The Edgefield Southern Immigration Society

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Excerpted From: A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks  Pages 37-45

By:  Laura Jarnagin

Where one would expect to find kinship ties among families from any given locale who chose to relocate to Brazil, a high degree of common kinship and professional ties also existed within the larger migrating population as a whole. Well a comprehensive accounting of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this book, the point can be illustrated by examining some of the members of the Edgefield Southern immigration Society of South Carolina.

The first meeting of this organization, also known as the Southern Colonization Society or the Edgefield Immigration Society, was held on August 30, 1865 at the Odd Fellows and Masonic Hall. It’s president, Major Joseph Abney had been briefly one of John C. Calhoun’s law partners at Abbeville. He is said to have "entered vigorously into the plans of Brazilian emigration" immediately after Lee's surrender. Edgefield was a major Broad River community, located near Abbeville. In Brazil, the societies advance agents, Robert Meriweather and Dr. Hugh A. Shaw, combined efforts with James McFadden Gaston, who had gone to Brazil on his own but was also from the Edgefield vicinity. Gaston's wife was the former Susan Brumby, daughter of Richard Trapier Brumby, A noted scientist, then of Marietta, Georgia, who served as an agent for perspective emigrants. Brumby, a fervent Calhoun supporter, had put his beliefs into action when he ran the Tuscaloosa State Rights Exposior and was one of the "most talented and effective of all Nullifier editors."

John C Calhoun's brother, James Edward Calhoun, had himself spent time in Brazil long before the Civil War. Between 1817 and 1829, James served in the U.S. Navy in Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South American waters. The last two years of that service were on the USS Boston when it posted to Brazil, where he is said to have made a number of friends.

Another scion of the Calhoun family, James M. Calhoun, provides us with ties to yet another key player in southern immigration to Brazil, namely, William Hutchinson Norris of Spring Hill, Alabama, and of Broad River dissent. Calhoun, nephew John C. Calhoun and a native of South Carolina, had moved to Alabama by the mid-1830s and served as a state representative from Dallas County for the rest of that decade, returning to that position in the late 1850s and early 1860s. A Cahaba nullifier, Calhoun was president of the Alabama Senate in 1838, 1857, and 1862. Villa Americana founder, Norris and James M. Calhoun served caoncurrently as two of the three state representatives from Dallas County in 1839 snd 1842. Norris, characterized as an “influential Whig,” continued in this capacity annually through 1845.

The Calhoun denominator is found again among at least three of the “first families of Edgefield” who intermarried with the Calhouns and were among the migrants to Brazil. They were the Brooks, Butler, and Pickens families. Another scion of the extended Calhoun family was D. C.  McIntyre, an Alabama resident at the time of the Civil War whom Charles Grandison Gunter was anxious to have join him in Brazil. McIntyre's grandfather migrated from Glencoe, Scotland, to Laurinburg, North Carolina, in late 1775 or early 1776. D. C. Mother’d maiden name was Colquhoun, a spelling variation of Calhoun.

Some of the McIntyrs later moved to South Carolina, and it was from there that D. C.  McIntyre migrated to Alabama. An 1859 letter to his sister about his cotton crops suggest he had not been in Alabama long and that the family were guests of the Gunters. McIntyre visited Butler and Wilcox Counties “to look for land but did not find any for sale to suit.” He therefore planned “to turn his attention to Marengo county to see some land described to him by Mr. Polmitz, Will Gunter's father-in-law.”   John C. Calhoun and his eldest son, Andrew Pickens Calhoun had acquired property in partnership with one another in Marengo county in 1858.

Charles Gunter’s son Will was married to the former Ellen Polmitz, daughter of Charles Augustus Von Poellnitz.. The Polmitz’s were descendants of a colorful German nobleman, Baron Frederick Carl Hans Bruno Von Poellnitz, a “courtier, scholar, diplomat and Lord Chamberlain” in Frederick the Great’s court. He and his third wife, Lady Anne Stuart, migrated to the United States from temporary residence in Bordeaux in 1782 following two years of correspondence with Benjamin Franklin. Poellnitz was married four times and divorced three. His wives were variously from the Dutch East Indies, Switzerland, England and South Carolina. After a brief stay in North Carolina, the Baron moved to New York City and, in the mid 1780s, acquired a property in Manhattan called Minto. There he conducted agricultural experiments, employed a newly invented threshing mill, cultivated fruit trees and flowering shrubs, and hosted George Washington, who became a personal friend. In 1790, the Baron swapprd Minto for almost 3000 acres along the PeeDee River in South Carolina, site unseen. The transaction with Robert Richard Randall, which took place in Alexander Hamilton's office, resulted in the Barons removal to South Carolina for the remainder of his life.

