The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade

by Gerald Horne

During its heyday in the nineteenth century, the African slave trade was fueled by the close relationship of the United States and Brazil. The Deepest South tells the disturbing story of how U.S. nationals - before and after Emancipation -- continued to actively participate in this odious commerce by creating diplomatic, social, and political ties with Brazil, which today has the largest population of African origin outside of Africa itself.
Proslavery Americans began to accelerate their presence in Brazil in the 1830s, creating alliances there—sometimes friendly, often contentious—with Portuguese, Spanish, British, and other foreign slave traders to buy, sell, and transport African slaves, particularly from the eastern shores of that beleaguered continent. Spokesmen of the Slave South drew up ambitious plans to seize the Amazon and develop this region by deporting the enslaved African-Americans there to toil. When the South seceded from the Union, it received significant support from Brazil, which correctly assumed that a Confederate defeat would be a mortal blow to slavery south of the border. After the Civil War, many Confederates, with slaves in tow, sought refuge as well as the survival of their peculiar institution in Brazil.
Based on extensive research from archives on five continents, Gerald Horne breaks startling new ground in the history of slavery, uncovering its global dimensions and the degrees to which its defenders went to maintain it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Brazil, Race, The United States Of America

341 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Dr. Gerald Horne is an eminent historian who is Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. An author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews, his research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, war and the film industry.

Reviews

[JRT · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book the great Gerald Horne analyzes the relationship between the slave societies of Brazil and the United States of America, with a particular interest on how the African slave trade in Brazil propped up and supported the entrenchment of slavery in the American South. Further and more specifically, Horne tells the story of how U.S. Nationals (particularly Northern shipping crews and financiers)—with the federal government turning a blind eye—escalated the *illegal* slave trade to Brazil, and how American Southern enslavers looked upon Brazil as a refuge for the strengthening and continuation of African chattel slavery, both before and after the Civil War.

The backdrop of the analysis is the surging trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans, which although technically outlawed by Great Britain and the U.S. on paper, was still largely being driven by American commerce and industry. Brazil was the main hub for this more illicit trade in Africans, and American slavers identified Brazil as the perfect haven to strengthen the institution of slavery in America (by creating a hemispheric slave empire). Brazil also became a safe-haven for defeated Confederates following the Civil War, and was consistently considered a prime candidate for the forceful relocation of emancipated Africans from North America.

Accordingly, I was struck by just how instrumental U.S. slavers and owners of capital were in proliferating the African slave trade outside of North America. Horne traces colonial America’s ties to slavery in Brazil all the way back to before the United States’ founding, showing how U.S. nationals were at the forefront of the illegal capturing and transporting of Africans from West, Central, and East African colonies to Brazil, fomenting devastation in Africa and dramatically impacting the demographic makeup of Brazil in the process.

I was also fascinated by the role Great Britain played in appearing to oppose and undermine the illicit trade, but not because they valued African life, but because they feared the economic competition. Along the same lines is Horne’s analysis of Senator Wise, a Southern (Virginia) political elite and slaver in his own right who also opposed the Brazilian slave trade because he felt it undermined the prices of enslaved Africans in the United States. With these examples and others, Horne details how some whites were compelled to take the right positions for all the wrong reasons, and virtually all whites (American, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and Brazilian) placed their economic interests above humanity and life.

Ultimately, this book depicts just how varied the interests of the white power structure in the Western Hemisphere were. Some wanted to suppress the slave trade in order to solidify the value of their homegrown slaves, or protect other (competing) forms of forced labor. Others wanted to expand the slave trade in order to strengthen the institution of slavery more generally. What Horne makes clear is that there were no heroes among any of the white power players. The entire power structure conspired to debase and colonize African people, with the United States of American consistently at the forefront of that degradation.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learning more about Brazil.

[Danilo דניאל Lipisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book sheds light on several points of 19th century USA/Brazil relations, relations that were not at all beneficial to Brazil. The example is the flood of slaves brought by americans smugglers after the Brazilian law of 1831 that was supposed to prohibit the entry of slaves into the country. The main points of the book are the desire of the southerners to emigrate to Brazil, which in their conception was a land that they could emulate the South of the US, defeated in the Civil War, and also the desire of American racists to unload "their excess of black human cargo" to the Amazon and even annex Brazil like they did at the period of the Monroe Doctrine. It is a book that Brazilian universities (I hope) should use in their Bibliography for the History of Brazil, especially with regard to the History of Black Slavery in Brazil

[Marcus Bourn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very interesting and a book that really explained things for me. I would recommend this book for anyone that wants to get a grasp of what happened to the plantation owners in the Southern US AFTER the Civil War. I also really enjoyed the early insights of the slave routes to Brazil and the United States involvement in the slave trade. I am not sure this book is for everyone, but it is a good book.