Throughline - American Exile

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

For centuries, the United States has been a prime destination for migrants hoping for better economic opportunities, fleeing danger in their home countries or just seeking a new life. But has there ever been a moment when Americans were the ones who felt compelled to flee elsewhere? In this episode, two stories that challenge the idea of who and why Americans sought refuge in other countries.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Migrant caravan heading from Central America to the U.S. border. Thousands of Central American migrants who are trying to get into the U.S. are still blocked at Mexico's southern border. We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.

They arrive at our border, and he says, go back to where you came from. In the meantime, communities along both sides of the border are responding to the increase in families and children fleeing instability and violence on a risky journey to a new future, or at least the hope of one. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR, where we go back in time to understand the present. Hey, I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode, American Exile. Let's start with a few questions.

Who is a migrant? Where do they come from? Why are they leaving their homes? And as a country, how should we treat them? All those questions have been at the center of discussions about immigration in the U.S. for a while now. Needless to say, it's been a heated debate. The focus most recently has been on the migrants trying to get into the U.S. across the southern border with Mexico. Some are seeking a new life and economic opportunities, and many are just fleeing for their lives.

And for centuries, the U.S. has been a destination for people in this situation. But we were curious, was there ever a time when that script was flipped, when Americans were the ones fleeing and seeking a better life in another country. And that led us to two stories that both happen around the same time during the period of slavery in America and take us figuratively and literally in completely different directions. Hi, my name is Paula Polk from Frisco, Texas, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Rund, Ramteen, I've got a great story for you. All about immigration. Not at the southern border like you might expect, but at the northern border with Canada. The U.S.-Canada border is the longest shared border between any two countries in the world. It's 5,000 miles long. More than 5,000 miles long. Really?

Wait, wait, before we get into it, why don't you introduce yourself? Okay. My name is Parth Shah, and I'm a producer on the NPR show Hidden Brain. All right. So, so far we know that this story takes place at the U.S.-Canada border, right? Right. Nearly 200 years ago. And it's about people who fled the United States for a better life.

If you could just tell me a little bit about how about your first car, and I'm going to get a level on my end. My first car was a Junker that cost me $1,700. Didn't learn to drive till I was 36. So I thought I should learn... This is Carolyn Smarts Frost. She's the author of a book called...

I've Got a Home in Gloryland, A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. And she was my guide through this story. I know this is probably irrelevant, but I'm kind of surprised she didn't learn how to drive until she was 36. Yeah, I had the same thought. What kept you from learning for so long? I didn't really need it. I lived in Toronto, which has really good public transportation. But once she started driving, Carolyn put a lot of miles on her car. Because between the 1980s and early 2000s, she often drove across the border into the U.S.

to research the origins of the Underground Railroad and the story of one couple in particular, Thornton and Ruthie Blackburn. You know, I fell in love with the Blackburns, and I would spend, you're right, it was two decades, it was 20 years of my life. I spent every holiday and every spare minute and every cent I had going to Kentucky, and I actually eventually went to 13 U.S. states to find the story of the Blackburns. What was it about the Blackburns that made her, you know, so interested in diving into their story?

Well, for starters, the Blackburns had an incredible story of escape. The odds were stacked against them. They faced obstacle after obstacle on their way up to Canada. They encountered violence and even spent time in jail. Along the way, without even knowing it, they helped shape the Underground Railroad and set the foundation for Canada's extradition laws. The story begins in Louisville, Kentucky. The year was 1831, 30 years before the Civil War, when slavery was still in full swing.

Louisville is a port city on the Ohio River, and the docks there were usually pulsing with people. At the time, many enslaved people worked and lived near the docks, like the Blackburns. Ruthie Blackburn worked in the home of a businessman. She was a nursemaid in the household. And Thornton Blackburn was a porter. So he would go down back and forth to the dockyards and drive the cart to deliver goods. It's unclear how the two met.

It's possible that they crossed paths at the port one day. But even after they got married, they couldn't live together. They were enslaved by different slaveholders. Shortly after their marriage, Ruthie's slaveholder died. And it turned out his business was completely bankrupt. And because of that, there was only one major item of real value they could auction off to help pay off the creditors. And that was Mrs. Blackburn. She was put up on a table or a chair in the living room of the very house where she had served, and she was auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder was another local businessman, and Carolyn says he had plans to resell. Mrs. Blackburn was very, very beautiful, and that was not an asset to an enslaved woman, ever, because she was worth far more in the deep south, in the markets in New Orleans that were called fancy girl markets, than she ever would have been as a house servant in Louisville. Fancy girl markets.

