SUB THESIS Philippe | scvpalmbeach

The negotiations that Hastings, like other ex-Confederates made with the Brazilian and other governments following the Civil War, therefore did not emerge only as a consequence of the Confederacy’s defeat. One of Maury’s ideas that preceded the Civil War involved transferring enslaved people from the US to Brazil. In the 1850s, Maury anticipated the abolition of slavery and was concerned about how fellow southerners would respond to this drastic change in their lives. He could not conceive of a world in which southerners would willingly give up their enslaved property without receiving compensation, so he envisioned that Brazilians would pay US citizens for their human property, thus satisfying their interests in the perpetuation and growth of slavery in their country. His plan, therefore, would ensure the continued survival of slavery in the hemisphere, no matter what legal actions the US would take to end its perpetuation within its borders. Maury’s objective was not to promote slavery’s reduction or abolition in the US, but rather its perpetuation, choosing Brazil as the appropriate “safety valve” for US slaves. He viewed the Amazon as “empty,” a perfect coincidence for his slaveholding compatriots. Maury would have been aware of the 1850 Brazilian law that banned the slave trade, so his recommendation that the US transfer slaves to Brazil suggests a belief that such a move would not represent a violation of law. In 1831, the Brazilian government had legally freed all slaves that arrived from outside of Brazil and enacted penalties against slave smugglers. The law was not enforced, however, as the interests of the Brazilian elite lay in the preservation of slavery. In fact, a significant black-market slave trade began, with an average of 30,000 to 40,000 slaves being smuggled into the country every year between 1840 and 1850.65 This bespeaks of a worldview in which national borders were fluid, especially when it came to the question of slavery. The Amazon, according to Maury, was slave territory, and therefore, a transferal of US slaves there would be a transferal of slaves from one slave territory to another. The question of Brazilian sovereignty over Amazonian territory did not factor into his project.

Maury was not alone in this. Slaveholding US citizens had long shown a deep concern regarding the fate of slavery in Brazil. Matthew Karp writes that “the most pronounced characteristic of proslavery foreign policy was neither a ravenous quest for fresh slave territory nor a desperate search for possible new slave states. Over and above these desires stood the need to protect systems of slave property across the hemisphere.”66 That is, US slaveholders felt secure in the future of slavery as an economic system as long as they saw evidence that it was thriving elsewhere. Brazil was one of the chief places they turned for evidence of this. Maury’s plan, therefore, echoes Secretary of State Abel Upshur’s statement in 1843 regarding the British attempt to abolish slavery “throughout the American continent.”67 Speaking of Brazil, he wrote that “what ever affects [slavery] in a neighboring country, necessarily affects it incidentally among us.”68 This meant not only that a threat to end slavery in Brazil was a threat to its continuity in the US. It also signified that the continued Brazilian reliance on slavery implied the survival of a larger hemispheric system of slavery. The US had neither to colonize Brazilian territory nor to violate Brazilian law in order to perpetuate US slavery there. Brazil, when convenient, was an extension of the US. Though Maury’s plan never received enough support to have been viable, the migration of his ex-Confederate compatriots was a profound reflection of the reallife implications of such a vision.

Horne articulates a connection between the fact that “those who had been so pro-Brazilian slavery were equally anti-U.S. after the Civil War.” 69 This does not imply that those who were pro-Brazilian slavery had always been anti-US, but rather that as circumstances shifted, so too did the allegiances of those who believed they had the most to gain and lose from changes in official policy positions regarding slavery. The development of the Confederate States was not a reflection of the visceral hatred of southerners against the United States, but rather a response to what they saw as an unacceptable attack on the institution on which their entire economic system was based.70 The same logic, then, can be applied to the actions of Maury, Hastings, and other promoters of emigration, and the thousands of emigrants themselves, who saw in Brazil an opportunity to continue to profit from the same system they, their families, friends, and ancestors, had relied upon since long before the very founding of the United States.

Maury’s designs on Brazil as a “safety valve” for US slavery were not exclusive to him. One similarly-minded US citizen was prominent South Carolinian James Gadsden (1788-1858). Gadsden was a colonel in the US Army who served under General and later President Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812 and from 1816 to 1821 at the US southern border, fighting in Spanish Florida in battles with Native Americans and maroons. After leaving army service, Gadsden became a planter in Florida, and was appointed to a commission to help in the expulsion of the Seminole Peoples from Florida and southern Georgia along what would become known as the “Trail of Tears.” He went on to become the president of the South Carolina Railroad company, where he promoted the construction of a transcontinental railroad through the southern US. In response to the admission of California to the Union as a state where slavery would not be permitted, Gadsden became an advocate for South Carolina’s secession from the US eleven years before this state would become the first state to do so.

In 1852, he developed a plan he shared with the Brazilian government to establish a company that would send slaves from the US to Brazil.71 The plan could not be realized, however because of the 1831 Brazilian law regarding slavery, though Gadsden, like Maury, never demonstrated any recognition of it. Gadsden went on to negotiate the Gadsden Treaty as a US diplomat to Mexico. The treaty defined the US-Mexico border and resulted in another major undertaking under Gadsden’s name – the Gadsden Purchase – in which the US acquired much of present-day New Mexico and Arizona from the Mexico in 1854.

