The confederates who left the USA

Summary

Throughline (NPR): "The Confederates Who Left the USA"

Date: March 17, 2026
Hosts: Rund Abdelfattah & Ramtin Arablouei
Guests: Luciana Brito (Historian, Federal University of Reconcavo de Bahia), Sunny Dossey (Retired Professor, Auburn University, Director of Institute for Latin American Studies)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Throughline explores the lesser-known story of the "Confederados," white Southerners who, after the Civil War, refused to reintegrate into the restructured United States and instead migrated to Brazil in hopes of preserving their antebellum way of life—including slavery and white supremacy. Hosts Rund Abdelfattah and Ramtin Arablouei trace the origins, motivations, and enduring legacy of these Americans abroad, examining how their transplantation shaped both themselves and Brazil.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Aftermath of the Civil War and White Exodus

• Context: The American South was left devastated—economically and socially—after the Union’s victory and the abolition of slavery (02:52–03:17).
• Desperation & Fear: Many Confederates felt lost and fearful, both economically ruined and anxious about a possible “wave of violence” from newly freed African Americans (03:08–03:48, Luciana Brito).
  • Quote (Luciana Brito, 03:48): “They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the African American population.”

2. Searching for a New Slave Society: Why Brazil?

• Limited Options: By the mid-1860s, slavery was illegal in most of the Western hemisphere except Brazil, which still had the world’s largest enslaved population (04:20).
• Brazil’s Appeal:
  • The Brazilian empire actively recruited white settlers with incentives: cheap land, travel, lodging—motivated by a state policy of “whitening” the population (05:05, Luciana Brito).
  • The hope: attract Americans with advanced agricultural know-how, especially for cotton (05:53, Ramtin Arablouei).
    • Quote (Sunny Dossey, 05:33): “He paid for travel tickets for them to get to Brazil... He thought it would be very beneficial to his country to receive these people from North America.”

3. Selling the Brazilian Dream

• Books & Reports: Early “explorers” and migrants, such as James McFadden Gaston, wrote glowing reports (“Hunting a Home in Brazil”) describing Brazil as a promised land (06:24–07:07, 07:21, Sunny Dossey and Ramtin Arablouei).
  • Quote (Ramtin Arablouei, 07:07): “The climate, the dark reddish or brown color of the earth is found to be especially well adapted... The cotton plant promises also an abundant yield.”
  • Quote (Sunny Dossey, 07:21): “Painted it almost as a Garden of Eden.”

4. Who Were the Confederados?

• Not the Planter Elite:
  • Most migrants were ordinary farmers, not wealthy aristocrats (08:20–08:30).
  • Many harbored the aspiration to become slave owners abroad (08:42, Luciana Brito).

5. Harsh Realities on Arrival

• Initial Disillusionment:
  • The idyllic expectations quickly crumbled due to poor soil, tropical diseases, and an unfamiliar, complex racial order (09:30–10:05).
  • Quote (Luciana Brito, 09:30): “Oh, definitely. They were really surprised, really frustrated too.”
• Racial Complexity in Brazil:
  • The meaning and social construction of race in Brazil differed markedly from the US, with more fluid (mestizo) classifications and a history of assimilation and mixing (10:05–11:35).

6. The Confederado Community: Isolation and Adaptation

• Cultural Preservation:
  • Language, religion, and customs were fiercely maintained: English at home, Protestantism, homeschooling (12:25, Sunny Dossey).
  • Quote (Sunny Dossey, 12:25): “They spoke English at home. The kids grew up speaking English..."
• Disconnection:
  • They remained insular, interacting little with surrounding Brazilian society (13:46, Sunny Dossey).
• Gradual Assimilation:
  • Over generations, assimilation increased through intermarriage, language shift, and civic engagement (15:02–15:37).
  • Quote (Sunny Dossey, 15:15): “Initially, of course, they were immigrants from the South... But as time passed, they became known as Americans.”

