Tag Archives: international

Brazil’s long, strange love affair with the Confederacy

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I knew of the Confederados existence, but I hadn’t had the time to read much into the history of those Confederates who moved (with their slaves) to Brazil after the war. I’m horrified to find out their descendants celebrate the fact. What a strange, lingering aftereffect of the Civil War! This article was quite the eye opener.

As early as the 1860s, Brazil was actively recruiting Southern American plantation owners, part of an immigration policy aimed at attracting Europeans, European-American and other “white” migrants. According to historians Cyrus and James Dawsey, who were born and raised near Confederado communities in São Paulo, Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II also promised cheap land to any American farmer who would come with a plow – a technology Brazil lacked.

Either way, thousands of white southerners made Brazil their new home after the Civil War. In São Paulo state, they established a somewhat closed and culturally homogeneous community that maintained its southern traditions for generations.

Source: Brazil’s long, strange love affair with the Confederacy ignites racial tension

Marx to Lincoln

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I did a cursory search a few years ago when I heard Karl Marx had authored… something on the US Civil War. A book? Essays? Opinions? I wasn’t able to unearth the results on Archive.org. But it seems from this article that he also wrote letters – this not-particularly-stirring one was sent to Lincoln, to congratulate him on his 1864 election win.

To mark the May 5, 1818 birthday of Karl Marx, Fight Back News Service is circulating a work he authored in 1864, a statement of congratulations to President Lincoln upon his reelection.

To mark the May 5, 1818 birthday of Karl Marx, Fight Back News Service is circulating a work he authored in 1864, a statement of congratulations to President Lincoln upon his reelection.

Source: It’s Karl Marx’s birthday, read his letter to Abraham Lincoln | Fight Back!

How Cinco de Mayo Helped Prevent a Confederate Victory

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A look at Cinco de Mayo, and the effect it had on the war raging in the USA.

Hayes Bautista says California Latinos were ardent Union supporters. When their home countries won independence from Spain, they had unilaterally abolished slavery and established citizenship for non-whites. Now living in California, a free state, they saw the pro-slavery Confederacy as an existential threat. When reports reached Los Angeles of Zaragoza’s victory against the French, Latinos made the Civil War connection immediately.

“In 1862, things weren’t going well for the Union in the Civil War, but here in Puebla was a clear-cut victory that completely threw the French timetable off,” says Hayes-Bautista. “The news reports just electrified Latinos and jolted them to a whole new level of organization and activity.”

Source: How Cinco de Mayo Helped Prevent a Confederate Victory in the Civil War

Alabama Claims

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An article about Grant’s Chief Justice nomination made an offhand mention of the reparations Britain paid after the Civil War. I haven’t done enough reading about the post-bellum period, and the Alabama Claims were news to me. It’s a pretty fascinating little footnote in history, not least because it involves a fast-tracking of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation.

After international arbitration endorsed the American position in 1872, Britain settled the matter by paying the United States $15.5 million, ending the dispute and leading to a treaty that restored friendly relations between Britain and the United States. That international arbitration established a precedent, and the case aroused interest in codifying public international law.

Source: Alabama Claims – Wikipedia

Clyde Built

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I was lucky enough last summer to be able to accompany the ACWRTUK on their field trip to Cherbourg.  The London round table was dauntingly well read and many of the members had a depth of knowledge that I felt would translate well to books.

Turns out one of the members has written a book, and it’s a subject that touches close to home for me, as I’m the child of Glaswegians and the grandchild of a Glaswegian shipbuilder: The Clyde-built ships that served the Confederacy.

Looks to be a fascinating read. I’m adding it to my wish list!
Clydebuilt: The Blockade Runners, Cruisers and Armoured Rams of the American Civil War

Clyde Built in the American Civil War | Eric J. Graham.

Kauai and the American Civil War

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I do love the ripples in the pond effect of the war across the globe. Here’s a ripple I hadn’t considered before, though: The war’s influence on Hawaii. Turns out there were soldiers from there, and sectional arguments as well. With Union-impressed ships and Confederate privateers on the prowl, the war diminished Hawaii’s trade.

Two former residents of Malumalu, Kauai served as officers of the North — William Reynolds as a Union Navy officer and James Marshall, the first manager of Lihue Plantation, as a Union Army brigadier general…

Kauai was not, however, without its southern sympathizers…

Kauai and the American Civil War – Thegardenisland.com: Island History.

How Cotton Remade the World

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As a historian, one of my favourite aspects of study is to see the ripples that one stone cast in the global pond can have.  This article is an excellent little summary of how the American Civil War – fought entirely in the US and by American participants – became a force for change in Britain, India, Egypt and elsewhere.

