Brazilian 'Confederates' get back to roots

Web posted July 26, 1998

By Erik Tryggestad
Morris News Service

LEXINGTON, Ga. -- For five Brazilian students, a trip to their ancestral homeland in Oglethorpe County turned into a family reunion.

Thursday, Anna Lee Carr De Muzio, a law student from Americana, Brazil, met Tony Carr, a surveying consultant from Augusta.

Anna Lee is his distant relative, part of a family of Carrs who left their home in Montgomery, Ala., years ago to work in Brazil.

``We found out we had descendants in Brazil about five years ago,'' Ms. Carr said. ``Then I found out through a relative in Florida that they'd be here.''

Many other families besides the Carrs left the South in 1866 to start a new life in Brazil. King Dom Pedro II wanted to expand his country's agricultural and textile industries, so he offered Americans land in exchange for technical expertise.

Many Southerners at the time were eager to leave their homeland, which had been devastated by the Civil War and was under what they considered an oppressive Reconstruction government, said Tracy Norman, a member of the Oglethorpe County chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

About 9,000 people went to Brazil, but only about 2,000 stayed.

They formed a colony called Americana, under the direction of Col. William Norris, who was born in Oglethorpe County in 1800 and later moved to southeast Alabama, Mr. Norman said.

Col. Norris' colonists became known as ``Confederados,'' Spanish for ``Confederates.''

They held on to their Southern heritage, and to this day they celebrate annually with Dixie songs and Southern cooking, according to Dan Coleman of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans.

``In Americana, they celebrate their Confederate heritage more than we do,'' Mr. Coleman said. ``They display the Brazilian flag, the Confederate flag and the American flag.''

Nevertheless, some Confederados are concerned that their children are becoming more Brazilian than American, so they arranged for five of them to take a one-month tour of the South.

That tour began June 27 when Anna Lee (who is named after her grandmother, Anna, and Gen. Robert E. Lee) and Jose Frederico Padoveze, Joao Leopoldo Padoveze, Raphael Romi and Ricardo Silva, all high school students in Brazil, landed in Atlanta.

The tour of their historic homeland included a six-day trip to the 135th re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, a visit to historic sites in Atlanta and Virginia and a trip to Six Flags over Georgia.

Anna Lee said their favorite part of the trip so far was meeting former President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Members of the Northeast Georgia chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans supplied the group with plenty of Southern memorabilia and clothing.

Joao was sporting a Brazilian-style soccer shirt and socks with the Rebel flag during a tour of the Oglethorpe County Courthouse.