7. Americana: A Confederate Exile’s Legacy

• Founding of Americana:
  • The town, "Americana," became a symbolic Plymouth Rock for the Confederados (14:33–14:51, Sunny Dossey).
• End of Slavery in Brazil:
  • The abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888 eliminated the initial rationale for migration (14:51).
• Present-Day Memory:
  • Today, some descendants embrace a romanticized Confederate identity, flying Confederate flags—not as pro-slavery activists but as a marker of heritage (15:37–16:02).
  • Quote (Luciana Brito, 15:45): “So it's a romanticize, it's a fantasy about this Confederated life of this Confederate ancestry.”
  • Quote (Sunny Dossey, 15:57): “They celebrate it, but at the same time they are fully Brazilian.”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the Brazilian Dream:
  • “Painted it almost as a Garden of Eden.” — Sunny Dossey, 07:21
• On Racial Dynamics:
  • “They talk about this a lot about, oh, in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was shocking for them.” — Luciana Brito, 10:30
• On Cultural Preservation:
  • “They spoke English at home. The kids grew up speaking English. They provided education, homeschooling...” — Sunny Dossey, 12:25
• On Present-Day Identity:
  • “So it's a romanticize, it's a fantasy about this Confederated life of this Confederate ancestry.” — Luciana Brito, 15:45
  • “They celebrate it, but at the same time they are fully Brazilian.” — Sunny Dossey, 15:57

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Notable Segments (Timestamps)

• 00:58 – 02:00: Contextualizing the Civil War’s aftermath and initial motivations.
• 03:08 – 04:28: Letters, fears, and Brazil’s remaining slave society.
• 06:24 – 07:21: First-person accounts selling the "Brazilian dream."
• 09:17 – 10:01: Arrival in Brazil—disillusionment and environmental/racial shocks.
• 12:25 – 13:39: Cultural preservation and the historian’s personal connection.
• 14:33 – 15:37: Formation of Americana, legacy, and present-day memory.

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Episode Takeaways

This episode sheds light on the Confederados—a largely forgotten chapter in American and Brazilian history—raising provocative questions about migration, race, and memory. The story complicates simplistic narratives of the post-Civil War South and reveals the transnational dimensions of white supremacy, as well as the unpredictable realities faced by those who sought to rebuild a lost world abroad.

The hosts and experts balance clear-eyed historical discussion with personal insight, ensuring listeners grasp not just the facts, but the enduring legacies and complex emotions surrounding this American diaspora.

Transcript

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This message comes from Carvana, who makes car selling easy. Enter your license plate or vin, get a real offer in minutes and have your car picked up from your door. Sell your car the easy way with Carvana. Pickup fee may apply. This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and npr. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the country was being rebuilt. Slavery was abolished. Black men had won the right to vote, and the rights and protections outlined in the Bill of Rights were starting to include more and more people. For some people, the changes happening in the country were just the same start. But for others, they felt like a step in the wrong direction.

[Sunny Dossey]

They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict, felt insecure, didn't know what to expect.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Many American confederates who didn't want to rejoin the Union after the war left in search of a place where they could recreate what they had lost, a world that still had slavery.

[Luciana Brito]

Slavery in Brazil was really stable, and at that point, the Brazilian empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Today on the show, Ramtin and I bring you the story of the Confederados, the white settlers from the Confederacy who brought the antebellum south to southeastern Brazil, forever changing the country's landscape. All that after a quick break.

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

The story of the Confederados goes back to the Civil War. After years of bloody fighting, the Confederate States were forced to surrender. They'd suffered massive losses. Their land was in ruins. Their future looked grim.

[Luciana Brito]

If we look at the letters and the documents, they were desperate. You know, they felt devastated.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Luciana Brito. She teaches history at the Federal University of Reconcavo de Bahia in Brazil. Luciana says the end of slavery completely disrupted the economic and social way of life in the American South. Farms were overgrown with weeds, railroads were torn up. Southern banks had no money. The price of cotton was dropping on the world market, and nearly 4 million formerly enslaved people were now free which created panic among white Southerners.

[Luciana Brito]

They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the African American population.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So they left the US in search of another slave society where they could continue their way of life with white supremacy as the social order and slavery as the economic system. The thing is, by this point, in the mid-1860s, slavery had been outlawed throughout much of the Western Hemisphere. In Brazil, however, slavery was still in place.

[Luciana Brito]

Brazil had one of the largest slave population in the Americas, if not the largest.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Civil War ended slavery in the US in 1865.

[Luciana Brito]

But meanwhile, slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian Empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil. Brazil was living a process of whitening the population. It is really important to say that the idea of white supremacy is transnational.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Emperor of Brazil thought the country had become too dark and was hoping white Americans and Europeans would tip the scales in the other direction.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

He also saw another benefit.

