White Homeland: Part 1

In this episode of F*** Your Racist History, we explore three specific efforts by American white supremacists to create a white homeland abroad. In 1859, a physician turned orator named George Bickley spearheaded a paramilitary movement designed to aid the Southern states in the formation of a massive slave Republic consisting of 36 slave states and encompassing most of South America. He named it Knights of the Golden Circle, and the society was rumored to have nearly 60,000 members on the eve of the Civil War. Then, in 1863, a smooth-talking Florida planter and self-proclaimed abolitionist named Bernard Kock convinced President Abraham Lincoln to start a colonization effort for ex-slaves on an island off the coast of Haiti called Île-à-Vache, or "Cow Island." Finally, when the Confederacy officially lost the Civil War, Southern slave owners who could not, or would not, face the uncertainty of their future abandoned the United States in favor of a slavery-friendly colony in Brazil where they transplanted their Southern practices and customs; they were called the "Confederados," and they still have descendants living there to this day.