PBSCV1599

Gen. James Patton Anderson Camp 1599
Celebrating 30 Years 1992 - 2022
UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DE CAMPINAS
INSTITUTO DE ECONOMIA
IMIGRANTES NORTE-AMERICANOS NO BRASIL: MITO E
REALIDADE, O CASO DE SANTA BÁRBARA
NORTH AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS IN BRAZIL:
MYTH AND REALITY, THE CASE OF SANTA BÁRBARA
Letícia Aguiar
Defesa de Mestrado apresentada ao
Instituto de Economia da UNICAMP para
obtenção do título de Mestre em Ciências
Econômicas, sob a orientação do Prof.
Dr. Hernani Maia Costa.
Este exemplar corresponde ao
original da dissertação
defendida por Letícia Aguiar,
em 19/11/2009 e orientada pelo
Prof. Dr. Hernani Maia Costa.
CPG, 19/11/2009.
Campinas 2009
This Thesis was translated, without footnotes, from the original Portuguese manuscript into English using "Coogle Translate", therefore some of the syntax may be a little strange - Absolutely no reflection on the author of this document.
For the original Manuscript, including the footnotes, go to the link:
http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/bitstream/REPOSIP/285998/1/Aguiar_Leticia_M.pdf
Catalog data prepared by the Library
of the Institute of Economics / UNICAMP
English title: North American immigrants in Brazil: myth and reality, the case of Santa Barbara
Keywords: Immigration; American confederate voluntary exiles - Santa Bárbara D’Oeste (SP); American
Civil War
Concentration area : ------------
Degree: Master in Economic Sciences
Examining Board: Prof. Dr. Hernani Maia Costa
Profa. Dra. Ligia Maria Osório Silva
Profa. Dr. Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro
Defense date: 11/19/2009
Graduate Program: Economic Sciences
Aguiar, Leticia
Ag93i American immigrants in Brazil: myth and reality, the case of Santa
Bárbara / Leticia Aguiar. - Campinas, SP: [s.n.], 2009.
Advisor: Hernani Maia Costa.
Dissertation (master's degree) - State University of Campinas, Instituto de
Economy.
1.Migration. 2. American Confederates in voluntary exile - Santa Barbara
D´Oeste (SP). 3. United States - History - Civil War - 1861-1865. I. Costa, Hernani
Maia. II. Campinas State University. Institute of Economics. III. Title.
09-039-BIE
Masters dissertation
Student: LETICIA AGUIAR
“North American immigrants in Brazil: myth and reality,
the case of Santa Bárbara ”
Defended on 11/19/2009
JUDGING COMMITTEE
Prof. Dr. Hernani Maia Costa
Advisor - Institute of Economics / UNICAMP
Profª Drª Ligia Maria Osório Silva
Institute of Economics / UNICAMP
Profª Drª Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro
UNESP / Araraquara
To my mother and grandmother (Cida),
for help in this stage of life.
Acknowledhements
First of all, I thank God for having blessed this whole journey and guided me towards the realization of this goal. I am grateful for giving me the strength, courage, dedication and patience that research work on primary sources requires. And as this was a sometimes complicated task, God still placed “helpers” in my life.
In this way, I thank my family, for having always been by my side and supported me in this decision; for providing the basis for a good education and the foundations for me to get here. I am grateful for the personal contribution of each one in this work: my mother, sister, grandmother, stepfather and father, because, in a way, each one participated a little in it. It was the rides, the lunches, the snacks, that accom-panied me throughout the process of research, graduation and master's.
The interest in the subject and in continuing in academic life after graduation arose at UNESP - Arara-quara. Developing a scientific initiation project under the guidance of Profª. Dr. Maria Lúcia Lamounier, I discovered how fascinating economic history is and I started to dedicate myself to the theme of the North American immigrants who came to Santa Bárbara d'Oeste at the end of the Civil War. Thinking that there were still some gaps in my research, I returned to the topic in the master's degree. Admission to the master's degree, via ANPEC, was encouraged by some professors from the aforementioned University, such as Renato Colistete, Maria Lúcia Lamounier, Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro and Alexandre Sartoris. I thank everyone and especially my first advisor, Maria Lúcia, who, with great patience, showed me how fascinating the area of economic history is.
Still remembering UNESP, I would like to thank all of the “grupinho da heavy” or “immortals” - everyone knows what that means. I am grateful for the companionship during graduation and for the current friendship. I keep all of you in my heart: Clara, Cris, Ju Barbosa, Tati, Renan, Régis, Ronaldo A., Ronaldo Y., Zelão, Sil and Suzana. Thanks for the support especially in this final stretch of my dissertation.
Once at Unicamp and decided by the theme, the professors of the Institute of Economics contributed to my training, with emphasis on my advisor Prof. Hernani Maia Costa, who worked actively to carry out this work. An advisor who always tried to motivate me and show that the work was always "almost done". In addition to the Institute's professors, I would like to thank Profª. Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro, for helping me in the research process. His trips to Santa Bárbara provided me with company for solitary moments of research and important academic information. Together with my advisor, she was responsible for authorizing us to search the collections at the First Registry Office of Santa Bárbara d'Oeste. We jointly thank Dr. João Gilberto, owner of the Registry, who ended up authorizing us to search the collection, which is, in fact, extremely rich from a historical point of view and with very preserved books (the best among the researched collections). The employees of this registry were also extremely kind and considerate to me when conducting the surveys, which took three months.
An important source of research was also the Santa Bárbara d'Oeste Memory Center. In that place, I had my first contact with research in primary sources, still in graduation. I had the opportunity to meet Sandra Edilene de Souza, who was the one who first introduced me to all the material. Although she no longer works at the Memory Center, she helped carry out this work, as a friend and as a researcher at the Romi Foundation, in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste. In addition to Sandra, I would like to thank Cláudia, who remained at the Memory Center and opened all the doors for me, allowing me to carry out the research work without major problems. His pleasant company made daily trips to the place much more pleasant. The survey was concluded with employees Marlene, Bruna and Wellington, who, like their predecessors, received me very well, allowing easy access to the materials. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the employees of the Museum of Immigration of Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, as well as those of the Municipal Library.
Thanks also to the researchers and employees of the UNICAMP Memory Center (CMU), very helpful and with the doors always open for our research, which eventually led me to join the thematic project Families and Business in West Paulista, to be developed by CMU, under the coordination of Profª. Maria Alice.
I would also like to thank my friends from the master's course, especially Andrea, Filipe and Fabrício, who were my best friends during the course. I also thank Lucas (Ferraz Vasconcelos) whose friendship comes from before, and who lived with me every affliction of ANPEC, in addition to those of the master's. I would like to thank Gustavo for giving me much more than his friendship and for always saying to me: “Calm down, that everything will be all right”.
Not forgetting my friends from Sta. Barbara, who made my research days more fun: Japa, Karina, Cida, André, Matheus, Juany, Lenize, Jean, Dary, Dé, Carlos Barroso. And also to Alexandre Scarpelim, who has always been concerned with helping me with research.
Finally, I thank the professors Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro and José Ricardo Barbosa Gonçalves for the criticisms and suggestions when I qualified. And to the teachers Maria Alice Rosa Ribeiro and Lígia Osório Silva for participating in my defense board.
I apologize for any omissions and forgetfulness, because in this final stretch of completion of work, my head is no longer working well ... Tico is already "bad" from Teco ... My thanks to everyone who, in a or otherwise, they could help me with this work!
Summary
This work aims to rescue the trajectory of a group of North American immigrants who went to Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, state of São Paulo, at the end of the American Civil War, as well as the myth and reality that surrounds it. This group is identified by the bibliography as the most relative success, among all those who came to Brazil. The period of analysis comprises the years from 1866 (the year in which the first immigrants were established in the region) until 1900.
By concentrating research on primary documentary sources, we seek to elaborate the panorama of the (especially economic) relations that involved these immigrants in and around Santa Bárbara. Using purchase and sale deeds, mortgages, works and agricultural contracts, wills, powers of attorney, voter lists, marriage records, industry and profession tax records, we reconstruct the relationships established by these immigrants with the local population and also with each other . The sources demonstrate that, little by little, the North Americans were integrating themselves into the local society, including natura-lizing and actively participating in politics, acquiring rural and urban properties and inserting themselves in the local economy, primarily with commercial cotton agriculture, followed by sugar cane (including brandy production), and watermelon. In the urban area, dry and wet business owners, dentists, doctors, blacksmiths, among other professions
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1:
The background:
The American Civil War, the decision to emigrate and the first research on Brazil.....................13
Secession and the American Civil War ...................................................................................... 14
Research about Brazil................................................................................................................ 22
The efforts of the Brazilian Imperial Government
and associations promoting immigration in Brazil.....................................................................34
Southern emigration.................................................................................................................. 43
Chapter 2:
North American immigration to Brazil and Santa Barbara......................................................... 53
Rio de Janeiro ........................................................................................................................... 56
Pará (Santarém) ........................................................................................................................ 57
Espírito Santo (Linhares) .......................................................................................................... 60
Paraná........................................................................................................................................ 62
São Paulo................................................................................................................................... 63
Vale do Ribeira – Lizzieland – Rev. Ballard S. Dunn ........................................................... 63
Vale do Ribeira – Major Frank McMullan e William Bowen................................................ 64
Interior de São Paulo – Os norte-americanos de Santa Bárbara................................................. 66
Cotton cultivation....................................................................................................................... 81
Cultivation of sugar cane............................................................................................................ 83
Watermelon cultivation ............................................................................................................. 84
Other activities carried out by immigrants................................................................................. 86
Chapter 3:
An assessment of the Santa Bárbara group ................................................................................ 91
Families, Religion, Culture and Technology ..................................................,,,,,,,,,.................... 91
Modernization: the plow............................................................................................................ 109
Conflicts with Brazilians............................................................................................................ 112
The relative success of Santa Bárbara ........................................................................................ 113
Final consideration.................................................................................................................... 121
SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 127
Primary handwritten sources ................................................................................................... 128
Fontes secundárias (viajantes)................................................................................................... 129
Bibliografia........................................................................................................................................................................................ 129
Articles...................................................................................................................................... 129
Books ........................................................................................................................................ 130
Dissertations and monographs.................................................................................................. 132
Anexos....................................................................................................................................... 135
Quadros e Tabelas Quadro 2.1.
Imigrantes norte-americanos em território brasileiro: principais agrupamentos e líderes........................................................................................................................................ 55
Tabela 2.1. Transações envolvendo norte-americanos – 1866 a 1900 (Parte 1)........................... 73
Tabela 2.2. Transações envolvendo norte-americanos – 1866 a 1900 (Parte 2)........................... 74
Tabela 2.3. Licenças para funcionamento de comércios (1878 a 1893)........................................ 88
Tabela 2.4. Registros de ofícios (1893-1899) .............................................................................. 88
Tabela 2.5. Registros para funcionamento de comércios (1899-1900) ........................................ 89
Anexos Tabela A1: Registro de Eleitores (1890-1899)................................................................. 135
Tabela A2: Declaração de estrangeiros (1890)............................................................................ 141
Tabela A3. Registro de casamentos (1873-1887)......................................................................... 142
Introduction Page 1
The world of the 19th century lived with a movement of population displacements of gigantic proportions. The most important thing is that Europe itself has become the great expatriation center for millions of individuals of the most different nationalities, in an emigration flow that headed mainly, among other destinations, to the American Atlantic coast.
What would lead these large population groups to seek other territories outside the limits of their homeland, at a time when nationalist forces were fighting for the creation of several European National States? What motivations have led a multitude of inhabitants of the Old Continent to look for other extra-European areas? Is it not in the 19th century that the heyday of European civilization took place? And more than that, the consolidation of European hegemony over the world?
We understand that this would not have been possible in previous centuries, as the railways did not yet exist, navigation had little changed, and even the population of Europe had not grown as much as between 1801 and 1900. The 19th century was lavish in creating new conditions for this movement migration to reach such an accelerated pace. For Eric J. Hobsbawm, “railroad and steam navigation had reduced intercontinental or transcontinental travel to a matter of weeks instead of months” . Furthermore, we must not ignore that this century was marked by the effects of the two great revolutions that took place in the last decades of the 18th century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.
From the first, we know its effects on the European economy and society, when it was disseminated throughout Europe and even outside it. In England, according to the same Hobsbawm in The Age of Revolutions, the Poor Law of 1834, “was designed to make life so intolerable for the rural poor that they were forced to leave the land in search of any job they were given. to be offered. ” But, where to find employment in the industrial cities inhabited by a multitude of workers and their great offspring who huddled in the slums in the midst of the saddest misery, subjected to debased wages and without any right or guarantee of work?
What we have there, then, is the great migration of miserable proletarians produced by the transformations taking place in the fields. The revolution in land ownership that took place concurrently with the Industrial Revolution broke with the foundations of traditional agrarian society in the name of a new agrarian market economy. At the same time, Malthus supporters anticipated 1846, the beginning of a gigantic emigration. Short-term cyclical crises in a world that, still agrarian, was rapidly industrializing and leading to hunger crises. The Malthusians were right: in 1847 Ireland experienced the Great Famine resulting from the potato crisis, the basis of the population's diet, and as a result, approximately one million Irishmen died. Over the next seven years more than a million and a half Irish people emigrate to America, more specifically to the United States, as well as other regions of the planet. Thus, it is the conjunction of certain factors, such as the economic crisis, the scarcity of opportunities of labor and land available to a population that tended to grow more and more, which ends up providing a huge mass of free workers on the international market. Also according to Hobsbawm: “In the second half of the 19th century, their misery led to what was proportionally the greatest emigration movement of the century”.
From the French Revolution, we have the consecration and universalization of the principles that guided it, among them, freedom and equality. The bonds that hindered the freedom of men were broken and the notion of equal opportunities was borne fruit, opening space for the talent and the work and production capacity of each individual. In this way, the uprooting, which could only occur under the crucial transformations of the 19th century, the greater circulation and dissemination of news about promising distant stops, in addition to the legally assured notion that he was a truly new free man, led the European to look in foreign and distant lands the solution to their problems, and the conditions for their self-realization, greatly boosting the emigration flow of the time.
