He sent two cartographers to map Amazonia for the future day when U.S. slaveholders would go “with their goods and chattels to settle and to revolutionize and to republicanize and Anglo Saxonize that valley.” Southern plantation owners should resettle there, Maury argued, converting the river basin into the biggest U.S. slave state. Few planters paid attention until the South lost the Civil War. Hoping to re-create slave society in the forest, ten thousand Confederates fled to the Amazon. All but a few hundred quickly fled back. The remaining die-hards formed a sort of micro-satellite of the
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