Rio de Janeiro, Salvador de Bahia, Recife, Fortaleza, Manaus—these are the cities in Brazil that attract tourism. It is unlikely that a traveler would note in their agenda two places practically unknown to most, such as Santa Bárbara d’Oeste or Americana.

However, a historian—and probably also a novelist or a filmmaker—would find an incredibly interesting past there, as both places received a migration influx as significant as it was curious starting in 1867: the thousands of Confederates who exiled there after the Civil War.

That conflict ended in 1865 and, as we know, was won by the Northern states due to their greater human and industrial potential, which allowed them to carry out something the Southerners did not need: occupying enemy territory. The problem, once the war ended, was to win the peace. Not only because the economy of the defeated was destroyed and their slave system dismantled, leading many Southerners to ruin, but also because many of them were unwilling to give up their way of life or risk suffering foreseeable reprisals.

The surrender of General Lee at Appomatox (Thomas Nast)
The surrender of General Lee at Appomatox (Thomas Nast). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Consequently, many of them chose to move west, the natural frontier for U.S. expansion, in search of new lands to settle, even at the risk of dealing with the Indigenous people. However, this migratory current was disjointed: it was not a wave but a trickle that, in practice, merged with the one from the North. In contrast, there was a massive outflow abroad, and although some chose British Honduras, New Virginia (Mexico), Spanish Cuba, Venezuela, or even Egypt, the preferred destination was Brazil.

Not only because it was an allied nation of the Confederacy and a place in the Americas in a formation process comparable at that time to the U.S., but also—and above all—because it was one of the two only Western states that still maintained slavery; the other was Spain.

Abolitionism had emerged in the early 19th century for two reasons. One, the consideration of slavery as an unjust and barbaric regime; another, the need for the more developed countries, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, to create a proletariat. For this reason, the United Kingdom became a scourge of traffickers, putting the Royal Navy to patrol the African coast and arrogating the right to other governments to decide the issue, although in return it was compatible with substantial subsidies to those who joined. Thus, everyone was banning slavery, and after the defeat of the Southern states, which allowed the Emancipation Proclamation to be enforced throughout the U.S. through the Thirteenth Amendment, only Spain and the Brazilian Empire remained.

The main slave routes between Africa and the Americas (1500-1870)
The main slave routes between Africa and the Americas (1500-1870). Credit: Contemporary African Art

The latter had been founded by Pedro I from the Portuguese colony, where the royal family had taken refuge after the Napoleonic invasion. Later, Joao VI returned to Europe, but his son, the mentioned Pedro, decided to stay in America, governing as regent of the Kingdom of Brazil until he declared independence in 1822 and, after defeating his father’s troops, was proclaimed emperor. Much of the economy was based on slaves, who initially made up about a third of the population, although over the decades it tended to reduce, and when the Confederates arrived, they were around a quarter of the total. In the mid-19th century, the Brazilian abolitionist movement practically did not exist.

In Brazil, the main crop was sugarcane, although there were also areas dedicated to rice and, of course, mining, but coffee eventually became the most important. In any case, these were large plantations worked similarly to those in the U.S., which did not go unnoticed by the Confederates when choosing a place to exile, especially when they learned that Pedro I wanted to introduce cotton, for which he offered to pay the travel expenses, grant lands, and exempt immigrants willing to do so from taxes (in an attempt to whiten the free population).

And since most of them were not wealthy and had lost everything, they packed up and left, ignoring the pleas of the southern authorities, including former President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee, who asked them to stay for the reconstruction of the country.

Pedro I proclaims the independence of Brazil and names himself the first emperor (François-René Moreau)
Pedro I proclaims the independence of Brazil and names himself the first emperor (François-René Moreau). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Thus, between ten and twenty thousand people moved to Brazil from the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas over the twenty years between 1865 and 1885, establishing about half a dozen settlements. The variation in numbers is due to the fact that many of these exiles would return when the Jim Crow Laws, a legislative body that white Democrats managed to pass to impose racial segregation, were enacted and remained in effect until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act abolished them in 1964 and 1965, respectively.

The Confederates, as they were called in their new host country, settled in various areas of Brazil, but especially in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as well as Santarem and Paraná in the south. The cities that welcomed them the most were those mentioned earlier: Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and Americana, the only ones that survived in the long run.

The first is a municipality in Sao Paulo, founded in 1818 from the sugar plantation of a widow named Margarida da Graça Martins, where Colonel William Hutchinson Norris, a former senator from Alabama, settled at the end of 1865. Two years later, about thirty families joined him, and that is why it was also called Colonia Norris.

William Hutchinson Norris
William Hutchinson Norris. Credit: Find a Grave

As for Americana, its founding was later, in 1875, by the military officer Ignácio Corrêa Pacheco, who had acquired several farms in the area totaling more than half a thousand acres, which he then sold to the aforementioned Norris; it was more of an expansion of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste. It was called Vila dos Americanos until 1904, and a previously unknown crop, watermelon, was grown on its lands. In both places, the newcomers worked in agriculture, buying slaves as labor and introducing cotton, modern farming techniques, Protestantism (specifically the Baptist Church), and, in general, their Anglo-Saxon customs.

These customs turned out to be not as compatible as they thought, due to different religions—they had to create their own cemetery because they were not allowed to bury their dead in Catholic soil—but also because Brazil’s racial policy was ambiguous, and people considered white there were black or, at least, mulatto in the eyes of the Confederates; not to mention the possibility of something as unacceptable to them as interracial marriage. However, over time they adapted to the local ways and switched from English to Portuguese. This integration was driven by two interconnected reasons. First, in 1871 Brazil decreed the Lei do Ventre Livre (Law of Free Birth), granting freedom to the children of slaves, which in 1880 extended to those over sixty until the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) officially abolished slavery in 1888. Brazil was the only Western country still practicing slavery, as Spain had abolished it in 1880 (although it established a transitional period called patronato that did not end until six years later).

Second, this new situation, where many slaves could become legal workers or even owners, led many Confederates to return to their now more appealing country with segregation or to leave the countryside to settle in cities, where it is always more difficult to maintain one’s identity. This was somewhat curious because a significant number of African Americans had traveled to Brazil with the Southerners, some as their slaves but others as freedmen attached to their former owners (perhaps the most famous case is Steve Watson, who was appointed manager of his master’s sawmill, Judge Dyer when he returned to his native Texas).

Home of the Norris
Home of the Norris. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

On the other hand, in the last quarter of the 19th century, Italian and German immigrants also began to flow in, tending to focus their activities in the agricultural sector that the Americans were beginning to leave. Both groups married their children to the third-generation Confederates, some of whom also established marital ties with Brazilians.

In this way, the homogeneity they had maintained for a while was partially diluted, but it is still commemorated today by the Fraternidade Descendência Americana through a picturesque annual event called Festa Confederada; it is a day to enjoy the stainless banner flag, bustle dresses, fried chicken, and gray uniforms to the rhythm of Dixie.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on August 26, 2019: Cómo Brasil se convirtió en el último refugio de los Confederados

SOURCES

Eugene C. Harter, The lost colony of the Confederacy

Cyrus B. Dawsey y James M. Dawsey, eds, The Confederados. Old south immigrants in Brazil

Elda González Martínez, La inmigración esperada: la política migratoria brasileña desde João VI hasta Getúlio Vargas

Jesse Greenspan, The Confederacy made its last stand in Brazil

Wikipedia, Confederados

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