The Southern Exodus to Mexico

Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico is a novel effort to rethink the historical role played by Southern migrants who exited the United States for Mexico following the Civil War. Until now, the historiography has held that when Southern exiles went to Mexico and curried the favor of Maximillian—the French emperor in Mexico—they simply sought to recast parts of Veracruz as a new South, but Wahlstrom pushes back against this view. While that first wave of migrants did indeed include many Confederates-cum-royalists who courted the transplanted Hapsburgs in Mexico, many more Southerners simply went to Mexico because they wanted to improve their standing in life. Wahlstrom contends that many did not necessarily believe that upward mobility predicated upon African slavery—although it should be noted that these same migrants did boost for servile coolie and Indian labor once they arrived in Mexico. Another argument made by Wahlstrom has similarly significant historiographical ramifications. He suggests that the genesis of the New South existed in germinal form among those who promoted Southern migration across the hemisphere. Those first Southern migrants sought merely to transplant Dixie, but later migrants hoped to work with the Mexicans to bring progress to their host country. This new approach corrected the most troubling problem with the first group of migrants—namely, that they expressed little interest in interacting with the country and the people surrounding them. Not so with later Southern migrants, especially those who came in the wake of the Republican victory over Maximillian’s forces in 1867. Further, Wahlstrom hypothesizes that many of those who boosted for and carried out hemispheric migration went on to become major players in the building of the New South. Accordingly, historians might now think of the ideas that resulted in a modernizing South as having their origins in a larger hemispheric context and take a similar transnational approach as this author. Had Wahlstrom explored the ideas and people who drove Southern migration to other places in the western hemisphere (Brazil and Cuba, for instance), or more fully considered the Mexican side of the story, he might have made this argument even more convincing.

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