I think we know what that means. Yeah, sex trafficking. Ugh. But Ruthie wouldn't accept that fate. Sunday morning, July 3rd, 1831. The day before Independence Day. And was that symbolic? The docks were quiet.

Church? Church. Makes sense. It was a perfect time to try to escape. There couldn't have been many people there to see Thornton and Ruthie, dressed in their finest clothes. They hailed a ferry to take them from the Kentucky side across the river to Indiana. And from there, they boarded a steamboat headed north, up the Ohio River.

Where were they headed? It's unclear whether they had a set destination in mind. All they knew was that they would need to travel far enough to evade slave catchers. How far was far enough? Far enough to be safe, to be free. After all, there was an iron-fisted law in place to prevent enslaved people from escaping. The federal fugitive slave law, which had been passed in 1793 and empowered slaveholders or their agents to capture

freedom seekers anywhere in the United States. And white people could be fined or even imprisoned if they were caught helping fugitive slaves. Fugitive slaves, but I prefer the term freedom seekers because it speaks to agency of the people who escaped from slavery rather than the language used by slaveholders who were complaining about their fugitive property. And that's in quotation marks. Wait, how would they be allowed to board a ship? Like, wouldn't they have needed ID or something?

Yeah, at the time, if you were black and traveling, you either needed a document from your slaveholder that said you had permission to travel, or you needed to carry freedom papers that indicated you were not an enslaved person, but a free person of color, which was, of course, rare at this time. The Blackburns had neither of those things.

So a local barber forged freedom papers for them. What was written on those freedom papers? An extremely specific description of their appearance. Their eyes, the color of their skin, how their hair would have been dressed, the kind of clothing they were expected to be wearing, and birthmarks or possibly a list, anything in great detail, because, of course, slaveholders were very afraid that people would share freedom papers with each other and therefore help others escape to liberty.

And their counterfeit papers proved to be convincing, because Thornton and Ruthie were able to get on the ferry to the Indiana shore. And from there, they bought tickets and boarded a steamboat headed up the Ohio River. After a day and a night sitting next to the boilers on the steamboat, the Blackburns arrived in Cincinnati. From there, they traveled from city to city, hopping out of one stagecoach and into another.

They tried to blend in and avoid suspicion. If anyone caught on that their papers were forged, or that they were on the run, they could be sent back to slavery or killed. Finally, they arrived in Detroit, Michigan. Far from home, far from familiar faces

that could recognize and report them. And they met other free Black people who already lived there. Some of whom, at least least were freedom seekers themselves. At last, they felt they were free. So they decided to stop running and to settle down. And the couple moved into their first place together.

No more being apart. No more slaveholders. No more living under the horrible conditions of slavery. In Detroit, Thornton and Ruthie finally got to start their life together as a family. The summer went by. A year passed. The couple had a church they went to. They had friends.

They'd made a home in Detroit. But right on the cusp of the two-year anniversary of their escape, they got the knock at the door that they'd feared since they arrived. It was the Detroit sheriff, and he'd come to arrest them. Oh no. Their former slaveholders finally tracked them down. A slave catcher by the name of Talbot Clayton Oldham was sent to collect the Blackburns, and the law was clearly on his side.

All that was necessary under the federal fugitive slave law to capture someone and send them back to slavery was the word of a white man. So the Blackburns were arrested. This was the Blackburns' worst nightmare, to be sent back to

slavery, back to a life of fear, isolation, and abuse. But the sheriff didn't immediately hand them over to the slave catcher. Instead, they were given a court date for that same day, Saturday, June 15, 1833. And much of the black community of Detroit showed up to support them. There was a big horseshoe-shaped balcony at the top of the courtroom, and that's where African Americans were required to sit in court. So they went up there, and they muttered and complained, and it was packed. The Blackburn' neighbors were horrified and angry.

Their arrests threatened the status of other freedom seekers who lived in hiding among the free Black community. And that could tear the community apart. But the law was clear. There was no room for negotiations. So the Blackburns didn't stand a chance in court. And when the word came down that the Blackburns were going to be sent back to slavery, the people in the balcony said, And when the word came down that the Blackburns were going to be sent back to slavery, the people in the balcony said,

you will not do this, we will burn this city to the ground if you try. The sheriff was worried about rioting. So instead of handing the Blackburns over to the slave catchers immediately after the verdict was made, he put them back in jail, in two separate cells. And he scheduled for the couple to be sent down the river, back to enslavement in two days, on Monday afternoon. That would mean that all of the African Americans with jobs would have to be back at their workplaces.

