In Brazil, Heirs Recall Last Stand of U.S. Confederacy

There’s not much left now to tell their story, save a small museum and scores of weather-beaten tombstones in a shaded cemetery far from the U.S. towns and cities they once called home.

Historians say theirs was the only political exodus of U.S. citizens in the history of the United States, although it is rarely mentioned in history books. In the latter half of the 1800s, thousands of Americans from all over the South left their homes and families in search of new lives in Mexico, Cuba and Brazil.

Many returned disillusioned soon afterward; others were wiped out or run off by locals. But in Brazil, they carved out a foothold, and many prospered.

This month, a dwindling handful of their descendants will gather, as they do annually, at a special memorial ground surrounded by seemingly endless fields of sugar cane in this city of 150,000 to pay homage to the men and women, most buried nearby, who came as pioneers.

Men like Col. William H. Norris, a former Alabama senator; Ezekiel B. Pyles, the final military escort for Confederate President Jefferson Davis; H.F. Steagall, a Confederate spy from Wall, Tex.; George S. Barnsley, an assistant surgeon in the 8th Georgia Infantry; Johnathan Ellsworth, a drummer in the 1st Arkansas Brigade, and Benjamin C. Yancy of the 16th Battalion, Alabama Sharpshooters.

Their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren will sing a hymn in Portuguese, say a prayer and then unfurl three flags--the Stars and Stripes; Brazil’s green, yellow and blue banner, and the red, white and blue Stars and Bars of the old Southern Confederacy.

Once again, they will tell the stories, some even today speaking with a Southern drawl, of how America’s Civil War rebels made their last stand in Brazil.

“They came here because they felt that their ‘country’ had been invaded and their land confiscated,” said Judith McKnight Jones, 68, great-granddaughter of the original McKnight family that moved to Brazil from Texas. “To them, there was nothing left there. So they came here to try to re-create what they had before the war.

“I grew up listening to the stories. They were angry and bitter. When they talked about it--moving here, the war, leaving their homes--it was always a very sore subject for them.”

Jones is the resident historian and keeper of the flame for the 350 members of Brazil’s Fraternity of the Confederate Descendants, to whom she sends a newsletter every three months. She has written a 408-page book in Portuguese on the lives of the Confederate colonists in Brazil, most now completely absorbed into Brazilian culture.

Her home sits on part of what was once a 5,000-acre plantation that was the beginning of the most successful Confederate colony. Inside it are hundreds of pieces of memorabilia that Jones has collected--tattered photographs, letters, notes, diary entries.

They represent the memories and lives of slave owners, soldiers, belles, schoolteachers, dentists, doctors and farmers during their early years in Brazil.

Every year, about a dozen Americans--historians, students, vacationers and Southerners whose ancestors told them of the emigration--make their way to her home to inquire about what some call the “Lost Colony of the Confederacy.” One was then-Georgia Gov.--and later U.S. President--Jimmy Carter, who wept as he toured the cemetery.

Patiently, carefully and often with great humor, Jones, hobbled by age and arthritis, tells the stories of lost ships, families wiped out by tuberculosis and fortunes made and lost in a new land. But mostly she tells how a handful of Southerners left their stamp on a large piece of this huge nation.

An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Confederates emigrated from the United States during the years right after the Civil War. The number would have been much larger, historians say, had not still-revered Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee publicly urged Southerners to stay in the United States.

Still, the fever to leave spread, and thousands shipped out of emigration stations set up in Galveston, Tex.; New Orleans; Baltimore; New York; Mobile, Ala., and Newport News, Va.

Many chose Brazil, where the government promised cheap land in the hope that the Americans’ farming techniques would establish the country as a leader in a worldwide cotton market depleted by the Civil War.

Brazil was also attractive to many Southerners because it still practiced slavery. (The country abolished it in 1888.) Many hoped to start a plantation system based on a life they had cherished in the South.

They established several colonies: one in northern Brazil 500 miles from the mouth of the Amazon River, which became the city of Santarem; another in Rio Doce near the coast; three more--Juquia, New Texas and Xiririca--in southern Brazil, and another just outside a town called Santa Barbara, 80 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

“Most of the colonies failed,” Jones lamented. “There were all kinds of problems. In Santarem, they were just too isolated. A few people did well, but most gave up, and they didn’t hold together long.

“There was a lot of disease--malaria, smallpox--and then the soil wasn’t real good for farming in a lot of places. A lot of the families returned to the United States. Some of the people moved to the cities, such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but a lot of them came here, where things were going well.”

Initially, the Confederates remained a cloistered community. They intermarried and established their own schools and churches, sending back to the States for teachers and ministers. They established a separate cemetery initially, because the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil did not allow the Protestant Confederates to be buried with Catholics.

Even after 80 years in the country, many spoke exclusively English in their homes.

“I remember when I was 4 years old, I was lost in a textile factory, and I couldn’t tell the people anything because I only spoke English,” recalled Allison Jones, 51, an engineer and third-generation descendant. “I didn’t learn Portuguese until I started school.”

Their community bordering Santa Barbara was dubbed Villa Americana by native Brazilians and officially became Americana in the mid-1930s. In the interim, the Confederates introduced to Brazil baseball, peaches, pecans and various strains of rice. There were fortunes made in cotton and watermelon with seeds brought from Georgia.

Rita Lee, a Confederate descendant named after Robert E. Lee, has become one of Brazil’s most popular singers. Her uncle, Leonard Yancy Jones, established the first public radio station in Sao Paulo. Others have gone on to become elected officials and business leaders.

They also brought with them their rebel spirit. When a brief Brazilian civil war erupted in 1932 as the state of Sao Paulo tried to secede, many of the Confederate descendants, such as Roberto Steagall, fought on the side of the secessionists.

“Once a rebel. Twice a rebel,” reads Steagall’s tombstone.

Many of the original Confederate families gave up farming and moved from Americana in later years to Sao Paulo and Campinas, where they became professionals. In the process, the spirit of kinship began to drift.

To keep their history alive, the descendants established a small museum in 1988 in Santa Barbara. There are sporadic picnics throughout the year to keep the descendants updated, and an annual celebration during which they don antebellum gowns and Civil War uniforms, hoist the flags of the Confederate states, look at old pictures and reminisce about an era that millions of Americans are happy is long past.

During one recent gathering, Daniel Carr de Muzio, son of an Italian father and a Confederate descendant mother, brought his daughter and son out to look again at the tombstone of their great-great-great-grandparents on land that his relatives once owned.

“Everybody has roots, and you want to know your roots,” said De Muzio, a sales manager in Sao Paulo and head of the newly established chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy in Brazil. “It was passed on to me, and now I’m passing it on to my children.”

He and others are mindful, however, that the tradition and symbols they hold so dear have the onerous connotation of slavery to many Americans.

“I know what you’re saying,” said Allison Jones, “but it’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s a good tradition. We try to value the good qualities and try to forget some of the defects.

“Like the flag. I’ve seen it depicted with drunkards in bars, making a lot of noise and yelling. That has nothing to do with my flag. That kind of behavior is not what the flag symbolizes to me.

“To me, it is the idea that you can fight for your own opinion. It’s about being defiant. It doesn’t have to be about segregation. It arouses in me (the feeling) that I can fight, even if I lose.”