In these distant foreign lands, in turn, and in the specific case in America, governments encouraged the arrival of foreigners, in addition to presenting several attractions here; in the United States, in the 1840s, gold was discovered in California; the same had occurred in Latin America and, especially, in Brazil. In the Brazilian Empire, the first steps in the expansion of coffee plantations to the west of São Paulo were accompanied by the suppression of the African slave trade, in 1850, and the approval of a Land Law, also in the same year. This contributed to the beginning of the slow decomposition of slavery and the need for a new form of production based on free labor (mainly from Europe). In other words, the “green gold” mirage can also be considered as a pole of attraction for expatriates from the Old Continent.
In the 19th century, the entrepreneur also emigrated, the successful trader versed in the export and import business, the liberal professional, the professor, among others; this, for example, is the case of Iná Von Binzer, a young German woman who emigrated to Brazil in search of opportunities that did not exist in her land, and came here to work as a teacher for the children of wealthy farmers.
What we are asking now is: why, in the midst of so many circumstances that mainly impelled Europeans to seek America, and especially the United States of America, did we see the emigration of a large contingent of Americans to Brazil and Mexico, among other countries? And even more, why did this group, which the bibliography presents as southern confederates and slavery, felt the need to abandon their homeland in the second half of the 19th century, after the end of the American Civil War? According to Harter, “there is nothing that achieves the pride of a country more than emigration” . The immigrants who came to Brazil were considered fools, since the United States was a country that received many immigrants; it was a point of arrival and not of departure. But can they be considered “immigrants”, like those who crossed the seas in search of opportunities in a new land, or even “colonists”, who through labor contracts came to replace the slave arm in the fields? The best would be to understand them as part of “spontaneous immigration”, as it appears in the ministerial documents and reports of the time. Or maybe even as “refugees”, according to the expression used by the young Pattie Steagall, who with her family waited at the Hotel dos Imigrantes, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in 1868, the time to move to Santa Bárbara d'Oeste: “It was my duty to explain that we were not immigrants. We were refugees. War refugees. ” Thinking like Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, we have one thing for sure: it is a mistake to imagine that all were confederate defenders of slavery, or even southerners, or even native Americans, since many foreigners who lived for some time in the United States they also followed this contingent of immigrants.
The defeat of the Confederates in the Civil War seems to be an important reason for the great migratory flow of Americans to other areas of the United States, Mexico and Brazil, among other countries in America. The "southerners" or "ex-confederates" were devastated after the end of the Civil War. The humiliations and deprivations they were subjected to during the Reconstruction period would have motivated them to emigrate. It would therefore be the emigration of defeated ex-Confederate southerners. Of course, not everyone who emigrated was in fact Southerners and ex-Confederates; many took advantage of the facilities offered and embarked on this adventure. However, we believe that most of the emigrants who went to Brazil were formed by southerners, directly or indirectly linked to the Confederation. If they were not confederates, they were at least sympathetic to the cause.
If, on the one hand, the southerners were desolate and sought to escape a situation of oppression in this period of Reconstruction, the Brazilian Imperial Government, in turn, was eager to bring in immigrants both to serve as an alternative labor force for slave labor as for develop the country. With the disintegration of the southern productive system during the Civil War, Brazil saw its chance to enter the international market as a supplier of cotton to English industries. Thus, the arrival of the southern “immigrant” was viewed with good eyes, since it was believed that they had full control of cotton cultivation and that they could develop it here, contributing, and much, to our prosperity.
Since the 1850s, the Brazilian Imperial Government has been encouraging immigration to the country, as a way of solving the labor problem, since the slave trade was in extinction, making it impossible to continue the reproduction of slavery until then. based on trafficking with Africa. In the province of São Paulo, coffee farming was in full expansion and farmers began to seek alternatives to slave labor, first with the partnership and then with the settlement.
Thus began the initiatives to import European immigrants as free workers. The first experiences with this form of work in the coffee farms of São Paulo were based on the partnership system, and were carried out on Senator Nicolau de Campos Vergueiro's lands, in the Limeira region, with emphasis on the Ibicaba farm, the oldest . The first contracts with immigrants were made with settlers from Swiss cantons and several German states, as we have already mentioned, under the partnership regime; a first experience so well portrayed by Emília Viotti da Costa. Warren Dean also addressed these partnership colonies, but in the Rio Claro region, pointing out the possible causes of the failure of such a work regime, among them, the fact that the colonists had lost interest in farming when it seemed impossible to pay off debts so high that they were incurred since their arrival; another cause would be the superiority that the São Paulo farmers believed to have over the immigrant, and because they did not imagine that they could protest and even react violently, they dispensed with all sorts of ill-treatment. These were the conditions responsible for the constant settler revolts, such as the one that broke out in 1857, on the farms of Vergueiro & Cia, and whose epicenter was the colony of Ibicaba.
In the 19th century, the Brazilian Empire faced for decades problems that impeded the flow of immigration, be it “spontaneous” (financed by the immigrant himself) or “regular” (financed by the imperial government). And this, even with the adoption of the Land Law of 1850, which had as one of its main objectives the attraction of immigrants, even foreseeing, for example, the sale of vacant lands in small plots accessible to the colonists who had a small savings. The partnership system, which in the words of the German traveler Robert Avé-Lallemant, presented itself as a “carbuncle with gangrenous consequences", presented numerous problems. Problems that would end up, in 1859, in a wave of colonist rebellions in In addition to the reasons already known for these to occur, the colonial nuclei were located in distant areas, practically incommunicado and without any support from the authorities, and, according to Lígia Osório Silva: “The colonization companies, in the greed of guaranteeing their profits, they did not have many qualms about fulfilling contracts and government oversight was at least slow. ” According to the author, the settlers complained that In addition to the religious problem, since among them there was an expressive number of Protestants, while in the Empire, although there was religious tolerance, Catholicism was an official religion. This was a problem, always minimized in the official documents of the time, as can be seen in the excerpt from the 1868 Report of the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works:
“Tolerance wisely decreed by the Constitution; so deeply ingrained in our customs and so recommended by modern civilization and the very spirit of Christianity, allows dissidents of the Catholic religion to live in the shadow of national laws like those who profess the religion of the State ”.
Even though government authorities boasted that they created conditions for European immigrants to choose Brazil for the establishment of their new homeland, such as “guaranteeing land ownership at a minimum price and within a five-year term, as well as the supply of seeds and agrarian utensils to people who joined the already existing State colonies, or those who were to be formed ”, the results were not very encouraging. And this is perfectly explainable, since, in addition to the enactment of the Land Law, whose application had barely left the paper, and the regulations and innocuous instructions on the matter, the imperial government's action was limited to the publication of some works abroad with the objective of advertising the measures that the government itself had difficulty implementing, as L'Empire du Brésil, published in Paris in 1863, and Situation sociale, politique et economique de l'Empire du Brésil, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1865. to improve the image of the Empire in the countries considered as potential suppliers of the European immigrant, remembering that the kingdom of Prussia and other German states in 1859 prohibited the emigration of their subjects to Brazil. This also explains the preparation and dissemination at the International Exhibition in Paris, 1867, of the publication Brief news from the Empire of Brazil, translated into English, French and German.
In addition to the flaws and hesitations of the Brazilian government's immigration policy, it must be understood that international competition made the success of an immigration policy even more difficult, especially with episodes such as the gold rush to California in 1849 and to Australia , between 1851 and 1861, and the Homestead Act, voted by the United States Congress in 1862, insofar as they directed the immigration currents to other countries of the New World, less to Brazil.
Only from the 1880s, with the spread of the settlement system and the promotion of immigration subsidized by the Imperial Government, did the flow of immigrants to São Paulo, especially Italian immigrants, be boosted.
In the 1860s, despite the failure of the first experiences with the partnership regime on coffee farms in São Paulo, the Brazilian Imperial Government continued to dedicate itself to promoting immigration to the country. In that step, the beginning of the Civil War in the United States offered a good opportunity to encourage national cotton production. With the start of the war, the ports of the southern states were blocked and England found itself deprived of the supply of cotton at the height of its industries. Alice Canabrava analyzes the introduction and development of cotton culture in the province of São Paulo, pointing out the consequences of the war and the British incentives as promoters of the beginning of the cotton culture of the herbaceous type in the province. Until then, according to the author, the cotton culture was abandoned, and in the past, the type planted was made of arboreal cotton, different from the herbaceous. But England demanded herbaceous cotton, preferably from the same varieties previously imported from the USA, such as cotton from the New Orleans variety, which was used to produce thicker cotton threads for more rustic garments.
England even went so far as to send seeds to Brazil after learning of the country's interest in producing cotton. The Manchester Cotton Supply Association (Manchester Cotton Supply Association) was interested in finding other suppliers of raw materials, as events in the United States, the main supplier, were damaging the industry with the production stoppage due to the lack of cotton. The English association in Manchester took charge of encouraging cotton cultivation not only in Brazil, but also in India and Egypt.
In addition to the Imperial Government, two immigrant associations, one in São Paulo and the other in Rio de Janeiro, also dedicated themselves to promoting immigration by southerners to the country. These two associations were interested in expanding their members' businesses and saw southern immigration as an opportunity.
Many southerners, dissatisfied with the direction the south had been taking after the Civil War, in the process of Reconstruction, decided to emigrate. Among the destinations chosen were Europe, and countries like Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela and, of course, Brazil. The incentives of the Imperial Government and immigrant associations seem to have contributed to this choice. In addition to these, the propaganda made by North American emigrant agents was also decisive in choosing the country.
These agents came to Brazil representing a group, or a southern pro-immigration association. They were received in Rio de Janeiro and forwarded to the Minister of Agriculture. The Minister himself was responsible for recommending them to influential people who could show the lands and living conditions in the country.
“Addressing the interior of the provinces of Espírito Santo, Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, they took letters of recommendation from the Minister of Agriculture to influential people in the localities. In the case of São Paulo, agents were recommended to large agricultural landowners who provided them with the necessary aid."
After the visit of these agents to Brazil, they returned to the United States and published books and pamphlets talking about the country's wonders and encouraging their compatriots to emigrate. The vast majority of these agents acted as the leader of a group of emigrants willing to settle in the country. This was the case, for example, with Rev. Ballard S. Dunn, who settled in the Ribeira Valley with compatriots from 1867; James McFadden Gaston, who also settled in the Ribeira Valley in 1867, but in a different area of Dunn, and Major Lansford Warren Hastings, who settled in Santarém (Pará), bringing two waves of immigrants (one in 1867 and another in 1868, totaling more than 300 immigrants).
The first immigrants began to arrive in Brazil in 1865, but most of them arrived during the year 1867. Settling in Pará (Santarém), Espírito Santo (near Lagoa Juparanã, in Linhares), in Paraná (near the Assungui River), Minas, Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (on the coast - Vale do Ribeira region - and in the Santa Bárbara region), these immigrants in 1867 totaled 2700 individuals, with São Paulo concentrating the largest number of them: 800.
Of all the groups formed, one in particular stood out: that of Santa Bárbara, in the province of São Paulo. Located in the region close to Campinas, this group obtained the greatest relative success, since its members were inserted in the local economy in the most varied professions, and the great majority acted even as "farmers". Cultivating commercial genres, such as cotton, sugar cane and watermelon, these immigrants managed to insert themselves in the mercantile circuit of the region, having also integrated themselves into local social and political life. As an example of this, between 1896 and 1898, Wilber Fish McKnight, a member of the North American community, was a councilor at the Santa Bárbara City Council. It is known that he was the first American to take an active part in municipal politics.
However, Santa Bárbara was not part of the places offered by the Imperial Government to American agents at more modest prices and with payment facilities, such as the land located in the Vale do Ribeira. Those who bought land in Santa Bárbara bought it at the prices prevailing at the time, and without the facilities of those who went to the São Paulo coast. Why did these Americans go to Santa Barbara? Why, of all the groups, was this the most successful relative? What did Santa Barbara have to offer these immigrants?
This work aims to study this group of North American immigrants who went to Santa Bárbara from 1866. We seek to understand the conjunction of factors that brought them to Brazil and even Santa Bárbara, and also the reasons that would have propitiated the prosperity that group relative to the others. Using primary sources available in Santa Bárbara, as well as printed bibliography related to the topic, we tried to examine how Santa Bárbara was chosen, the insertion of these immigrants in this region and what kind of activities they dedicated themselves to. We know that most immigrants settled in rural areas as farmers, but that was not the only form of economic insertion. Professions such as blacksmith, doctor, dentist, merchant were very common within the North American community of Santa Bárbara. In our research we sought to detect the economic relations developed between Americans and the local population, between Americans themselves and, likewise, differences in the types of relationships.
If at first immigrants tried to isolate themselves within their own community, having a social life that was limited to their own circle of North American neighbors, at the end of the 19th century they ended up integrating themselves into the local population, through marriages and ties of friendship. As a result, the community lost its distinction, having gradually integrated with the local population.
The literature on the topic points Santa Bárbara as the most successful group, without specifying whether it was material or economic success, or just in the sense of reproducing the southern way of life, or even, of restarting lives that seemed ruined in an unknown and different country. , in other words, to “turn things around”
Our work intends to reconstruct the trajectory of the North American immigrants who went to Santa Bárbara and there to find the answers to our questions. For this, we dedicate ourselves mainly to the handwritten primary sources available in the 1st Notary's Office of Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, very well cared for and preserved, allowing the consultations to be made without major problems. The only drawback was that two books were lost, however, those in the collection are in excellent condition for consultation. In addition to the notary documents, the documents of the Municipality of Santa Bárbara were also important. The latter can be found at the Santa Bárbara d'Oeste Memory Center, where some books are in terrible condition, with pages torn and sometimes falling apart, others, however, allowed us to have a great consultation. In both places we had an excellent treatment, which allowed the research to be carried out without major problems.
This work is divided into three chapters, in addition to this general introduction and final considerations. The first chapter presents the antecedents of southern immigration to Brazil, the factors that motivated emigration, the choice for Brazil and the choice for Santa Bárbara. The second chapter focuses on the arrival of immigrants in Santa Bárbara. In this chapter, the primary sources researched are used, with which we try to recompose the network of existing relationships, mainly economic ones, between North Americans and between them and the local population, seeking to understand how their insertion in the Santa Bárbara region would have occurred. The third chapter presents the discussion about the relative success of immigrants from Santa Bárbara. It is a general assessment of the group, which even with many dispersed to other regions, some even returning to the United States after some time, ended up integrating fully with the local population from the beginning of the 20th century.
