Many have no idea on how they were Confederate Slave owners who moved to Brazil (called the Confederados), as the slave trade was international and it opened up doors for commerce/business relationships throughout the Americas.
The history of the Conferados is truly fascinating..and for more, one can investigate a read entitled "
The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade" ( ):
Having roots in Latin America, I'm aware of how the abuses in slavery were even worse there (and in the West Indies as well) than in North America....and I know there has always been strong racism present due to what the Portuguese and Spaniards did in coming over/setting up the systems they did. Thus, no surprise to see what happened with the active development of relationship between others in the American South and those in the Southern Hemisphere. The American Civil war even managed to spill into Brazil, as seen in the
Bahia Incident ( a naval skirmish fought in late 1864 during the American Civil War where a Confederate States Navy warship was captured by a Union warship in Bahia Harbor, Brazil...and the engagement resulted in a United States victory, but also sparked an incident with the Brazilian government, which claimed the Americans had violated Brazil's neutrality by illegally attacking a vessel in their harbor..nore
shared here).
SOuthern States desiring secession wanted to create a new International Empire called the "Golden Circle" that would've taken slavery onto an entirely different level. For
what occurred with the Golden Circle (proposed country) was the unrealized pan-Caribbean political alliance of the 1850s, organized chiefly by United States adventurers, and envisioned the incorporation of several countries and states of the Americas into a federal union similar to the United States...it would've forced the states in the U.S to really reconsider a lot of things.
The balance of power between the northern and southern U.S. states was threatened by the proposed Golden Circle since Federalists feared that a new Caribbean-centered coalition would align the new Latin American states with the slave states in the US..tilting the balance of power southward and weakening U.S. federalism in favor of the Pan-American confederalist union, whereas those Americans in favor of the Gold Circle believed that an alignment with the remaining slaveholding Caribbean territories would reinforce their political strength.
Some have noted where there were black slave owners and having them involved made a difference - as seen in
Black slave owners in the Golden Circle | Southern Nationalist - and it's amazing seeing how the narrative of all blacks being against the confederacy doesn't line up with history.
For more, one can study Chesteron's 1922 work called
What I Saw in America. What Chesteron noted is especially considering the timing of it being written in 1922. This was less than 60 years removed from the Civil War. That would be like someone writing about Korea and Vietnam right now. The memories and direct consequences of those wars are still very real to us today. Chesterton was born in 1874, only four years after Virginia itself was re-admitted to the Union (1870). The crushing of secession was ultimately written down in history as the “right” thing to do, only because, ultimately, most Southerners accepted it as simply immutable. ...and to be clear, as
many blacks fought in the Civil War on the side of the South for their own reasons (freedom being one of them (more
here/
here /
here)as
well as the fact that not all in the South endorsed slavery nor abuse as many in the North claimed---and for them, the North often didn't have much to offer). The Reconstruction was to be the re-programming of the Southern mind. It worked, and now Lincoln is seen as great. If, as Chesterton alludes to with his Irish example, the Southern spirit had continued to buck
against centralized government and the resistance had continued into the twentieth century, Lincoln would be viewed more like Cromwell than Bismark.
Had the Confederacy won, who knows the ways things would have turned out for others in the Caribbean. people on both sides were concerned for the welfare of minorities...and there were people on both sides who couldn't of cared less about the plight of blacks. History is truly complicated...
There's actually a very amazing mockumentary on the issue entitled
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (more
shared here ) -as it explores the results of a Southern victory in the Civil War and posits the Golden Circle as a plan enacted after the war. One of the most wild and yet challenging critiques I've ever come across...