(grand music) (singing in foreign language) - My grandparents on my mother's side were from Gonzales, Texas.

And on my father's side from Chester County, South Carolina.

- My father came from Georgia, my mother from Waco, Texas.

- I'm proud of having Brazil as my mother country and the United States as my grandmother country.

(drums beating) - [Narrator] After the Civil War, the south was a conquered land.

Its way of life as dead as Greece or Rome.

To these southerners life in the native land was no longer tolerable.

Reconstruction they felt was new form of war being waged upon the south.

In every state of the dead confederacy, the angriest and the bitterest formed colonization societies, sold their few possessions, said goodbye to friends and family and sailed to seek new homes under foreign flags.

And while immigrants were streaming from Europe to the land of opportunity, thousands of America's unreconstructed confederates were doing everything they could to leave it.

- Well, my ancestors came after the close of the Civil War because they would rather leave the country than to pledge allegiance to the federal government that they had fought for over four years.

- They hated the Yankees, though.

They wanted to live with honor, their conception of honor and a lot of the people felt that the only way do to it was to get up and leave.

My grandfather and six others of my relative, together with 150 all told made up one group.

- They were encouraged to come to Brazil by the propaganda that the Brazilian government was doing in the United States to bring to Brazil the know how on the cotton planning.

- And when they came down, we never asked and we never talked very much about how it was on the boat.

I would like to know how on the ship they came down, the hardships they had, they must have had.

- They went from Galveston, Texas, stopping at New Orleans when they picked up up one of my grandfathers and they proceeded on to the Gulf of Mexico around Florida, but off the coast of Cuba they hit a storm.

The ship was called the Derby, it was a brig.

It was old and it was hard to handle.

And they ended up on a rock in a beach in Cuba.

There they stayed about a month and then thanks to the help of the Cuban people, they were able to gather funds and enough clothes, they lost everything, to get back to the United States and start over again.

- [Narrator] On route to New York to charter another ship, the battled immigrants encountered another storm and were forced to put in off Norfolk, Virginia, in the shadow of Fort Monroe, where they're leader Jefferson Davis was being held in a cell at Irons.

Arriving in New York, among their former enemies, they were objects of curiosity, the men in their confederate gray, the clothes of the women, as the New York Times said, relics of finer days.

Finally they set sail and after a two-month journey, arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

- Well, they were met with bands, the emperor, parades, bands playing Dixie and presented with almost free land, thousands of acres of free cotton land.

- They settled in this vicinity.

My mother was 11 years old, my father 18 and eight years later, they were married, having met on the ship and made this journey to Brazil.

No doubt that life was very difficult in those days.

- In coming to Brazil, the conditions of the trip down here and conditions in Brazil and of the houses they had to live in was so bad.

- They didn't have any homes, they had to build their homes and while they built their homes, well, they lived in practically huts I presume.

- [Narrator] The confederates exiled themselves, not only to Brazil, but throughout the world, to Venezuela, Jamaica, British Honduras, to Egypt and Japan.

Some never surrendering, cross the Rio Grande with the confederate cannon to fight in Mexico another Civil War for Emperor Maximilian against Benito Juarez.

Again on the losing side, now twice defeated, many confederates in Mexico again looked south.

Entranced by the Emperor's propaganda goaded by memory and pride, from Mexico, from New Orleans, from New York, they sailed to new homes 5,000 miles south of the Mason Dixon Line in Brazil.

Probably the most outlandish scheme was to settle in the tropical rainforest of the Amazon jungle.

(flute music) In this ill conceived theater for grand dreams, endless rains washed out the roads.

Isolated by physical distance and language, the immigrants who had bitterly abandoned their home now were overwhelmed with memories of it.

Most gave up and returned to the United States.

Those who remained were absorbed into the Amazon culture and nothing but their names, Hennington, Reicher, Vaughn, remains to identify them.

Throughout the rest of Brazil, colony after colony failed on the hard realities of exhaustion and despair.

Of all the colonies of confederates, the only one to survive was in the highlands around San Paolo.

Here, this illusion but refusing to return to their native land, the tattered remnants of the failed colonies gathered around the farm of Colonel William Norris.

- Well, my great grandfather picked out this part of the country because it looked so much like Alabama where he came from and the rolling country and the soil.

It's just like Alabama.

- You see Colonel Norris went and decided that some of the land that belonged to my grandfather, he decided should be his.

- [Narrator] In a dispute over land, Lillian Smith's grandfather was blinded in one eye by James Jones' great grandfather, the redoubtable Colonel Norris.