The Baron’s fifth child by his second wife, the Swiss aristocrat Charlotte de Bondeli, was Julius Poellnitz, who married Elizabeth Rogers. Their son, Charles Augustus Poellnitz, was a lawyer, planter, and close associate of the Presbyterian clergyman James H. Thornerll,, known as the Calhoun of the church in the antebellum period. Charles married Mary Peay of the Huguenot descended piedmont family. Ellen Poellnitz was their daughter. Ellen sister Stella was the second wife of Robert a Hardie, son of John Hardie, originally of Scotland, and the former Mary Meade Hall, a couple who eventually settled in Talladega, Alabama. Meade was a personal friend of Reverend Ashbel Green Simonton, the first representative of the Presbyterian Church in the USA to Brazil, who arrived there in 1859. John Hardie's younger brother, Alva Finley Hardie became a Presbyterian missionary to re-post Civil War southern community in Brazil and msrried Katherine E Hall. Her grandfather, Hervie Hall, a native of Vermont, lived in Saratoga Springs, New York, moved to Georgia, and migrated to Brazil in the postbellum era.

Charles Gunter’s daughter Eliza was married to Dr. Thomas DeYampert of Marengo county. He traveled to Brazil, lived there briefly, then reportedly died at sea in 1867, apparently on a return voyage to the United States. The DeYampert’s were a Broad River family of French-Dutch origins and therefore, in all likelihood, would have been descendants of Huguenots, as were many of the Broad River families. By the 1800s the DeYamperts of Georgia and later Alabama were variously intermarried with the Broad River Meriwethers and Taliaferro's, who in turn were interrelated with the Gilmers, one of whose offspring, Peach R. Gilmer, was Charles Gunter's neighbor in Montgomery in 1860. Among these interrelated families, the attractiveness of Brazil varied considerably. Writing to his son Will, Charles Gunter remarked that “Dr. DeYampert.....may try to discourage you and others who may wish to emigrate but get ready and come along.

Other linkages among the migrating population that can be traced from Edgefield and James McFadden Gaston include his brother, Dr. J. B. Gaston, who moved to Montgomery in the antebellum era and later migrated to Brazil with Charles Gunter. From J. Be. Gaston, we find a connection to the Florida immigration Society of Madison. A copy of it articles of agreement, which was to be delivered to Dan Pedro II in person by the society’s commission, specified that the potential migrants interest was in “lands between the coast and the mountains, at 10-30° latitude South.”   Broad River surnames occurring among the Florida society’s members include Whitner and Dozier. Huguenots who originally settled at Manakin, Virginia, the Dozers intermarried with the Gilmers, among other Broad River families.  A. J.. Dozier became one of Charles Gunter’s sons in law.

J. B. Gaston's brother-in-law, Samuel Darwin McConnell, was also part of the Florida society whose members wanted "to get away from this country but don't know where to go.  Dr. Gaston my brother-in-law will start for Brazil this week to see what chance there is of living there. If he brings a good report, I may go out there."  Two members of the L’Engle family, Edward and F. F., Also belong to the society. F. F. Originally offered to make Edward one of the societies commissioners but then had to downplay his influence as there became “many interested and fit to go,” perhaps “two or three hundred.” He assumed those going to Brazil would be relying primarily on agriculture and stock rating,” but he and Edward were considering setting up an export business. "Your idea of forming a business acquaintance at the north is good for you personally, but not necessary for the general interest as there are many of our numbers to my knowledge who have such connections already.” F. F. L’Engle aspired to buy just “two or three slaves in Brazil and hold them as long as the damnable abolition spirit of the age will permit me."

About a year later, in May 1866, Edward was in Jacksonville where his father, Captain John Claudius L’Engle, had been one of the first planters to settle in the St. Johns River region and ship from what became the port of Jacksonville. The elder L’Engle was the scion of a French family that moved to Charleston, South Carolina from Haiti. In addition to planting, some of the L’Engles were important Florida statemen both before and after the Civil War. Edward received a letter from C. C. Williams of Quincy, Florida, who reported he had sold certain household articles as instructed by L’Engle  in preparation for departing to Brazil and noted making a payment to a Gr. Hentz from the proceeds.