Yet given all that attention, it is surprising that we have spent considerably less effort on understanding the war’s global implications, especially given how far-reaching they were: The war can easily be seen as one of the great watersheds of 19th-century global history. American cotton, the central raw material for all European economies (and also those of the northern states of the Union), suddenly disappeared from global markets. By the end of the war, even more consequentially, the world’s most important cotton cultivators, the enslaved workers of the American South, had attained their freedom, undermining one of the pillars on which the global economy had rested: slavery. The war thus amounted to a full-fledged crisis of global capitalism—and its resolution pointed to a fundamental reorganization of the world economy.

How Cotton Remade the World – Sven Beckert – POLITICO Magazine.

Black Canadians fought in the American Civil War

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Brief article (though supporting a much more indepth book) by a Canadian professor on the black Canadians who fought for the Union cause.  I’d been reading earlier this week about escaped slaves in Canada signing up for militia units to protect their new homes. This is an interesting counterpiece.

The black recruits who joined did so for many reasons. Anderson Abbott, the first Canadian-born black doctor, believed most fought to give “the world a higher conception of the value of human liberty.” Others were caught up in the excitement and adventure. Money also played a role, for by 1863 a knowledgeable recruit could earn hundreds of dollars in bounties or substitute fees.

Most of the African Canadians volunteering came from a hardscrabble working-class background and were supporting elderly parents, wives and children. The enlistment money allowed their dependants some financial security in their absence.

The timing of the black enlistment, however, suggests that one factor — fair treatment — was paramount. Some African Canadians volunteered as soon as black regiments began recruiting. Their numbers peaked in January 1864 and then slowed to a trickle by April, likely a result of Canadian black communities learning that some black regiments were being treated as second-class soldiers and assigned excessive fatigue duties and menial work. Canadian papers also carried reports of Confederate atrocities where black prisoners were cut down in cold blood.

via How black Canadians fought for liberty in the American Civil War.

The Irish in the Civil War

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This article by the Irish Independent points out that the first Union private and the last Union general killed in the war were both Irish.  It’s a brief look at the impact Irish immigrants had on the American cataclysm.

They reckon that 210,000 Irish soldiers fought in British uniform in the First World War, and that 49,300 were killed. Yet almost as many Irishmen fought in the American Civil War – 200,000 in all, 180,000 in the Union army, 20,000 for the Confederates. An estimated 20 per cent of the Union navy were Irish-born – 26,000 men – and the total Irish dead of the American conflict came to at least 30,000. Many of the Irish fatalities were from Famine families who had fled the desperate poverty of their homes in what was then the United Kingdom, only to die at Antietam and Gettysburg. My old alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, is collating the figures and they are likely to rise much higher as Irish academics mine into the American Compiled Military Service Records for the regiments of both sides.

via A timely reminder of the bloody anniversary we all forgot – Comment – Voices – The Independent.

Douglass in Ireland

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I was in Europe this year, and kept running into “Frederick Douglass spoke here” plaques. I didn’t see any in Ireland, though there are plenty of Daniel O’Connell commemorations. Turns out the two men had a very complicated relationship through the 1840s. Salon documents it and the Irish/American/Negro complications that came out of the troubles Ireland faced at that time.

Frederick Douglass’ four-month Irish sojourn – he traveled to Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast in 1845, part of a two-year stay in the United Kingdom – has long fascinated historians and others who care about human rights. Douglass crossed paths with the great Irish “Liberator,” Daniel O’Connell, a champion of his own people and also an abolitionist, who the younger leader praised as a mentor and an inspiration throughout most of his life. He flourished in Ireland, where he was seen as a man, not “chattel.” Mixing with intellectual elites, he – and they – realized that the auto-didact and former slave could more than hold his own. A statue of Douglass stands proudly in Cork’s University College today.

“I can truly say,” he wrote to his abolitionist ally (and sometimes antagonist) William Lloyd Garrison, “I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country, I seem to have undergone a transformation, I live a new life.”

Yet comparatively little is known about what Douglass thought and felt about the most pressing Irish issues of that time – the fight to repeal the Act of Union with Great Britain, which had stripped the native Irish Catholic majority of many rights, and the gathering storm of the catastrophic potato famine. In the years around his visit, famine or its attendant diseases killed at least a million Irish and sent two million more fleeing the country. The potato blight was only a rumor and a worry when Douglass visited Ireland in 1845, but it was a crisis by the time he left England in 1847 to return to the U.S. How could such a towering human rights figure remain silent on the catastrophe, as it seemed he had?

via Frederick Douglass’ Irish sojourn: A bracing look at his encounters with poverty and prejudice across the Atlantic – Salon.com.