing could not be better. In the past few years, issues surrounding Lost Cause memorialization, especially Confederate flags, monuments, and names on streets and public buildings, have erupted in national debate and civil unrest. Marcus's study is not driven by these current concerns; it is a historical inquest into the migration story of the Confederados, and the various forces locally, nationally, and internationally that set them in motion. At salient junctures, however, Marcus does comment on our present times and how they relate to this migration. Questions of racism loom large here. While the immigrants generally held beliefs and attitudes common to white southerners of their time, Marcus contends that they, and their descendants, adapted to Brazil's more fluid racial environment. He counters the assumption the Confederados were attracted to Brazil in order to reestablish slave-driven plantations and forge a "luso-tropical" Dixie. He shows that the emigrants' motives and motivations were far more varied, constituting both a mix of "push" and "pull" factors. The result is an engaging study that refracts this history along various lines of evidence and archival excavations, shedding considerable light on some aspects and leaving others open to additional research and interpretation. In his preface we learn that Marcus has more than a passing interest in this story, what many may see as a dusty attic item in the larger history of the post–Civil War era. As C. Wright Mills argued in The Sociological Imagination (1959), the nexus between biography (personal experience) and history (events in their society) offers perhaps the best avenue for sociological understanding and explanation. Marcus was born in Brazil (Rio) and raised and schooled in São Paulo. While not a Confederado descendant, he has uncovered personal connections with aspects of this history. His residency in Baltimore since 2008 has opened up other angles, especially Baltimore's nineteenth-century connections with Brazil, the focus of chapter 1. As a Brazilian emigrant, his graduate work in geography focused on Brazilian emigration to the US, another personal touchstone. This study is a semi-inversion of his doctoral work. It has taken him back to Brazil and deep into the US South. Often a single reading can coax or trigger a research project. For Marcus, it was Laura Jarnagin's A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (2008). Jarnagin's study explores the genealogies [End Page 116] of nineteenth-century mercantile families in Brazil and the Atlantic world, and their connections with Baltimore and the Confederation migration. This book sparked Marcus's study, not unlike certain promotional literature, discussed in chapter 2, that stirred several thousand former Confederates to look south to Brazil for a new home. The introduction lays out the framework for the study. Five key aspects are identified: the Baltimore mercantile connection; the role of Protestant missionaries; the importance of propaganda; the influence of "scientific" (positivist) thought among Brazilian elites; and the inducements offered to new immigrants by the Brazilian government. Marcus offers an overview of the previous scholarship. A few geographers precede him, including Mark Jefferson (1928) and Confederado descendant Cyrus "Sonny" B. Dawsey (1995), but largely it has been historians or descendant memorialists. Theoretical guides include migration theory and place and mobility studies, with nods to Cresswell, Tuan, and Wright. But the main emphases and strengths are empirical: who, what, when, and how...