CHAPTER 1 Page 13
The background:
The American Civil War, the decision to emigrate and the first research on Brazil
The decision of emigration by the Americans, among them many southerners, took place only after the end of the American Civil War, the violent conflict that divided that country between 1861 and 1865, in two states: the United States of America properly said, among other words, the Union, encompassing roughly the northern states, and the Confederate States of America made up of the southern separatist states, the Confederacy.
The war and the defeat of the Confederate forces resulted in violent changes in the economy and society of the southern states. First, its long duration resulted in the stunting of the productive forces, economic stagnation, inflation, in addition to, of course, the material, physical and moral destruction that affected its population. Economically, with the destruction, almost everything had to be rebuilt in the south. It is from there that the industry in the north took its big leap.
It is worth remembering that the war had as an important outcome the end of slavery in the southern states, and consequently throughout the American territory, bringing about a social and economic reorganization throughout the country.
These transformations reached the Old South more violently, since with the defeat it came to the dominance and more severe control of northerners in the period known as Reconstruction (1865-1876). During this period, the intention was to "reconstruct" the southern states, with all the meanings that this word may have. It was not just the material, physical and economic reconstruction, but an attempt to adapt the southerners to the new rules of the political game, to the new power relationship that was configured there.
The transformations that took place in the south were often heartbreaking for southerners. Many of them, in the face of the Reconstruction reforms, the non-conformity in the face of the destruction of their way of life and even the intolerable coexistence with blacks, now free, decided on emigration. Of this contingent of emigrants, many decided to come to Brazil and, especially, to Santa Bárbara, in the interior of the state of São Paulo.
This chapter presents the background of American immigration to Brazil. We started by presenting some important points related to the Civil War, seeking to understand the possible reasons that would have led these southerners to emigrate. We present the relevant facts that may give indications about this important decision, as well as those that may indicate the reason for choosing Brazil and, mainly, those who chose Santa Bárbara.
Secession and the American Civil War Page 14
The Civil War is considered the most violent and bloody in the history of the United States of America. For four years (1861-1865), the Union and the Confederation (constituted by the southern separatist states), clashed in several battles, culminating in the victory of the Union and the end of slavery in the country.
Union and Confederation constituted different economies, with different interests and oligarchies. The Union was formed, roughly, by the northern states, from Maine to Maryland. They devoted themselves to manufacturing and commerce, and their elite consisted of the urban middle class of artisans and professionals, and the wealthy class, generally linked to import and export trade, finance and banking. The Confederation was initially formed by the southern separatist states: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Gradually, more states joined the Confederation, until they totaled thirteen states. The south prospered on the basis of commercial agriculture for export, first with tobacco and later with cotton, carried out with African slave labor, in the model of the large farm, plantation. Therefore, it is easy to see that the dominant class in the south was that of the great landowners and slaves, involved with the profits of the great commercial farming.
“Thus, cotton became 'king', dominating the southern economy and society, contributing seven-eighths of the world production of this raw material, and generating almost two thirds of the income of American exports in the years 1836-40. England bought two thirds of this American cotton ... ”.
North and south were, therefore, two distinct regions within the same country. The elites of the north and south managed to remain in balance by not entering into a direct confrontation during almost the entire post-Independence period, at least until the early 1860s. During this period, the interests of both could always be reconciled, with the adoption of various measures aimed at reconciliation.
Thus, we can see that the simple fact that the two regions are economically and socially different, and the fact that they have different interests would not lead to a fratricidal war of such proportions. Within the same country there are always conflicting interests, with one group always trying to assert its own interests to the detriment of the other groups. However, this does not mean that civil wars are constantly occurring, and in all countries. In other words, the marked differences that marked the formation of these two regions are not enough to explain the outbreak of war. As Moore Jr recalls:
“... there is no general abstract reason for the struggle between north and south. In other words, the presence of special historical circumstances was necessary to prevent the agreement between an agrarian society based on slave labor and a growing industrial capitalism ”.
If the war was not primarily caused by differences over the issue of import tariffs - protectionism from the north vs. free trade in the south - access to new lands conquered in the west, relations between banks and money, and the issue of internal improvements, causes commonly cited in the bibliography, so what really motivated the war?
The war, in fact, stems from something deeper, the question of central power. The change in the game of political forces aroused spirits in such a way that it culminated in the violent confrontation of a conflict that dragged on for four years. It was slavery that would have raised the moral issues and also the passions on both sides.
“It is impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of war as the main consequence of the different moral positions in relation to slavery. Moral issues arose from economic differences. Slavery was the moral issue that gave rise to most of the passion on both sides. Without the direct conflict of ideals about slavery, the events that led to the war, and the war itself, are totally incomprehensible. At the same time, it is clear as the sunlight that economic factors created a slave economy in the south, just as they created different social structures, with contrasting ideas, in other parts of the country ”.
It is important to note that both Moore Jr. and Eisenberg, Goldman and Oliveira (1995) highlight the fact that slave owners were a minority in the south. However, it was a very powerful and influential minority.
“In southern society, plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there must have been less than 350,000 slaveholders, out of a total population of about six million, in areas under slavery. With their families, slaveholders constituted perhaps a quarter of the white population at most. Even within this group, only a small minority owned most of the slaves: an 1860 count confirms that only seven percent of whites owned about three quarters of black slaves. ”
According to Eisenberg, half of the slaveholders in the cotton area had between 16 and 50 slaves, and only a third of these had more than 50 slaves. Slaves represented a third of the southern population in 1860. But, even though they were a minority, this was the southern elite that also subjected a considerable contingent of small landowners in the region, who, without choice, accepted the political dominance of large planters. minority strong enough to elect 10 of the 16 US presidents, in the 76-year period between the beginning of George Washington's first presidency (1789) and Abraham Lincoln's mandate starting in 1861. Whereas of the first seven presidents, With the exception of John Adams and J. Quincy Adams, five were elected for two terms (G. Washington, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, J. Monroe and A. Jackson), plus three with a single term (Harrison -Tyler, Polk and Pierce) and Z. Taylor's short one-year presidency, the Southerners held the U.S. presidency for 53 years.
This fact allows Moore Jr. to state that: “Slavery was certainly not about to disappear for internal reasons. (...) If slavery had to disappear from American society, only the force of arms could do it”.
To understand the causes of war, we need to understand what has changed in the play of forces between north - or east - and south. And at that point the west played an important role. The west, around 1860, was still little occupied, but its conquest was still accelerated. The forces of this territorial expansion, always in the direction of a “moving border”, initially formed the territories that were gradually being annexed to the Union; it was these territories that ended up becoming new states. There was a clear complementarity between the northern, southern and western regions. The north provided financing, transportation, sale and insurance services for the products exported from the south (in the 1860s, cotton mainly). In addition, the south was still the buyer of manufactured goods and food from the north and west, since its economy was very specialized. Thus, part of the profits of southern farmers ended up being spent in the north and west.
For the war to break out, it would be necessary to break this balance of forces. This balance was broken with the realignment of the regions, with the west beginning to identify much more with the north and, both, feeling threatened by the strength and the southern institutions, especially slavery. In this way, the environment of fear and mistrust against the south was created, gaining ground in Slave Power. This became the most powerful symbol of the threat posed by southern despotism and its influence, or slavery, on the government.
In the west, two economic activities predominated: successful commercial agriculture, and livestock, both developed by free men, so that, in a short time, surpluses began to appear. The change in the consumer market for these products appears to have redirected power relations in the United States. According to Moore Jr.:
“Until the 1830s, these surpluses were directed to the south, to feed the most specialized economy in the area, a trend that should continue, but which lost its meaning when the eastern market became more important”.
In addition, the issue of slavery made free farmers in the West afraid, which made it possible to spread anti-slavery sentiment. The link between the industrial east and the western farmers at that time helped to eliminate the hypothesis of a direct reactionary solution to the country's economic and political problems, in favor of the dominant economic strata, and so it took the country to the extreme of a bloody Civil War.
This imbalance ended up provoking war, according to Izecksohn, because the two political groups used the state machine as a way of maintaining their power. Through the spoil system established by Andrew Jackson, American politics did not generate an independent bureaucracy, as in Europe, for example. Government offices and posts were the prerogatives of the party in power.
“The fundamental aspect has increasingly become the fact that the machinery of the federal government has to be used to support one society or another. That was the meaning behind such uninteresting subjects, such as the customs tariff and which put passion in the southern claim, by stating that it was paying tribute to the north. The question of central power also made the issue of slavery in the territories crucial. Political leaders knew that the admission of a state of slaves or a state of free workers would tip the scales one way or the other ”.
To this must be added the uncertainty and mistrust between the political forces involved, proof that the forces of cohesion within the country were still very weak, which favored the outbreak of war. According to Moore Jr:
In short, with desperate brevity, the ultimate causes of the war lay in the development of different economic systems, which led to different (but always capitalist) civilizations, with positions incompatible with slavery. The link between northern capitalism and western agriculture helped to make the characteristic reactionary coalition between urban elite and landowners unnecessary for some time and therefore the only compromise that could have prevented war (it was also the compromise that eventually ended the war). Two more factors made this commitment extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain, in order to make the distribution of central power uncertain, thus intensifying and increasing all causes of distrust and dispute. Second, as we have just noted, the main forces of cohesion in American society, although they were consolidating, were still very weak”.
The war was the way out, north and south, to try to maintain its political power and thereby defend its institutions. The south fought for the maintenance of its economic power, its social status and, even, the maintenance of its wealth and patrimony. The same was true in the north. However, the north had opposite interests, seeking protectionism for its industry, maintaining private property and opportunities. The north also argued to fight to avoid the division of the Union, not so much because of the spirit of fraternity in relation to its fellow citizens, but because it was able to guarantee an internal market large enough for its products and not having to depend on the foreign market.
The war broke out after the presidential elections of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln of the Republican party was elected. Even before the new president took office, South Carolina, followed by other southern states, voted for secession. Then, the Confederate States of America were created, with a new constitution and a new president: the democrat and cotton farmer Jefferson Davis.
The Union, trying to avoid secession, sent soldiers to Fort Sumter, located in South Carolina. Before these soldiers even managed to arrive, the war started with bombing and the destruction of the fort by the separatists. At the beginning of the war, the Confederates reaped important victories. The Union used the tactic of attacking, while the south was on the defensive. To try to annihilate the enemy, the Union took control of the seas and decreed the blockade of southern ports. Thus, the south would have no help from any country and would still suffer from the lack of manufactured products, which they imported. However, without a central command, the northern troops had a confused strategy and, therefore, the war took so long to end.
After this confused strategy, on the Union side, the commander-in-chief of the troops became General Ulisses S. Grant. Known as the “butcher”, it was he who led the north to victory.
“Appointed commander-in-chief of all federal armies, in March 1864, Grant implemented a deadly two-purpose strategy. First, it would destroy the material base of the south and thereby the morale of the civilian population. Second, he would continually attack southern armies without worrying about northern losses, which could be replaced more easily than southern losses, which soon earned him the nickname 'the butcher'.
On the southern side, Commander-in-Chief Robert E. Lee was responsible for the relative balance of the war until 1863. In July of that year, in an attempt to conquer Pennsylvania, the northern industrial heartland, Lee experienced defeat in Gettysburg. With the failure of the bold military action, the overthrow of the Confederates began. The war ended on April 9, 1865, with Lee signing the southern surrender at Appomatox. Five days after the end of the war, President Lincoln was assassinated.
The population of the United States, in general, was exhausted, with hundreds of thousands of dead and disabled, and mourning marked almost every home for a relative killed in the conflict. But national unity was maintained, slavery was abolished and new legislation on the lands of the west was in force since 1863. In a quote from Eisenberg we can see the violence of this civil war.
“The death toll helps to appreciate the magnitude of this traumatic event for the United States. It is estimated that a total of 618,000 American combatants died on both sides, a total that exceeds that of all American deaths in World War I (1914-18, with 125,000 American deaths), in World War II (1939-45, with 322,000 American deaths), the Korean War (1950-53, with 55,000 American deaths) and the Vietnam War (1961-75, with 57,000 American deaths).”
In addition to the high number of deaths and injuries, the war brought another result that significantly affected the Southern economy and morals: the abolition of slavery. Proclaimed by Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and entering into force only in 1865, abolition gave freedom to approximately four million blacks. Farmers who owned slaves had great losses, since slaves were part of their heritage and they had no compensation. Eisenberg estimates that slave farmers lost about 46% of their total wealth through abolition.
“Generally speaking, large and small landowners or poor southern farmers experienced severe physical destruction combined with a complete disruption of the agricultural production system. According to reports by journalists, federal officials and evangelical ministers who traveled the south in the immediate post-war period, there remained a devastated region: plantations ruined by battles, droughts that occurred in early 1866 and looting in the name of confiscation or hunger itself; the destruction of buildings on farms, roads and railways; the scarcity of cattle, mules and birds; the lack of technical and agricultural implements; the disorganization of any labor or credit system, compromising production; military occupation; high sums of debt; among others ”.
At the end of the Civil War, the Union militarily occupied the southern states and began the period known as Reconstruction (1865-1876). During this period, the main political positions in the south were held by Union politicians, or northerners. The proud southern aristocracy had lost the power to appoint judges, tax collectors and even postmen. Blacks were included among voters, while whites who had participated in the rebellion lost their right to vote. In addition, blacks began to participate in politics. At once, the southern political order was upside down: fourteen blacks were elected as federal representatives and two as senators. One was appointed governor and six others, vice governors. Several served as state secretaries and many filled local offices.
Conditions in the south were extremely bad for the former agrarian elite. This further hurt the pride and morals of southerners. Thus, some began to think that perhaps it would be better to restart their lives far from their homeland, in a place where they could have peace of mind and less constraints. They then went on to search for possible places where they could emigrate and rebuild their way of life. In our work, we will focus on research about Brazil, although they have also been interested in other countries, both in Latin America, especially in Mexico, in addition to Cuba and Venezuela, as well as in Europe and Canada.