While Gadsden himself was the owner of 235 slaves, ambitions to settle enslaved people in the Amazon, however, were not exclusive to southerners or slaveholders.72 Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) had a long-standing interest in promoting US black settlement abroad as a solution to the problem of slavery. It was not until he became president, however, that he was able to put these plans into action. The abolition of slavery became imminent with the start of the Civil War. As individuals like Hastings developed their own expansionist plans for the Confederacy, in the throes of the Civil War, Lincoln and others were crafting their own colonization plans. These plans had been in the developing stages since before the start of the war in 1861 and the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

The Lincoln administration, however, was not the first to actively consider black colonization. The idea had, indeed, held an important place in US politics for much of the nineteenth century. It was discussed for the first time in the US House of Representatives in 1816 at a meeting in which prominent politician and planter from Kentucky, Henry Clay, defended his support of colonization by declaring that it would purge the country “of a useless and pernicious, if not a dangerous portion of its population,” referring to free black people.73 He also suggested that wherever they settled, presumably somewhere on the African continent, free blacks would spread “the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted portion of the globe.”74 Colonization, in this case, would be beneficial not only to the US by removal of an unwanted group, but would also serve to better the foreign society they would be joining.

Given their exposure to US civilization, free US blacks would be superior than the locals at the site of the imagined colony. Clay does not specify what this means to him, and many other promoters of colonization would make similar arguments without articulating specifics about what functions black colonies would serve, beyond removal from the US. In his book The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia, Claude Clegg writes that “the paradoxical language of Clay and other colonizationists regarding free African Americans would, for decades to come, incorporate a tortured logic geared more toward effecting their ends than to proving the intellectual cogency of their position.”75 Rather than serving to diminish their movement, however, Clegg shows how the vagueness of colonization propositions actually made possible their persistent ubiquity in US politics. Colonization had a wide appeal that transcended regional and political boundaries, and it suited the interests of groups with diverging ideologies. That is, the movement was simultaneously pro-slavery and abolitionist. Constant in all this, however, was, as Clegg puts it, a fundamental belief in “irremediable difference, indeed dysfunction” brought about by the presence of free black Americans.76 In order for colonization to be understood as a necessary solution to a problem that was impossible to ignore, the black and white races had to be categorized “as absolutely distinct and dissimilar in nature, interests, and aspirations, and consequently unsuited to coexist as equals.”77

It was under the influence of this ideology that in 1861, Lincoln began publicly advocating for colonization outside the borders of the United States. He presented this option as a viable mechanism for winning the support of the border slave states of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and later West Virginia. Lincoln hoped that slaveowners in these states would agree to relinquish ownership of their slaves and resettle them in colonization programs abroad “in a climate congenial to them” in exchange for monetary compensation.78 In March 1861, a month before the first shots of the war would be fired, Elisha Crosby became US Minister to Guatemala, where he would work with the Guatemalan president to design a colonization site there. 79 Another member of Lincoln’s cabinet proposed colonizing parts of southern Mexico that were in need of laborers, while another proposed a colony in the Chiriquí province in Panama where a US company hoped to buy land and profit from its coal.80

Members of Lincoln’s administration began preparing in earnest for the abolition of slavery across the United States after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. While plans for colonization only took off following this new policy, Lincoln had long been an advocate for black emigration and colonization, favoring the creation of the state of Liberia. Historian Robert May has argued that Lincoln “wanted pockets of Latin America preserved for U.S. free black laborers.”81 That spring, as a part of Lincoln’s colonization program, 453 US blacks left from Virginia to the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache.82 US businessman Bernard Kock obtained a ten-year lease on Île-à-Vache from the Haitian government. The deal stipulated that the black emigrants would become Haitian citizens upon arrival on the island and would work cutting timber, a percentage of which Kock would give to Haitian authorities.83 Lincoln eventually approved a smaller-scale version of Kock’s original plan. The plan proved to be a failure, in part due to the lack of communication and full agreement of Haitian authorities, and about 400 of the emigrants were transported back to the US in February 1864.84

Lincoln’s Secretary of State James Seward was a fierce advocate of US interventionism abroad. May describes Seward’s approach to foreign policy as opposite from Lincoln’s in many ways. According to May, while Lincoln never explicitly mentioned the Monroe Doctrine and his political values existed in contrast with those of his predecessors who strongly favored proslavery expansionism, Seward encouraged a much more interventionist line.85 When it came to potential courses of action following the end of slavery, however, Seward did not believe as strongly as Lincoln in the necessity of resettling freed slaves on foreign soil. Black colonization, however, was essential to Lincoln’s vision for the course of the war, and Seward, among others, was responsible for directing various individuals under his supervision to conceive of new options for the transfer of freed slaves. Possible countries included British Honduras, Haiti, Liberia, Panama, Nicaragua, British Guinea, and Costa Rica. The plan that won the most traction with Lincoln was that which was crafted by his Secretary of the Interior Caleb Smith. If Lincoln did not express his hopes for colonization as a product of his belief in Manifest Destiny, Smith did, arguing that if his proposal for a colony in Chiriquí were to come to fruition, the black colonists would establish an “influence” there that would “most probably secure to us the absolute control of the country.”86 Smith does not establish how the US government would formulate the political or economic relationship between the black colonists and the US. Instead, Smith merely implies that the US government could wield its desire to reduce the black population in the US in order to strengthen a US hold on foreign territories, where he hoped they might potentially establish sovereignty, though he never clarified how black colonization would enable this.

