Awards

• Short-listed for Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award (Nonfiction) 2008

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780814736883

Table of Contents

Reviews

This fascinating study uses the tools and sources of diplomatic history to examine a sweep of national and international history far beyond the confines of diplomacy... For Horne, the slave trade, rather than slavery, was an explosive political issue much later in the 19th century that is normally understood. Highly recommended. -Choice An important study that starts with the proposition that what happens abroad affects developments in the United States. For the first time we are made aware of the extensive contacts between pro-slavery forces in the United States in the years after the abolition of the slave trade and the promoters of slavery in and the slave trade to Brazil and elsewhere. -Richard J. M. Blackett,author of Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War Horne expertly interweaves the political views presented in official documents with personal commentary from letters and travel accounts... It is valuable for scholars of U.S. foreign policy due to its coverage of diplomacy between the United States and other nations. This work contributes to the study of U.S. South since Horne details the plans of some southern leaders and planter elites who looked to Brazil as the answer when all was lost in the United States. -The Journal of Southern History [Horne] depicts through rich description and numerous examples the many tentacles of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century. -Journal of Latin American Studies A well-researched, skillfully-written, and carefully-argued diplomatic history examining connections between the United States, Brazil, Africa, and Europe as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Horne sheds considerable light upon the ideas, ruminations, and practices of U.S. nationals in their interactions with and encounters of Brazil over the question of slavery, especially from the mid-nineteenth century on, and makes a valuable and important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of (American) hemispheric relations and trajectories, both eventual and potential. -Michael A. Gomez,editor of Diasporic Africa: A Reader In The Deepest South, U.S. diplomatic historian Gerald Horne provides a fascinating look at an important topic ... In eleven chapters marked by significant strengths, the author argues that the histories of the two largest slaveholding nations (the United States and Brazil) of the western hemisphere were closely intertwined throughout the nineteenth century. -Mary Ann Mahoney,The Americas

A well-researched, skillfully-written, and carefully-argued diplomatic history examining connections between the United States, Brazil, Africa, and Europe as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. - Michael A. Gomez, editor of Diasporic Africa: A Reader

Author Information

Gerald Horne is Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and has published three dozen books including, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA and Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire.

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