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

In Festas past, the ceremony went this way: The Brazilian flag, or Auriverde (“of gold and green”), was raised to the Brazilian national anthem, which is a bouncy number but goes on longer than a four-verse hymn. Next up was the American flag, raised to “America the Beautiful,” and everyone more or less stood through that. Then the Stars and Bars went up to a rousing chorus of “Dixie” and everyone went crazy, especially the old-timers who whooped it up and rebel-yelled and danced all over the place. I would’ve paid to see that, but the ceremony proved a little too ebullient, a little too in-your-face for some sensitive someone somewhere, so it was bagged in favor of its present staid alternative: All flags, including two that I’d never seen, are raised together, verrrry slowly, to the singing of the Brazilian national anthem.

Getting Out of Dodge

It’s impossible to exaggerate the harsh feelings of defeated Southerners toward the Northern army. They might have been willing to accept military defeat, but when their families were burned out of their homes, robbed, and left to starve, a deeper resentment began to take hold. A resentment against America itself. With citizens starving and property in distress, unscrupulous Yankee agents purchased estates at fire-sale prices. A farm worth ,000 could be purchased for 0. The entire town of Fernandina, Florida, was purchased for ,000. Congress piled on by branding 3.5 million Southerners traitors and depriving them of their citizenship. Northern newspapers called for mass hangings. Jefferson Davis was thrown in jail. It’s no wonder that thousands of Southerners began to pack up and flee to almost anywhere else.

The voyage to Brazil was booked through emigrant organizations such as the Southern Colonization Society of Edgefield, South Carolina. Most of the original colonists were the equivalent of our present-day upper-middle class: doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and businessmen. They were lured to Brazil by the land, the promise of a new day, and a profound spirit of adventure. The journey was often difficult: hammocks sleeping three, with upwards of three hundred passengers per vessel. The early colonists set out from Charleston and traveled thirty days to Rio de Janeiro. Later expeditions set out from ports as far south as Galveston and as far north as New York. The trips were organized the way the pioneers organized their wagon trains—one after another and each responsible for all others, and for the most part this technique worked. Sometimes, however, the trips became perilous, as recorded in the diary of Sarah Bellona Smith Ferguson on the ship Derby in 1866. The shady Spanish captain had been bribed by Yankee agents to orchestrate a shipwreck in the treacherous waters near Cuba by tying down the helm and retiring to his cabin. “When the trick was discovered,” Ferguson writes in her diary, “McMullen and Judge Dyer and other resolute men entered the [cabin] and at the point of a six shooter forced the captain to loose the helm.” But they were too late. The vessel slammed against the rocks, and its passengers barely escaped with their lives.

"Dixie" in Portuguese