When the Confederates lost the U.S. Civil War, a big variety of them feared reprisal from the Yankees and life in a society where their former slaves had been freed. So hundreds of Confederates left for other places, with many settling in Brazil.
This aspect of history was surprising to many on the web, and has long been a lesser-known chapter in studies of the Confederacy. One particular celebration of Confederate history even continues in Brazil, in keeping with the graphic below:
In response to the Washington Post, these celebrations have been ongoing for a long time, and have been held by the descendants of the Confederates in the dual cities of Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste.
Among the many outstanding Confederates who left the U.S. was the family of William H. Morris, a former Alabama state senator. In response to History.com, he bought land in southeastern Brazil, settled there together with his son, brought his enslaved employees, planted cotton, and sent for the remaining of his family to maneuver there as if the Civil War had not happened.
This move was possible because of the efforts of Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II who was a staunch ally of the Confederacy. He offered hundreds of white southerners the prospect to maneuver to Brazil within the 1860s and 1870s. The then-empire of Brazil was also one in all the last places within the Americas to abolish slavery, only doing so in 1888. Confederates were in a position to settle there and recreate facets of their lives, which included having slaves.
While History.com puts the variety of Confederates who moved into Brazil at around 10,000, this varies in keeping with other accounts. In response to the book, “The Lost Colony of the Confederacy,” by Eugene C. Harter (a descendant of Confederates who migrated to Brazil) “it just isn’t known what number of Confederates migrated to South America— estimates range from eight thousand to forty thousand.” While an estimated total of 3 million people migrated from the previous Confederate states to other regions across North America, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere within the a long time after the war, nobody really kept track of what number of went to Brazil. Brazil only began to maintain accurate immigration records in 1884, and the early migrants didn’t have passports; they simply boarded ships and moved south, in keeping with Harter.
Harter, who grew up among the many Confederate descendants within the Twenties and ’30s, also argued that these latest arrivals to Brazil were desirous to benefit from slave labor, and low-wage labor conditions in the realm, regardless that there was a thriving local abolitionist movement fighting the practice. A number of American slaves, who would have been freed within the U.S., moved to Brazil with the Confederates who were their former owners. Harter wrote:
The abolitionist movement in Brazil was clearly winning out when the southerners stepped off the ships. Perhaps a number of the immigrants had begun to query the morality of slavery, although there isn’t any written evidence to support this contention. Definitely, they were lured by the low price of paid farm labor in Brazil, in addition to the potential of owning slaves. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop. In a competitive world cotton market, low-cost labor could provide a decisive edge over their compatriots who stayed within the U.S.
The town of Americana near São Paulo became a serious location where Confederates partially recreated their old lives. The town didn’t start out with that name, but when Morris and other Confederates settled there, their “American” traditions returned. In response to Harter:
First-generation Confederates like Colonel Norris continued to contemplate themselves Americans. They were from the C.S.A, not the united statesA.; but still they were Americans, linked firmly to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the colonial heritage. The Fourth of July holiday was the key event of the yr. Subsequently, it should come as no surprise that the name of their town became Americana. But it surely was the Brazilians within the neighborhood who selected that name in reference to the place where their neighbors, the Americanos, lived.
Within the 1870s when the railroad from Såo Paulo was accomplished, the Confederados had begun to construct their houses near the railroad station, several miles east of Santa Barbara. For about twenty-five years the cluster of homes and shops grew and the settlement took on the name Estaçåo (the station). The Brazilians, nevertheless, at all times called the town Villa Americana in response to the obviously foreign ethnic character of its majority population.
Province authorities, recognizing the necessity to offer proper fire, police, and sanitary services to the group across the station, met in January 1900 and incorporated the town, arbitrarily naming it Americana. The Confederados offered no objection to the selection. They themselves, though, continued to call it the station long into the 20th century.
Their American identity was step by step subsumed by more “Brazilianization” because the variety of Americans unfolded and moved away from the unique plots of land. The early migrants had envisioned a mass migration from the previous Confederate states, which didn’t occur. Now a lot of them had begun to talk Portuguese and adapt to local customs. Many Confederates even returned to the USA after being unable to adapt to Brazil’s turbulent economy.
Yet today, in keeping with The Latest York Times, there are still yearly gatherings that remember the Confederacy, and wave the flag that’s so controversial back within the U.S. In an April 2016 Festa Confederada (Confederate Party) celebration, nobody registered the meaning of the flag to Black people descended from slaves. Others expressed their condemnation of the Charleston shooting of Black people by a white gunman, saying it was a “clear example of intolerance.” Attendees described the Confederate flag as an emblem of “family, unity, fraternity and friendship.”
Nonetheless, to Brazilian historians, this attitude stems from a reluctance in Brazil to deal with the legacy of slavery, and the role it played in bringing these migrants to the region. Luciana da Cruz Brito, a Brazilian historian of slavery, told The Latest York Times, “There’s an attempt by the Confederados to erase the interest in slavery as a principal motivation for his or her arrival in Brazil.”
Brito had even documented a case where Charles G. Gunter, a former Alabama state representative, acquired 40 slaves in Brazil for $12,500, considered to be a less expensive amount than what he would have paid within the U.S. before the abolition of slavery. A number of historians reported through scouring records, deeds of sale, and more, that a minimum of 54 families bought a minimum of 536 slaves upon entering Brazil.
