CHARLES NATHAN
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Source: A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks
By: Laura Jarnigan
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The firm. Nathan E Irmao, (Nathan and Brother) had been in Rio for more than two decades prior to the Civil War. Charles was the family's second generation to do business in Brazil when he arrived in the early 1860s. Charles and his brother Henry, (known in Brazil as Carlos and Enrique), traveled between Rio and New Orleans. Their brother George, usually anchored the family's business at New Orleans.
An 1851 letter written by George leaves no doubt that the Nathan's Birkheads and Maxwell, Wright and Company were close business associates. The correspondence was to James Birkhead in New York, whom he addressed as Snr. Diogo. It reported the prices of coffee, sugar, molasses, flour, pork and cotton in New Orleans, plus the London and New York exchange rates. It also referenced receiving coffee shipments via the Clintonia Wright, a vessel named for William H. DeCoursey Wright's daughter.
The Nathan's are often identified as English merchants who had relocated to New Orleans, although evidence suggests the family had an earlier and continuing presence in Germany, Charles and George married their cousins, two of the several "dainty" Goodman sisters of Alabama. Another of the Goodman sisters married Edward Clifton Wharton, who was associated with the New Orleans Picayune and became involved in relocating Southerners to Brazil. A. Charles Goodman and a Nathan Goodman are also listed among the prominent founding members of Villa Americana.
Charles Nathan went to Rio with his bride around 1862. He maintained a business on Rua Sao Pedro and a residence in the barrio of Botafogo with coffee trees growing on the grounds. Henry was a broker of government bonds who counseled Brazilian officials, including the Galvos, one of whose members was the official Brazilian emigration agent in the United States on such matters as Bond issues. The Nathan's proximity to imperial purse strings furthers our understanding of how Charles became so directly involved in transporting and settling Southerners.
Charles Nathan met with advance agent James McFadden Gaston in November 1865. According to Gadsden, Charles was more interested in promoting Southern emigration than any former U.S. resident with whom he had spoken. He observed that the Nathan brothers were the only men in Rio who had been in the United States at the outbreak of the war, and that they left to avoid the consequences that seemed inevitable from the enemy's movements. By January 1866, a handful of Brazilians and assorted foreigners, mostly bankers and brokers, met in Rio to formally approve the southern migration. Their efforts resulted in the founding of the Sociedade Internacional de Imigracao's, with which disagreements surfaced over whether to target U.S. emigrants only or Europeans as well. Nathan argued vigorously for the former option.
Within one version of the Sociedade Internacional de Imigracao twenty three articles authored by Aurélio Candido Tavares Bastos, Carlos Nathan was to be the Society's designated manager for its first three years. He is the only person named in the document. The society was to contract with the government to transport migrants directly from the United States and other places, get them located in Brazil, take them to the port closest to their destination and take care of their business affairs, undertake purchases and sales as necessary, build roads, provide for river navigation and assist the government in attracting an agricultural and upright class. The association was clearly a business venture that started with a fund of 1,000 contos (more than half $1 million) divided into 5000 shares. Article twenty states that Nathan was obliged to cede the lands of an unidentified freguesia (a parish) he had already acquired to the Southerners. He was also required to put up half of the operating capital of 50 contos, (almost $30,000) to be advanced as needed to help establish the given planters.
By mid-1866, Alabamian Charles Gunter reported that Charles Nathan and William Scully, an Irishman who had recently founded the Anglo-American Times, would do everything necessary to get migrants to Gunther's location. Scully, who was also a merchant, took on Gunter's son, Harris as a clerk. A liberal Catholic and a member of Sociedade Internacional de Imigracao, Scully published a book in 1866 entitled Brazil, Its Provinces and Chief Cities, in which he described cotton cultivation, predicting Brazil might become the greatest cotton-growing country in the world and noted that there was an increasing introduction of improved machines for ginning and packing.
On July 23rd, 1867, Charles Nathan concluded a contract with the Minister and Secretary of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas to bring some 5000 people from southern ports over eighteen months. Assisting him was James D. Porter of Marengo County, Alabama, whom Gunter was anxious to have join him in Brazil. By August G.T. Gunter, writing from the heart of Rio's commercial district, reported that Mr. Porter "goes into business here today". Porter got involved in Nathan's venture rather quickly writing to his cousin in Texas a few days before Nathan's contract was approved. Porter declared, "The best thing for our people who are willing and capable of labor or who have the means to buy labor is to come to this country" because he had no interest in any colonization schemes or land speculation, his opinions were uninfluenced by interested motives