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The Slaveholder Exodus

On the eve of the Civil War, southern slaveholders agreed that blacks were inferior, that without total subordination they were dangerous and destructive, and that without coercion they would not work. Voicing nearly universal sentiments, Henry Watson, an Alabama planter, declared that “if emancipation takes place,” plantations “will be worth nothing.” Mississippi planter James Kirkland asserted that he had rather “be exterminated” than live in the same society “with the slaves if freed.” Faced with a Republican victory in the election of 1860, planters led the South out of the Union and fought a ferocious war to keep blacks in bondage.

Yankee victory meant abolition, but slaveholders ended the war much as they began it, still believing that without slavery the South “would be wholly worthless, a barren waste and desolate plain.” Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. of South Carolina reaffirmed the widespread conviction that “it is absurd to suppose that the African will work under a system of voluntary labor. . . . The labor of the negro must be compulsory—he must be a slave.”

Three months after Appomattox, an Alabama planter described the scene to his absent partner: “The Yankees have declared the Negroes all free. We have no authority to control them in any way, or even to defend ourselves. . . . Our country and town are filled with idle negroes, crops abandoned in many cases. On some plantations all the negroes have left. . . . The result will be that our whole country north and south will be impoverished and ruined. . . . The loss of our slaves, to a very great extent destroys the value of all other property. . . . All want to sell and get out of the country. Many expect to go to South [America]. . . . The idea is to get away from the free Negro.”

Thousands of white Southerners, perhaps as many as ten thousand, fled after the Confederacy fell. They did not flee blindly; planters overwhelmingly chose Brazil. Because “it was the last resting place of slavery,” they believed that it offered the best chance of resurrecting antebellum southern society. The ruler of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, personally encouraged Southerners to come settle. But planters had no intention of assimilating into local life. One emigrant remembered that southern planters in Brazil were “tenacious of their ideas, manners, & religion” and “laughed with scorn” at their “adopted land.” They had to be, he said, “masters.”

Firsthand experience in Brazil pleased some Southerners. Charles G. Gunter of Marengo County, Alabama, loved Brazil’s climate, people, land, and government, and he wrote to his son that he expected to soon buy a plantation with “fifty to a hundred slaves.” Eight months later, he declared: “Dispose of, give away and settle my affairs as if I were dead to the U.S. I shall never go there again.” Now owner of a plot of six thousand acres and “enough negroes to work it,” he concluded: “We shall be rich here.” His only complaints were “ants and a spirit of democracy among the people—no great evils in comparison with free negro labor, radicalism and taxes.”

But many more southern planters were shocked by Brazil. Andrew McCollam of Louisiana quickly concluded that “all is not gold that glitters here.” He saw the “finger of decay” everywhere. Even more disturbing was the state of race relations. Everywhere he looked, he found “white men & negro women all together.” But in the end it was the shaky status of slavery that ended his experiment as a Brazilian planter. The prevailing impression, he said, was that “slavery would be abolished in less than 20 years, perhaps . . . in ten years.” McCollam was captivated by the beauty of the country and said wistfully that if only a hundred good “families from Louisiana could be located here and the institution of slavery insured I should think I had found a new land of promise.” With that, he boarded a steamer for Louisiana.

In the end, southern planters failed to re-create antebellum plantation society overseas. By 1870, most émigrés to Brazil had found their way back home, where they joined the vast majority of former slaveholders who had stayed put. Staying put, however, did not signal an acceptance of free black labor. Indeed, for every slaveholder who joined the exodus, several others longed to join him. Many had “the inclination,” a Mississippi woman observed in 1866, but “not the means.” Since both the returned emigrants and the stay-at-homes shared the same grim prediction for southern plantations with free black labor, they joined together to channel plantation affairs back into familiar antebellum ways.

Questions for Analysis

Summarize the Argument: What drove former slaveholders out of the South after the Civil War, and what specifically attracted them to Brazil?

Recognize Viewpoints: What sustained slaveholders’ proslavery ideas through the war, and why didn’t the fact of emancipation change their minds about the necessity of slavery?

Consider the Context: What were the consequences of the persistence of proslavery thinking for the South’s transition from slavery to free labor during Reconstruction?