Thanks to movies like The Boys from Brazil, it’s somewhat common knowledge that several members of the Third Reich fled Germany after WWII and took refuge in South America. It’s less commonly known that thousands of Confederates did the same after the American Civil War.
When the Civil War ended, much of the South was in ruins. Rather than rebuild in a unified America that had abolished slavery, many Southerners preferred to move to entirely different countries where slavery was still legal, like Brazil. The Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro, who had supported the Confederacy, enticed Southerners to relocate to his country with cheap land and by subsidizing their transport.
It’s estimated that between 8,000 and 20,000 Southerners left the United States for other countries, and most of them ended up in Brazil. Many of these Southerners specifically chose Brazil because they wanted to continue enslaving people. For the Brazilian government’s part, American Southerners were desirable because of an official policy to make Brazil’s population more white by enticing Europeans and their American descendants to immigrate.
These Southern immigrants came to be called “Confederados,” and they built settlements across Brazil. Most of the Confederados found Brazil’s climate too hot and soil too inhospitable for cultivating the crops they were accustomed to growing. Others failed to assimilate into Brazilian culture. In 1888, Brazil outlawed slavery and many Confederados returned to the United States. However, a few hundred Confederados remained, and their descendants still live in Brazil and celebrate their Confederate heritage today. One Confederado settlement, Americana, grew into a large city and still has that name.