It was another strong believer in Manifest Destiny, Lincoln’s appointee to Minister to Brazil James Watson Webb (1802-1884), who would propose a colonization program in Brazil to Secretary Seward. Echoing William H. Edwards, the former US Consul to Buenos Aires in 1847, Webb argued that due to climate similarities between the Amazon and the US South, the Amazon would be the perfect location for black resettlement and labor.87 Webb proposed the creation of a “joint stock colonization company” that would facilitate the arrival of 50,000 black colonists in the Amazon, thus cheaply blessing the US with the “riddance of curse” – its freed slave population – and providing Brazil with valuable laborers who would win the equality granted by Brazilian citizenship.88

In his proposal, Webb portrayed Brazil as being in urgent need of a solution to “the labor question,” given that slavery there was on the decline.89 When Brazil officially abolished the slave trade in 1850, the elites that governed Brazil began planning new ways to acquire labor. One of the consequences of the quest for new sources of labor, which elites agreed should emanate from European immigration, was the Land Law of 1850. The law made it so that individuals could acquire public lands through purchase rather than through grants or squatting. One of the principal objectives of this law was the promotion of European colonization. In order to facilitate it, the law stipulated that the funds from taxes on property registration and public lands sales be used exclusively to finance land-surveying and the immigration of “free colonists.”90 Supporters of the Land Law were desperate to subsidize the acquisition of free labor in the face of the end of the slave trade.91 Opponents of the law were more concerned with the question of colonization than of labor. Instead, some proposed that the government provide land grants to immigrants.92 Tavares Bastos, the same politician who had worked tirelessly to open the Amazon to international commerce and navigation, believed that Amazonia, out of all of Brazil’s regions, was the most in need of receiving immigrants.93

The decline of slavery, in Webb’s telling, is left disconnected from the abolition of the slave trade. Instead, Webb attributes it to the superiority of Brazilian slaves in contrast to the “ignorant and docile” slaves supplied to the US and West Indies.94 Their superior nature made slavery intolerable to them, Webb explained, leading to an ongoing “organized conspiracy to prevent the increase of slavery by the mothers committing infanticide.”95 In reality, the end of the slave trade caused the slave population to decrease because of the high slave mortality rate in Brazil.96

Webb did point out an important aspect of slavery in Brazil which was the prevalence of slave resistance, especially in the form of quilombos, autonomous or semi-autonomous maroon communities. Quilombos were present throughout the country, including in the Amazonian region that Webb hoped to populate with slaves. The decline of slavery, for Webb was a “great evil” to which the solution was US black colonization, of equal benefit to all parties involved – the freedmen, “the philanthropist, the capitalist, and the governments of the United States and Brazil.”97 Aware of the Brazilian pursuit of new sources of labor, Webb represented his personal ambition to rid his country of part of its black population as a service to Brazil. Because of the growth of coffee production in Brazil, coffee growers in the southern provinces of Brazil were importing slaves from the norther provinces. Given the severe threat of the loss of slaves in northern Brazil and of “negro insurrection,” Webb believed that the Brazilian government had every incentive to desire the US government’s offer of “experienced and practical, negro labor.”98 The only means by which Brazil’s “wild lands, now utterly valueless to her” could at last become valuable was if the country placed “upon them the proper laborer for their cultivation.”99

While Webb was not concerned with using freed slaves as cultivators for the purposes of the US government, he suggested the Amazon as a perfect location for black colonization because of his adherence to racist beliefs. In accordance with the popular racial ideology of the time, Webb believed that black people possessed certain racial traits, opposite from those of whites that made them particularly suitable to certain climates, and therefore, to certain places on the globe – that is, the tropics.100 He was joined by many other prominent US citizenss, like those mentioned previously, across the political spectrum, who shared almost identical beliefs about race. Webb’s racist attitudes influenced him to desire to remove black people from the US and his solution to their undesired presence in the country was equally grounded in racism. Like Lincoln and Maury, Webb never held slaves and expressed interest in bringing about the end of the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself. Yet, his anti-slavery views, like those of Lincoln and Maury, did not emanate from a belief in racial equality. Lincoln, Webb, and the other men with which they surrounded themselves in the Union government, were the natural enemies of the staunch Confederate Matthew Maury, who devoted his life throughout the Civil War to playing his part to sabotage the Union war effort. Yet the racial logics of these men did not significantly diverge, and by extension, neither did their beliefs about possible solutions to the problems of slavery and its abolition.

It is here where the ideologies and policy proposals of Maury and Webb intersect. Maury was considered a scientific authority across the US for his role in the study of oceanography, meteorology, and geology, among other disciplines. Many consider Maury, the first head of the US Naval Observatory, as well as one of the founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to be the father of modern oceanography. While Maury lauded the richness of the Amazon, he did not believe that the land provided suitable living conditions for white people. Black people, inherently destined for servitude under the white race, possessed a genetic makeup that made them the perfect instruments of the white race in the cultivation of this land, a sentiment with which Webb agreed. These views were founded in the authoritative science of the time, and the reception of such science was not a function of the North-South or Union-Confederacy divide. Both Maury and those involved in the black colonization debate in the Union during the Civil War subscribed to scientific beliefs about the relationship between climate and race, accepting as true that “the black race” was better suited to life in the tropics due to the hot climate.101 Lincoln and his administration are treated as heroes in the popular US imagination, but they shared racist ideologies with those who are more universally accepted as racist figures. This sort of ideology was anything but marginal; rather, it influenced the ambitions and decisions of those in the highest positions of power.