Research about Brazil Page 22
The emigration of southerners to Brazil was not an impulsive and thoughtless act. Before deciding on where to go, they sent agents to visit the great Empire of South America. They had the mission of researching the conditions of establishment, the lands, the climate, the culture, political and religious freedom, etc. . According to Weaver: “For the ex-Confederates, emigration from the United States to Brazil was not the spontaneos action of rash men; it was the result of study, thought, and deliberate planning. (…) Many Southern libraries included books on Brazil ”.
In addition to the books on Brazil in southern libraries, Americans also had at their disposal reports of former travelers who lived or had visited and become interested in Brazil, as well as reports subsequently published by agents of emigrant associations who came here to research possible conditions of establishment. The reports made by the agents after the Civil War are extremely important, however, there are some previous works that also stand out and may have influenced the southerners. This is the case of travel reports written by Protestant missionaries in their evangelizing campaigns, such as Kidder and Fletcher, who visited the Empire of Brazil well before the Civil War.
Daniel Parish Kidder, Methodist pastor, arrived in Brazil in 1838 as a member of a Methodist Church mission. He returned to the United States with his two children in 1840, when his wife died. In 1845 he published a book about Brazil: Sketches of Residence and Travel in Brazil. In 1857, together with Reverend James Colley Fletcher, he wrote another book describing his experiences in Brazil. Fletcher, a minister of the American Presbyterian Church, established in Rio de Janeiro, came to Brazil in 1851. Even without any real intention, both ended up influencing southern emigration to Brazil, because through their books, southerners were able to learn a little more about the country.
"Kidder and Fletcher, at first unwittingly, gave great impetus to the emigration movement from the South to Brazil. As the idea of leaving the country began to grow among defeated Confederates, they read avidly these accounts of Brazil, its government, its people, and its customs. New editions of Brazil and Brazilians had to be run from the press in 1866, 1867, and 1868, and these included a section with information of special interest to emigrants”.
According to Jones, Reverend James Fletcher would have worked actively to promote the emigration of southerners, helping to establish a regular line of vapors between the two countries. The company established for this purpose was the United States and Brazil Steamship Company, subsidized, according to the author, by the governments of the two countries.
In addition to the writings of the two missionaries, the main source of information for southerners who wished to emigrate was the reports of North American agents and individual explorers, who came to research conditions in Brazil, and which were published in the southern press. Among them, we can highlight the pamphlets of Joel E. Mathews, James Mac Fadden Gaston, General W. W. Wood, Reverend Ballard S. Dunn and Lansford W. Hastings.
These agents came, in general, on behalf of an emigration-promoting association. Many of these associations were formed after the end of the Civil War and reflected the disillusionment and decision to emigrate from the southerners.
“At the end of the American Civil War, aiming to develop an emigrant feeling among the southern population, several agencies were organized in most of the former Confederate States of South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, such such as the Florida Emigration Society and the Southern Colonization Society. (...) Seeking to convince the population towards emigration, they held public conferences and published articles in southern newspapers praising the 'atrocities' committed by the federal government, the 'unbearable' black equality, the increase in taxes, thefts and „ insults' to southern whites ”.
These associations first established contact with the Brazilian consulates in New Orleans and New York. After a first contact and, as they received good news, they strengthened their relations and sent the agents to explore Brazilian territory. According to Zorzetto, during the second half of 1865, shortly after the end of the war, more than twenty agents arrived in Brazil to explore possible sites for the establishment of southerners. These American agents were accompanied by engineers, interpreters and guides provided by the Imperial Government and set out to search for land in the provinces of Brazil.
“Involved throughout the 19th century with immigrant proposals as a solution for the implantation of a free labor market in Brazil, the government financed the transportation, food, guides, interpreters and provided a certain savings for agents to explore the land available for immigrants to settle. Addressing the interior of the provinces of Espírito Santo, Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, they took letters of recommendation from the Minister of Agriculture to influential people in the localities. In the case of São Paulo, agents were recommended to large agricultural landowners who provided them with the necessary assistance ”.
In the province of São Paulo, in addition to private land, agents explored vacant lands located on the coast. These lands were offered at half the price of private individuals, however, they were less fertile land and, often, subject to flooding.
Dr. James McFadden Gaston, born in Columbia, South Carolina, was a surgeon and served as such in the Confederate army. He was the first to come to Brazil to research the conditions that would allow the establishment of the Americans. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro on September 12, 1865, and on the 21st of the same month he embarked for Santos. From there, he went to the interior of the province of São Paulo, having traveled from Jundiaí to Araraquara, when he found the General Wood, who had been in Brazil since October, going with him to Brotas. According to Goldman (1972), Dr. Gaston would have liked the land between Campinas and Araraquara, however, on learning that Wood had chosen land in the fields from Araraquara, he decided elsewhere, since he had a certain dislike for him. The curious thing is that they traveled together for several times in national territory. In addition, Wood never got to transfer to Brazil. On November 26, Dr. Gaston returned to Rio de Janeiro in the company of General Wood.61 However, he still had to see the lands on the coast of São Paulo, where he would later settle with other compatriots.
“Gaston returned to Rio, where he was with the Nathan62 and through them met with Major Meriwether and Dr. Shaw. Together they decided to return to Santos, to go by cart and on foot to Conceição de Itanhaém. There they met with Capt. Buhlaw who came from Cananeia and said that the lands were great and transportation by sea very easy ”.
On December 1, 1865, Dr. Gaston returned to Santos, accompanied by Robert Meriwether and Dr. Shaw. He went to see land in the Vale do Ribeira region of São Paulo. There, he met Rev. Ballard S. Dunn, who was deciding to purchase land in the region. Gaston then presented a favorable opinion to emigration to Minister Paula Souza, who ended up reserving him a piece of land in Xiririca, awaiting his arrival with some other countrymen.
Returning to the United States, Dr. Gaston published a book entitled Hunting a home in Brazil, in which he sought to present all the facilities and opportunities existing in the country, in order to try to convince his compatriots to transfer their residence here. According to Jones and Goldman (1972), Dr. Gaston sponsored the arrival of a hundred emigrants from South Carolina. However, as presented by Oliveira (1995), Dr. Gaston would have established himself in Xiririca with seven more compatriots. One of those compatriots was João Ridley Buford, who was Gaston's partner in his business. According to Jones, in April 1868 they had already traded thirty-six rolls of tobacco, a load of mate and another of bacon. The Demaret family also settled near Gaston, and already on their arrival they bought a family of slaves (father, mother and son) . However, with the breakdown of the colony, Gaston, Buford and Demaret came to the Santa Bárbara region. Gaston lived in Campinas; Buford and Demaret in Santa Barbara. João Ridley Buford even named one of the central streets of Santa Bárbara.
General W.W. Wood, before the Civil War, had served as a lawyer and journalist in Mississippi, and like Dr. Gaston, was one of the first agents to visit Brazil on behalf of a group in order to gather more specific information about the country. Boarding the Montana ship in New York, he arrived at the port of Rio de Janeiro on October 3, 1865. On October 12, he took a steamer to Santos, looking for places to establish southerners in the province of São Paulo. On November 26 he left Santos for Rio de Janeiro, and in his company, aboard the ship Santa Maria, was none other than Dr. James McFadden Gaston. Wood was very well received by the Emperor, who introduced him to the Minister of Agriculture Paula Souza. He returned to the United States on board the ship South America on January 2, 1866. There he published a book with the title Ho! For Brazil, encouraging its compatriots to emigrate. We couldn't find that book, or maybe a pamphlet. Not even the relevant bibliography on the topic has been able to find it. However, we know that Wood did not promote, as the leader of a group, the emigration of southerners to Brazil. According to Weaver: “Instead of returning to Brazil as the leader of a great emigration movement, he settled down as a country attorney in Adams County, Mississippi.” In the records of passenger movements at the port of Rio de Janeiro, compiled by Betty Antunes de Oliveira, there is no record of Wood after his return to the United States, on January 2, 1866, indicating that he did not return to the country. His incentive for emigration was limited to the publication of a book, and he himself did not decide to emigrate. According to Hill:
“One of those men commissioned by others to come and investigate local conditions was General W. W. Wood, from Mississippi, who had lived in New Orleans for many years. Dr. James McFadden Gaston met him in July 1865 in New Orleans and he told him that he was representing 500 families. A lawyer, editor, and great orator, General Wood was so outspoken that he managed to get 19 emigration companies, representing 7 states, to put luck in his hands. Representing so many people and wearing a coat and top hat, he arrived here as a great character, was received with the greatest honors and adulation by the government. The music band came to greet him and they played 'Dixie', the official anthem of the south, they fired rockets, they made banquets, they rang bells ... A carriage was put at their disposal for trips to the interior, interpreters were provided and beasts of cargo for the immense luggage. In Araraquara, Brotas, Botucatu, wherever he went, he was received with the greatest honors, but, apparently, it was a lost effort on the part of the Brazilians, as nothing resulted from all this except the great tour that the general did ”.
Regarding Reverend Ballard S. Dunn, we know that he arrived in Brazil on October 28, 1865, on board the ship Adelaide Pendergast. He visited lands in Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and the coast of São Paulo, having met McMullan, Bowen and Gunther in the latter province. Upon returning to the United States, he published the book entitled Brazil, the home for Southerners, encouraging the arrival of southerners to Brazil. On the cover of this book there is an indication that Dunn was part of the Confederate army. Dunn came to Brazil in 1867, accompanied by approximately 150 compatriots, where he formed the group called Lizzieland, in the Ribeira Valley.
Robert Meriwether and Dr. H.A. Shaw represented the Southern Emigration Society, of Edgefield, South Carolina, one of the most well-known associations in the United States and abroad. They arrived in the port of Rio de Janeiro from New York on board the ship North America, on November 26, 1865. From there they went to Santos, on the ship Santa Maria, on December 1, 1865, accompanied by Dr. James McFadden Gaston. They returned from Santos to Rio de Janeiro on February 21, 1866, and must have immediately embarked for the United States. Upon arriving, they published the results of the surveys in an Edgefield newspaper. Through the documentation searched in the 1st Registry From Notes of Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, we know that Robert Meriwether emigrated to Santa Bárbara. It is his first deed of purchase and sale registered with the municipality's registry office, among North American immigrants. Meriwether came to Brazil with his family on board the ship Douro, arriving in Rio de Janeiro on September 1, 1866. On the 6th of the same month he took the ship Pirahy to Santos. From there he went straight to Santa Bárbara, where he bought, on October 28, 1866, a farm of 315 fathoms from Joaquim de Godois Bueno and his wife, and from Firmino de Godois Bueno and his wife, for two contos de réis.
Lansford Warren Hastings also came to Brazil to research the conditions of establishment, however, unlike other agents, he sought land in the province of Pará. In the United States he published the book The Emigrants Guide to Brazil. We did not have access to this book, but we know that in 1867 and 1868 Major Lansford Warren Hastings established a group in Santarém, with about 300 compatriots.
In addition to these agents representing pro-emigration associations, we met some other southern farmers who came and did research on the conditions of establishment. Among them are Frank McMullan and William Bowen, Charles Gunther and Joel Mathews.
Frank McMullan and William Bowen were farmers in Texas, and, according to Jones: “McMullan was a six-foot-tall boy with a lung condition, very easy on languages; and Colonel Bowen was a veteran of three wars: that of Mexico, the Indians and the Civil War. ” On December 9, 1865, they arrived in Brazil, on the same ship where farmer Charles Gunther was accompanied by his four children. McMullan and Bowen explored lands close to the ones Dunn had chosen to form Lizzieland, in Iguape, with the guarantee of the Brazilian government that they would be guaranteed the same advantages given to Gaston and Dunn: as a provisional title to the land, measurement and demarcation, exemption from taxes for agricultural implements, manufactures and machines, in addition to accommodation on behalf of the government, upon arrival.
“McMullan and Bowen chose lands in the Rio Juquiá basin, in the Province of São Paulo, returned to Rio, made their report to the government on May 24, 1866, naturalized Brazilians; then McMullan returned to the United States to take care of the settlers' transport, while Bowen stayed to provide his accommodation. ”
McMullan and his countrymen's return trip to Brazil was very troubled. The ship wrecked off the coast of Cuba, and migrants lost most of their belongings. They had to return to the United States and wait another month there to get another ship. Eventually they ended up on the same ship as Gaston and his settlers, North America, and settled near Dunn's land in Iguape. Frank McMullan, a victim of tuberculosis, died about six weeks after arriving in the Valley of the Ribeira, at Colonel Bowen's house, his friend and partner. According to Betty Antunes de Oliveira, as Brazilian law did not allow burials of non-Catholics in government cemeteries, a family of German immigrants was willing to bury him in the your property's backyard.
According to Goldman (1957), those who followed Dr. Gaston were a little luckier at first, but the colony did not prosper, even though the land was good and the plantations made promised excellent harvests. And this is for the simple reason that “the land demarcated by them was required by Brazilians, the roads promised [by the government] were never built and the crops were never sold”. Thus, the families of Dr. Gaston's colony were dispersed; some returned to the United States, others would have mixed completely with the Brazilian population and still others would have gone to Campinas, as in the case of Dr. Gaston himself. In our research we found no record of his establishment in the Santa Bárbara region, except an 1885 record, in which the doctor paid the taxes for an animal to the Santa Bárbara City Council.
On the same ship as Frank McMullan and William Bowen, on December 9, 1865, was also Charles Grandison Gunther, a southern farmer born in North Carolina, but who lived in Alabama, where he had already been elected deputy. He traveled through several Brazilian provinces, having enjoyed the lands located in Espírito Santo, on the banks of the Doce River. Having arranged everything with the Brazilian Government, he returned to the United States and brought four hundred compatriots with him.
Finally, we have the curious figure of Joel E. Mathews, a farmer from Alabama who came to Brazil on June 13, 1866, on board the ship Izabella. On that same ship was Harvey Hall, a member of the group of emigrants who settled in Santa Barbara. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, he embarked a few days later for Santos, on the same ship that Charles Gunther was on. Joel returned to the United States on October 6, 1866, and in 1867, the Daily Times of Selma, Alabama, published his reports under the title Brazil: Reflections on the Character of the Soil, Climate, Inhabitants, and Government. Its objective was to disseminate characteristics of the country that could be interesting to farmers interested in emigrating to Brazil.
