After the Confederate States
A map of immigrant Confederate family holdings in São Paolo State, 1875. Public doman image.
“Certain Amazon Indian tribes decorate their pottery with the design of the Confederate flag, the result of having encountered the colonists who chose to settle in that vast jungle”
—The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, Eugene C. Harter
The war had finally come to an end after almost four years. Jefferson Davis was captured at Irwinville, Georgia on May 10th, 1865, but the Confederate States of America had collapsed in April with the surrender of Robert E. Lee and his army. Lee would spend most of the rest of his life working for reconciliation between the North and South, and was surprisingly successful. The breach between the two cultures of Americans had shown signs of becoming permanent before, during, and after the war, but thanks to the efforts of Lee and people like him (both north and south) lasting bitterness was avoided. Places as widely spaced as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Ireland, and India are a sad gallery of what happens when two closely related communities can’t effect a reconciliation. Apart from the south’s descent into inter-racial terrorism, that didn’t happen in the former Confederate States.
Not everyone could be reconciled, though, and those people wanted a way out. Many moved west, but something like 40,000 Southerners emigrated from the United States entirely. For some their eyes lit upon the fact that, excepting the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Americas had one remaining slave-holding country. Furthermore, it was a state dependent on agriculture that wanted American expertise if they could get it. Brazil was embodied in its Emperor, Dom Pedro II, and he extended an invitation to any Confederates who wished to emigrate from the reunited United States. As many as 10,000 Southerners took him up on his offer and moved to Brazil in the years immediately following 1865. Those who did are called the Confederados.
The first Confederado was William Hutchison Norris, a former senator for Alabama who brought his entire family to Brazil—less one son, but with the son who’d been interned at Fort Delaware after being captured by the Union—on December 27, 1865. On disembarking, they were specifically met by the emperor (despite Pedro being anything but a figurehead and there being an incredibly bloody war underway with Paraguay). The imperial reception had to have been a bittersweet experience for someone who perceived himself as a war refugee. The Norrises settled along a railway line headed north from São Paolo, where they had landed, near the town of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste where they founded Vila dos Americanos (“The Americans’ Village”); it would eventually evolve into the modern city of Americana. Following his success, a significant fraction of his extended family left the United States in January 1867. They were not alone: in a semi-organized exodus, some 800 Americans arrived in São Paolo that month. As farmers, they focused on cotton and corn, but they also introduced the almost sterotypical peach and pecan to Brazilian agriculture.
Like many immigrants, the Confederados had reasons to stay in their own circle besides their pride. While they were willing to learn Brazilian Portuguese, they used English as their language at home for three generations before that bastion began to break down. More troublesome was their religion. Protestantism had been outright illegal in Brazil until 1824, and even in the 1860s Catholicism was the state religion; the Confederados would found the first Baptist churches in the country. Dom Pedro felt it necessary to specifically promise freedom of religion if he was going to entice any Southerners, but he ended up having to battle his local officials who followed the Chinese expression tian gao huang di yuan—“Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away”—to advance their own agenda. Part of the reason why Americana coalesced was that the first Confederado to die, Beatrice Oliver, was refused burial in all local churchyards. In response her husband Anthony donated land on his sugar plantation for what would become Campo Cemetery, one of the focal points of the community.
Something like sixty percent of the immigrants failed to thrive, either dying of disease or, surprisingly often, returning to the home country they’d thought they didn’t have any more. Many stayed, though, and carried on in ways increasingly different from pre-war Southern culture. Despite their isolation and isolationism, the Confederados assimilated to Brazil’s more fluid ethnic attitudes in their own peculiar way. According to the Harter book quoted at the head of this article, the turning point came in 1920 when a local scion dutifully married another American—as had been Confederado tradition since 1865 (though even in the first generation the intermarriage rate was about twenty percent). The conservative elements of the community were reportedly glad she’d avoided having to marry a native Brazilian. The newest in-law was a recent immigrant from the States, and owner of a successful sugarcane plantation. A new countryman entering the marriageable circle was rare, so he was quite a catch. He was also quite black.
Likely it happened because of new pressure the Confederados were under. The State of São Paolo was the destination of many Italian immigrants starting in the 1890s, to the point that the city of the same name was majority Italian in 1897. Americana had an influx of immigration as a knock-on effect, and the American immigrants had become a minority in their own colony; in the present day, they’re only ten percent of the city’s 200,000 people. On top of that, third-generation Confederados were reaching adulthood at about the same time, and the third generation is notoriously the one to thoroughly assimilate in any country.
Since then descendants of the Southern colonists have spread out across Brazil, and make up a tiny but notable fraction of Brazil’s middle and upper classes. It’s worth comparing two famous Confederado women, just to contrast how they’ve developed in the 20th century. In the past, arguably the most famous Confederado was the singer Elsie Houston, grandniece of the first Texan president Sam Houston. She eventually found Brazil too small and came to New York in the 1930s to make it big. Of recent women the most notable is Ellen Gracie Northfleet, who was the country’s first female Supreme Court Justice when she was appointed in 2000, and was made President of the court in 2006.
Despite the changes, and the final integration of the Confederados into Brazilian life, Americana itself remains the touchstone of Confederado culture. Each year it’s the site of the Festa Confederada, a celebration of their heritage on the grounds of the Campo Cemetery—around an obelisk marked with a Confederate battle flag and the names of the first immigrant families.
(An image gallery from the 2008 festival can be seen here)