It also fit into a larger way of thinking about the Amazon that prevailed in European and US thought and science. Susanna Hecht explains how scientists and collectors in the European and Anglophone tradition developed a narrative about Amazonia that positioned it as a purely “natural” place rather than one that was shaped by human effort.102 These travelers depicted Amazonian locals in their writings as “gracious hosts, earnest bearers, slaves, helpers, or rowers and watermen” who they did not view as active agents in interacting with and altering the landscape.103 Hecht writes that the colonial imperative of scientific expeditions continued after the colonial era, or rather that “scientific institutions had replaced the coffers of kings.”104 While many of the most prominent scientists to travel through the Amazon “were not formally staking claims,” “they were providing information…to a larger imperial apparatus.”105 The scientists were joined by “adventure tourists” who reproduced the knowledge of the day regarding race, climate, and the tropics.106

Assertions about race in the tropics are ubiquitous in discussions about black colonization in the Union. Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin (1815-1897), a Lincoln devotee, pointed to the Haitian Revolution as a case of “the laws of climate” overtaking “the white man.”107 One of colonization’s most vocal advocates, Frank Blair, in fact, used Maury’s findings about the Amazon to bolster his arguments. Blair was a US Representative from Missouri who remained loyal to the Union and joined the Union Army in 1862. He opposed slavery and proposed colonization in Central or South America as the right course of action after emancipation. In a speech delivered to the House of Representatives in 1858, Blair cited Maury’s paper the “Valley of the Amazon,” which spoke of “the white man’s” inability to alter the wilderness there, to support his call for black people to be settled in the tropics.108 He then cites an article from the New York newspaper Courier and Enquirer, edited by James Webb as further evidence. The article argues that black people should be transferred to the tropical regions of the continent, as, according to “the same law of nature which has given the blacks exclusive possession of corresponding latitudes in Africa,” they would replace white people.109 White people were essentially unfit to inhabit the land, according to the article’s writer, as proven by the fact that they had never succeeded in supplanting “the Indians of the tropics.”110 The extensive reach of these beliefs shows the deep roots that US views about Brazil and the Amazon had in US politics. Brazil and the Amazon consistently appeared in US discourse as part of a broader discourse about slavery, abolition, and expansionism.

The Plow, the Rifle, and Religion

Maury believed that Brazil and the Amazon could become extensions of a US empire. He was part of a post-Civil War movement that ought to expand outside of the physical borders of the US. Maury’s ideas, however, had their origins in the antebellum era. They were consistent with pre-Civil War notions about empire and the elements that constituted it. An understanding of the Amazon as empty wilderness played a key role in the formulation of colonization projects in the region. Maury, and others like him, relied on a long tradition of writing about the Amazon, particularly dominant in the nineteenth century, to come to their conclusions. Maury’s writings present just one example of how one man proposed to shape the Amazonian landscape based on these widespread and entrenched notions.

The Amazon, both as an empty wilderness, and as a potential part of a larger sphere of US influence, made it an ideal tool to use in the resolution of the “question of slavery” in the US. Maury presented the transferal of US slaves to the Amazon as a way in which the burdens of slavery in the US could be alleviated. In doing so, he also revealed his vision of a borderless South.

Maury attempted, however, to show that his colonial ideas were not efforts to expand the practice of slavery. He viewed himself as merely ensuring the normal functioning of a system that was already in place. “I am not seeking to make slave territory out of free, or to introduce slavery where there is none. Brazil is as much of a slave country as Virginia, and the valley of the Amazon is Brazilian,” he declared.111 Therefore, to send US slaves to Brazil would be no different than the internal transfer and trade of enslaved people that happened with full legality within US borders. Though Maury labelled slavery a “curse,” he did not dare to envision the abolition of slavery. He argued in 1855 that in his state of Virginia, if slavery were to be announced illegal, Virginians would leave the state or sell their slaves further into the South.112 Maury took this claim to an even more extreme conclusion. He foresaw a war as inevitable if US slavery were threatened, and he believed that slaveholders, “in order to prevent this war of races and its horrors,” would “in self-defence [sic], be compelled to conquer parts of Mexico and Central America, and make slave territory of that which is now free.”113 In his mind, then, it was better to send black laborers to regions south of the US border with the agreement of foreign governments, than for US citizens to invade foreign territory and institute slavery where it was unwanted.

As “we must deal with mankind as they are, and not as we would have them,” the natural response to this predicament was to look to a far-away place like the Amazon that, according to him, demanded black labor.114 The inhabitants of the Amazon, Maury claimed, would always depend on slave labor, and the Amazon forest itself could only be properly subdued through black labor.115 According to him, “Brazil is a slave country, and all the travelers who go there, I am told, say that the black man, and he alone, is capable of subduing the forests there.”116 If this was true, then the only question left to ask was whether enslaved labor would be purchased directly from Africa or from within the Americas. If from within the Americas, then not only would the number of slaves in the world not increase, but it would also “be relieving our own country of the slaves, it would be hastening the time of our deliverance, and it would be putting off indefinitely the horrors of that war of races which, without an escape, is surely to come upon us.”117