“Joel E. Mathews represented the aristocracy of Alabama cotton planters both in education and wealth. A native of Georgia, he acquired degrees in law and medicine from the University of Virginia, settling in Alabama about 1831. In 1860 he owned 284 slaves and a plantation of over 6,000 acres valued at $152,625, while his personal property was appraised at $404,760. He contributed $15,000 for the defense of the state after its secession and equipped several military companies at his own expense”.
We did not have access to the original, however, from the quotes presented by Barbara Stein, we can see that Joel's considerations included the maintenance of the slave system in Brazil, which would be a positive point and an attraction for ex-confederates. More than that, we have in Mathews an authentic member of the southern elite, so it is clear from his background and his properties, whose highlight is a squad of 284 captives.
“Mathews had set out from Selma in 1866 to „seek a new Home, because of the utter and entire disorganization of the system of labor to which I have been accustomed‟. He sought „a climate where I could plant and grow cotton… also, land, at once cheap and fertile‟ with the „same system of labor (African slavery), and many of the peculiarities of social society which result from the ownership of slaves, which to me are so pleasant and agreeable and to which I had been all my life accustomed”.
However, Mathews did not hide his fear that emancipation could occur in Brazil; he believed, however, that abolitionism was not yet a strong movement in the country.
“Emancipation was especially to be feared in Brazil „because the desire to have it done stimulated by that feeling which the Author of all sin has found means by which to infect to some degree most of the human family… (and which) is called in this country Democracy, in the Brazil it is called Liberalism – and in England it is called Reform – all men are of their party who think that all men are equal… Like all things which come from Satan, this is often shown in the world under many pleasing and alluring devices, first it shows a Banner inscribed with Liberty, Fraternity and Equality with the rights of man as a bar sinister. Next it appears with a banner on which is inscribed Paper money, Railways and the development of the resources. With the destruction of the right of property as a bar sinister… when seen in its third and last phase it waves a blood-red banner, with the words: Rapine, Robbery and Blood…”.
Barbara Stein, in her research, was unable to find out whether Joel E. Mathews emigrated to Brazil. In our research, there were also no records of Mathews living in Brazil and, mainly, in Santa Bárbara. After his return to the United States in October 1866, there is no record of Joel Mathews arriving at the port of Rio de Janeiro again.
According to Weaver (1961), these books that were published in the southern press had a lot in common and, mainly, they were all very optimistic about Brazil.
“There was great similarity in all of these books. They contained brief statements on the history and government of Brazil, accounts of the agents‟ welcome to and travel in the country, glowing descriptions of the land and the people, of opportunities available for immigration, and of inducement offered by the government, and, finally, details of the particular project in which the author was interested. Each had the limitations of hastily written accounts based on superficial surveys of a foreign country, but the men who wrote were interested in Brazil, and their enthusiasm was limitless”.
Another farmer who came to research the conditions of establishment in the country, but without representing a group and having not published any books with the results of his research, was Colonel William H. Norris, who came on his own, with his son Robert, to explore lands in Brazil. Departing from New York on the ship South America, they landed at the port of Rio de Janeiro on December 27, 1865. On January 6 of the following year, they went to Santos on board the Pirahy, from where they left to explore lands in the interior of the province from São Paulo, deciding to settle in the Santa Bárbara region, in the place where the city of Americana is today. As soon as they were comfortably settled, they sought the rest of the family that landed in the port of Rio de Janeiro on April 19, 1867. Colonel Norris encouraged other compatriots to emigrate as well, through letters sent to friends and other family members, talking about their success in the new land.
But the Norris were not the only ones to encourage other compatriots to come to Brazil. As other groups were establishing themselves, and having relative success in this new endeavor (or just a relief to escape the sad circumstances in which they found themselves in the United States), more propaganda was being done and more North Americans decided to emigrate to Brazil.
“As the first colonists began to reach their new homes, another medium of information about Brazil materialized, letters from and articles about Brazil sent back to the Southern newspapers. The emigrants wrote voluminous letters to friends and kin people, expressing either the joys and the disappointments connected with their new venture”
The efforts of the Brazilian Imperial Government Page 34
and associations promoting immigration in Brazil.
With regard to the position of the Imperial Government in the case of American immigration or colonization, it is necessary, first of all, to understand two moments. In the first, which corresponds to the 1850s, there was a fear of the American presence. More specifically, in the case of the opening of the Amazon River - an issue that also involved neighboring countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela - and, even in the establishment of colonization centers, also of North Americans, in that region. In the April 1854 session of the Council of State, this is quite clear. In the first place, there was a concern that what happened with Mexico at the end of the previous decade was repeated, where since 1821, with permission from the Mexican government, American colonists began to occupy part of its territory. A few years later, this region was declared independent under the name of Republic of Texas, with the clear purpose of joining the United States of America, which really happened in the late 1840s, after the war between Americans and Mexicans. . At the end of the conflict and victorious, the United States expanded its southwest, to the detriment of Mexico, still occupying the territories of California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and part of Colorado.
In the same way, what had happened in neighboring Colombia, when American colonists emigrated to Nova Granada (1840), where they were very well received, as the young Republic believed that they could take advantage of “their capitals and their industries”. . In September 1850, these same settlers promoted “a revolution intended to overthrow the government and establish a new state, with the name of New Columbia”.
That same session recalled the aggressive speech by American President Franklin Pierce, when he took office, in early March 1853:
“My administration's policy will not be influenced by the timid predictions of the evils of expansion. In truth, it cannot be hidden that our attitude as a Nation, and our position on the globe make the acquisition of certain possessions that are not within our jurisdiction, eminently important for our protection, if for the future it is not essential to maintenance the rights of trade and peace in the world ”.
Emphatically, the new president also assured, that: "The rights of each citizen in their individual capacity in the country or outside it must be sacredly maintained, with the proud awareness that they are a citizen of a nation of sovereigns".
Finally, the councilors understood, according to the Council's opinion, that American immigration, and especially in the case of the Amazon region, “would be an immense danger”, because before it, “our race, our language, our religion and our laws. Active and bold, [the Americans] aided by their government, would remove all competition from our inhabitants, or subject them ”.
In this picture, there is no way to forget the intriguing figure of Matthew Fontaine Maury, lieutenant of the North American Navy, mixed military, scientist, businessman and visionary. As a man of the south, since he was born in Virginia, Matthew was fully aware of the problems that afflicted the southern economy, and since the early 1850s, he began to alert his fellow citizens about the potential of the Amazon, whose colonization should be made by United. In the context marked by the spread of the doctrine of Destiny Manifesto, the imaginative Matthew in his studies came to several conclusions. The first was that the Amazon River, the Caribbean and the West Indies were part of a true “American Mediterranean”, while the second was the possibility of colonizing the Amazon territory with black Africans; evidently, these were slaves or blacks freed from the south, in view of the abolition of slavery in the United States. As for the first, and as part of the ardent North American expansionism at that time, Matthew advocated opening up to free navigation and trade on the Amazon River, at the time closed to foreign navigation. As for the colonization of the region, it should be developed by the United States, and who knows, in the form of a slave-owning empire. These pretensions, taken over by politicians and factions of the North American government, had a negative impact on the Empire and generated deep unease, since they were understood as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty.
It is curious that ten years before the Civil War, an American was enthusiastic about the potential of the lands of the Amazon region, its climate and its supposed fertility and carried out a campaign with American politicians and authorities to carry out this project; a project exposed in the book The Physical Geography of the Sea, authored by Lieutenant Maury himself, published in 1855 and which marked his time. The most curious thing is that, at that moment, it might not have crossed anyone's mind that Brazil could be the refuge of white Americans, desiring to preserve their world or build a new one, even if they had to abandon their land.
In the second moment, which corresponds to the 1860s, fears would give way to hope and, especially from 1865, when the American Civil War came to an end, and among the southerners the defeat was already presented as an accomplished fact . Based on that, from what can be seen from the reading of documents and ministerial reports from the Empire, as well as from the manifestations of politicians, the arrival of Americans as immigrants was viewed with good eyes; more than that, even with a lot of hope. Just look at the Reports of the Ministry of Agriculture, Trade and Public Works, which since 1866 have started to present in the title that dealt with “immigration and colonization” a subtitle dedicated to “North American immigration”. From that year on, it can be said that the imperial government sought to offer - or at least promised to offer - numerous benefits and advantages to those who expressed the desire to immigrate. The excerpt from the 1867 ministerial report, does not hide the rejoicing at the North American presence:
“It is recognized, as it is, that the most convenient immigration to Brazil is made up of individuals dedicated especially to agricultural life, the government, hurrying to assist the desire expressed by several inhabitants of the American Union, to move to the our country, aimed at those of the southern states in which that remarkable circumstance stands out. As a guarantee of their permanence on Brazilian soil, the political reason that acts in their spirits to expatriate expands ”.
There were many advantages offered to the Americans interested in emigrating to Brazil, by the responsible authorities (in this case, the Ministry of Agriculture): provisional title of the land, term for payment of plots at affordable prices, measurement and demarcation of the land offered by State, exemption from taxes for agricultural implements or machines they brought with them, accommodation on behalf of the Imperial Government when they arrived here and, in some cases, the payment or advance of their tickets here.
Despite the lack of definition of the Empire's immigrant policies, there was a great effort by many politicians of the time to make foreign immigration a reality, and in particular the North American one. In the 1850s, with the prohibition of trafficking, it was clear that slavery was entering a process of slow decomposition, and attracting the foreign settler was a solution to the labor problem. In the 1860s, immigrant associations were organized to which important figures of Brazilian politics became attached, and, in the North American case, the role of Tavares Bastos, promoter and member of the International Immigration Society, created in 1866, must be highlighted. in Rio de Janeiro. A deputy for the province of Alagoas and a member of the Liberal Party, Bastos was a great admirer of the Americans and their political and economic experiences, the United States of America having exercised a strange fascination on him since his college days and, mainly, on the works by Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he knew so well. For this reason, his writings that so exalt the great North American Republic have felt:
“I am a frantic enthusiast from England, but I only understand the greatness of these people well, when I contemplate the Republic that it founded in North America. It is not enough that we study England; you have to know the United States. It is precisely from this last country that more practical experience can come to us in the interests of our agriculture, our economic circumstances, which have, with those of the Union, the most vivid similarity ”.
Tavares Bastos was an immigration enthusiast, criticized the timidity of Brazilian politics and confessed his belief in the “races” coming from Europe. According to him:
“And I know of nothing but an effective means for that, namely, frankly opening the doors of the Empire to foreigners, placing Brazil in the closest contact with the virile races of the north of the globe, facilitating internal and external communications, promoting immigration German, English and Irish, and enact laws for the fullest religious and industrial freedom ”.
It is also noticed that, as a proponent of liberal thought, he saw the subordination of the Church to the State as an obstacle to the arrival of immigrants. An example of this is the maxim "Free Church in a Free State", attributed to him, as a staunch defender of freedom of worship, without restrictions, which would come from the separation of Church and State. Among other writings, his admiration for the United States is clear in the work “The evils of the present and the hopes of the future”, or even summarized in the famous sentence attributed to him: “Do we want to arrive in Europe? Let's get closer to the United States. It is the closest way to this curved line ”. For him, therefore, it was not enough to Europeanize the country; it was necessary to bring the settler of Anglo-Saxon origin and along with him, the light of Protestantism.
During the 1860s, at the same time that it received foreign agents in Brazil, the Imperial Government sought to maintain Brazilian agents in the United States, with the mission, among others, of offering initial information to those interested in emigrating, as well as establishing the first contact between the agents of southern emigrant associations and the Brazilian Minister of Agriculture. The best known agent was Quintino Bocaiúva, based in New York, who, in case of need to leave, to come to Brazil, for example, was replaced by the dealer Domingos de Gricouria.
“In addition to consular officials, to inspect the import contract and the transport of immigrants, the journalist and member of an immigration support association at the Quintino Bocayuva court was chosen by the shipping company and authorized by the imperial government. As it was mandatory for immigrants to embark at the port of New York to obtain financing for tickets, that colonization agent installed his office at the Brazilian consulate in that city in September 1866 ”.
Brazilian agents tried in every way to encourage emigration from the North American South. However, the incentives offered were to some extent exaggerated (or too generous) and as a result, not only southerners disillusioned with the war decided to emigrate. Weaver (1961) mentions that some Germans and Irish, newcomers to the United States, also decided to embark on this adventure.
“When Bocayuva opened the emigration agency in New York and announced a generous offer of passage and land, more than one thousand persons presented themselves as prospects within the first week. Four hundred of these were Germans and Irishmen who had just arrived in America”.
Among the incentives offered by the Imperial Government, as mentioned, were advance travel in the United States, measurement and demarcation of land in Brazil, transportation to vacant lands purchased in installments from the Government, etc. The installment payment of the land was made in up to five years, and the immigrant received the provisional title of the land on his arrival.
“According to each contract concluded between the agents and the imperial authorities, they would supply a steam for every two rented by the agents for the transport of immigrants; measurement and demarcation of the chosen lands; exemption from paying customs taxes on agricultural tools and implements brought by immigrants; free transportation between the port of landing and the colonies; supply of food for six months; construction of temporary accommodation and communication routes ”.
“Contracts were all in principle the same, varying only in minor details. Loans for transportation were made, usually allowing the colonist five years in which to repay. Contracts guaranteed free entry of personal belongings and agricultural implements, board and lodging for twenty days in Rio, and free transportation to a second destination. The agent obtained provisional title to the colonization site with the right to determine the purchasers. The head of a family received one square mile of land and a single person one half of that amount, the price, including surveying, ranged from twenty-two to forty-two cents an acre. Individuals could obtain permanent title upon payment of the total amount, with five years as the usual time limit. Some contracts provided that the government would build a temporary shelter at the site of the colony and furnish provisions for a stated time, for which the colonists would eventually pay”.
As the Imperial Government was interested in bringing in farmers, it also offered them an exemption from paying taxes on the agricultural tools they brought. What bothered the Government most was the fact that few southern farmers were immigrating. According to the 1867 Ministry of Agriculture report, this problem occurred because immigrants, in order to obtain the facilities promised by the Imperial Government, had to embark in the port of New York, which, in addition to being costly, exposed them to contact with northerners.