[Sunny Dossey]

The Emperor of Brazil offered very low prices for land.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Sunny Dossey, a retired professor of geography and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Auburn University in Alabama.

[Sunny Dossey]

He paid for travel tickets for them to get to Brazil. He provided a hotel in Rio de Janeiro for these people to stay. He thought it would be very beneficial to his country to receive these people from North America because they. And in fact, they did introduce new technology, established schools.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

The US had much more advanced agricultural technologies and techniques which he hoped they'd bring with them to Brazil, especially when it came to cotton.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Now, you might be wondering how the Confederates found out about all these perks.

[Sunny Dossey]

Well, individuals who had explored Brazil during the previous decade actually wrote a book or two extolling the wonderful opportunities that lay ahead.

[Luciana Brito]

There is one confederado called James McFadden. Gaston and James McFadden was a doctor during the Civil War.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

After the south lost the war, James McFadden hopped on a ship.

[Luciana Brito]

Then he ran away to Brazil.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He spent six months traveling around the country, meeting people and taking notes on what he saw. And in 1867, he published those observations in a book called Hunting a Home in Brazil.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

All the requisites of a desirable home have been found in Brazil.

[Sunny Dossey]

Talked about how wonderful the soil was,

[Ramtin Arablouein]

the climate, the dark reddish or brown color of the earth is found to be especially well adapted to the culture of coffee and corn and beans. The cotton plant promises also an abundant yield.

[Sunny Dossey]

Painted it almost as a Garden of Eden.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

To our southern people, the empire of Brazil embodies the character and sentiment among the better class of citizens. Very Much in keeping with our standard of taste and politeness. Though slavery may be destined to cease in Brazil at some point in the future by gradual emancipation, yet the elements of society which have resulted from the mastery of the white man will never be erased entirely from the people they would.

[Luciana Brito]

They have they promise of, you know, living the same racial dynamics that they lived in the south of United States.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Similar accounts of Brazil were published in newspapers throughout the southern U.S. and for many, the promise of a better life in an idyllic faraway place was too good to resist. Thousands of people packed up their bags and decided to cash in on the opportunity.

[Sunny Dossey]

And they were not necessarily plantation owners. In fact, very few of them were not.

[Luciana Brito]

All the Confederados had the money or came from privilege.

[Sunny Dossey]

So they were not the old slave owning aristocracy. These were just ordinary farmers, some doctors, people who had a family history of always moving to a new frontier.

[Luciana Brito]

But they also nurtured this hope of becoming slave owners in Brazil.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

For some Confederates, this was their chance to get rich quick, own slaves, make it big, a chance to become truly wealthy. The journey to Brazil wasn't easy. And you had to say goodbye to everything and everyone you'd ever known.

[Sunny Dossey]

I think you really had to make a decision that you were leaving the old World behind and going to a new place, going to a new world.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Up to 10,000 confederates heeded the call and left for Brazil to start a new life. But when they got there, they quickly found out the wonders they'd been promised weren't exactly true.

[Luciana Brito]

Oh, definitely. They were really surprised, really frustrated too.

[Sunny Dossey]

It turned out all of the descriptions were overblown. The environment was not as suitable as it had been portrayed. Climate was hot and tropical. The soil was not as good. Many of the crops that they attempted to grow became infested with diseases.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

The other part that came as a shock, Race.

[Luciana Brito]

Because the they realized that the idea that they had of preservation of poor white blood was on threat in Brazil.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Pure white blood. That's what the Confederados had traveled thousands of miles to preserve a way of life and a racial dynamic. The Civil war had upended. But they soon learned race meant something entirely different. In Brazil.

[Luciana Brito]

They talk about this a lot about, oh, in Brazil, the same family have several shades of color, which was shocking for them.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Whereas in the US if you were of African descent, you were considered black full stop. In Brazil, it's not that simple. And this has to do with the incredibly mixed history there. When Portugal colonized Brazil in the 1500s, the settlers who came over were overwhelmingly white and male.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

They lived alongside millions of indigenous people. But then Portugal began taking over more and more land for agriculture and imported a lot of African slaves to grow crops, especially sugarcane.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So the settlers were vastly outnumbered by people of color. And the colonial authorities figured the only way to ensure their authority was for white settlers to form relationships with indigenous women.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

With each generation, the population of Brazil became more and more racially mixed. And as a result, by the 1800s, Brazil had a new racial category, mestizo, that reflected that reality.