- And nearly killed the old man.

- Well, those days nothing happened.

- Because he had a very sharp lawyer tending to his case.

It was first case that lawyer tended to, but he was so sharp and he got to impressing the judge.

He said this old man being prosecuted on a contest, he's a fighter.

He fought in the Mexican-American War, he took part in the Revolutionary War.

It was way before he was born, but nobody knew the difference.

So he said he fought for the independence of the United States.

That impressed the judge very much.

- The McFadden family, my father and mother, were visited by a recent arrival from the United States.

After all were seated at the table, my father proceeded to ask the blessing and they were just about to start the meal when suddenly my father turned to this gentleman and said Mr. so and so, just where did you say you were from?

He named the city and state which happened to be up north somewhere, so my dad politely said excuse me, I have other things to attend to, I'll see you later.

He refused to sit with a Yankee.

- [Narrator] The confederates had lost a war, fought in large part over slavery.

At the time of the immigration, slavery still existed in Brazil.

- Well, when they came here, there was slavery in Brazil.

And some of them did buy slaves.

My grandfather had slaves.

- [Narrator] But it was dying institution.

And the confederates did not bring their slaves with them.

- They didn't go down there for slavery.

That was not the reason for the immigration.

They knew that slavery was on the way out, even though there were still some around until 1888.

- [Narrator] But the end of slavery in Brazil rekindled the old fatal passion in one anachronistic immigrant.

- Well, with many thousands of people going down there, we had some oddballs, too.

One fanatic, a slaver fanatic was among our colony apparently.

He tried to assassinate one of the Brazilian senators on the eve of emancipation, the Brazilian final emancipation.

He was such a pro-slavery man.

And when you think this was in 1888, the man was really lost in antiquity.

He was out of touch.

- In 75, the first railroad train came out this far.

That was the new end of the track and they Emperor got off the train and said America, she has railroad I promise you.

On one occasion, one of his visits, the question was brought up about the fact that these Americans left the United States unofficially.

No one had a passport and very few, if any, had any sort of a document such as a register or something proving their name or whether they were born and when.

So he made an offer.

Supposing I issue a decree considering all of you Brazilian citizens unless you state in writing that you do not want to become Brazilian citizens.

No one made this statement in writing, so they all became Brazilian citizens.

Many, many years later, I remember criticizing my dad for giving his opinion on what the Brazilian government should do and they it shouldn't do.

And I said dad, you must remember, we Brazilians can criticize our government, but you Americans, no.

Well, he immediately stated, came back to me, said, remember I am more of a Brazilian than you will ever be because I was made a Brazilian by the Emperor of Brazil and that can never happen to you.

- There were a lot of Americans around at that time.

It was a large colony.

Those Sundays, preaching Sundays we called them, they were something in our lives.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] In the large cities of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, traditions quickly eroded, but in the region around Americana, the city the confederates founded, the children and grandchildren of the immigrants did not assimilate into the Brazilian culture.

Their parents made every effort to preserve their traditions and their separateness.

- Up to a certain age I didn't feel Brazilian at all.

- The thing is that since I was born here in Brazil and raised up among Brazilians and all, until up to the age of 7, I didn't speak Portuguese.

I understood more or less what people said, but I myself didn't speak because we only spoke English at home, although my father preferred speaking Portuguese.

- And many of the Americans didn't speak English, even some of my cousins could only speak Portuguese.

They could understand it, but they wouldn't speak it.

So, we had to speak Portuguese.

But in our family, no, we had to speak, we spoke only English at home, as we do now.

- Because at home we were one thing and out we were another, you see.

- I was more or less 12 years old when I learned to speak Portuguese.

Because our school at that time was all in English.

All I'd ever taken was English.

ABCs, spelling and grammar, arithmetic, geography, it was all in English.

- If they are not family, they feel like family because when the Americans came out here they were not related.

Some were, of course, and the ones who were not related lived so near each other and kept up such a close friendship that it was the same as being family because everybody else spoke Portuguese and whoever spoke English meant family.

- Of course there was always a difference of religion.

You see we were all Protestants.

And Brazilians in the time that I was a child, they were Catholics, but Catholics, there was no getting around.

And thought sure that all Protestants were going to the hot place.

- Of course here there was Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists.

They would all come here and the preacher was one.

Sometimes the Methodist preacher will come.

Sometimes Presbyterian pastor would come, but most of the time it was Baptist that come here.

My family was all Baptist.

- And when she made the great point of the difference in religion.

