Almost every other year a newspaper publishes an article about how the Confederate flag still flies in a hidden place in the Brazilian countryside. In the years after the American Civil War, thousands of Southern families migrated to other countries, with Brazil becoming one of their main destinations. Settlements were established in different parts of the country, but it is only in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in the state of São Paulo, that a community of descendants survives to this day. This group, the so-called Confederados, with their annual parties and reenactments of American Civil War battles, has fascinated many people over the decades. Still, this is a little-known story among the wider public in either the United States or Brazil, and only recently has it been the object of more substantial scholarship. Confederate Exodus by Alan P. Marcus adds to this literature.Divided into five chapters, the book presents various aspects of the Confederate migration, including the push and pull factors behind the movement and the migrants' contributions to and impact on their new setting. Building on Laura Jarnagin's A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (2008), Marcus starts by outlining the trade relations that connected Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the former supplying mainly wheat in exchange for coffee. These relations were important for the migration movement, as we learn in the following chapter, in which the author outlines connections between those merchants and specific immigration agents. The same chapter provides an overview of the various US settlements in Brazil and their main characters, highlighting the multiple reasons why settlements failed in places other than Santa Bárbara d'Oeste. A third chapter outlines key aspects of nineteenth-century Brazil, from landownership patterns to literacy levels. The following chapter explores issues of race and compares the United States and Brazil. It also explores the racist ideas of key figures such as Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos in order to understand the ideological climate for much of the discussion and policies surrounding the Confederate migration. The last chapter focuses on the Santa Bárbara d'Oeste settlement, discussing its importance for the expansion of Protestantism and US schools in Brazil. The chapter also assesses Cemitério do Campo (the Confederate cemetery) as a key site for the reproduction of group identity over time.The book's most controversial aspects are those related to race and slavery. The author rejects explanations of the migration that focus on slavery and racism, such as those offered by Gerald Horne and Charles Willis Simmons, as too simplistic; Marcus offers instead a conjunction of factors that he considers to be more complex. But slavery then completely disappears from the explanation. In trying to understand the Confederados as any other immigrant group, Marcus neglects the fact that those individuals had been raised in one of the largest racially based slave societies of the Americas, sometimes as slaveholders themselves. They did not need to believe in the creation of a slave empire abroad, as Maury and a few others did, to hope to continue as slaveholders, at least for some time. And Brazil was one of the last places where this was possible. But Marcus argues instead that the Confederados “were well-aware that Brazil's population consisted of a sizeable number of black and miscegenated populations,” taking this as evidence that they were not “recalcitrant” or “Negrophobic” (p. 130). They escaped the “new kind of virulent racism” that pervaded the postbellum South and “ostensibly followed the Brazilian-based hybrid construction of race” (p. 132).To reinforce this point, the author argues that the Confederados were not significantly involved with slavery in their new setting. But the evidence to support this is too thin. Unfortunately, Marcus did not explore the many legal records involving Confederados that are stored at the Centro Cultural Martha Watts, in Piracicaba. A quick look at these records shows how slavery was important for the Southern immigrants to Brazil. There are references, for example, to slaveholders renting their captives to other families, which complicates the idea that slavery was restricted to a few individuals. Other records show Confederados asking for money to purchase slaves in Rio de Janeiro and individuals being arrested for torturing a slave. The founder of Cemitério do Campo was killed by his own slave. In sum, the Confederados indeed arrived in Brazil with limited resources and amid rising slave prices caused by the end of the transatlantic slave trade. But this makes it all the more impressive that an elite within the community could have purchased a nonnegligible number of captives in the interprovincial slave trade. We still await a full assessment of the relationship of the community with slavery.
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May 24, 2022
Jie Zheng + 5
Open Access