While Maury wished to avoid the coming bloodshed that the battle to continue slavery would incite, he also argued for the perpetuation of white supremacy in the same place he hoped to deposit black slaves. If slavery might be reaching its end point, the system that enabled it was not. Maury wrote: “For more than three hundred years the white man has been established in that Amazonian basin, and for more than three hundred years it has remained a howling wilderness.”118 This statement, which reveals a belief that Brazilians of European descent who lived in the Amazon were indeed white, also suggests a hierarchy within his conception of those who were white. Brazilian whites had failed thus far to cultivate the Amazon. This did not imply that no white man was matched to the task. He did not believe that the entire white race should be excluded from the opportunity to colonize the Amazon. What the region needed, in fact, was specifically a white US presence. According to him, “in the valley of the Amazon, the plow is unknown and the American rifle and axe, the great implements of settlement and civilization, are curiosities.”119 Here, Maury mimics O’Sullivan in his listing of two crucial elements of successful US occupation of the western territories – the plow and the rifle. What Maury saw when he turned his gaze towards the Amazon was a landscape that had many of the same characteristics that previous foreign observers had noted. He also saw a land that was virtually empty, just as other lands conquered by the US had previously been viewed. Maury’s in his belief was specifically in the supremacy of US white settlers – the Amazon’s only and last chance for progress and cultivation after the failures of indigenous and European peoples. Hecht demonstrates how Maury’s racist beliefs complemented commonplace nineteenth century myths about the Amazon as bountiful but empty. English naturalist Henry Walter Bates, a prominent traveler to and writer about the Amazon, claimed that “everything in Amazonia remains to be done.”120 According to Hecht, “the tropes of emptiness, primitivity, and incapacity” combined with a new set of logics – economic, political, racial, and religious – to create what she terms the nineteenth century “Amazon Scramble.”121

Maury’s belief in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race was shared by many during this era. This ideology became dominant in connection with ideas of Manifest Destiny during the Mexican War. By 1850, according to Reginald Horsman, US Anglo-Saxons had come to be view themselves as “a separate, innately superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world.”122 US citizens were choosing a narrative of their own history that would justify and glorify their current objectives of global conquest. Horsman writes: “From their own successful past as Puritan colonists, Revolutionary patriots, conquerors of a wilderness, and creators of an immense material prosperity, the Americans had evidence plain before them that they were a chosen people.”123

One of the benefits Maury expected this chosen people might find in South America was gold. According to him, the Andean gold that could potentially be discovered might rival the quantity present in California. Therefore, one consequence of US conquest of the Amazon was the possession of this gold, which could flow directly to the Atlantic. This claim speaks to the permanence of the myth of El Dorado, which held there was a golden city in the Amazon and other areas. This myth dates back to Columbus’ claim that more gold and items of value could be found south of the equator than elsewhere, a belief that would go on to influence European and US thought.124 The southern journal that published much of Maury’s writings about the region disseminated the idea of the Amazon as “a gold and diamond country.”125

According to Maury, the status quo precluded the possibility of profiting from this gold, as it was to be found in “Indian country,” the inhabitants of which lacked the “energy and enterprise” to do the work necessary for it.126 The Andes, however, were not the focus of Maury’s vision; the Amazon Valley was. There too, the local inhabitants had failed to properly benefit from its resources. After three hundred years of unsuccessful European and indigenous attempts at “contending with the forests,” “no impression” had been made.127 Other than this myth, there would be no reason for Maury to believe that there were large gold deposits in the Amazon. The solution to the seeming immutability of the Amazon, though, was clear and singular: “If ever the vegetation there is subdued and brought under; if ever the soil be reclaimed from the forest the reptile and the wild beast, and subjected to the hoe, it must be done by the African, with the American axe in his hand.”128

The benefits, too, of a US presence in the Amazon, would be extended to the US in general, and not just to the southern slaveholder. The enormous wealth this project would bring about was so evidently appealing to Maury he believed it would not “fail to find favor with every true hearted American, whether he come from the North, or the South, the East or the West.”129 This was the case because his project would connect the US directly to a whole other section of the globe: “Settlement there, will transfer the productions of India and place them in Amazonia at our feet; so that the ships of all nations that may flock there to buy and carry them away, will have to pass by our gates.”130 Rather than privileging the southern US so as to disadvantage other regions, his plan would unify the nation; the only factor that privileged the South in this scheme was its greater geographical proximity to South America.

In Maury’s worldview, “the South” was not limited to the southern US. Johnson, in fact, argues that what was now viewed as “the South” emerged entirely of the secession of a certain conglomeration of states from the Union, rather than the pre-Civil War reality. Instead, Johnson proposes that it might be more helpful to ask “where Southerners (and slaveholders in particular) thought they were going and how they thought they could pull it off in the first place” in the years before the war.131 According to Johnson, in the 1850s, “many of those who would later become Confederates were busily imagining and promoting a vision of a pro-slavery future – of pro-slavery time and space.”132 This harkens back to the notion of border fluidity to which Maury seemed to subscribe.

Maury’s writing betrays a vision of a pro-slavery space that was expansive and that he only vaguely defined. In an 1845 paper entitled “The Commercial Prospects of the South” and presented to the Virginia Commercial Convention, Maury first proclaimed “Let the South look to the South! Behold the valley of the Amazon!”133 He repeated the same entreaty in his 1852 paper published in DeBow’s Review in 1852, imploring twice that “the South not forget to look to the South.”134 Rather than articulate a relationship between different sovereign nations, Maury implies that two slaveholding regions, separated by national and geographical boundaries, are in fact, parts of an expansive, unified system. The southern US and the Amazon were one and the same.

