Tropical Dreams: Promoting Brazil in Nineteenth- Century Us Media

chapter 8 Tropical Dreams: Promoting Brazil in Nineteenth- Century us Media

Beatriz E. Balanta

In the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, Brazil ignited a seldom-studied episode in the history of Reconstruction: the migration of American citizens to the tropical monarchy. In the vanquished Confederate States, political instability and economic destitution, coupled with deep anxiety over the abolition of slavery, were channeled into successful campaigns to settle regions south of the Rio Grande. Brazil’s bountiful nature and the monarchy’s promises of subsidized travel, affordable access to land, and assurances of religious freedom were marketed as alluring qualities by emigration prospectors. Although remote, Brazil was not totally unknown to southerners. Diplomatic relations between Brazil and the United States go back to at least 1825 when José Silvestre Rebello became the first Brazilian envoy to the White House. By the 1840s, fifty percent of the coffee consumed in the United States came from Brazil. In the 1860s, the United States became Brazil’s second largest commercial partner.1 This trade was particularly benefi- cial to the merchant-planter families of the u.s. mid-Atlantic and southern states that operated the trading houses that imported Brazilian goods and owned the plantations that supplied Brazil with tobacco, cotton, lumber, and flour. In the 1850s, the specter of freedom for enslaved people motivated southerners’ escape from the fallen Union. They found refuge in a place where slavery remained legal until 1888 and whose government actively encouraged immigration. Calculations indicate that from the 1860s until the 1880s, about 20,000 people from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina relocated to various places in Brazil, ranging from the urban areas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to the northern Amazon region.2 Today, the most impressive evidence of this movement is the city of Americana, founded by Colonel William Hutchinson Norris in the Brazilian state of São Paulo in 1866.3

1 Steven C. Topik, Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire (Standford: Standford University Press, 1996), 54. 2 Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 12. 3 For in-depth treatments of the confederate migration to Brazil see: Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey, eds. The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil (Tuscaloosa:

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Given the synergy between systems of capital and systems of representa- tion, it shouldn’t be surprising that Robert Clinton, a partner in the trading firm Maxwell, Wright & Company, the largest exporter of Brazilian coffee to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, partially financed the trip that the Methodist missionary Daniel Parrish Kidder and the Presbyterian cler- gyman, James Cooley Fletcher, took to Brazil in 1857. Their experiences were the basis for a book entitled Brazil and the Brazilians Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches (1st edition Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1857). In ten years, the illustrated account of their sojourn in Brazil went through eight editions and became one of the main sources on Brazilian history and society in the United States. Each of the editions published after the Civil War (1866, 1867, 1868, and 1879) was updated with a chapter entitled, “Notes For Those Going to Brazil,” and a series of appendices that provided information about newly established u.s. immigrant communities, pronunciation, cur- rency conversions, and tips about transportation and clothing. Brazil and the Brazilians, together with pamphlets and newspaper articles such as Brazil, the home for the southerner: or a practical account of what the author, and others, who visited that country, for the same objects, saw and did while in that empire (Rev. Ballard S. Dunn, 1866), Ho! For Brazil (W.W.W. Wood, 1866) and the Emigrant’s Guide to Brazil (Lansford Warren Hastings, 1867) became constitutive elements in the media ensemble used by immigration societies throughout the South. In these works, promoters were quick to pro- vide information on the relatively misunderstood political and social climate of Brazil; they emphasized the fact that it was a stable constitutional monarchy reigning over a vast domain. Culturally, it was similar to the United States; its landscape was dotted with libraries, museums, busy ports, and sizeable cities. According to Gaston, author of Hunting a Home in Brazil, the stability of the empire (as supposed to the chaos that characterized Spanish America) could be attributed to “the pacific character” of its citizens and their “proneness to adhere to an existing state of things.”4 The people were dormant but funda- mentally good, and blacks were peaceful and obedient. None of these narra- tives, for example, speak of slave insurrections in the plantations. In these

University of Alabama Press, 1995); William Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan’s Confederate Colony in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); and Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 4 James McFadden Gaston, Hunting a Home in Brazil: The Agricultural Resources and Other Characteristics of the Country. Also, the Manner and Customs of the Inhabitants (Philadelphia: King and Baird Printers, 1867), 21.