Civil War History

70CIVIL WAR HISTORY The Confederados: OldSouth Immigrants inBrazil. Edited by Cyrus B. Dawsey and James Dawsey. Foreword by Michael Coniff. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 273. $34.95) Brazil, occupying one-half of the surface area of South America and home to over 140 million people, is perhaps the least understood of the major Latin American nations. The Portuguese language barrier is undoubtedly one factor contributing to this ignorance, along with the geographic diversity of the country—which stretches from Amazon jungles to the dry grasslands of the Argentine border—and the complicated ethnic mixture of African, European, Indian, and Asian that forms the Brazilian nation. Despite these obstacles, Brazilian studies are an exciting and fruitful field for American historians. Historical comparisons between the two lands are natural. Both began as agrarian nations thatmade the transition to industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century; both featured agro-export sectors that relied heavily on African slave labor; and both countries continue to grapple with the problem of racism. Less known to American audiences is the way the history of the two nations has been linked. Brazil, since achieving independence in 1822, has largely followed a pro-U.S. foreign policy, and the elites have attempted, rather unsuccessfully so far, to copy the American model of economic growth and political stability. But it is the human connection between the United States and Brazil that concerns the authors of the present volume—the immigration ofthousands of Southern sympathizers and their families to Brazil in the aftermath of the Lost Cause. "The Confederados," as they came to be known, constituted the largest concentration of Americans to ever settle in Brazil. This volume, ably edited by two descendants of the settler families, should be of great interest to historians of Brazil, the American Civil War, and nineteenth-century immigration . The book centers on four questions: What motivated a substantial number of erstwhile Confederates to leave the South? Why did they choose Brazil? How was the settlement of the new land accomplished? What impact did the Confederados have on the local economy, politics, and culture? Since, as the useful bibliography makes clear, the story of the Confederados has been examined in detail before, by both American and Brazilian scholars, what does this collection of essays contribute? The major strength of this volume is that Confederado immigration to Brazil is placed in the context of American, Brazilian, and world history of the nineteenth century. Seen from this perspective, the decision of some Southerners to move to Brazil was not idiosyncratic at all. The Brazilian empire offered cheap fertile soil to experienced farmers willing to develop the interior of the country, the "kindred culture" (17) of a society dominated by plantation owners, and religious toleration for North American Protestants. (Interestingly, the existence of slavery in Brazil until 1888 was not a major factor motivating the Southern exodus; few of the Confederados could afford slaves.) In the book's best chapter, "Relocating Family and Capital within the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World Economy: BOOK REVIEWS7I The Brazilian Connection," Laura Jarnagin argues that Confederado immigration was mutually beneficial: it granted the Southerners a chance to start life over again as farmers, the only work most of them had known before the Civil War, while liberal politicians and intellectuals of the Brazilian empire pointed to the "American colony" as a showcase of how the small farm, instead of the plantation, could serve as the backbone to capitalist agriculture. The other essays in the book, which treat the technical, religious, educational, and linguistic legacy ofthe Confederados, make clear that the Southerners' contribution to their adopted homeland was modest. It was the moral example they set—of a small immigrant community that staked a claim on a piece of the Brazilian backlands and made it prosperous—that earned them a niche in Brazilian history. The main drawback of the volume is that it is unlikely to appeal to anyone outside ofacademic circles. All the contributors assume a knowledge of Brazilian politics, economics, and racial attitudes that few American readers will possess. Many of the essays are exercises in revisionist history, requiring some foreknowledge of the literature on the Confederados. Still, the exotic...