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

In The Deepest South, U.S. diplomatic historian Gerald Horne provides a fascinating look at an important topic. This book places slavery in the United States and U.S. involvement in the slave trade in the broader context of the Atlantic World. In eleven chapters marked by significant strengths, the author argues that the histories of the two largest slaveholding nations of the western hemisphere were closely intertwined throughout the nineteenth century.

Professor Horne sees Brazilian slavery as an essential support for slavery in the United States and U.S. actions as essential to the growth and continuation of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil. According to the author, during the antebellum period in the United States, proslavery factions justified slavery there by arguing that slavery was also essential to the economy of the other continental-sized nation in the hemisphere, the Empire of Brazil. During this period, men who supported slavery occupied most of the U.S. diplomatic posts in Brazil, and most of the command structure of the U.S. Navy’s Africa and Brazil squadrons. Several proponents of slavery in the United States also developed schemes to annex the Amazon River valley to the United States and their presence in key government, military and commercial positions helps to explain the failure of the United States to stop the importation of Africans to Brazil after the U.S. government passed legislation against the African slave trade. It should hardly be surprising then that some supporters of the Confederacy fled to Brazil with their slaves as the U.S. Civil War was coming to a close.

Professor Horne also shows us that Brazil and Brazilians contributed to slavery’s demise in the United States, if only in a limited way. The abolition movement, he argues, received a boost when “Northerners” stopped in Rio de Janeiro on their way to California during the Gold Rush and, for the first time, observed the realities of slavery in the experiences of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians in the Brazilian capital. The horror of what they saw inspired the fortyniners to oppose slavery when they returned to American soil.

For historians of Latin America, several aspects of the book are particularly valuable. First, Professor Horne de-centers discussion of U.S.-Brazilian relations by taking seriously the importance of non-governmental actors, their words and their experiences, and by placing the entire discussion of U.S.-Brazilian relations in the context of the African Diaspora. Moreover, he provides very clear evidence that—at least in the view of Americans—Brazilian ideas about race and color were much more fluid than those of Americans well before the formal characterization of Brazilian racial ideology as “racial democracy.” Finally, Professor Horne’s argument that proslavery Americans considered Brazil the South American equivalent of the United States may not be a comfortable argument for believers in American exceptionalism, but I suspect that it is historically accurate.

For all its strengths, elements of Professor Horne’s study are troubling. The author makes little effort to show us both sides of this relationship. Indeed, there is surprisingly little from the Brazilian perspective. Professor Horne conducted research in archives in the United States, England, Spain, Portugal and Brazil, but most of his sources are in English. Those produced in Brazil are essentially travelers’ accounts; in other words, the comments of foreigners, generally in Brazil for only a brief time. As Latin Americanists know, such accounts have very significant weaknesses for understanding the reality of Latin America.

Despite this concern, the study is a valuable contribution to the history of the relationship between the United States and Brazil, the reading of which can profit Brazilianists and Latin Americanists alike. It offers the bold argument that slavery in Brazil reinforced slavery in the United States and vice versa, and that the demise of one contributed to the demise of the other...