Source:

The Lost Colony of the Confederacy,  Eugene C. Harter, 1985

Excerpted and paraphrased

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John Wesley Harris and his brother, William, were youngsters living near Meridian, Mississippi, in February 1864, when General Tecumseh Sherman came through on the Meridian Campaign.  The two boys watched the Union army plunder and burn the little town.  "It was something," John recalled many years later, "that the North could take little pride from, not the kind of stuff likely to occupy the memorial plaques on the walls of West Point Military Academy....

Not long after Sherman's five days of destruction, word arrived that John and William's father had died in battle.  The boy's mother was devastated.  How could the Yankees kill this kind, strong, blue-eyed man, so full of fun and spirit?  She never recovered from the blow.  Within a few months of her husband, she was put to bed.  Expressing hope that she would see her husband in heaven, she died several days before the peace of Appomattox.

The Reverend Junius C. Newman, the pastor of the Methodist church, part of the Alabam Conference, had tried in vain to console the widow.  Now, he took the young boys in, sharing with them the little food available to his family.  Sherman's bummers had stolen almost everything they owned, leaving them little more than a few pieces of furniture and the clothes on their backs.  Stunned by events and the desolation that overwhelmed Meridian, Newman began his plans for moving his newly enlarged family to a safer place.  He wondered whether life in Brazil, about which he had read, might not be preferable to this living hell that General Sherman had created.  

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On August 5, 1867, Rev. Junius Newman and his family arrived in Rio de Janeiro.  He came as a minister from the Alabama Methodist Conference and settled near Col. William Norris in the town that would become American, Sao Paulo, where he organized the first Methodist church in that region.

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