Maury’s arguments show that he was dedicated to a vision that was deeply rooted in the US tradition of expansionism. He was committed to ideals that were not confined to the borders of the nation. Walter Johnson argues that for Maury, “space was not defined by politics, and it was neither national nor regional; the economy produced space, rather than being bounded by it.”135 That is, at the moment at which the Amazon began to figure centrally in Maury’s imagination, many US southerners were conceiving of ways to respond to the heavy reliance of their economy on exports. Maury understood the slavery-reliant economy of the southern US to be under threat, and in response, he was resolved to extend US slavery into a greater South beyond US national borders. The Amazon river, in fact, was an “appendage” of the Mississippi, and by connecting the two, the “American Mediterranean” (the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean) would become the center of a new empire.136 This new empire would also be connected to Asia, as Maury hoped that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would be joined via the Isthmus of Panama.137

When Maury compared the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon Valley, he participated in a long US tradition of invoking the Mississippi Valley as the central target of expansionism. Before US leaders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson began envisioning and enacting the expansion of the US empire into the Mississippi Valley, it was the French who dreamed of its annexation. Napoleon thought of the region as a provider of food for the enslaved people employed in sugar cultivation in the French colony of St. Domingue.138 Before its fall as a result of the Haitian Revolution, St. Domingue had been one of the world’s most lucrative colonies, and after its fall, the Mississippi Valley lost much of its value to Napoleon.139 The Valley then became of principal interest to one of the chief architects of the early United States – Thomas Jefferson. In Jefferson’s view, by expanding the domain of the US into the Valley, the fledgling nation could create an “empire for liberty.”140 This liberty was the liberty of white male farmers whose livelihoods would depend on slave labor. In this way, the story of interest in expansion into the Mississippi Valley was inextricable from the expansion of the institution of slavery. Emphasis on the natural rights of US Anglo-Saxons would provide the perfect alibi for the institution’s expansion into new lands.

Belief in the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, however, did by no means develop exclusively in the US. As Maury and so many others were articulating a global role for the US that was justified by the racial superiority of the US citizen.

Brazil was advocating for European immigration based on similar racial premises. As Brazil prepared for the abolition of slavery, it searched for a new labor force that would supplant the enslaved one. The determination on the part of those like Maury to mold Brazil and the Amazon on the basis of their racial ideology, then, coincided with the desires of elite Brazilians who had the power to act on such beliefs.141 Viotti Da Costa writes that the Brazilian Empire prided itself on its adherence to liberalism, which served as a “utopia for the elites,” but as “empty rhetoric” for the large majority of the population.142 Instead of seeking radical change, those in power blamed the empire’s problems on Brazilian “backwardness.”143 For the most part, she argues, the colonial structure, dependent on slave labor and the patronage system, persisted following independence.144 The dependence on slave labor, as well as the attitude towards land it produced, fundamentally connected the US and Brazil. In the backlands of colonial Brazil, “anyone who was able to fight the Indians and survive in the wilderness could secure a piece of land.”145 Like in the US, land ownership, attainable through domination of indigenous people, was central to conceptions of the Brazilian citizen. The power of Brazilian elites also resembled that of US southern planters, though slaveholding Brazilians controlled the entire country, in contrast with the regional confines of slavery’s direct practice in the US. In the 1850s after abolishing the slave trade, “Brazil’s ruling planters worked consciously to duplicate the thriving US model: a slave society that could reproduce itself through better slave management, the internal slave trade, and a close slaveholding grip on the power of the central government.”146 “No two countries in the world have greater mutual interests than this beautiful Empire and our own Republic,” proclaimed Robert G. Scott, the Virginian serving as U.S. consul in Rio de Janeiro. The reason was simple: “[t]hey are the two greatest and only powers on the globe with negro slavery recognized and governed by law.”147

In Maury’s argument for the changing of Brazil’s laws concerning foreign access to the Amazon, he refers to the context of US expansion westward in order to prove his point about the absurdity of the limitations of these laws. “Suppose the United States had established military posts in California to prevent the people there from going there and digging for gold, what would have been the condition of that State now in comparison to what it is? It would have been as the interior of Brazil is now.”148 What he saw as the Brazilian government’s refusal to promote commerce amounted to a crime given that Brazil was “the finest country in the world.”149 Brazilian law as it stood was insignificant to Maury in that he viewed it as an obstacle to overcome in the pursuit of his dream.

Though this dream was specifically a US one, its implications extended far beyond the nation’s boundaries. Nícia Villela Luz claims that Maury saw himself as a pioneer in the model of Christopher Columbus. He, too, would introduce the world to a new territory rich in resources, but in need of being domesticated and civilized.150 Maury articulated the fated conquest of the Amazon as part and parcel of a longer arc of history. As he saw it, the US was still animated by the “spirit which moved men in the days of knight-errantry, which drove them in the time of the crusades, and which at a later period, carried them across the seas and conducted them to the New World in search of adventure and geographical discovery.”151 If this very same spirit was “permitted upon the wings of free navigation to enter the grand river basins of South America,” it would “cause the wilderness there to blossom.”152 Brazil owed it not just to the US to allow US steamships up the Amazon but also to “the good of commerce, science, and the world.”153 The US had a destiny, in which the Amazon figured importantly, and it was the obligation of all involved to take the necessary steps to fulfill it. Maury consistently articulated his vision of the Amazon as something greater than simply an economic project. Not only did commerce demand the free navigation of the Amazon, but so did the “necessities of Christendom.”154

