Despite the sensational title, this is a well-documented study of North American pressures on Brazil to open the Amazon to international traffic and the corresponding responses of the Brazilian government. The title refers to a scheme for transforming the Amazon Valley from a region neglected by allegedly shiftless Latins into a flourishing garden cultivated by black slaves under the supervision of North American planters.
The outstanding proponent of this vision was Matthew F. Maury, the Old South’s most distinguished scientist, still remembered as the father of oceanography. Maury aggressively lobbied for his pet idea, stirring up journalists and politicians. He inspired and helped plan the United States naval expedition which explored the Amazon Valley in 1851.
Not all those Americans who favored opening the Amazon were southern expansionists, but the goals and activities of Maury and his friends were more than sufficient reason to alarm the Brazilian government. It must be admitted that even official United States pretensions often were more grandiose than warranted. Thus William Trousdale, the American minister in Brazil, acting in consonance with his instructions, informed the Brazilian Foreign Secretary that natural law considered great rivers to be as open to international trade as were the high seas.
The author indicates that for a brief period contemporaries regarded the Amazon as a region likely to become another Texas. She also describes strong opposition in the United States to such a development, opposition which she attributes mainly to American commercial interest already established in Brazil. As she views it, the expansionists were checked by vested business interests until the crisis leading to the Civil War absorbed American energies. After the Union victory North Americans sought new markets instead of new lands. The nearly empty Amazon Valley no longer interested them—except for those unfortunate ex-Confederates who emigrated to northern Brazil in the vain hope of renewing their old slavocracy in a tropical paradise.
This book contains much information of interest to students of the nineteenth-century relations of the United States, Latin America, and Brazil. Researched with support from North American grants, it nevertheless reflects, as does much contemporary Latin American thought, continuing distrust of United States’ intentions. Both the author and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda refer to the recent effort of the Hudson Institute to study the Amazon region as yet another manifestation of the perennial Yankee peril.
