Throughline - The confederates who left the USA

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

After the Civil War, while America was rebuilding itself, some Southerners made a different kind of move — they packed up and left. Today on the show: the Confederados, the American settlers who fled to Brazil chasing wealth, land, and a chance to keep slavery alive.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abd al-Duttah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the country was being rebuilt. Slavery was abolished. Black men had won the right to vote. And the rights and protections outlined in the Bill of Rights were

starting to include more and more people. For some people, the changes happening in the country were just the start. But for others, they felt like a step in the wrong direction. They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict. Felt insecure, didn't know what to expect. Many American Confederates who didn't want to rejoin the Union after the war left in search of a place where they could recreate what they had lost, a world that still had slavery.

Slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian Empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil. Today on the show, Ramtin and I bring you the story of the Confederados, the white settlers from the Confederacy, who brought the antebellum south to southeastern Brazil, forever changing the country's landscape. All that, after a quick break. 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. 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. 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 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 African-American population. So they left the U.S. 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 safe. still in place. Brazil had one of the largest slave population 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. This is Sunny Dossi, 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. 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. And 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 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 point in the future,

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. They promise of, you know, live in the same racial dynamics that they live, 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 competitors, 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. Up to 10,000 Confederates heated 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. 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. The climate was hot and tropical. The soil was not as good. 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 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. Brazilian's 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 1914, to do his work. Decades after the Confederados decided to leave the U.S. during the Reconstruction era. 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, and accounts, and ended up hosting a conference and writing a book about the topic. It's called the Confederados, Old South immigrants in Brazil. 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 confederato 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.

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 their 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 Confederators. who stayed began to assimilate into Brazilian society,

intermarrying with Brazilians, speaking Portuguese, and redefining what it means to be a confederato. Initially, of course, they were immigrants from the South. They were confederates, and with all of that, everything 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. 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 confederated life, of this Confederate ancestry. They celebrate it, but at the same time, they are fully Brazilian. Dossi says it's not because they're advocates for slavery, but the same thing, they're the 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 leaving the country in pursuit of a different

way of life, check out the full-length episode of ThruLine called American Exile. And be sure to join us for a new episode next week. There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity. So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation. When we travel to the Great Lakes region in Minnesota to explore how and why the Ojibwe peoples became a nation within a nation in the face of an expanding United States. That story next week. Don't miss it.

This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadem and edited by Christina. Kim with help from the throughline production team. Music as always by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, RAND Abed Fattah, and Ramtin Arablui. Thank you for listening.