While Maury named Christendom as one of the larger motivating factors in the need to colonize and civilize Brazil, US Protestant missionaries had already been articulating the need for Christianization as a necessary tool in the promotion of civilization. Christianization, for them, implicated missionizing Catholics, as they did not view Catholicism as properly Christian. They considered Catholics as part of an inferior religion. Paul Naish argues that, during the 1850s, as the debate about slavery intensified in the US, pro-slavery southerners used anti-Catholic sentiment to bolster their arguments in favor of US slavery, as opposed to the slavery practiced in Latin American countries where Catholicism was the dominant religion.155 While Maury spoke of an expansive south that was limited by geopolitical borders, many southerners spoke disparagingly of slavery in places like Brazil and Cuba. Instead of articulating commonalities with other slave societies, southerners more often chose to distance themselves from Latin American countries. Religious difference was key in establishing this distance. Naish writes that southerners’ “enmity to Catholicism” was “reflexive and unselfconscious.”156 It was also racialized, as descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists were considered to be tainted by the Muslim and Jewish blood of their ancestors.157 Maury, like other similarly-minded polticians, targeted the Amazon not for its use of slave labor, but for what he saw as the unfulfilled potential of the land. In focusing on the land itself, these southerners ignored the question of the usefulness of slave labor in Amazonia. As a promoter of emigration after the Civil War, Hastings would perpetuate this willful ignorance.

Protestant churches had chosen the heavily Catholic Brazil as a target for proselytization and sent agents there for such purposes. In fact, one of the chief sources of information about Brazil in the US was a book entitled Brazil and the Brazilians written by Daniel Kidder, a New Yorker, who upon graduating from Wesleyan University in 1836, entered the Methodist ministry and traveled throughout Brazil on a mission. The book was widely read, especially in the South. Several editions were published, including new ones in 1866, 1867, and 1868, when southerners were considering emigration. In the book, Kidder sets forth a narrative of Brazilian history that commends the empire for its relative progress given its Portuguese origins. He argues that Brazil stands out amongst other nations of the “Latin race,” which he denotes as inferior and therefore not worthy of comparison to those of the Anglo-Saxon race.158 Like Maury, he believed Brazilian backwardness to be at fault for the large swaths of yet un-surveyed and uncultivated land existent in the country.159 Also like Maury, Kidder believed that immigrants were necessary in order to make proper use of this land and for Brazil to achieve its great destiny.160 At the same time, Kidder echoed the belief that, in the Amazon, the tropical climate might prevent permanent white settlement, writing that “whether the Amazon region...can ever be thickly peopled by a more Northern race, remains to be seen. It is in one range of temperature…and is as yet an almost unbroken wilderness.”161

The first Methodist reverend to visit Brazil, two years before Kidder, was Tennessean Fountain Pitts. Writing from Rio de Janeiro in 1835, Pitts claimed that the city – this “thoroughfare of Papal delusion, and mart of slaves and coffee – was “the most unchristian place” he had ever encountered, while expressing hope that “the day of gospel light will soon dawn upon” it.162 Pitts would later go on to become a chaplain in the Confederate Army and his son, Josiah would follow Hastings to Santarém. Fountain Pitts’ church, following his trip to South America, resolved that proselytization was the duty of all, as “every genuine lover of freedom should aid in the advancement of a religion that has always been the precursor of civilization, literature, and the rights of man.”163 Maury, then, was not alone in articulating progress in Brazil and the demands of Christianity as mutually dependent.

Like Hastings, Maury’s ideas for a different future for the US, however, were not relegated to his imagination. As mentioned before, he manipulated his influence in the upper echelons of US government to bring to fruition a government-funded exploration of the Amazon in the hopes of convincing the Brazilian government of the advantages of opening the river to international navigation and commerce. His goal was also to reveal these benefits to the US public for which the Amazon was largely a far-off land of little consequence to the US.

In 1851, Maury’s brother-in-law Colonel William Herndon (1813-1857) set off on an expedition that would begin to concretize Maury’s plans. Herndon’s expedition was directed by the Secretary of the Navy under President Millard Filmore. Herndon’s report was submitted to the both houses of congress. The Secretary of the Navy ordered that twenty thousand additional copies of it be published.164 Before setting off, Maury made it clear to Herndon that this journey was to create “the first link in that chain which is to end in the establishment of the Amazonian Republic.”165 Repeating a favorite phrase of his, Maury entreated his brother-in-law to do the preliminary work required to establish the dominion of “a race that has energy and enterprise.”166

PICTURE

Upon their return to the United States, Herndon and Gibbon, each wrote their own accounts of their time on the Amazon. Herndon’s mission was described primarily as a scientific and commercial one, but he did not limit himself to observations of that nature, and neither did his second-in-command Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon in his separate account. Herndon’s book would become a national bestseller.167 In the final section of his report, Herndon concluded that there was a “bond” between Brazil and the US given they were both slaveholding nations.168 While acknowledging that the US had to respect Brazil’s wishes, Herndon invokes this “bond” to harshly criticize the country for refusing the US her “just rights” in limiting access to the Amazon.169 He then re-produces an address Maury had made to Congress in which he concluded that Brazil, in keeping the Amazon off-limits to foreign use, was acting in defiance of “divine law.”170 According to Maury and the jurisconsult he was citing, “Providence” had ordained that commerce between different nations was “essential to the moral well-being of the whole human race.”171