And fewer people would be there to protest the Blackburn's return to slavery. So basically, he was stalling. The next day, Sunday, two women approached the sheriff after church service. Mrs. French and Mrs. Lightfoot. Both Caroline French and Tabitha Lightfoot were free Black women, and they were friends of the Blackburns. Dressed in their Sunday best with veils over their hair,

they went to see the sheriff and they asked him if they could offer their friend Mrs. Blackburn the solace of friendship and prayer. And the sheriff let them into the jail. Perhaps he thought this would assuage some of the era of violence around the town. Mrs. French and Mrs. Lightfoot stayed well into the evening in Ruthie's cell. It was after dark when they left the jailhouse. With veils over their faces and crying into their handkerchiefs. And walked off down the darkened streets.

The sheriff and the jailer prepared Thornton and Ruthie to be sent back to the South, to Louisville, Kentucky. But when the jailer got to Ruthie's cell, he found someone else waiting for him behind bars. It was Caroline French. Wearing Mrs. Blackburn's very short dress? Oh, they swapped clothes. Yeah, they swapped clothes the night before.

And by the time the sheriff realized this, Ruthie Blackburn was already across the river, in Upper Canada, one of the two territories that made up modern-day Canada, outside the grip of the Fugitive Slave Act. What the sheriff probably didn't know was that a local abolitionist community had started to organize. Just a few years earlier, there had been a similar incident between a couple of freedom seekers and their enslavers. There had been a case of two freedom seekers from Kentucky who had been captured by a slave catcher.

And they were going to be sent back to slavery. But the black community on both sides of the border, African Americans and African Canadians together, rescued those two young men and got them across to Canada. And I'm pretty sure that the people in Detroit and the people from the Canadian side had formed a plan right after, because the Blackburns, when things came to a head for them, it was all very carefully laid out. And the Blackburns' allies had a plan to get Thornton out too. The sheriff comes to the door of the jail with Thornton Blackburn beside him. Thornton had chains on his hands, manacles on his feet.

They're going to take Thornton to a rented carriage and put him in the carriage and take him down the steamboat docks. And the steamboat would take him back to slavery forever. But up Gratiot Street marched a crowd of 200 angry, yelling people. Almost all African Americans, but with some whites amongst them who disagreed with the black rooms being sent back to slavery. At the head was an elderly woman, a wooden stake under her arm and a white rag tied around the front of it. And she pointed it at the heart of the sheriff. Wow. This is from an eyewitness account, a newspaper.

Someone in this massive crowd got Thornton's attention and tossed him a pistol. And even with his hands shackled, Thornton caught the gun. People yelled at him to shoot the sheriff. Shoot the rascal! He didn't shoot anyone. Instead, he shot in the air. But when he fired, the crowd surged forward. They grabbed Thornton. A group of men grabbed Thornton, and they piled into a cart.

And at the helm was a horse. A blind horse, a very elderly horse. So this blind horse galloped the cart into the woods. And as the jailhouse faded away in the background, they raced towards the river. When they got about halfway there, they could hear dogs barking, a posse was coming. The men jumped out of the cart. And they sent the horse and the cart off in a different direction to decoy the dogs. They had an axe with them and they used it to break the chains on Thornton. And they ran with him to the riverfront. A boatman waited for the group.

Arrangements had been made in advance for him to take the men across the river into the Canadian town of Sandwich. However, the boatman... He wasn't too anxious to leave when he saw how urgent the case was. He asked for more money and nobody had any cash on them. So finally, one of the young men gave the boatman his prized gold pocket watch. And with that payment in hand, the boatman took Thornton and the other men across the river, away from the dominion of the Fugitive Slave Act, into freedom, into Canada.

Where they were all promptly jailed. After the break, the Blackburns go back to court. This is Michael Ruffin in Yatesville, Georgia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com.

Two years after escaping slavery in Kentucky, and just days after being forced out of their home in Detroit, the Blackburns were now in Canada. But they weren't safe yet. The mayor of Detroit sent a letter to a sheriff in Canada saying that the Blackburns had initiated a riot. They had aroused civil unrest, and there was going to be an extradition demand for the Blackburns. Though no one died, some were seriously injured in the riots, including the sheriff. The sheriff, Sheriff Wilson, was beaten within an inch of his life. And that, I don't think, was part of the original plan at all.

