A new confederacy in Latin America?

Would there be any way of having confederate immigrants after the civil war create their own nation in South America, or take over the government of somewhere in Latin America and have a country kind of like OTL apartheid South Africa, but instead run by confederates. I thought about this after hearing about the small population of "Confederados" in Brazil. Would this work, or is their no way for them to rule like the Afrikaners did in OTL South Africa
 
William Walker tried to create his own empire to Central America and it failed. And I don't think that Confederates have any better lucky. Countries of SA were powerful enough armies stopping them.
 
Would there be any way of having confederate immigrants after the civil war create their own nation in South America, or take over the government of somewhere in Latin America and have a country kind of like OTL apartheid South Africa, but instead run by confederates. I thought about this after hearing about the small population of "Confederados" in Brazil. Would this work, or is their no way for them to rule like the Afrikaners did in OTL South Africa


The number of defeated confederates that fled to South America was too small and they lacked the resources necessary to do any "nation building", as William Walker had done (attempted to do) in the mid-1850s and as you describe. Additionally, I find it highly unlikely that a significant number of southerners are going to leave the US to fight again for their ideals in a far and distant land. Only in a "worst case" harsh and oppressive Reconstruction scenario would there be a mass exodus of southerners from the US after the the war.
 
You might be able to have an exodus of emigres to places like Sonora or Cuba, but there's no real reason for them to form their own nation. In Cuba, landowners from the Old South could flee to keep their slaves, but that's about it.

Also, this scenario comes up a lot and I wonder if it has anything to do with ideas of the Mighty Whitey enforcing his will upon the darkies. Seems suspiciously close to Draka or whatever.
 
You might be able to have an exodus of emigres to places like Sonora or Cuba, but there's no real reason for them to form their own nation. In Cuba, landowners from the Old South could flee to keep their slaves, but that's about it.

Also, this scenario comes up a lot and I wonder if it has anything to do with ideas of the Mighty Whitey enforcing his will upon the darkies. Seems suspiciously close to Draka or whatever.

I'm baffled that someone would make an analogy between the Afrikaners conquering southern Africa, and Confederates conquering 19th century Brazil.

Seriously, WTF? Brazil was a largely agricultural country, and not strong, but it was still an organized 19th century state with an army. Kind of a far cry from native tribes armed with spears. I guess since there's a lot of dark people in Brazil they're all the same. :rolleyes:
 

katchen

Banned
There are a few facts that proponents of large scale slaveholder migration to Latin America forget.
1. The North had a blockade of the South. And the South had a limited number of blockade runners, all of whom were engaged in the lucrative business of smuggling illegal cotton to the UK. What kind of hard money would it take to smuggle slaves and their masters to Cuba let alone Brazil?
2. The Confederacy was not about to permit that kind of hemorrhage of people needed for the war effort. And if they got that far, neither was the US Navy, both because there was a federal law against exporting slaves FROM US territory that had been on the books since the 1790s and because
3. The emigration of slaves and their masters, while providing an apparently painless resolution of the slavery issue for the US as a whole would be an anything but painles affair for US bankers in the North, most of whom, particularly the larger ones, held notes and mortgages on Southern plantations and would then be left with absconded debtors, foreclosed plantation land and slaves that had been pledged as collateral and now were outside of the US and unable to be repossessed. Unless of course, those banks wanted to get involved in Brazillian or Cuban plantations with both feet, something that now carried moral turpitude. So they could be left with plantation land in the South that was unsalable since the Homestead Act meant that the Federal Government was now giving farmland away for free. That could bankrupt banks. To protect them there was no way the US government would permit large scale absconding by plantation owners. And finally
4. After 1865, there was no way that plantation owners could compel African Americans to go to Cuba or Brazil and take up the life of slaves when they were now free under the 13th and now 14th Amendment. And few Southern plantation owners were solvent enough to liquidate their assets and move to Brazil and buy a new plantation and slaves there let alone the time and trouble of learning to speak Portuguese.
 
There are a few facts that proponents of large scale slaveholder migration to Latin America forget.
1. The North had a blockade of the South. And the South had a limited number of blockade runners, all of whom were engaged in the lucrative business of smuggling illegal cotton to the UK. What kind of hard money would it take to smuggle slaves and their masters to Cuba let alone Brazil?
2. The Confederacy was not about to permit that kind of hemorrhage of people needed for the war effort. And if they got that far, neither was the US Navy, both because there was a federal law against exporting slaves FROM US territory that had been on the books since the 1790s and because
3. The emigration of slaves and their masters, while providing an apparently painless resolution of the slavery issue for the US as a whole would be an anything but painles affair for US bankers in the North, most of whom, particularly the larger ones, held notes and mortgages on Southern plantations and would then be left with absconded debtors, foreclosed plantation land and slaves that had been pledged as collateral and now were outside of the US and unable to be repossessed. Unless of course, those banks wanted to get involved in Brazillian or Cuban plantations with both feet, something that now carried moral turpitude. So they could be left with plantation land in the South that was unsalable since the Homestead Act meant that the Federal Government was now giving farmland away for free. That could bankrupt banks. To protect them there was no way the US government would permit large scale absconding by plantation owners. And finally
4. After 1865, there was no way that plantation owners could compel African Americans to go to Cuba or Brazil and take up the life of slaves when they were now free under the 13th and now 14th Amendment. And few Southern plantation owners were solvent enough to liquidate their assets and move to Brazil and buy a new plantation and slaves there let alone the time and trouble of learning to speak Portuguese.

Good points, Katchen.

Yeah, let's look at it from the point of the soon-to-be-defeated wealthy Confederates. In OTL, they can:

1. Abandon their valuable land and take their virtually worthless liquid assets and the very few slaves they can smuggle out to Brazil, where they can continue the plantation slavery lifestyle.

2. Continue to live in the same spot they were before, doing the same thing they were before, only now paying their freedman sharecroppers peanuts to do the same labor they did as slaves.

OTL, only an extreme hatred of the North or an extreme belief that the South was doomed would drive a Confederate plantation owner, even one whose home was destroyed during the war, to migrate all the way to Brazil. In OTL many of the initial Confederato migrants returned to the US after a decade or so when the Southern economy started to improve. In order to have a larger migration of Confederatos, you'd need something like a far more vengeful North trying to confiscate the property of prominent Confederates. But that still wouldn't solve the money problem, or the fact that the rich plantation owners only made up a small portion of the white Southern population. The number of possible Confederatos seems limited from the onset.

And whatever number do migrate, it's a guarantee they're going to be setting up their own communities inside Brazil, not trying to carve off a piece of it or overthrow the Brazilian government. They'll be Portuguese speaking Brazilians within generations. Hell, in OTL the Brazilian government encouraged Confederates to move to Brazil after losing the civil war.
 
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