[Luciana Brito]

In Brazil, a lot of people who had African ancestors, black ancestors, could look white and live in Brazilian society like they were white.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

That's because race was determined partly by your physical characteristics, but also by how much money you had and who your family was. In other words, it was possible to move between races because being white was more subjective than it was in the

[Rund Abdelfattah]

US which brings us back to the Confederados and the government initiative to whiten Brazil by inviting them to settle in the country. It was an effort to offset centuries of this racial mixing.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Faced with this unexpected reality, the Confederados desperately tried to hold on to things they knew, things that reminded them of home.

[Sunny Dossey]

They spoke English at home. The kids grew up speaking English. They provided education, homeschooling. There was also the question of religion. The Americans were Protestant. Brazilians were Roman Catholic.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Sonny grew up in Brazil, not far from where the Confederados originally settled. His grandfather was a missionary sent to Brazil in 1914 to do his work, decades after the Confederados decided to leave the US during the Reconstruction era.

[Sunny Dossey]

And so I do have a personal connection to that history.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Sonny and his two brothers would hear stories about this strange place, a town of expats from the Confederacy, where seemingly opposite worlds collided. After all, they themselves were Americans growing up in Brazil, speaking English at home, but Portuguese with everyone else. And they couldn't shake that feeling that there was a deeper story there. So after going to college in the US and starting a career in academia, they set out to find it.

[Sunny Dossey]

We uncovered some documents, first person accounts, and ended up hosting a conference and writing a book about the topic.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

It's called the Old South. Immigrants in Brazil.

[Sunny Dossey]

Just as happened here in the south for so many generations, the whites thought of their own society, of their own culture, and really didn't interact and didn't think much about what was going. Unfortunately, of course, what was going on in the broader communities.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Eventually, many Confederados decided they'd had enough and returned to the US

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But a Confederado enclave remained Americana.

[Sunny Dossey]

Obviously, that was not the name of the community at that time. In fact, there was hardly anybody there. And it took on the name Americana simply because that was where the Americans did establish themselves.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And Americana became the epicenter of Confederado life.

[Sunny Dossey]

I often like to compare it to maybe Plymouth Rock here in the United States. It came an area that was known for being a place where the Americans were. And if you wanted to be with the Americans or the Confederates, then that was where you would go.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

In 1888, slavery was abolished in Brazil, the last country in the Western world to do so. The thing that had drawn so many Confederados to Brazil was now gone.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And as time went on, the Confederados who stayed began to assimilate into Brazilian society and intermarrying with Brazilians, speaking Portuguese and redefining what it means to be a Confederado.

[Sunny Dossey]

Initially, of course, they were immigrants from the South. They were Confederates, and with all of that, everything that that entailed. But as time passed, they became known as Americans. It was not named Confederados, it was named Americana because this was the town of the Americans.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Some people in the town of Americana have started calling themselves Confederates again. They hang the Confederate flag proudly.

[Luciana Brito]

So it's a romanticize, it's a fantasy about this Confederated life of this Confederate ancestry.

[Sunny Dossey]

They celebrate it, but at the same time they are fully Brazilian.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Dawsey says it's not because they're advocates for slavery, but that it's an homage to their forefathers who left the south in opposition to the nation America was becoming. And that's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more stories about Americans leaving the country in pursuit of a different way of life, check out the full length episode of Throughline called American Exile. And be sure to join us for a new episode next week.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity, so there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

When we travel to the Great Lakes region in Minnesota to explore how and why the Ojibwe peoples became a nation within a nation in the face of an expanding United States. That story next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moghadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music as always by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner and Lindsey McKenna. We're your hosts, Rund Abdelf and Ramtin Arablouein.

[Ramtin Arablouein]

Thank you for listening.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This message comes from Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Kelly Corrigan. Her podcast Kelly Corrigan wonders has over 20 million downloads and thousands of five star reviews. Kelly is beloved for her smart, candid, timeless questions. Join Kelly and recent guests Steve Kerr, George Saunders and father Greg Boyle for conversations about curiosity, humility and creativity. Tune in to Kelly Corrigan Wonders to be delighted and inspired.

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