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

Consort of A.T. Oliver

Born Georgia, USA, Aug 8th 1827, died July 13th 1868

With a full Christian hope she sleeps in Jesus

Oliver’s daughters are buried here, too—Ingliana F. Oliver, who died on April 19, 1869, and Mildred Oliver, who died on December 17 of the same year. Ingliana was eighteen when she died, and Mildred was fourteen. There’s no written record of how Oliver responded to these tragedies, whether he was mad with grief or somehow accepting of it all. I think it’s safe to say he was Job with the hedge lifted. Not that his neighbors were in any way protected. Nancy Bankston lived six years. Juliet MacKnight lived less than a year. The MacKnights’ second child died unnamed—“Infant of Harvey and Mary MacKnight, 3-7-1922.” Pattie Ethel Thomas lived sixteen months, and Francis B. Hawthorne lived eight years. The sorrow is everywhere around me. Mal-assombrado. Annie Seawright (1856–1908) and Eugene Virgil Seawright (1854–1918) are buried next to a stone that bears the remarkable words “4 Seawright Babies,” and behind it, on a tiny stone almost hidden in the weeds, words that tell us that everything and nothing happened one day long ago. “Sept. 7, 1869—Asleep in Jesus.”

I’m not morbid, and I don’t make a habit of hanging out in graveyards. But Campo is not morbid. And it’s not a graveyard. It’s not any kind of yard. It’s a garden. In fact, it may be the loveliest garden I’ve ever visited. It’s a garden and a cemetery, and I don’t know if there’s a word for that. There’s as much life as death present, and as much night as day. In the middle of the day it feels nocturnal. Maybe it’s the blackness of the stones or the density of the leafy shade, but the bright dapples read more as moonlight in here. They fall across the concrete plots, berry-flecked dirt, weeds, and wildflowers.

The Brazilian sun clears a high conifer and settles on Miriam Constance Capps, and for a minute or so the words are an illuminated manuscript. Then the sun finds another name—John Wilson Cullen. What is there to know about John Wilson Cullen? Capps occupies her own lonely plot, but Cullen is buried among family. When he married, his wife became Annie Luther Terrell Cullen. (Long names are a way of keeping track of property and bloodlines, common in island societies.) When Cullen gave his daughter’s hand in marriage to a non-descendência, she became Doris June Cullen Pierami. These etched records of assimilation are everywhere. Martha Smith is survived by Henrique Smith. Joe Joseph Green is survived by Genny Green Junqueira Franco, and Albert and Josephine Carr are survived three generations later by my new friend, Daniel Carr de Muzio.

Daniel would later complete the sad saga of A.T. Oliver for me. “First, let’s not be too hard on the Catholics,” he says. “There is reason to believe that Beatrice Oliver was denied their burial grounds not because she was Protestant, but because she died of galloping consumption [a virulent strain of tuberculosis], and the groundskeepers didn’t want to handle the body. She contracted the disease either on the voyage to Brazil or in Charleston Harbor and arrived deathly ill. Oliver’s daughters caught the same disease and died the same way.”