In 1866 the American minister at Rio de Janeiro turned from the reality
of a few incongruous and trouble-breeding Kentucky colonels,
slouched-hatted and frock-coated, wandering through the unfamiliar
streets of the great South American capital, and saw a nightmare. There
is a touch of panic in the despatch which he sent to Mr. Seward at a
time when both secretary and public were held too closely in the throes
of reconstruction to take alarm at so distant a chimera. Agents of the
Southern States, wrote the minister, claimed that not thousands of
families, but a hundred thousand families, would come to Brazil.
As a matter of fact, this exodus, when it took place, was so small that
it failed to raise a ripple on the social pool of the Western
Hemisphere. But to the self-chosen few who suffered shipwreck and
privation, financial loss from their already depleted store, disaster to
their Utopian dreams, and a great void in their hearts where once had
been love of country, it became a tragedy--the tragedy of existence.
The ardor that led a small band of irreconcilables to gather their
households and their household goods about them and flee from a personal
oppression, as had their ancestors before them, was destined to be short
lived. From the first, fate frowned upon their enterprise. They looked
for calm seas and favorable winds, but they found storms and shipwreck.
Their scanty resources were calculated to meet the needs of only the
crudest life, but upon the threshold of their goal they fell into the
red-tape trammels of a civilization older than their own. Where they
looked for a free country, a wilderness flowing with milk and honey,
which in their ignorance they imagined unpeopled, they found the
squatter had been intrenched since the Jesuit fathers and their
following explored the continent four centuries before. Finally, they
believed themselves to be the vanguard of a horde, but, once in the
breach, they found there was no following host.
Most of those who had the means reversed their flight. Others, with
nothing left but their broken pride, sought aid from the government they
abhorred, and were given a free passage back in returning men-of-war.
But when the reflux had waned and died, there was still a residue of
half a hundred families, most of whom were so destitute that they could
not reach the coast. With them stayed a very few who were held by their
premature investments or by a deeper loyalty or a greater pride. Among
the latter was the head of the divided house of Leighton.
The Reverend Orme Leighton was one of those to whom the war had brought
a double portion of bitterness, for the Leightons of Leighton, Virginia,
had fought not alone against the North, but against the North and the
Leightons of Leighton, Massachusetts.
To the Reverend Orme Leighton, a schism in the church would have meant
nothing unless it came to the point of cracking heads; but a schism in
governmental policy, which placed the right to govern one's self and own
