Confederates in Brazil and Mexico

After the American Civil War, thousands of former rebels fled the South, seeking new homes in Latin America. Because of proximity and a welcome from Emperor Maximilian, Mexico attracted many settlers, among them a number of well-known ex-Confederates, including oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury; generals Joseph Shelby, Sterling Price, J. B. Magruder, and Thomas C. Hindman; and former governors Isham G. Harris of Tennessee and Henry W. Allen of Louisiana. Confederate émigrés scattered across Mexico, but Córdova and the Tuxpan region were the two most important areas of settlement. For most emigrants, settlement in Mexico was of brief duration because of the political turmoil attendant upon Maximilian's overthrow in 1867, the hardships of pioneering, and the lack of capital. British Honduras (now Belize) and Venezuela also attracted ex-Confederates, but the country which received the most Confederate emigrants, a conservatively estimated 2,500 to 4,000, was Brazil.

Former rebels who settled in Brazil feared the onset of a harsh Reconstruction in the United States and dreamed of rebuilding their plantation way of life. Prior to the war, Matthew Fontaine Maury had propagandized for the settlement of fertile lands in Brazil. In 1865 and 1866 emigrant agents toured Brazil, made arrangements to purchase land and bring settlers, and wrote enthusiastic books and letters on the prospects of settlement. Former leaders of the Confederacy and the Southern press were hostile, however, viewing emigration as abandonment of the South.

The peak years of emigration were 1867 and 1868. Since most confederados lacked adequate means for settlement, Brazil's attraction was a liberal immigration policy with good land offered at prices as low as twenty-two cents an acre and mortgages payable in five equal installments. Equally important was the presence of slavery and cheap labor in general. There were four distinct areas of rural settlement: 200 pioneers located at Santarém on the Amazon River 500 miles from the coast; 50 or more families settled at Lake Juparana (the Rio Doce settlement) 30 miles from the coast and 300 miles north of Rio de Janeiro; 150 families formed a community on the Juquiá River near Iguape, some 100 miles south of São Paulo; and some 75 families located in a cluster of communities (Retiro, Campo, and Villa Americana) in the Santa Barbara area, 80 to 100 miles northwest of São Paulo. After clearing land and planting, most settlers soon failed because of their remoteness from markets and lack of transportation and capital. Disillusioned, they moved on to São Paulo and Rio, or returned to the United States. By the mid-1870s most had abandoned rural life, and Brazil's two largest cities had the greatest numbers of remaining confederados, the most successful of whom were doctors, dentists, and engineers.

The only successful rural settlement was Americana. Located 30 miles from a rail line to São Paulo, Estação or Villa Americana, as it was first called, was initially a cotton-growing settlement; settlers later switched to other crops, among them the Georgia rattlesnake watermelon, which they introduced to Brazil. The confederados of Americana tried to maintain a "Southern way of life," but by the third generation they had become Brazilianized. Today Americana is a city of 160,000 where descendants of the first settlers still celebrate the Fourth of July and the Fraternidade Descendência Americana meets quarterly at the American Cemetery to remember the past.

See alsoBrazil: 1808–1889; Maximilian; United States-Latin American Relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peter A. Brannon, ed., "Southern Emigration to Brazil: Embodying the Diary of Jennie R. Keyes, Montgomery, Alabama," in Alabama Historical Quarterly, 1 (Summer 1930): 74-75 (Fall 1930): 280-305 (Winter 1930): 467-488.

Lawrence F. Hill, "The Confederate Exodus to Latin America," in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 39, no. 2 (October 1935): 100-134, no. 3 (January 1936):161-199, no. 4 (April 1936): 309-326.

Blanche Henry Clark Weaver, "Confederate Emigration to Brazil," in Journal of Southern History, 27, no. 1 (February 1961): 33-53.

Andrew R. Folle, The Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico (1965).

Bell J. Wiley, "Confederate Exiles in Brazil," in Civil War Times Illustrated, 15 (January 1977):22-32.

Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (1985).

William Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan's Confederate Colony in Brazil (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Dawsey, Cyrus B., and James M. Dawsey. The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Gussi, Alcides Fernando. Os norte-americanos (confederados) do Brasil: Identidades no contexto transnacional. Americana: Prefeitura Municipal de Americana, SP, 1997.

Horne, Gerald. The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Oliveira, Ana Maria Costa de. O destino (não) manifesto: Os imigrantes norte-americanos no Brasil. São Paulo: União Cultural Brasil-Estados Unidos, 1995.

                                              Carl Osthaus