Elusive Eden tells the story of Frank McMullan’s efforts to establish a colony of Texans in Brazil in the years immediately following the U.S. Civil War, which ended in 1865. However, academic historians probably will not find this book to be directly relevant to their own interests in either Brazilian or U.S. history. William Clark Griggs’s intended reader is clearly the layperson, so he provides only a superficial chronological narrative, without thesis or analysis.
Nevertheless, the book has a few things to offer scholars. Despite occasional slides into romance bordering on fiction. Elusive Eden is on the whole well documented. Footnotes point to valuable manuscript sources. Moreover, the narrative raises all kinds of suggestions for more analytical work on Brazil-U.S. relations for example, or on immigration policy and experience. Brazilian policymakers sought to step up the flow of immigrants, and in particular they appealed to those from the United States who possessed agricultural expertise. Their U.S. counterparts, judging from the roadblocks thrown up in front of McMullan, had reasons for discouraging outmigration. And the motives of the migrants themselves seem to have been complex. Leaving a war-torn land for exotic oases is easily understood. More than that, however, the expatriots were a rootless bunch, moving several times before landing in Brazil. The story of the Texans is also suggestive on questions of comparative slavery and racial attitudes. Although Griggs never discusses these matters, the subjects of his book noted differences. More than one colonist remarked that Brazil was “not a white man’s country” (p. 103).
Griggs does not discuss politics in Brazil, nor the colonists’ reactions to such small, but progressive, measures toward ending slavery as the Rio Branco Law of 1871. Ironically, the Confederates who left the southern United States following the Civil War and emancipation may have been welcomed in Brazil by a government that looked to replace slave labor in its own country with the labor of immigrants. Unfortunately, the boundaries that divide fields within academe will make it difficult for professional historians to explore a subject that is neither Brazilian nor U.S. history, but both.