For Herndon, if divine law mandated a US influence on the Amazon region, so too, did the inherent deficiencies of the people who inhabited it. While in Pará on the Amazon, Herndon commented on the idleness of the population there, writing that “men, in these countries, are not ambitious. They are not annoyed, as the more masculine people of colder climates are, to see their neighbors going ahead of them.”172 Brazilians in general, he said, were “perfectly contented” with the basic necessities of life due to the climate, the relaxing effect of which makes labor impossible. The solution to this problem, according to Herndon, was to make labor compulsory. The restitution of the slave trade was out of the question, since public opinion was against it, and so was coercive indigenous labor, given that indigenous people would “sooner die than do more than is necessary for the support of their being.”173 Given these restrictions, Herndon foresaw US settlement as the best option. The Brazilian government, as Maury so desperately hoped, would first have to modify its long-standing limitations on who could enter the Amazon, requiring them to “throw off a causeless jealousy, and a fear of our people.”174 Then, Southern planters who feared the coming disappearance of slavery at home in the US would “remove their slaves to that country, cultivate its lands, draw out its resources, and prodigiously augment the power and wealth of Brazil.”175

PICTURE

The opening of the Amazon, for Herndon, was about more than US access to greater commercial opportunities. By encouraging emigration as well, Brazil would gain access to the wealth the Amazon Valley, with its “unrivalled fertility,” had the potential to produce as long as it was cultivated by US citizens. 176 Brazil, he entreated, should “stretch out her hands to the world at large, and say, ‘Come and help us to subdue the wilderness; here are homes, and broad lands, and protection for all those who choose to come.”177 The result of such a revolution in policy would be the transformation of Rio de Janeiro, the then-capital of Brazil, into a mere village, compared to Pará, and of Santarém, the site of the future ex-Confederate colony, into the new St. Louis, Missouri.178 The US impact on the Amazon would be so great, he believed, that its fundamental character would shift from its primitive, inferior state into a center of modern civilization. “No longer would the forests that line its banks afford but a shelter for the serpent, the tiger, and the Indian; but furrowed by a thousand keels, and bearing upon its waters the mighty wealth that civilization and science would call from the depths of those dark forests, the Amazon would ‘rejoice as a strong man to run a race’” he wrote.179 The specific advancements Brazil would point to were “the blossoming wilderness, the well-cultivated farm, the busy city, the glancing steamboat.”180 Listening “to the hum of the voices of thousands of active and prosperous men,” Brazil could say, “‘thus much have we done for the advancement of civilization and the happiness of the human race.’”181

Conclusion

When Herndon published this report, entreating the US government to advocate for a change in Brazilian policy toward the Amazon, the kind of “Amazonian Republic” that Maury envisioned was still a dream. He did not know that his work would help fuel the establishment of a colony of US citizens motivated by similar impulses. Hastings would use Herndon and Maury’s language and information for his own propagandistic purposes. While Herndon’s report painted a vibrant picture of what a US presence in the Amazon could look like, this picture existed mostly in his imagination. What had been a fantasy for Herndon and Maury would turn into an imagined necessity for their ideological heir, Hastings. While Herndon’s book had entreated the US government for its support of the US government, by the time Hastings set his mind on the Amazon, he no longer required it. The Brazilian Empire’s interest in facilitating immigration would sync with the wishes of the US southerners who could not tolerate the consequences of the Civil War. With the backing of the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II himself, Hastings would position himself to his southern US compatriots as the man who would prove that US citizens did indeed possess the “energy and enterprise” to alter the Amazon, and thus contribute to the grand civilizing project Herndon so eloquently described.

The negotiations that Hastings, like other ex-Confederates made with the Brazilian and other governments following the Civil War, therefore did not emerge only as a consequence of the Confederacy’s defeat. One of Maury’s ideas that preceded the Civil War involved transferring enslaved people from the US to Brazil. In the 1850s, Maury anticipated the abolition of slavery and was concerned about how fellow southerners would respond to this drastic change in their lives. He could not conceive of a world in which southerners would willingly give up their enslaved property without receiving compensation, so he envisioned that Brazilians would pay US citizens for their human property, thus satisfying their interests in the perpetuation and growth of slavery in their country. His plan, therefore, would ensure the continued survival of slavery in the hemisphere, no matter what legal actions the US would take to end its perpetuation within its borders. Maury’s objective was not to promote slavery’s reduction or abolition in the US, but rather its perpetuation, choosing Brazil as the appropriate “safety valve” for US slaves. He viewed the Amazon as “empty,” a perfect coincidence for his slaveholding compatriots.64 Maury would have been aware of the 1850 Brazilian law that banned the slave trade, so his recommendation that the US transfer slaves to Brazil suggests a belief that such a move would not represent a violation of law. In 1831, the Brazilian government had legally freed all slaves that arrived from outside of Brazil and enacted penalties against slave smugglers. The law was not enforced, however, as the interests of the Brazilian elite lay in the preservation of slavery. In fact, a significant black-market slave trade began, with an average of 30,000 to 40,000 slaves being smuggled into the country every year between 1840 and 1850.65 This bespeaks of a worldview in which national borders were fluid, especially when it came to the question of slavery. The Amazon, according to Maury, was slave territory, and therefore, a transferal of US slaves there would be a transferal of slaves from one slave territory to another. The question of Brazilian sovereignty over Amazonian territory did not factor into his project.