So much so that she hoped that all her children who got married would marry Protestants and it happens they all married Catholics.

- At the time there was no division of state and church in Brazil.

So non-Catholics could not be buried in the municipal cemeteries.

They couldn't have been buried at the cemetery anyway.

And later on a child died and was refused burial and so it was brought to this place and they asked permission if they could bury the child close to the others and they made the little wired fence around the graves because cattle roamed around and that was the beginning of the cemetery and then everyone else made the point, and they still do, make a point to be buried here.

- [Narrator] In 1932, Brazil was racked by Civil War.

Getulio Vargas, then president, attempted to increase the powers of the central government.

The state of Sao Paolo, where most of the confederates had settled rebelled.

- One of the great ironies of this if the 1932 revolution in Brazil.

My family had moved from San Paolo to Rio, which was the federal state, the Washington, D.C. of Brazil, but Civil War broke out there between the southern states, Sao Paolo, Rio Grande Do Sul and a couple of others against the federal government.

States rights were still important to these people.

So much so that they joined the army in great numbers of the state of Sao Paolo saying that they were gonna defend their homes.

The federal armies marched towards the city of Campinas and Americana, that was really on their main route and today it's been noted in Brazilian history their part in that war.

They lost that war, too.

They were pretty good at joining losing causes.

- The Americans, it was in their blood to go to this side of the revolution and I had three brothers in the revolution taking part, one of them got killed, near Minas, one of the was killed.

- [Narrator] Today's generations of descendants are not rebels.

They and their confederate ancestors have brought to Brazil the talents the Emperor Don Pedro had foreseen.

The city the confederates founded, Americana, is today in another historical irony, a major cotton textile center and bears the confederate flag on its coat of arms.

The confederates founded eight universities and the educational methods they introduced are used throughout Brazil.

- I think that the neighbors learned much with my grandfather.

Much more than they have learned with us now.

Because when my grandfather came out here, in the states I think they used to work much more advanced that we were working and the neighbors learned a lot.

Now the neighbors around here are just about like we are.

- [Narrator] In 1980, some 500 confederate families live in Americana.

Today most descendants have intermarried, adopted Brazilian customs and moved away.

- The Americans practically disappeared, you know.

They married Brazilians and they're all practically Brazilians.

The old Americans, very few of them are alive here until now.

Most have died.

- One generation back when I was young, I thought that cemetery would run aground and nobody would be here to take care of it.

I thought it could come to an end, but it didn't.

People are getting to be proud of being descendants of Americans and they are glad of the chance to get together and see their kinfolks that they never saw and I believe it'll go on better and better.

It won't die down.

- My parents came to Brazil at the time of the Civil War because their side lost so they had to come to Brazil.

And here in Brazil life wasn't easy.

(gentle music) - [Narrators] Descendants of the immigrants who came to America seek to discover their heritage in their mother countries.

The descendants of the immigrants who left America, now fourth generation Brazilians, find their roots in the United States.

- I had heard all my life about the United States and my father would tell me all about his childhood in Alabama and so I had a queer impression, looked like I was going back home after 100 years added since.

- And when I went to the states for the first time, IT was a funny feeling.

I fell like I was among my own family with the people in the street.

- I was among my people.

That's the way I felt.

- Well, I was a consult in Sao Paolo in 71 and one day I was sitting there and a fellow named Jody Powell came in the office and was looking for things for his boss to do, who happened to be governor of Georgia.

And I suggested since he was from Georgia that he go out and visit my relatives out at the confederate cemetery.

Jimmy Carter, as everyone by now knows, a deep died southerner.

He's culturally every other way a southerner.

In the middle of his very fine address, one of the best I think he ever gave, he stopped and actually began to cry.

It was too much for him to see these people, these southern faces as he called them the lost tribes of Israel standing in front of him.

- And we walked all over the cemetery and Rosalind Carter said to me that she had this descendant buried out there, Wise, and that her name was Smith formerly, Smith from Texas and she wondered if perhaps we were related.

- When Jimmy Carter came down, he cried when he got up to speak.

He said to think that these people were from my country and they came down and suffered the way they did.

Because they did suffer a lot.

(singing in foreign language) - [Narrator] Four times a year they meet here.

They visit, tell the old stories and care of the graves of their ancestors who left their homes forever, lived out their lives under strange constellations and finally were laid to rest here, their graves shadowed by pine grown from Alabama seed.

- Brazilian first and then American.

I couldn't separate one from the other.

I wouldn't be whole either way.

(gentle flute music)