Meanwhile, a letter from McConnell to Edward L’Engle indicates he had decided to stay in the United States. Edward had helped McConnell get a certificate of admission to the Georgia bar, an option he was planning to exercise the following term. Returning the favor, McConnell sent L’Engle professional cards to his brother James in Savannah to circulate among the merchants there. McConnell reported that Gaston had returned from Brazil “very pleased” but as for himself, “The passage of the civil rights bill by Congress, had caused others here to think of emigrating, but I do not believe that there are many who will do so. I don't think that I could better my condition pecuniarily by such a step, and will therefore try to “bear the ills we have” with as good grace as possible. Business seems to be thriving in this part of Georgia, and even the lawyers are living, though they say that they make very little. All concur in the belief that the practice will be lucrative after a little.”

McConnell's fatherer was William Phinzey McConnell, who's middle name presumably connect him in some unknown way with the Broad River Phinzey  family. Their members included major cotton factors of Augusta Georgia, such as Ferdinand Phinzey, reputedly the wealthiest man in Georgia at the time of his death.  In 1870, Mary Louise Yancey, a niece of Alabama fire-eater William Loundes Yancey, married Ferdinand Bowdre Phinzey. Also in the postbellum era, the crippled McConnell became the first mayor of Ocala, Florida, and married Mary Eloise Brumby, Susan Brumby Gaston's sister.

Edward L’Engle’s reference to “Dr. Hentz” takes us back to Alabama and into the Keyes family, who like the Norrises, were from Spring Hill and migrated to Brazil, first settling with the Guntersters at Lake Juparana. The Keyes family provide some of the richest first hand accounts of southerners’ daily lives in Brazil in the papers of Julia Louisa Hentz Keyes and the 1867 diary of her daughter, Jenny Keyes, which was published in 1930 by the Alabama Historical Quarterly. The Dr. Hentz to Whom L’Engle referred was Julia's brother, Charles Arnould Hentz. Julia's parents were Nicholar Marcellus Hentz, a French born 1816 immigrant to the United States, and the former Caroline Lee Whiting of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Nicholas, who had studied medicine and miniature painting in Paris, became a noted entomologist specializing in arachnids. Caroline, the daughter of General John Whiting, was a novelist who penned The planters Northern Bride, in defense of the peculiar institution. Dr. Hentz taught at private boys and girls schools and seminaries in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia, and was a professor of modern languages and belles lettres at the University of North Carolina. The Hentz family moved to Marianna, Florida in 1851 for health reasons.

In Tuskegee, Alabama, Julia has married John Washington Keyes of Florida in 1846. And 1849 - 50, he studird dentistry and medicine in Ohio and earned ther degree of doctor of dental surgery. In 1857, the couple moved to Montgomery. Like his wife, Keyes had Massachusetts roots, his paternal grandfather, John Wade Keyes, was from the Boston area. His paternal grandmother, Louisa Talbert, from Alexandria, Virginia, was the niece of president James Monroe. Early in life, John’s father, George moved from Virginia to Limestone County Alabama where he and his brother engaged in merchandising and planting. In 1820 George married Nelly Rutledge of Sullivan county, Tennessee, a niece of Davy Crockett.

Wow Yankee soldiers were in camped by the Keye’s family garden fence in July 1865, John was ready to decamp to Brazil.  +The Dr. is bent on leaving the country and like many others has his heart turned Brazil-ward,  Julia wrote to her cousin, “but I am not willing to go until I see some one who has been there and can assure me that our condition will be bettered, in every respect. I am entirely dissatisfied with this regime, but I must know what I am doing before taking such a journey.”  John was more in emphatic,” I am going to Brazil whether anyone else goes or not,-- I do not feel that I am living here—only camping-- I can make money here but I must get where I can breathe.”

John Washington Keyes was attracted to Gunter’s settlement in part because he wanted to quit dentistry. Joining them there were twenty families “and more in all,” including the McIntyres and sons of William Lowndes Yancy. When the colony failed by mid-1868, Keyes moved his family to Dixie island in Rio’s Guanabar Bay and into a new 16 room house in the city itself by May 1869. Their eldest daughter, Eula and her husband, Dr. John W. Coachman, we're already in Rio where they had settled upon arrival. Coachman, who was also a dentist, had established a practice by the time his in-laws arrived from the lake.

