The Lost Confederados (Southerners and Southern culture flourishing in Brazil)

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.

My son and daughter-in-law, who've relocated permanently to Brazil, sent me this proud and morale-boosting article over the weekend, and I wanted to share it here to brighten up people's spirits after what was frankly the worst week for the US and conservative America in over a century, at least. In just the past week, the USA's corrupt governing elites officially went crazy in their full embrace of tyrannical socialism and rejection of the conservative principles of our founders, and what's worse, the Republican Party (both in Congress and on the Supreme Court) was fully complicit with Obama and the Dems in the backstabbing of our people-- meaning that we have no representation, whatsoever, in the halls of US power. In one horrible week, we had the RINO Supreme Court impose no less than 3 extreme encroachments on our freedom, alongside a rank betrayal by the GOP RINO Congress and RINO governors like Nikki Haley. There was the Court prohibiting us from choosing our own neighborhoods and places to raise our kids (Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project-- the ugliest form of forced integration), the spectacle of McConnell, Ryan and Boehner leading the charge to pass Obamatrade and further gut our communities, SCOTUS imposing Obamacare and its corruption and crony capitalism on our businesses, SCOTUS then going farther and gutting the very institution of marriage itself, and then traitor RINOs Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham and of course, Jeb Bush capitulating to Marxist rabble-rousers in the media and ordering the permanent removal of the Stars and Bars-- a symbol not of slavery, but of cultural pride and resistance to government tyranny. Sometimes we talk and fret about the Fall of America and the USA's submission to government tyranny, but last week, we saw it actually happen, and now it's irreversible with the bought-out Republican RINO establishment (purchased by crony capitalist anti-American traitors like the Chamber of Commerce, Sheldon Adelson and Mark Zuckerberg) firmly in the pocket of the socialist/globalist set.

Many of my family members have emigrated out of the USA in the past decade, two to Asia (China and Korea for their import-export businesses), one to Germany (in a very gun-friendly part of the country), one surprisingly to south France (more conservative there in Provence than I expected), but most-- including, recently, my own son-- to South America, Nicaragua and Panama. Notably, none of them left the US for cultural reasons specifically. My extended family is a clan of hard workers and entrepreneurs-- it runs in our blood, and the US has become one of the hostile countries in recent years to the aspirations of entrepreneurs and small business owners. The highest corporate tax rate, the outrageous practice of double-taxing foreign earned income (in which the US is nearly unique), the oppression of tax authorities-- all of these have taken a growing toll on US businesses. Now the outrageous costs and demands of Obamacare, even more bureaucratic red tape at the state and federal level, the corruption of the Chamber of Crony Capitalists, student loans and other factors are making it impossible to do honest business in the US anymore. So nearly a dozen of my family members have left.

Needless to say, our son's departure to Brazil was not easy for me or my wife at first, and it's been an adjustment getting used to our grandkids address us as "vovô" and "avó" (Grandpa and Grandma in Brazilian Portuguese). But the relative freedom and success enjoyed by our son and his family in Brazil have warmed us to his move, and this article about the Confederados was a welcome surprise.

I had never known this until this weekend, but apparently, many of the most solid bastions of Southern culture and traditions in the world are down there in those lush, free, spirited communities in Brazil, as this article proudly demonstrates. Many Confederates went there after 1865, and were joined by others over the succeeding decades.

Unlike the US, being swallowed up by the Cultural Marxism and stifling Gramscian political correctness of our decadent and bought-off rent-seeker elites, the Brazilian communities proudly wave the Confederate flag and appreciate its true meaning of freedom and resistance to tyranny, with no shame or impulse to take it down from any corner. Firearms and gun culture in general are not only tolerated but celebrated, while Southern slogans, cuisine and culture are proudly proclaimed and embraced in the lilting beauty of the local Portuguese dialect. My son's business is already flourishing down there, and he's fully expatriated (in part due to the outrages of the Fatca tax laws, a pathetic lame and failed attempt by US tax authorities to harass citizens and immigrants to cover the $18 trillion mountain of US debt). My son's trade is in agricultural equipment, and Brazil has the most beautiful and richest land in the world-- in stark contrast to the United States, where the wave of droughts will soon render perhaps three-fourths of the country (and virtually all of socialist California) uninhabitable. But more importantly, my son is flourishing in Brazil because Brazil is letting him flourish, in one of the many basically autonomous communities that are a defining feature of South America. He saw the handwriting on the wall in the US in 2010, when state tax authorities (desperate to close the revenue gaps from their own corruption) came to shake him and his fellow prosperous businessmen down for extra cash, while the passage of Obamacare and its federal intrusions sealed the deal. In Brazil, he is allowed to prosper from his hard work. And most of Brazil is very unlike downtown Sao Paulo with all its favelas, it's very rich and beautiful, with the world's friendliest people and without doubt the most beautiful women (which I'm sure my grandsons will appreciate when they grow up).

Talking to my son and seeing this article, I came to appreciate why so many US freedom-lovers and free market self-starters have opted to move to places like Patagonia in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, Panama, Colombia and of course Brazil. As an American kid myself I had long learned only about these countries' flaws and problems (a good deal of propaganda from freedom-hating US media one might say), the favelas, the occasional bribes and gifts in many regions. Yet recently I've come to learn that these are not only exaggerations but often outright lies that obscure the broader truth. For all their flaws, Brazil and countries like it have realized the central principle of freedom that makes all other freedoms possible: that the greatest freedom is to simply be left alone to succeed and celebrate one's culture. It's why for example there are rich and prosperous Irish, Welsh, German, Scottish, Italian, English, Russian, Asian Indian, Filipino, Dutch, Ukrainian and Polish communities right alongside the Confederados in Brazil (with Gisele Bündchen herself, for example, hailing from one of these). Brazil, like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador and other countries in the region, has had the good sense to leave them largely alone, let them celebrate their identity and succeed, quite unlike the constant impositions and demands of the US and state governments more and more. And I can entirely understand why so many freedom-loving Americans are moving there. It is a great comfort to know that, even as our ever more assertive Bolsheviks in the United States push for the Stalinist quashing of our history and the elimination of the Confederate flag and other symbols of freedom, that the flag and the Southern spirit will continue to flourish in Brazil.

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