Rebel with a Cause
William Bruce Mumford was an unlikely candidate for martyrdom. A native of North Carolina, he fought with honor in the Seminole and Mexican-American wars and, like many men from small Dixie towns, sought his fortune in the big city. When he discovered a knack for card games, he became a regular in the New Orleans gambling houses and found further success on the Mississippi River steamboats. Like the vast majority of Southerners, seventy five percent in fact, Mumford did not own slaves, nor did he champion the region’s “peculiar institution.” He wasn’t even particularly political, but when his beloved South and her Queen City were threatened by civil war, Mumford rushed to embrace the Confederate cause. His fierce loyalty would have terrible consequences. In...
Read MoreBrave New World
Louisiana’s Cane River Colony was a daring dream made real by an ex-slave named Marie Thérèse Coincoin. The facts about her astonishing achievement have been wildly compromised over the centuries, but what I’ve set down here is true enough. Marie was born in 1742 to African slave parents in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and bore four children, fathers unknown. She was eventually leased to a Frenchman, Claude Pierre Metoyer, a union producing ten more issue. In 1778, Metoyer bought and freed Marie and gave her a cabin and 68 acres of rich land where the industrious Marie grew indigo and tobacco and sold medicines and bearskins. She eventually earned enough to buy land on Isle Brevelle, a sliver of land thirty miles long and a few miles wide between the Cane and Old...
Read MoreWhistling “Dixie” in Brazil
When I was traveling across Brazil some years ago, a Rio lady noticed my Southern accent and asked if I’d heard about an old Confederate colony somewhere below Sao Paolo. I thought she was kidding until a little homework confirmed that, sure enough, thousands of former confederates, or confederados as they’re called in the local Portuguese, immigrated to Brazil in 1866, following the South’s defeat in the Civil War, and founded a town called Americano. The colonists came at the invitation of Emperor Dom Pedro II, a far-thinking monarch interested in promoting agriculture throughout his empire. He appealed to the bruised dignity of Southern cotton planters who had lost everything in the war and were chafing under Union domination. The emperor’s trump card, albeit...
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