“It follows that few are encouraged to seek that port to continue their journey in demand from Brazil; and however strong their penchant for this country, they postpone or renounce the idea of change.”
“The fact confirmed this truth. Of the immigrants who arrived here on board of that company, few were from the south: most of them were foreigners who had just arrived in the north, or individuals who had no propensity for rural habits. This was certainly not the most useful immigration to the country ”.
In addition, not all emigrants were peaceful and there were some problems after their arrival in Brazil.
“In general, German families settled peaceably, but other groups were dissatisfied and created disturbances, including the burning of a sawmill belonging to an ex-Confederate. Some even refused their colonization sites and were turned on the streets to beg; some lived off the colonization society; some were jailed; others set off to fight the Paraguayans”.
This provoked negative propaganda from Brazil in the United States. In an attempt to correct the error and promote the emigration of farmers (that was the true intention of the Brazilian Government), it was determined that the transport of southern farmers, with advance passage guaranteed by the Imperial Government, would be made directly from the southern ports , such as Mobile and Nova Orleans. Despite the initial problems with recruitment, the Imperial Government believed in the arrival of southern farmers to the country, and in 1868, it emphasized the superiority of immigration of people from the southern states of the United States, and he stated that, despite having attracted few spontaneous immigrants, they had already developed and boosted crops in the places where they had established themselves. And this was due to the fact that they brought with them some initial capital, which allowed them to choose the place of establishment, regardless of the vacant lands offered by the Government, to carry out the expenses of the establishment and still obtain the first results of their activities.
And it was not just the Imperial Government that was interested in the immigration of the southerners. Businessmen and powerful farmers, in Rio and São Paulo, were also interested in this immigration and, to encourage it, created two support associations, one in each location.
In São Paulo, the Auxiliary Immigration Association for São Paulo, AAISP, was founded in November 1865. It was made up of the most affluent and influential farmers and capitalists in the province. Its president was Antonio da Silva Prado, the baron of Iguape, and the vice president was commander Vicente de Souza Queiroz, the baron of Limeira. Its members supported southern immigration, as they saw the possibility of selling their land at double or even triple the price to immigrants, and those who owned export houses foresaw the profits that could be generated by commercializing the production of these immigrants.
“Therefore, the arrival of American immigrants opened up the possibility of selling private land in any location in the Province. However, as we have seen, the agents came to São Paulo with letters of recommendation for influential people. In this sense, on their travels they were guided by individuals linked to AAISP, such as Joaquim Pinto Júnior and John Aubertin, who „coincidentally‟ visited areas where members of that association owned farms ”.
The São Paulo association did not have much influence over North American immigration, since the Rio association was soon created, which had greater prominence than the first.
In Rio de Janeiro, the International Immigration Society was created in January 1866, composed mainly of businessmen linked to the Praça do Comércio in Rio. According to Zorzetto, most members of this association were foreigners.
“Among the 150 shareholders enrolled in the first call for the organization of that company, we find 131 foreigners acting as bankers, bank directors, insurance company agents, managers and owners of shipping companies, shareholders and railroad organizers, public accountants, import and export commissioners, lawyers and editors from the three main Rio de Janeiro newspapers. In addition to these members directly linked to the square, we find several imperial politicians, such as deputies Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos and Silveira da Motta, senator Teófilo Ottoni, imperial colonization agent, Ignácio da Cunha Galvão, and the minister of agriculture himself the senator Antônio Francisco de Paula Souza from São Paulo ”.
In addition to the aforementioned politicians, we also found Quintino Bocaiúva as one of the directors of this association.125 As mentioned earlier, he had been appointed by the Imperial Government to act as a promoter of southern immigration from his office in New York.
The International Immigration Society had a short period of existence, having been closed in 1867, due to the lack of resources resulting from a financial crisis, and to discouragement, when realizing that the Imperial Government did not respond to its demands for legislative reforms, which would act in favor of southern immigration. Its performance was limited to intermediation between immigrants and the Brazilian Imperial Government during a year of operation.
Southern emigration Page 43
“The birds didn't sing anymore. The defeat had covered the south with the sad pallor of hopelessness. The southern landscape was in ruins. Virtually every family mourned the loss of at least one relative in the war. The railways were disabled. The churches and schools were closed. All banks were insolvent. Destroyed houses, farms and plantations. Entire cities reduced to rubble. The economy had crashed. The job market had disappeared while men and women aimlessly, black and white, roamed the countryside ”.
It was in view of this situation that the southerners decided to emigrate from the United States. The situation of domination and humiliation that followed the war led them to decide to leave their country of origin, to try to restart their lives in a place where they had better conditions and opportunities. They could not see such opportunities in the defeated south.
The Americans who decided to emigrate went to Europe, and countries like Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela and, of course, Brazil. Between 1864 and 1874, 3,691 North Americans entered the port of Rio de Janeiro.
“For years it has been useful for America to minimize the exodus of southerners in the post-war period to Brazil, or to dismiss it as a simple trip by mad adventurers. Nineteenth-century America decided to believe that only a few participated in the exodus and that those fools had undoubtedly disappeared in the humid and insect-infested jungles of the interior of Brazil. Over the years, little news has appeared in newspapers, with the total number of emigrants profoundly variable, and which generally underes-timated the right number, giving the impression that there were only a few hundred."
According to Harter, the number of those who came to Brazil is very uncertain, however, it is estimated that about twenty thousand southerners went to the country, and that this group would be formed mainly by farmers. As for Goldman, this number is much smaller, that is, about two thousand immigrants, with eight hundred of them staying in the province of São Paulo and, in addition, it was far from being a homogeneous group, either by origin - not all were southerners - or by occupation, as it was small number of farmers, and many were not even farmers.
In particular, the Confederacy's political and military leaders went to Mexico. They intended to wait for tempers to cool down in the United States and, finally, to return to their homeland, perhaps being able to resume their careers.
For part of the bibliography, especially the descendants of immigrants, the reason for the decision to emigrate was due to the actions developed by the government of the Union after the end of the Civil War. The humiliations to which the southerners subjected and the spirit of revenge that came to dominate actions in the south would have motivated them to emigrate. In two words, the ultimate cause for emigration would be hurt pride. Among the authors who defend this idea are Hill, Jones and Harter.
According to Hill (1927), the reason for emigration would be the fact that southerners did not support equal rights between whites and blacks. “... a desire to get out from under a government controlled by Brownlows,„ niggers ’, And Yankees.”
For Jones, the humiliations imposed in the south, looting and disrespect, were the reasons for the decision to emigrate. Both Jones and Harter describe a sad situation for postwar southerners. Disillusionment, defeat, humiliation, deprivation are described in several passages, leading to the belief that the situation was really unbearable for these ex-combatants, good men who just wanted to preserve their way of life.
“The south was rebellious and there was a lot of effort from the north to subdue it. The occupied land was subjected to all manner of humiliations. Bands of opportunists of the worst kind invaded the south and occupied positions of command. Plundering properties and disrespecting families were done with the police with their eyes closed. Taxes have risen extortionately and the policy was among the most disgusting.”
For Harter, it was the fear of the change that would come from the victory of the Union over the southern states, as well as the desire to maintain a way of life that would no longer exist, that made the southerners decide to emigrate.
“The fear of the changes that the Yankee victory would bring and the strong desire to maintain their way of life, gave many people a deep confidence, necessary to leave the south, leaving for an unknown and distant country in Latin America. Unlike the high-ranking Confederates who went to Mexico looking for a temporary paradise from which they could return and settle again, those who left for Brazil never expected to see their native clod again.”
According to Zorzetto, the descendants of the first immigrants followed an epic or novelist line, making immigrants true heroes of their time. For these authors, the defeat in the war and the actions that followed it, explain the decision to emigrate from southerners. The emigrants would therefore be ex-Confederates, constituting a representative part of southern society, made up of farmers and farmers.
And there are also two authors who downplay the importance of the Civil War in the decision to emigrate from the Americans: Goldman (1972) and Oliveira (1995). According to these authors, the decision to emigrate would come from the desire of the southerners to reproduce their way of life elsewhere, including with the institution of slavery, “although some of those who led them had already predicted that slavery was also about to come into Brazil. extinguish. ” This is what Oliveira calls the“ myth of eternal return ”. They emigrated in an attempt to “return to the religious, political, economic environment of before; to return to the living conditions of the 'times of luxury'. (...) In the collective psyche of immigrants, the myth of eternal return was installed ”. According to the author, there was something in the psychological baggage of immigrants that led them to territorial expansion, with the Monroe Doctrine and the Manifest Destiny as a backdrop.
The choice of Brazil would be due to the aforementioned incentives of the Brazilian Imperial Government, as well as the reading of the books and pamphlets of southern emigrant agents who came to the Empire to research the conditions of establishment for those interested in emigrating. It is believed that the fact that the country was a slave would have been a positive factor, but, as Harter rightly states, this was not the most important factor in the decision to emigrate. Interested parties were aware that slavery was about to disappear in Brazil as well.
“At first glance, Brazil seemed, at best, a secondary prospect for colonization. He still counted on slavery - and this was attractive to many Confederates - but he was going through a process to get rid of this habit. The importation of slaves had been banned in 1850. In any case, if the desire to continue to own slaves had been the only reason for emigrating to Brazil, the southerners would have found it much easier to settle in Cuba, just a day trip from Florida, than in a country located eight thousand kilometers away. Slavery existed in Cuba where abolition took place in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888. And from the beginning, emigrants were informed that in Brazil there was 'racial equality', but this did not serve to discourage them. It was better to live with blacks than with Yankees”.
Southerners, in fact, were fleeing a post-war situation that became unbearable for them. It was the end of their political importance and the traditions they were used to.
“They were wrapped up in the memory of the war and resented the proximity of the Yankees. Their plan was to isolate themselves and establish communities that would preserve Southern customs - a mental confederation”.
“Emigration started to seem like the only way out of an unbearable situation”.
Zorzetto believes that they chose Brazil because of the possibility of acquiring land, since the acquisition of slaves would be difficult for many, due to the extreme poverty in which they found themselves.
“Although the possibility of becoming a slave owner in Brazil was a strong incentive for many to choose the Empire, it is necessary to pay attention to the condition of extreme poverty in which the majority of the southern population found itself after the civil conflict. (...) we believe that a portion of that population that decided to emigrate had little or no savings. By reserving this capital for the purchase of land, southerners were driven by the possibility of acquiring land”.
However Silva (2007), is emphatic when stating that the choice of Brazil as a destination by the souther-ners had to do with the existence of slavery: “We argue that the main factor for choosing Brazil as a destination included the existence of a hierarchical social structure whose base resided in slavery”.
There is an attempt by the bibliography to identify immigrants to the Confederation, as well as to identify them as great southern slave farmers. According to Zorzetto:
“On the other hand, despite the immense methodological and theoretical differences, most of the biblio-graphy referring to North American immigration, seeks cultural links of identification among the first immigrants. Characterizing them as southerners who were part of a 'confederate nation', the authors establish an immediate association between 'southern immigrants' and 'confederate citizens'.
However, as Alcides Gussi rightly points out, the Confederate origin of immigrants is, in fact, an idealized reconstruction of the past by the descendants, a reconstruction that is not always true.
“But, immigrants were confederates in Brazil, how do they intend to attribute their descendants to them today, reinforced by the literature that is based on the myth of the reproduction of a southern way of life and the alleged isolation?
If, in fact, there was a confederate project on the part of a few immigrants - which seems to be more of a story that the descendants tell today about what they imagine their ancestors to be - it is shipwrecked in the context of the processes of identity negotiations. First, because immigrant groups were quite heterogeneous, not necessarily aristocratic and confederate; and, also, because the conjuncture of Brazil at the end of the 19th century, with Abolition and the Republic, exorcised once and for all an aristocratic-slavery project, better contextualized in the Monarchy. These immigrants stopped being confederates - which many never were - to become Americans in Brazil, too.”
In addition, the fact that the majority of immigrants came from Texas (69%) allowed Frank Goldman (1972) to relativize the southern origin of immigrants. According to the author, Texas, since it was only annexed to the United States in 1840, would have most of its population formed by former local inhabitants, and by pioneers, coming from other regions of the United States and Europe. However, as points out Zorzetto, the fact that the immigrants are from Texas does not necessarily mean that they were not southerners. As already mentioned, many southerners had gone to Mexico; those in Texas could be Southerners in transit.
“Recent research shows the constant migratory movement within the southern states after the Civil War, as the Union army took possession of the east and south of the confederate states. In this way, internal migration allowed the existence of a good part of the population of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, among others, as residents of Texas around the end of 1865. Thus, when identifying the American immigrant as a native of Texas, the sources do not necessarily mean that he had inhabited the place all his life, but that the last place of his residence, or even the port from which he embarked, was located in Texas”.
According to Zorzetto, Griggs would be the only author who would have worked with American sources (population censuses) looking for the social origin of emigrants. In his work, Griggs characterizes emigrants as small farmers. Through the bibliography and the type of immigrant project existing in Brazil, Zorzetto, in his work, concludes that the American immigrants who came to Brazil had a very heterogeneous social origin. This heterogeneity of immigrants had previously been pointed out by Hill (1927) and by Goldman (1972) . According to Hill (1927), even vagabonds would be part of this group:
“Included among the self-imposed exiles, were people of almost every social and economic class then existing in the United States. There were generals, colonels, doctors, lawyers, merchants, planters, ministers, teachers, barroom loafers, bounty jumpers, and vagabonds. As it was later discovered, not all who went were American citizens, for some of the émigrés were of English and of Irish lineage and had never become naturalized”.
Here, we have the same stance as Zorzetto, Hill, Goldman and Gussi, who point to the heterogeneous origin of immigrants. Through our research, we found immigrants from the most varied professions, and we could see that some never dedicated themselves to the cultivation of the land, demonstrating, in a way, their inability for this type of activity. Furthermore, the fact that two American immigrants worked as contractors for a Monte Mor farmer, demonstrates that if they were really big southern farmers, they would never be involved in this type of activity unless they had totally lost their values. moral. Here we do not want to say that all immigrants were not great southern farmers, we just want to demonstrate that the group was very heterogeneous, and that, if there were former southern farmers, owners of large farms, called plantation, with a large squad of slaves, these were not the rule. As pointed out by Griggs, immigrants would, for the most part, be smallholders. Considering that many worked on their own land, it is not difficult to accept this hypothesis. However, in our research, we found immigrants who bought large tracts of land and slaves, demonstrating that they probably tried to reproduce a production relationship that they already knew in their homeland. They must have been farmers in the south. The fact that some immigrants brought with them enough money to buy land and slaves, at a time of extreme poverty in the United States, is indicative that they could be possessors of great fortunes and, even when depleted, still managed to bring a reserve with them.