So things got out of hand once the crowd surged up the stairs of the jailhouse. So the Canadian officials must have been in kind of a diplomatic bind, right? Trying to figure out what to do with the Blackburns. Exactly. Canada and the U.S. were more or less friendly at the time. But you have to know Canada wasn't even a country yet. It was still a British territory. And there was no interest in arousing violence on the part of the upper Canadian government. Now, just a few months prior to the Blackburn's escape, Canada had passed its first extradition law. It was called the Fugitive Offenders Act. And that act required

that if they were going to be sending an accused criminal to a jurisdiction outside of Canada, it required that the crime of which they were accused was a capital crime. In other words, according to Canadian law, the only way the Blackburns could be sent back was if they were accused of a capital crime, like murder. Escaping from slavery wasn't a crime in Canada. However, arousing civil unrest and trying to kill the sheriff of Detroit would have been,

and those are the crimes of which the Blackburns were accused. Over the next few weeks, while the Blackburns sat in separate jail cells, Canadian officials tried to figure out whether they should allow them to stay in Canada or to send them back. The slave catcher from Kentucky, Talbot Clayton Oldham, quickly came to argue that Canada should give him the Blackburns. This young man was very arrogant. He went across the river to see the judges deliberating the case, and he demands the Upper Canadian government just turn them over.

But this wasn't going to happen. The abolitionist movement in Canada was strong. That riled people up and put them very largely on the Blackburns' side. Another white man that crossed over to talk to the judges about the Blackburns was the city attorney of Detroit. Alexander Frazier, the city attorney, this white city attorney. Was he also there to speed up this extradition process? No. Alexander Frazier came on his own to argue against sending the Blackburns back.

He was actually part of the group of people who planned the Blackburns' escape. Alexander Frazier told the judges that the Blackburns couldn't be found guilty for starting a riot. After all, Ruthie was already in Canada when the rioting began in Detroit. The court case ended after several weeks, and the Attorney General of Upper Canada delivered his final verdict. The prevailing thought was... That Upper Canada could not return an accused criminal to a jurisdiction where the punishment for the crime of which they were accused was harsher than the British colonial law of the province would allow.

If the Blackburns were returned to be tried in an American court, it wouldn't matter whether they were guilty or innocent. They would have the same sentence. They would be enslaved for life. Enslavement wasn't a punishment under colonial law in Canada. They wouldn't send the Blackburns back. The Blackburns could stay. And this is a really important part because this is the foundation of Canadian extradition law to this day.

We still don't send people to places where they're going to be executed or tortured. We don't always get it right. But that is the foundation of extradition law, and it started with the case of Thornton and Lucy Blackburn. They made history. Wait, did she call Ruthie Lucy? Yeah, when Ruthie made it into Canada, she changed her name to Lucy and kept that name for the rest of escaping to freedom,

they actually set the foundation for Canadian extradition law. Yeah, and in fact, by doing so, they opened up a path for other freedom seekers. Remember, this happened 30 years before the Civil War. At that point, the Underground Railroad was in its infancy, relatively undeveloped. And Canada came to be a destination for many, a place outside the reach of the U.S. Fugitive Slave Act.

And the Blackburns were pioneers in this movement of people who migrated north from the southern U.S. to escape slavery. What happened to the people who rioted for the Blackburns back in Detroit? Almost everyone was arrested. This is called the Blackburn Riots of 1833, and anybody who was involved in it was jailed and fined. It was a tremendous upheaval. About a third of Detroit's African-American citizenry left Detroit.

They moved to Upper Canada as a direct result of this event. So where did the Blackburns go after they were released from jail? The couple moved to Toronto in 1834. Thornton went to work as a waiter. But Carolyn says even though slavery was abolished there, racism still existed. And so he wanted to get away from these people who were probably treating him just as badly as in a dining room in Louisville, I would imagine. So Thornton, like many other free black people in Canada, chose to start a business. He saved up and bought his own carriage. And the business he created for himself was a taxi cab company. Thornton called his cab the City, and he ran the first taxi business in Upper Canada.

