True Stories #423 - The South Will Rise Again

What happens when your Confederacy surrenders to the Union but you have no intention of surrendering?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Saint Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. The Confederacy, the pro slavery south of
the late eighteen hundreds, marked by that famous rebel flag
featuring the red background behind a blue diagonal cross, a

(00:24):
symbol which still flies as a proud banner for today's racists,
or at least those ignorant of the flag's meaning. But
way back in the late nineteenth century, if you were
part of the Confederacy which had just surrendered, but you
had no intention of surrendering, you would not accept surrender.
What would you do then? Of course, the American Civil

(00:47):
War had officially begun on the twelfth of April eighteen
sixty one, when the Confederates bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter.
The carnage would continue for four years until Robrobert E.
Lee's surrender to General Grant in April of eighteen sixty five.
And of course, there are many discussions about the actual

(01:08):
root causes for the Civil War, political ends, fierce convictions
that slavery was immoral, a combination of that and other factors.
But on thousands of different battlefields, the Blue and the
Gray faced off in over ten thousand separate engagements and
fifty major battles. Gettysburg alone saw fifty one thousand casualties.

(01:33):
This war was a meat grinder until finally, after six
hundred twenty thousand people had died, the Federal army was
victorious and the rebel states were returned to the Union.
But you might not have heard about the twenty or
so thousand who had fought for the South. They formed
their own racist nation after Lee's surrender. Now, the South

(01:59):
was a culture of agriculture, and many plantation owners and
businessmen simply refused to abide these new constitutional codes of
conduct imposed by the Union. What give up our free labor,
pay workers to harvest in the fields, to build our structures,
clean the stalls, serve the masters. Unthinkable, And so a

(02:24):
large group of rankled rebels formed a post Confederacy confederacy
called the Confederados, and they moved to a new location.
Among those people was an Alabama state senator. His name
was William H. Morris. He relocated with his family, he
brought along the slave workers, He planted cotton on the

(02:47):
new land, and he continued to live as so many
others were continuing to live as if the Civil War
had never happened, and his team had never lost. These
were quote unquote true Americans, establishing a new mini nation,
celebrating American holidays, honoring the nation's founders, as if we

(03:09):
were the United States of Slavery, except that these post
rebellion rebels were no longer in the United States. They
had crossed the border. Twenty thousand Confederates had gone south,
I mean very south. They had established a rebel flag
America in Brazil. That's right, to achieve the nation that

(03:35):
they very much wanted. They left for another nation over
four thousand miles away, and the attraction was understandable. Slavery
was still a thing in Brazil. Low cost farm labor
and sa labor meant that Southern plantation owners could likely
pick up right where they had left off, especially on

(03:57):
the cotton fields, which required back breaking days in the
hot sun. The vision was that these Confederatos would entrench
themselves as the South further south. They would use cheap
labor to gain a market edge over the country they
had just left, and they would attract compatriots other people.

(04:18):
Mass migrants from the American South would see what was
happening in Brazil. And they would leave their homes, and
they would grab their families and their slaves and resources,
and they would go down and join this exciting new America.
That was the dream, but it never really happened. Now,
the town, which had been dubbed Via Americana was an

(04:41):
actual town. It had been incorporated. It was centered around
a train station for easy access. It was populated with
homes and businesses. It had a police force, city services, etc.
But rather than the dream of this mini America expanding
in kind of taking over the country of Brazil, those

(05:03):
Americans were learning to speak Portuguese. They often adapted to
Brazilian customs, They migrated out to other parts of that
country and assimilated, or they just gave up and packed up,
moving back to the United States. And yet for many
years there were celebrations at that place, celebrations of the Confederacy.

(05:28):
And yet many Brazilians claimed not to know the true
meaning of those flying rebel flags, or maybe they had
done like many in the South had done, they assigned
them a different meaning. The rebel flag is all about
family and fraternity or something else. Many historians think that
brazil simply didn't want to acknowledge its own dark history

(05:50):
in the slave trade, so it looked the other way.
But ultimately, in twenty twenty two, the racist rebel flag
was banned out right. Today the festival still exists as
a celebration of American heritage, whatever that means. But now
you know about those who lost the Civil War and

(06:12):
established a new country, the via americanas in the South,
a much much further south that had temporarily risen again
a state of slavers who tried to build upon their
bigotry with a post Civil War American Confederacy built in Brazil.

(06:37):
And that history is a true story True Stories podcast
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