“Although obtaining severe losses due to the liberation of slaves and the devaluation of two thirds of the land after the end of the conflict, immigrants brought considerable amounts to Brazil, which, according to Tavares Bastos, varied between 1 and 2 contos, or even more for those who had initially established themselves. In Laura Jarnagin's calculations, that amount would be between 500 and 1000 dollars, and Charles G. Gunther, leader of the colony near Linhares, in Espírito Santo, would have brought 3000 pounds sterling and 2000 dollars with him”.
Regarding the confederate origin of immigrants, we believe that not all were, however, a part of the immigrants had been part of the army. We know, for example, that Dunn was part of the southern army, as well as the sons of the cel. William H. Norris. Silva (2007) points out other immigrants who also played an active role in the Confederation:
“In addition to ex-officers, sons of prominent pro-slavery politicians like John Ridley Bufford, Dalton and Benjamin Yancey, as well as William Hutchinson Norris and his son Robert C. Norris, they came from families who had active and decisive political roles and confederate military. They defended an aggressive stance in the face of the threat of an imbalance of forces in relation to the north”.
On the website of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, an entity that has existed in Santa Bárbara since 1954, which seeks to preserve the memory of immigrants in the city, there is mention of thirty-six Confederate veterans in Brazil, most of them in Santa Bárbara. They are: Albert G. Carr, Benjamin C. Yancey, Benjamin Norris, Calvin McKnight, Capt. William AH Terrell, Dalton Yancey, Dr. Joseph Pitts, Ezekiel B. Pyles, Frank McMullan, George S. Barnsley, George Washington Carr, Green Ferguson, Henry Clay Norris, Henry Farrar Steagall, John Barkley MacFadden, John Henry Rowe, John Henry Scurlock, John R. Bufford, Jonathan Ellsworth, Joseph E. Whitaker, Joseph Long Minchin, Joseph Meriwether, LS Bowen, Louis Demaret, Lucien Barnsley, Napoleon Bonaparte McAlpine, Raibon Steagall, Robert Cicero Norris, Robert Cullen, Robert Meriwether, Robert Porter Thomas, Thomas Lafayette Keese, Thomas Stewart McKnight, William A. Prestrige, William F. Pyles, William Meriwether.
Therefore, we believe that immigrants were, for the most part, southerners. And that, in addition, they had some link with the Confederation. In addition to the aforementioned war veterans, we believe that others were sympathetic to the cause, although they had not actively participated in secession. And we believe that the majority of those who decided to emigrate did so to escape from a situation that they found too humiliating. Emigrating to a place as far away as Brazil, with economic opportunities and the maintenance of slavery similar to those in closer countries, would only be justified as a way to get away from the country, since they could have found similar conditions in Cuba, for example, which at that time was still a colony of Spain, where slavery still persisted.
CHAPTER 2 Page 53
North American immigration to Brazil and Santa Barbara
From the end of 1865 and the beginning of 1866, the Americans began to arrive in Brazil, determined to remake their life in the country. Once here, they ended up settling in Santarém (in Pará), in the provinces of Espírito Santo, Paraná, and on the coast and interior of the province of São Paulo. In these provinces, the main groups and colonies were formed, however, there are also reports of Americans in Minas, Bahia and Pernambuco, according to a quote by Mark Jefferson, which helps us to appreciate the number of the first immigrants to arrive in the country.
“Captain Richard F. Burton was in Brazil at that time and expected great results to flow from the immigration of Confederates to the Empire. He gives the number of arrivals from the States for 1867 as 2700 persons: 200 in Paraná, 800 in São Paulo, 200 in Rio de Janeiro, 100 in Minas Gerais, 400 in Espírito Santo, 100 in Bahia, 70 in Pernambuco, and 200 in Pará, Southerners who had, he says „exchanged their desolate homes for happier regions‟. The 200 settlers in Paraná were „principally Missourians, who come with considerable capital, and who in a few years will make this center very important’”.
With the exception of those who went to Santarém, most immigrants arrived through the port of Rio de Janeiro and from there they went, by steam, to the other regions of the Empire. In Rio de Janeiro they received food and lodging, mainly at the Morro da Saúde Hospedaria, which since March 1867 has functioned as a hotel or hostel for immigrants. According to Blanche Weaver, it was a southerner, Colonel Charles Matheus Broome, who took care of the inn, which on the occasion received the visit of the Emperor, D. Pedro II, for the first time.
There the immigrants stayed for a few days, until they recovered and decided where they were really going. Many immigrants were only sure of their destinations at the hotel, talking to other immigrants, and to the American agents themselves who were beginning to arrive with their first groups.
Many followed these American agents who had obtained land concessions from the Imperial Government, in the promise of bringing in good-natured countrymen, and who, with their physical and intellectual capacity, could promote the country's development. These went to the coast of São Paulo, Santarém (PA), Lagoa de Juparanã (ES), etc.
“Despite the efforts made by private individuals to sell their land to immigrants, the facilities provided by the imperial government to those who came to settle in vacant areas, made American agents choose them”.
Others, however, were not satisfied with the land offered by the Brazilian Government, and decided to seek better options within the country; it is in this group of dissatisfied people that we find Cel. William Hutchinson Norris, from Alabama. Having come to Brazil on his own initiative, without hiring or trusting any North American emigration agent, he came with his eldest son Robert and sought land that seemed more suitable for him to settle with his family. Thus, it ended up arriving in the region of Santa Bárbara, in the place where today is the city of Americana, at that time part of the municipality of Santa Bárbara, and that later belonged to the term Campinas, in a constant dispute between the two municipalities for the question of that currency . The colonel having established himself, many other compatriots followed, settling in what is now Americana and in a good part of Santa Barbara. Some of those who had gone to other locations, especially to the coast of São Paulo, ended up also going to Santa Bárbara, based on the attractive news they received from the immigrants already established there.
The province of São Paulo concentrated most of the North American immigrants. But the group that was formed in Santa Bárbara was, without a doubt, the most relative success. The available bibliography on the subject is unanimous on this issue; even Mark Jefferson, a very pessimistic author, who considers that North Americans only had failures in Brazil, recognizes the relative success of the group that settled in Santa Bárbara.
In this chapter, we deal with the arrival of North American immigrants to Brazil, and of the colonies and groups that have formed since then. After a brief summary of these main settlements, we will dedicate ourselves exclusively to Santa Bárbara, analyzing the arrival of the first immigrants, the material conditions in which they lived and the economic relations developed, using in this part the empirical material obtained from the primary sources. researched in the municipality.
According to Ana Maria de Oliveira, the distribution of American immigrants in Brazilian territory was as follows:
Table 2.1. North American immigrants in Brazilian territory: main groups and leaders
Source: Oliveira (1995), p. 111. 1- The term used by the author was maintained; here, for methodological options we use the term grouping.
Rio de Janeiro Page 56
In Rio de Janeiro no colony was formed, not even an organized grouping, but over the years the capital of the Empire housed many North American immigrants, dispersed in their location. The Court also served as a point of departure and arrival for these immigrants.
“Throughout the history of the Confederate colonies in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro was the center of activity. With the exception of those who went to Santarém, all the settlers passed through the capital en route to their respective homes; business transactions of many varieties, such as the purchase of slaves, caused many to frequent the same city; those who returned to the United States temporarily or permanently passed the same way. But in addition to the sojourners, were those who lived in and around the city for considerable periods of time”.
These immigrants who lived in Rio de Janeiro dedicated themselves to liberal professions, such as medicine, dentistry, among others. In the list of North American immigrants presented by Betty Antunes de Oliveira, we were able to identify 30 of these professionals living and working in the Court between 1866 and 1888. Still others bought land and farms on the outskirts of the city and dedicated themselves to the cultivation of agricultural products, such as sugar , coffee and orange, using slave labor.
Dr. Keyes, for example, moved with his whole family, shortly after settling in Espírito Santo, to Rio de Janeiro, starting to exercise his profession as a dentist. In 1870, three years after his arrival in Brazil, he returned with his family to Alabama (USA) .
Pará (Santarém) Page 57
The Santarém colony emerged under the leadership of Major Lansford Warren Hastings, born in Knox County, Ohio, in 1819. In 1842, he had been elected leader of one of the first wagon train trips to Oregon. From there, he headed for California. Hastings aimed to defeat the Mexicans and become president of the Republic of California. He was married to a young woman from Alabama and defended the Confederate cause during the Civil War. According to Hill (1927) the group led by Hastings was formed by farmers Alabama and Tennessee, who were unhappy with the conditions that came into force after their defeat in the Civil War.
“Not many months after the surrender at Appomattox a company of Tennessee and Alabama planters, „disgusted with free niggers, the United States government, the defeat, and everything connected with the country‟, assembled farming implements and provisions for six months at Montgomery preparatory to a journey to Brazil as soon as their agent, the above named major, should return with the announcement of a site”.
The group ended up having several problems on the trip to Brazil. On the first attempt, in March 1866, with thirty-five emigrants, just days after sailing, there was a bladder (smallpox) epidemic on board and they had to return to Mobile, where the quarantine was carried out and eleven people died. In the second, in July 1867, Mobile sailed with one hundred and nine emigrants. They managed to get to the island of Saint Thomas, in the archipelago of the American Virgin Islands. There the steam needed repairs and the journey could not proceed. They then had to buy tickets for steam from the regular line to Pará. According to Hill (1927), two years had passed since preparations before arriving in Santarém: “Thus, in September, 1867, after two years of hope and anxiety, the first of the Hastings followers, numbering about 115 weary and downcast souls, reached the scene of their El Dorado - if such it remained ”.
According to Jones, the Brazilian Government has given many advantages to this group: the land should only be paid from the third year after the group was established, and even so three times. In addition, they received temporary land titles that cost them twenty-two cents an acre. The Brazilian Government has also granted exemption from taxes on belongings brought with it and exemption from military service, even for those who are nationalized. Finally, a sum of twenty-six contos de reis was granted for the construction of shelters and a path to Santarém.
In his research, Hill found two versions for the Santarém colony: those that succeeded and those that failed. There are reports of these two versions published in newspapers in the United States. Hill attributes this divergence to the types of people who came to Santarém. Those who had little money and little desire to work hard ended up failing, while those who had a little more money and, moreover, a lot of energy to work, prospered. Conditions in the Amazon region were much more difficult for the group of immigrants, as they were, in general, very isolated areas and with a lot to be done to make them a good place to live: “Most of the group did not act precipitately; they had made preparations for more than a year before departure. But many were unused to the hard conditions that had to be faced in the Amazon wilderness ”.
Even with the help of the indigenous people (available labor in the region), immigrants were not successful in the Amazon's wild lands. Just six months after the first group arrived in Santarém, American immigrants were already seeking help from the American consul in Pará.
“Under the circumstances it is not surprising that before the expiration of six months many of the exiles were appealing to the American consul at Pará for relief. In the communications they alleged that the Brazilian government had failed to carry out the terms of the contract entered into with Major Hastings in November, 1866, and that to this fact was attributable much of the impending suffering”.
The colony, in the end, seems not to have been successful. According to Hill, only one of the immigrants actually achieved material success.
“As late as 1874 there were still at Santarém some fifty of the two hundred Americans who had attempted to establish themselves on the Amazon. But at this time, according to Roy Nash, the half hundred were „burdened with debts, living in squalor, with brokendown bodies and discouraged hearts‟. Still a half century and two years later (1926) found a dozen or fifteen of the southerners, or their descendants, living at Santarém, though only one is said to have made a success in this land of jungles. Perhaps it should be said that only one had accumulated a large share of material possessions – the yardstick by which most Yankees measure their fellowmen”.
Major L.W. Hastings fell ill and died before returning to Brazil with the second group of southern immigrants he tried to bring to the region, in 1868. With the failure of Pará, Colonel White and William Barr ended up moving to Santa Bárbara. who remained in Santarém, like the Riker family, were fully incorporated into the local society, completely misrepresenting their North American origin.
Espírito Santo (Linhares) Rio Doce Page 60
In Espírito Santo, a colony of North American immigrants was established around Lagoa Juparanã, close to Rio Doce. The lagoon is located in the current city of Linhares. The group's leader was Colonel Charles G. Gunter of Alabama.
The group was divided into about twenty establishments. They were emigrants who fled Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. According to Harter, the group consisted of lawyers, doctors and southern farmers. Like other immigrants, they were received at the Immigrants' Inn in Rio de Janeiro when they arrive in Brazil.
The land could be purchased through a credit granted by the Government, which should be paid within four years. The land price was twenty-two cents an acre. Colonel Charles G. Gunter, in a letter sent to a friend, states that he would like him to come and join the colony, and advised that if the friend wished to come, that he bring with him all his tools, which were better than those that could be purchased here in Brazil, and also its lighter furniture, and the most varied types of fig and grape seeds and seedlings. He also commented on the freedom of worship existing in Brazil and on the Brazilian Government. He concluded by saying that he had almost already forgiven his Yankee enemies for having forced him to emigrate to a country so much better than the one in which he lived.
Another important source for getting to know the lives of Americans in the Lagoa Juparanã region is the letter from Josephine Foster, dated December 1, 1867 and published in 1868, in the southern newspaper Times. Josephine embarked in New Orleans with her family, for Brazil, on April 16, 1867. They arrived in Rio de Janeiro a month later, on May 17, 1867, They were received at the Hotel dos Imigrantes, where some North Americans were. Americans who had just arrived in the country and his family still did not know where to go in Brazil. In conversations with Dr. Keyes, they decided on the Rio Doce region, around Lagoa Juparanã, in Espírito Santo.