This just keeps getting better. So Thornton brought the taxicab to Toronto. Yeah, yeah. Huh. And the business, like, it took off. The Blackburns made bank. They gave a great deal of it away over the course of their life to help other freedom seekers. The Blackburns helped resettle many of these freedom seekers. They actually owned six houses in Toronto by this point. Yeah, they did very well. And they rented most of those houses out for very nominal rents to other freedom seekers

up to the time of the Civil War to help them get settled. One of the refugees they helped to resettle was Thornton's mother. A few years after they started the taxi business, Thornton actually left Canada, crossed over to Kentucky and brought her back to live in Toronto. Whoa, so he went back to the place he was enslaved in the opposite direction of the Underground Railroad, rescued his mom and then made it all the way to Canada with her? Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, this was a really dangerous journey and he could have been caught at any moment. But because he took that risk, Thornton's mom was able to live out her days in Toronto

as a free woman. Thornton Blackburn died in 1890. Lucy passed away five years later. They both are buried in the Toronto necropolis under a red granite obelisk headstone. That was Parth Shah. He's a producer with the NPR show Hidden Brain. Oh, and for listeners in Detroit,

you can go see the actual sites where the Blackburn riots happened by visiting the Skillman Public Library. That's where the jail used to be. And while you're there, you can check out a copy of Carolyn's book about the Blackburns. It's titled, I've Got a Home in Gloryland, A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. After the break, we shift our gaze from America's northern border to the south. This is Abby Johnson from Salisbury, Maryland, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. There is a town in Brazil where the Confederate flag is celebrated. Thousands of miles away from where the flag originated is a place called Americana. Every year, people from throughout Brazil gather nearby for a celebration.

During this celebration, Confederate flags can be spotted everywhere. Brazilians, even Afro-Brazilians, dress in costumes from the American South of the 1860s. The men in gray Confederate soldiers' uniforms carrying swords, the women in puffy hoop skirts and lace-up shirts with bell sleeves. Oh, and there's foot of a January. Oh, and there's square dancing, too. Basically, it's like watching old reruns of Gone with the Wind or something. Not I wouldn't mind dancing with Abe Lincoln himself.

In between the celebrations, some people take time to visit the campo, or the field cemetery, searching among the tombstones for a familiar name. Clark, Bowen, Seawright, Miller, Perkins. So how did the slice of the American South end up in the middle of Brazil? They are often referred to as the Confederados, and essentially they are descendants of people who migrated to Brazil after the Civil War. Can you introduce yourself, your name, and what do you do? Okay, my name is Sonny Dossi. I'm a retired professor of geography and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Auburn University in Alabama. And Sonny first encountered the Confederados

when he was a kid growing up in Brazil. Not too far from the city of Americana, my grandfather in 1914 decided to go off as a missionary. They sent him off to Brazil. He went there for the particular purpose to minister to these Americans who were down there and had written home and said that they needed somebody to provide spiritual leadership for them. And so I do have a personal connection to that history. 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 U.S. and starting a career in academia, they set out to find it. We uncovered some documents, first-person accounts, and ended up hosting a conference and writing a book about the topic. It's called The Confederados, Old South Immigrants in Brazil. 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. The gloomy night of sorrow and of

death has been lengthened out to four long and bloody years. The weary watchers who have fallen asleep to wake no more beside the judgment day are numbered by hundreds of thousands. The lurid morning that struggles and alternates between darkness and dawning, bewildering and disheartening indeed, can, at best, promise a day little better than the night. If we 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.

And I have been the last few years researching about slavery and abolition in Brazil and the U.S. 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 over 3 million formerly enslaved people were now free, which created panic among white southerners. Their society had collapsed, essentially.

They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict, felt insecure, didn't know what to expect. They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the African-American population. And I guess they just didn't really see a future for themselves in the U.S. They didn't. They didn't. For some Confederates, they saw only one solution, to leave the U.S. The question was, where would they go? Some of them went to Canada, others to Mexico and Cuba. But a group of Confederates wanted to go to another slave society.

A 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. But in Brazil, slavery was still in place. Brazil had one of the largest slave populations in the Americas, if not the largest. The Civil War ended slavery in the U.S. in 1865.

But meanwhile... 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 a process of whitening the population. It's really important to say that the 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. He also saw another benefit. The emperor of Brazil offered very low prices for land.

