By Gary Hawkins | Sept/Oct 08 | Features

The Lost Confederados

Why thousands of Southerners fled to Brazil after the Civil War, why they stayed, and why their descendants still remember

I set out from rural North Carolina where folks drink beer, eat barbecue, and listen to Skynyrd on the local classic rock station, flew ten hours to São Paulo, took a cab eighty miles north through a pleasant stretch of Brazilian countryside, and exited onto a dirt road that wound through endless fields of sugarcane before delivering me here to the Cemitério do Campo, where I’ve just stepped through the gate to find folks drinking beer, eating barbecue, and listening to Skynyrd on the PA. The occasion is the Festa Confederada, an annual fund-raiser hosted by the Fraternidade Descendência Americana for upkeep of the grounds, and I’ve come south, way south, in hopes of discovering why, after five generations of intermarriage with Brazilian locals, the people here still seem so obsessed with their Southern heritage.

A little-known fact: Of the more than forty thousand Southerners who fled their homes after the Civil War, at least nine thousand migrated to Brazil. Many of these Confederados assimilated into the Rio or São Paulo societies, some returned to America for financial or nostalgic reasons, but the more determined formed insular Protestant colonies that more or less re-created Dixie on foreign soil. Five generations later I’m visiting the most successful of these settlements, the Santa Bárbara D’Oeste colony founded by former Alabama senator Colonel William Norris, who at age sixty-five declared that although he knew nothing of the Brazilian culture or its language, he was “just mad enough to give it a go.” The cemetery itself was gifted to the Confederados by Colonel Anthony T. Oliver, a first-generation colonist whose wife died shortly after their arrival here in 1867. Evidently, Protestants couldn’t get themselves buried in Catholic cemeteries, so Oliver donated two and a half acres for this unforeseen need. I can just make out the cemetery on the far side of the outpost, occluded by shady foliage and the general busyness of the Festa. That’s where I’ll conclude my sweep of the grounds.