In 1888, months before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Confederates like James H. Warne and John J. Klink carried out the brutal lynching of Joaquim Firmino, an abolitionist police chief in a town near Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, in front of his family.
Only through years of intermarriages, abolition in Brazil, and the dearth of draconian racial distinctions compared with the U.S., did views shift among the many immigrants. Indeed, Harter identified that a number of the Confederates’ opinions on race shifted over time: “Certainly one of the changes most evidenced within the Confederados of my youth (Twenties and Thirties) was their belief in tolerance among the many races. This that they had acquired from the Brazilians.”
And yet in celebrations from recent years, attendees ate southern fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits and square danced, and a few wore Confederate army uniforms in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste. Asher Levine, a Sao Paulo-based correspondent for Reuters, told the BBC that most of the people celebrating saw themselves as expressing pride of their American heritage, which they saw as their ethnicity, and never as a political stance.
But Black Brazilians in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and elsewhere noted the brutal shootings within the U.S., the controversy over the display of Confederate monuments, and reflected on their very own experiences of racism of their communities. In 2019, numerous activists demanded that the celebrations lower the Confederate flag. They didn’t have an issue with the party, however the flag needed to go. Organizers refused.
Generations after Gunter moved to Brazil, his descendant, Montana Ray, would write in The Point magazine about her experience researching the celebrations, and learning about her shared history with Rita Lee, the famous Brazilian singer:
Imagine my surprise to learn Lee — a central figure in Brazilian music history — was a confederada who grew up attending the festa in Santa Bárbara. Her memoir articulates, slightly cavalierly, how the confederados have at all times been a multiracial crew. She writes that as a woman she watched her father joke with the family’s ex-slave, Olímpia, who accompanied her great-grandfather from Alabama to Brazil, where she served because the “dama de companhia” for her grandmother until she died. Lee remembers Olímpia’s American Creole — indeed, all the arrangement — as “fofa,” or “cute.” Brazilian law, while kind to white immigrants, prohibited the immigration of free Black people, so formerly enslaved individuals who immigrated with their former traffickers were thus re-conscripted into slavery. I’m unsure, but perhaps this historical perversion explains Olímpia’s lifelong “companionship” to Lee’s grandmother.
In much of this research I actually have felt a queasy revulsion — and I don’t think it’s appropriate necessarily that I felt more sharply outraged by Lee’s attitude toward her — our — forebears. [My child] Ami and his babysitter Mateus had found me unhappily eating pão de queijo; I handed the remaining snacks and Lee’s book to Mateus, pointing to the passage. His whole body made an exclamation point when he realized I’d appropriately understood the Portuguese. Most Brazilians don’t know that it’s “Lee” in honor of General Lee. I’d confessed that I used to be planning on going to the festa to jot down about it, but that I wasn’t sure if I should bring Ami. “Hell no,” shouted Ami from the subsequent room, where he’d nestled down with a book. Hell no, my biracial, gender-fluid child wouldn’t go to a Confederate party with a bunch of bikers and men dressed as Confederate soldiers in the course of São Paulo’s interior.
And in 2022, a latest could end the practice of displaying the flag. After years of protest and advocacy, a neighborhood ordinance was passed that banned the usage of “racist symbols” and specifically named the Confederate flag as a part of the justification for the law. The law also bans the distribution of public funds to organizations and events that display such symbols. Some say it could put the festival in danger, but others argue that it’s a probability to balance the historic narrative being told in regards to the Confederate immigrants.
“We will not be against people celebrating their ancestors,” City Councilwoman Esther Moraes told the Christian Science Monitor. She wrote and sponsored the law and insisted the festival could proceed celebrating American heritage. “The problem is the usage of Confederate symbols […] that represent the oppression that our Black population doesn’t wish to carry any longer.”
Sources:
“Eugene C. Harter.” MyEasternShoreMD, https://www.myeasternshoremd.com/obituaries/eugene-c-harter/article_12c596f7-6695-5d56-9895-6d9f3624fe28.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
Greenspan, Jesse. “The Confederacy Made Its Last Stand in Brazil.” HISTORY, https://www.history.com/news/confederacy-in-brazil-civil-war. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
Harter, Eugene C.. The Lost Colony of the Confederacy. United States, Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
“Latest Law Could Mark End of American Confederacy – in Brazil.” Christian Science Monitor, 16 Aug. 2022. Christian Science Monitor, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2022/0816/Latest-law-could-mark-end-of-American-Confederacy-in-Brazil. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
Ray, Montana. “Os Confederados.” The Point Magazine, 16 Nov. 2020, https://thepointmag.com/politics/os-confederados/. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
Romero, Simon. “A Slice of the Confederacy within the Interior of Brazil.” The Latest York Times, 8 May 2016. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/world/americas/a-slice-of-the-confederacy-in-the-interior-of-brazil.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
“The Town in Brazil That Embraces the Confederate Flag.” BBC News, 23 June 2015. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33245800. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
“They Lost the Civil War and Fled to Brazil. Their Descendants Refuse to Take down the Confederate Flag.” Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-confederate-flag-civil-war-americana-santa-barbara/2020/07/11/1e8a7c84-bec4-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.