Assobiando Dixie: Confederate exiles in Brazil

Katrina Louise Cassiere

During Reconstruction, between 1865-69, a few thousand former confederates emigrated to Brazil to make a new home and recreate a new south. Confederate women were crucial to the emigration and settling process, in that recreating a new south revolved initially around recreating Southern homes in Brazil. Because domestication was the American woman's primary task in the nineteenth century, she was instrumental in carving out the cultural sphere former confederates sought to uphold as a paragon of civilization. This is significant because scholars of this group of emigrants have largely overlooked how gender relations affected the process. Moreover, due to claims made by the Brazilian government as well as prompting from southern guidebooks, confederates believed they would be ambassadors of modernity and become prosperous as planters. Unbeknownst to them, Brazilian slavery, and plantations, were crumbling fast, and Brazil needed a new source of labor. American southerners expected their experience in Brazil to be similar to Southern American realities prior to the American Civil War. American southerners had managed to reproduce their slave labor after the close of the international slave trade. In contrast, Brazilians scarcely imported female slaves and life expectancy for Brazil slaves was shorter. Because of this, after the international slave trade closed, the numbers of Brazilian slaves dropped off dramatically, whereas in the United States they had remained nearly level. Confederates failed in their endeavors partly because of this oversight. Additionally crucial, these emigrants largely did not learn Portuguese so they were unable to communicate with the Brazilian government, whom they expected to provide aid, after their endeavors failed. Most confederates ended up bankrupt and many died of disease, including male heads of household. Bereft women and children were largely the demographic left begging on the streets of Brazilian urban centers. Because of upper-class male anxieties, concern for American women and children abroad negated distaste for former rebels and catalyzed the American government's rescue efforts.

Assobiando Dixie: Confederate exiles in Brazil

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