The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade

Epilogue

Epilogue Despite the return to the U.S. of so many disgruntled exiles, others remained in Brazil where they continued to shape their new homeland, just as they had molded their old. Thus, “when a Senator opposed to slavery was assassinated on the eve of Brazil’s emancipation ” in 1888, “the Confederados”—as they came to be called—“were at first suspected.”1 Those with U.S. ties may have been innocent in this instance but others were a more troublesome presence in Brazilian internal affairs. In early 1888, a “police delegate of the municipality who sympathized with the antislavery movement was sheltering refugees in his home.” This was at a time when many plantations were “being abandoned” in anticipation of slavery’s 1888 demise and, thus, “angry slave proprietors decided to take action. They were led by two naturalized Brazilians, James Ox Warne and John Jackson Clink, immigrants from the United States, who had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The two incited the planters by telling them that they had ‘cockroach blood’ and that under such circumstances a revolution would have occurred in any other country.” They “bludgeoned” the “young man to death,” along with others deemed to be abolitionist sympathizers.2 As early as 1867, the exile, John Codman, had signaled that many of his fellow émigrés would not be enthusiastic about the demise of slavery —and the concomitant final strangulation of the African Slave Trade— in their new homeland. “Soon the pressure of the abolition party in Brazil, aided by the influence of Brazil and the United States, will terminate slavery altogether,” he said with rancor, referring to “the anti-slavery party” as “already a disturbing political element.” “The shock upon society will not be so great there as it has been here,” he added generously , “and the absence of distinctions of color [sic] will aid in incorporating the black into the body politic,” though he warned that “coming as we did from a country where we knew too well how much of the 244 pretended love for the Negro has emanated from that political ambition which has made him the mere tool for the purposes of party and of power,” he advised Brazilians to adopt an alternative course.3 The Confederates had seemed to be a people without a nation—or a hemisphere—as their attempt to revive the “peculiar institution” ran aground on the shoals of Brazilian abolitionism. Unwilling to reconcile with abolitionism, they had even more difficulty adapting to a substantive role for the formerly enslaved in politics. The latter did not make it easy for them, for as in the U.S. they came to take quite seriously their newly forged citizenship rights. Thus, in April 1869, a group of AfricanAmericans petitioned President Grant; they wanted some of their number to be appointed not only for diplomatic posts in Liberia, Haiti, and other Latin American nations but, as well, wanted their leader—Frederick Douglass—appointed Minister to Brazil, indicative of their viewing this South American nation as part of the Pan-African world.4 As was to happen so often in coming decades, these petitioners were to be sorely disappointed. For continuing the antebellum tradition of appointing “reliable” white Southerners as chief diplomats in Brazil, the revival of this practice after the war was a troubling signal that though slavery and the African Slave Trade might have virtually disappeared, the ideology that underpinned both was very much alive. Thus, with Reconstruction’s demise, dispatched to Brazil was Henry W. Hilliard, a “strong, unrepentant rebel”; in fact, “there was not in the city of Augusta in the Summer of 1865, after the termination of the rebellion, a more decided rebel than this man Hilliard”—he was a “ ‘last ditch rebel.’ ”5 Hilliard, born in Cumberland County, North Carolina in 1808, was admitted to the bar in Athens, Georgia in 1829, and in 1831 was “elected to a Professorship in the University of Alabama” before Jefferson Davis “commissioned him as a Brigadier-General in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States.”6 A self-described “Union man” wrote in anguish about the “active part taken by” Hilliard in “causing the separation of the state of Tennessee from the Union in 1861”—the “union men of 1861 are indignant and ashamed,” it was said, “that such a person should represent in a foreign country the Government they loved more than life.”7 Hilliard sought to reassure the doubting, issuing a...