Josephine Foster describes in detail the days she and her family spent at the inn in Rio de Janeiro. While they were staying there, they met with a group that had been accompanying Major Frank McMullan, and that was going to Vale do Ribeira, in the province of São Paulo.
Josephine Foster states that, at a certain point, during her family's stay at the inn, five hundred southern immigrants occupied their premises. It also records the Emperor's visit to immigrants, accompanied by some of his officers.
“A splendid looking man he is; dressed on that occasion in a plain suit of black cloth, with nothing to designate his rank except a star on his left breast, thereby showing his appreciation of our poverty-stricken condition. He passed through some of our rooms – dining and storerooms, kitchen, etc., to see if we were comfortable. History bears no record of any more noble and generous heart than that of Don Pedro II”.
In the letter, Josephine reinforces that, in order to make a fortune in the country, one has to be prepared for heavy manual labor. Many, when they realize this, end up discouraged. According to Hill (1936), slave labor was adopted by some immigrants in Espírito Santo, since they were not used to this type of work.
“Notwithstanding the fact that the new settlers on Lake Juparanao had plenty of arduous labor for employment – much more than they had ever known in their former homes – they found servants to aid them. Old Seraphim, wife and two daughters served the Keyes family, though they were not as useful as had been the Alabama Negroes. Their chief service was as teachers of Brazilian ways and customs. Indeed, in one sense the Brazilian slaves were masters of former slave owners”.
In the beginning, this was considered the most successful colony. However, there were a number of difficulties in the region, such as the proliferation of malaria, which affected many immigrants, and very severe droughts that destroyed crops and crops. Over time, many settlers moved to the interior of São Paulo, indicating that prosperity did not continue: “If Espíritu Santo could claim for a time the most successful of the confederate settlements, São Paulo could claim the largest number, and ultimately the most prosperous”.
Paraná Page 62
In Paraná, Colonel M. S. Swain and Horace Lane, both from Louisiana, established a colony on the Assungui River, which is part of Paranaguá Bay. Then Dr. H. Blue and Judge John Guillet, from Missouri, arrived. According to Hill (1936), shortly afterwards there were already thirty-five southerners from the Mississippi in the region. Paranaguá Bay was the core of this colony, although there were other North Americans spread across the province of Paraná. Among the immigrants, there were not only Southerners, but also Americans from Illinois, Nebraska and California.
Dr. Blue practiced medicine in the city of Paranaguá. Isaac Young, who came from Missouri to Brazil, dedicated himself to cultivating the land, exploring the work of slaves to produce cane, corn, beans, potatoes, cassava, etc. He had a mill and two distilleries. Other colonizers, who settled in the city of Paranaguá, were interested in manufactures. One of them, James K. Miller, built a sawmill and dedicated himself to producing barrels and drums to store yerba mate, a very important commercial genre for Paraná's economy at the time.
The colony was unsuccessful and many of these immigrants returned to their former homes in the United States as early as 1869 and 1870.
“Charles Nathan, an immigration agent, stated that in view of the intelligence of Dr. Blue, Isaac Young and the Miller brothers, the Paranaguá colony was the most prosperous in Brazil. However, according to Hill, the death of WP Budd in 1869 and the return of James K. Miller and MS Fife, as well as other less prosperous settlers, to the United States, the colony disintegrated between 1869 and 1870. The superior intelligence of members was not enough to prevent the group from collapsing.”
São Paulo (Two Colonies) Page 63
Vale do Ribeira – Lizzieland – Rev. Ballard S. Dunn
Reverend Ballard S. Dunn, from Louisiana, came to Brazil in October 1865, to visit lands in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and São Paulo. He was particularly interested in land near Iguape, in the province of São Paulo. Having become a Brazilian citizen, he obtained from the Imperial Government the provisional deed of the lands located near the Juquiá River, a tributary of the Ribeira River, near Iguape. He settled there with a group of approximately one hundred and fifty compatriots, where he formed the colony he named Lizzieland, in honor of his first wife.
The group left New Orleans on January 30, 1867 and, upon arriving in Rio de Janeiro, some gave up on continuing their journey and joined other immigrants who were going to Espírito Santo. The immigrants who went to Vale do Ribeira were poorer than the majority of those who came to Brazil. The purchase of the land was made in installments, with installments of up to five years. Immigrants received the provisional title to the properties and, after full payment, they would receive the definitive title deeds.
However, the colony did not prosper. As already mentioned, these immigrants came with little money, and when they waited for the results of their work on the land, they were surprised by floods (the place that was chosen by Rev. Ballard S. Dunn was prone to flooding during the rainy season, as rivers overflowed), and by fevers. This all caused deaths and the dismemberment of the colony. Of these immigrants, some returned to the United States, others went to other places in the national territory, such as Santa Bárbara and Espírito Santo; and some even went to Rio de Janeiro to meet other well-known Americans living in the capital. Dunn himself became discouraged after his wife's death and returned to the United States. According to Harter, Dunn returned to the United States only three months after he founded Lizzieland. There were suspicions about the reverend that he returned to the United States with money from some settlers, which he never paid again. Its objectives and suitability seem to have been questioned both here in Brazil and in the press in the United States.
Vale do Ribeira – Major Frank McMullan and William Bowen Page 64
Major Frank Mc Mullan and William Bowen, both from Texas, settled with fellow countrymen in lands close to Lizzieland, in the district of Iguape. According to the 1866 Ministry of Agriculture Report, they bought land from private individuals, in addition to applying for and obtaining the concession of vacant land located on the banks of the S. Lourenço and Juquiá rivers. Engineer Street was commissioned by the Imperial Government to demarcate and measure these lands.
Among the immigrants, most were Texans, except for two immigrants, the Barnsley brothers, who were from Georgia. However, almost everyone was born in the south, with the exception of Calvin and Thomas McKnight, who were born in Pennsylvania but have lived in Texas for some time. According to Griggs, most of these immigrants Major McMullan brought were small farmers of southern origin. However, Harter says that among the immigrants who accompanied McMullan and Bowen, were some of the most prosperous southern farmers, with gross wealth. which totaled more than a million dollars. However, they were completely depleted when they came, as a result of the Civil War.
McMullan and his countrymen's trip to Brazil was very troubled. The ship was shipwrecked off the coast of Cuba, and emigrants lost most of their belongings. Therefore, they were even more destitute than their neighbors in Lizzieland (who were already considered poorer than American immigrants established elsewhere in Brazil).
“The first expedition made by that one was not a happy one. The immigrants that on board the brig Derby came in demand from Brazil, were shipwrecked on February 10 on the coast of the island of Cuba. If none died, all were reduced to greater misery, by the loss of how much they had ”.
The Brazilian government, interested in bringing these immigrants to the country, paid for a steam to pick them up off the coast of Cuba and take them to New York. There, they had to wait another month before getting another ship. They came on the same ship as Gaston and his colonists, North America.
They settled in the lands chosen by McMullan, receiving the provisional title of the same ones, whose payment was divided in up to five years. After full payment, they would also receive the definitive title deed.
The colony, as expected, did not prosper. In addition to the lack of money, there was a lack of means of communication (which caused the great isolation of this colony), diseases and the death of leader Frank McMullan. According to Jones, after the death of the leader in October 1867, there was a break of the link that united this group and after that each took its course on its own. Many returned to their old homes in the United States and others went to Santa Barbara, and other settlements throughout Brazil. The Tarver, Bowen and Bony McAlpine families went to Santa Barbara after the disintegration of the McMullan colony.
Interior of São Paulo - The North Americans of Santa Bárbara Page 66
Further inland in the province of São Paulo, in Santa Bárbara, we will find the largest group of North Americans formed in Brazil.
“The interior and coast of São Paulo received most of the immigrants. Colonies were established in the Provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, Espírito Santo, Pará and Bahia. One after another, they all failed. But a wave of Americans, not destined for colonization, managed to stay in Santa Bárbara and Americana, and to attract immigrants from the unsuccessful colonies there”.
Santa Bárbara, today Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, is located 150 km west of the capital of São Paulo. It belongs to the metropolitan region of Campinas (RMC) and is currently separated from the neighboring city, Americana, only by streets. There are even streets that belong half to one municipality and half to the other.
Santa Bárbara was founded in 1818, from the donation of land from the sesmaria of D. Margarida da Graça Martins, for the construction of a chapel, which gives it a different origin, since its founder was a woman. From the information we have, this was the only city in the region founded by a woman.
“The donation is confirmed by the Capelas register book, CM23, which is in the archives of the Metropolitan Curia of São Paulo, in these terms:„ Santa Bárbara dos Toledos, a village founded by Dona Margarida da Graça Martins, to erect a chapel under it the evocation of Santa Bárbara. Year 1818 ".
On April 16, 1839, the chapel was cured becoming the Fourth District of Vila Nova Constitution (now Piracicaba). On February 18, 1842 the cured chapel was elevated to a parish. In 1844, Santa Bárbara became part of the Campinas region, returning to that of Piracicaba in 1846. In 1869 the parish was elevated to the category of Vila, gaining municipal autonomy and, with that, dismembering from Piracicaba.
Americana was founded on August 27, 1875, when the railway station, called Santa Bárbara Station, was inaugurated. Gradually, due to the influence of the Americans who lived around the Station, it came to be called Vila dos Americanos.
“When the São Paulo railroad was completed, in the 1870s, the Confederates began to build their houses near the train station, many miles east of Santa Bárbara. For about twenty-five years the handful of houses and shops grew and the place was named Estação. However, Brazilians have always called the city of Vila Americana, an obvious reaction to the ethnic characteristics of the majority of its popu-lation”.
From its founding until the beginning of the 20th century, Santa Bárbara and Campinas got involved in several disputes to know which municipality the taxes collected in the village of Americans would fit. Because of this, now Americana belonged to Vila Santa Bárbara and now to the district of Campinas, until, on July 30, 1904, Dr. Jorge Tibiriçá, president of the state of São Paulo created the village of Santo Antonio de Villa Americana, in municipality and county of Campinas, a district of peace with the name of Villa Americana. The elevation of the village to the category of municipality occurred on October 28, 1924, When the district of peace was created, the first appointed judges were Basílio Bueno Rangel, Basílio Duarte do Pateo and Charles Hall. For the appointment of Charles Hall as judge in 1904, we can see how he, not to mention other Americans, already stood out in the region. In this and the next chapter we will return to talk about Charles Hall, who was an important trader in the region, having even acted as a creditor, both for Americans and for Brazilians.
At the time of the arrival of the first immigrants (1866), Santa Bárbara was a small agricultural village, dedicated to the cultivation of sugar cane, with small and medium producers. In the words of Zorzetto and Zaluar:
“Despite being located in the coffee region of Campinas, and perhaps influenced by this proximity, Santa Bárbara was far from dedicating herself to coffee. Described by Augusto Zaluar, as „a small town without important buildings and adorned only with some very poor looking houses, in complete analogy with the costumes and customs of its inhabitants‟, it would be a small agricultural village”.
However, the Almanak of the province of São Paulo for 1873 presents an important change for Santa Bárbara, because the “development that has been cultivated in his municipality, mainly in the culture of cotton, coffee, sugar cane and tobacco has been extraordinary, since the arrival of American immi-grants...”
In addition, as it was located in an area that was not part of the interests of the Imperial Government for settlement purposes, the land in the municipality of Santa Bárbara was not offered to American agents. Its price was higher than the lands of the São Paulo coast, for example, and, in addition, there were not the same payment facilities granted to immigrants who went to the settlement centers. However, the Americans who came to the region in search of land found them fertile and suitable for the cotton planting they intended to do, and also for the establishment of their families.
In early 1866 the Norris arrived (Col. William Hutchinson Norris and his son Robert). They were from Alabama and Robert had served in the Confederate Army. Its lands were located a few kilometers from Vila Santa Bárbara, where it is currently the city of Americana. The deed to purchase these lands, according to Zorzetto, is in the First Notary Office of Campinas, however, we were unable to find it in the archives of that office, which are currently under the custody of the Unicamp Memory Center (CMU). Silva (2007), in conversation with the author, also confirmed that he had not found this deed in the Campinas registry offices. In Santa Barbara she is not to be found. The first record of Americans buying land at the Santa Barbara registry is from Robert Meriwether, who did so on October 28, 1866.
However, we know from the bibliography that they were the first to reach the outskirts of Santa Bárbara and settle in the region. They arrived at the port of Rio de Janeiro aboard South America on December 27, 1865, and embarked for Santos on January 6, 1866, Going up the Serra do Mar, they went to see lands first in the city of São Paulo. There they were offered land where today is Brás and São Caetano, but they refused it, because it was a wetland. They then proceeded with their belongings in ox carts to Campinas, but they had not yet found the land they wanted. Going a little further, in the direction of Piracicaba, they bought land from Fazenda Machadinho, just before Vila de Santa Bárbara. They also bought three slaves, two for the work in the field and the captive Olímpia to help with domestic chores. after they were established they sent a letter asking the family to come. The rest of the family arrived on April 19, 1867, aboard the Talisman (his wife Mary Black and the children).
In the six months following the arrival of the Norris, about fifty families came to settle outside Santa Bárbara. These families were mainly from Alabama, Tennessee and Texas. Zorzetto, likewise, points to the southern origin of most of the immigrants who were located in Santa Barbara.
“Finally, through lists sent by immigrants from Santa Bárbara to the American consulate (containing their names and states of origin), inscriptions of tombstones from their private cemetery, wills, inventories and powers of attorney, we understand that American immigrants from Santa Bárbara region would come from the southern states ”.
We believe that the majority of immigrants were indeed of this origin. Of course, we believe that people from northern states and also people of English and Irish origin, recently arrived in the United States, came together in an attempt to find something better for their lives. We understand that an event as tragic as a war, its unfavorable outcome and the conditions of reconstruction would be strong enough to impel so many Americans to leave their homeland, in flight to a country of little prestige and so different from their homeland.
According to Zorzetto, most immigrants came with their families. Only a small proportion (16%) would be single immigrants, who remained single throughout the period. In the author's words:
“Between 1866 and 1870, the period when the first immigrants arrived, the colony of Santa Bárbara brought together about 200 individuals. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, the number of North American immigrants in this region fluctuated between those who settled permanently and those who settled temporarily, a common spatial mobility for those seeking better living conditions. Among those who stayed long enough to have their names regis