The confederates who left the USA

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from THROUGHLINE and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in The US that began two hundred fifty 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 start. But for others, they felt like a step in the wrong direction. They had lost relatives and friends to the conflict, felt insecure, didn't know what to expect. Many American Confederates who didn't wanna 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. Slavery in Brazil was really stable. And at that point, the Brazilian empire was supporting Europeans and white Americans to come to Brazil. Today on the show, Rontin 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. The story of the Confederados goes back to the Civil War. After years of bloody fighting, the Confederate states documents, they were desperate. You know, they felt devastated. 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 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people were now free, which created panic among white Southerners. They were really afraid of a wave of violence from the the African American population. 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 eighteen sixties, slavery had been outlawed throughout much of the Western Hemisphere. In Brazil, however, slavery was still in place. Brazil had one of the largest slave population in The Americas, if not the largest. The Civil War ended slavery in The US in 1865. 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 in a process of whitening the population. It's it's really important to say that, idea of white supremacy is transnational. 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. He also saw another …