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, established schools. The U.S. 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 who had explored Brazil during the previous decade actually wrote a book or two extolling the wonderful opportunities that lay ahead. There is one confederado called James McFadden Gaston. And James McFadden was a doctor during the Civil War. After the South lost the war, James McFadden hopped on a ship. Then he ran away to Brazil. 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 have been found in Brazil. Talked about how wonderful the soil was, the climate. 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. Painted it almost as a garden of Eden. 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. Though slavery may be destined to cease in Brazil at some future day, 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. They would have the promise of, you know, living the same racial dynamics that they lived in the south of the United States. 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. And they were not necessarily plantation owners. In fact, very few of them were. Not all the Confederados had the money or came from privilege. 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. But they also nurtured this hope of becoming slave owners in Brazil.

For some Confederates, this was their chance to get rich quick, own slaves, make it big, a chance to become truly wealthy. The journey to Brazil wasn't easy, and you had to say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known. 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. Another Confederate who decided to make this journey was a man named William H. Norris.

He was a state senator here in Alabama. Decided to take his family down there. He bought some land. I came over on a ship called the Tartar, an old blockade runner once called the Wren. She was bought by a man named Carlos Nathan and fashioned into an emigrant ship. A slow as well as an unsafe one, too. William's daughter-in-law, Martha Temperance Stiegel, described the voyage to Brazil in a letter. It was loaded to the full with passengers from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. It's really interesting to analyze the perspectives of men, which were women who were coming to Brazil following their husbands and their brothers and fathers was a moment of uncertainty. This trip to Brazil meant a lot of isolation from the social life that they had in the United States. When the Norris family and others arrived in Brazil, they set up various enclaves throughout the country, up to 10,000 Confederates in total, although the exact number is hard to pinpoint.

They were ready to start their lives in this new land. But pretty quickly, they discovered that James McFadden Gaston, who'd written about all the wonders of Brazil, hadn't exactly told the truth. Oh, 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 good. Many of the crops that they attempted to grow became infested with diseases. They had this feeling of being isolated, of being on this land where the weather was different, people were different, the culture was different, language was different. 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 a 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 upended. But they soon learned race meant something entirely different in Brazil. They talk about this a lot, about all in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was shocking for them. Whereas in the U.S., 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. 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. 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. 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. In Brazil, a lot of 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 U.S.

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

Eventually, many Confederados decided they'd had enough and returned to the U.S. But a Confederado enclave remained, Americana. 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. This was the community set up by the Norris family, the family of that state senator from Alabama who'd managed to push past the unexpected challenges they faced. They stayed,

lived off the land, and made a home in Brazil. They even wrote to some friends back in the U.S. urging them to join the colony. 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 were. And if you wanted to be with the Americans or 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, 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. One thing that's happened more recently is some of them have gone back to talking of themselves as being Confederates. And that's been interesting to follow because, in general, that doesn't mean that they ascribe

to the values of the old South. They are not advocates for renewed periods of slavery or anything of that sort. But they do display the Confederate battle flag very prominently. To them, it's a symbol of their founding. I know that some of these Confederados dissenters don't even speak English or have never been in the United States. So it's a romanticized, it's a fantasy

about this confederate life of this confederate ancestry. And they celebrate it. But at the same time, they are fully Brazilian. One of the most popular singers in Brazil, not right now, but over the last couple of decades, is a lady named Rita Lee.

They, like myself and my brothers, do have a foot in both worlds, sort of dual citizenship almost. It's not a split personality per se, but I think the American heritage is an addition to what they have as Brazilian citizens. That's the way I would put it. It gives them a little something extra. As descendants of immigrants maybe here in this country,

if you think of somebody who comes over from Mexico, they could be thoroughly integrated into American society and still have some feelings and some association, some pride in where they came from. You know, Parth told us this story of an incredible fugitive slave journey to Canada, right? Right, right. And we've just told the story of a Confederate migration to Brazil,

which are two completely different experiences. But if we forget all the politics of it for a second, they're both stories about people motivated by fear and the journeys they took in search of a better life. Yeah. And it really does challenge the idea of who a migrant is and that migration happens in a certain direction. Honestly, listening to some of the descriptions of those journeys, I kept going back to thoughts about my parents, you know, who are refugees, like your parents, too. And I couldn't shake the idea that that could be me. It could be you or anyone else. Because it just takes a few things going wrong for the world to be falling apart. Or seem to be falling apart. And for you to then be the one running in fear. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui.

I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu.

Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Okay, smizing summer. Nigery Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thanks also to Lou Olkowski and Anya Grumman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Thank you to JC Howard and Katie Monteleone for providing voiceovers. If you'd like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR.

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