Julia Louisa Hentz Keyes hated the Rio Doce but enjoyed and admired Rio, the food, the theater, the opera, and even the sewage system. Once established in the city, Julia was delighted with Brazil. You cannot know how much we talk about all our friends and wish to see them, but I do not care to return to the States. I am so satisfied with this climate and I believe when we become settled we can live much more economically than there, coming to matter of fact-- and that is a consideration, you know. Julia’s emphasis on the cost-of-living undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that she and John had fifteen children. By 1870, however, A portion of the Keyes family did go back to Alabama. In a letter to a cousin notifying her of their impending return, Jenny Keyes wrote: “Emigration has ceased, and we rarely ever make a new acquaintance.”  Her father appended a counterstatement, Check--Emigration has not ceased, quite a number came on the last steamer and many more are expected to follow. I don't want to return and but for the children would not-- may get off in two months or two years. The Coachman and Charles Whiting Keyes (the older son) remained in Brazil, at least into the 1890s and, in Charles's case, into the early 1900s,living variously in Rio, São Paulo, and Petropolis, the location of the emperor Summer Palace in the cooler mountains above Rio.

The two interconnected reasons for migrating are evident, first, the prospect for a better life in a material sense over what the foreseeable future of the postbellum South might have had to offer, and second, the need to be part of a community of individuals with a common set of values and aspirations. With respect to the former motive, it is important to recognize that these migrants were caught in the throes of what proved to be the first major paradigmatic shit that took place within capitalism, whose defining edge was evolving from being agrarian-based, and largely predicated on slave labor in the Americas, to being industrially driven. Elite southerners who were involved in export commercial agriculture, (either directly or indirectly,)  were obviously aware of the changes being wrought by industrialization in “the great commercial round” of the antebellum era. However, as Maury and DuBow’s illustrates, there was also an assumption that differentiated but inter-dependent production zones would be able to coexist in in a mutually reinforcing, egalitarian way: industry in the northern United States, the British Isles, and northwestern Europe, and the raw materials that fed it and consumed a portion of its value added output variously in thr  U.S. South, the opening regions of the West and the Americas’ tropical climes.

While these Southerners’ understanding of the “global” nature of the capitalist system were correct, their assumption that in its zoned of production somehow enjoyed equal weight because of their interdependence was not:  capitalism’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery are so delineated precisely because their interdependent relationship to one another is hierarchical, not egalitarian. For those living in the times of capitalism's first major shift however, it would have been difficult to grasp the foll significance of the rapid incorporation of new areas of the world into the system’s periphery as industrialization in the core and it's grrowing appetite for raw materials proceeded apace. From the second half of the 1700s through the first half of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, the Russian Empire, China, Ssoutheast Asia, and West Africa were all networked into capitalism’s periphery. By the mid 1800s, virtually all areas of the globe had been “pulled inside” the system.

Consequently, by the mid-1800s, Cotton was being grown in many places in the world that had only recently become incorporated into the capitalist system, this challenging the US South’s earlier, more privileged commercial enclave position within the periphery as a cotton producer. Further, as the system expanded geographically, the value of the raw material commodities that the periphery produced was decreasing relative to other goods and services because of their sheer volume and relative accessibility. In the process, slave-based  agrarian capitalism was in the final stage of morphing into free labor industrial capitalism.

The system’s very “success” over time at incorporating territories it did not originally occupy not only took it to an appreciably high level of sustainability but also irrevocably modified it in ways that adversely affected those whose livelihood and lifestyles were dependent on earlier systemic configurations, including the elite southerners. Meanwhile, as Wallerstein explains, the newly incorporated zones of the world gave hegemonic Britain a wider market so that it needed a second layer of industrializing countries to take up the slack and leave it free to pursue new technological advances. That second echelon included France, Belgium, western “Germany,” Switzerland, and the northern United States. This placed the United States as a whole in ascendancy, moving from peripheral to semi peripheral status as the North industrialized. By the late 1800s, the United States and a newly unified Germany became the upstart challengers to a then declining Britain, much as the once peripheral and semi peripheral England, France, and Netherlands has surpassed the original European capitalist core in previous centuries. To mount a successful challenge to the British dominated capitalist core, though, the U.S. North needed the South to be its own “internal” periphery, not someone else's.

Amid these major changes in the system as a whole, we find that those southerners who sought to reposition themselves elsewhere in capitalism's periphery tended to be related to others in the migrating population.  For the present, though, it must remain as an unproven hypothesis that the majority of the purpose of migrants from the south held some degree of kinship with others in the pool, though whether we are dealing with one large, relatively seamless network or several networks that intersect at a few points remains to be determined. Additionally, one of the reasons southern migration to Brazil never became a widespread phenomenon attracting many thousands of former confederates may be that once the kinship lines of those who did migrate had run their course, the scope of the most likely migrants was a Likewise defined. The significance of this high degree of familial interconnectedness among the migrants does not stop at the borders of the US South, however.  These migrants, (or would be migrants) also belong to interlocking elite kinship networks that had spanned me geographic regions of the Atlantic capitalist system for centuries and has contributed to the systemic integrity and expansion.