ASSIMULATION

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Over time, Americans would begin to integrate with the local community, which gave rise to some picturesque situations. One of them came from the watermelon seeds, known as the "Georgia rattle-snake," which they had brought in their luggage. By 1890, an outbreak of yellow fever coincided with one of the earliest fruit crops, and health authorities vetoed her sale because she thought it transmitted the disease. It was necessary that the scientist Oswaldo Cruz discovered the cause of the disease so that the watermelon trade, prohibited for more than a decade, was released.

In addition to cotton of a type superior to the one existing in the country, the Americans would introduce other novelties in Brazilian agriculture, such as the animal-drawn plow instead of the limited hoe, and a metal wheel trolley that supplanted the heavy ox carts . But it was in education that they made their greatest contribution, through missionary schools and their schoolmasters (teachers) and schoolmarms (teachers). From the methods used by the pastors who accompanied the immigrants from Santa Bárbara and Americana, a new model of education emerged, which was eventually absorbed by the Brazilian government - the so-called "decoreba" and the physical punishments, very common in the education of that period, were abolished. Presbyterian missionary Mary Chamberlain and her husband, Rev. George Chamberlain, founded the American School in São Paulo, which would give rise to the current Mack-enzie University. The creators of the Methodist University of Piracicaba (Unimep) also left the com-munity.

In terms of religion, the Americans would introduce Protestantism into Brazil. The first chapel of the country that served the three denominations - Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist - was erected in Campo Cemetery, spiritual center of the community in Santa Bárbara, dating from 1878. In the assis-tance area, the immigrants also made their contribution: Pérola Byington (1879-1963) founded the Pro-Childhood Crusade and the hospital that bears his name in São Paulo. 

It could also be said that the confederates helped create Brazilian rock. Rita Lee Jones, co-founder of the Mutants, is the daughter of dentist Charles Jones, a descendant of Colonel Norris. 

To this day, the descendants of these immigrants make a point of maintaining their traditions. On the property where the Campo Cemetery is located, on lands that belonged to Colonel Anthony Oliver, every second Sunday in April, the community, represented by the non-governmental organization Fraternidad Desendencia Americana, is amused by old songs and dances typical of the rebel south with the boys dressed in Confederate soldiers and the girls as clones of Scarlett O'Hara in And the Wind Took. At such times, the cars display the Confederate flag.

During the celebration, everyone savors typical dishes such as fried chicken, cornflakes, biscuits, ham, cakes, pies and refreshments. From time to time, they are visited by "cousins" from the southern states. In 1972, one of them, then Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, visited the Field Cemetery four years before becoming president of the United States. His wife, Rosalyn, has a great-uncle buried there. Curiously, the community was the subject of a study by Eugene C. Harter, a journalist and former US consul in São Paulo, who wrote the book The Lost Colony of the Confederation, which was very successful in his country.

Allison Jones, a public relations officer for the NGO representing the community, says she was discriminated against in New York because of her English accent, and was a victim of explicit racism on the part of New York blacks. In the south, when traveling in a bus with 40 passengers, all black, except him and the driver, the feeling was diverse. "Although Brazilian, I felt at home and I was treated well by all."

A student of Unimep's history and descendant of Richard (Dick) Crisp, an American who challenged the racism of his own community by marrying a black slave, Frederico Padovese participated five years ago in an experience that has relegated him to the past. Through a fraternity agreement with the Virginia-based Sons of Confederate Veterans (or SCV) NGO, he joined a Confederate battalion in the re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863. In the midst of cannons and weapons of the time, he slept in tents and ate the bland ranch.

The university says it is proud of its origin, but the feeling is not directed at the United States as a whole, but at the south of the country. "When I hear of US imperialism, I say that the Civil War was the first US imperialist onslaught, in the case against a part of its own people, who wanted the separation to disagree with the central government," he says. To this day, much of the descendants of immigrants refer to themselves as confederates and to the North Americans as Yankees, the same nickname given to the inhabitants of that nation by their opponents, among which are members of leftist currents and militants anti-globalization. 

Healthy and active at age 88, Maria Weissinger of the Cross is one of the oldest descendants of Americans in Santa Barbara. His grandfather, John Wesley Weissinger, when he arrived in 1866, would win the nickname "John of Mato", because the Brazilians had difficulty speaking his name. 
With a strong hickory accent, Dona Maria, as she is known, brings in the traces the mark of Anglo-Saxon origin. The main memories of his youth are the dances, practically frequented only by people of the community. "The parties were very fun, they were always held on the farm of someone from the colony. The girls did everything to go," she says.

On a visit to the city, Dona Maria, who was then living at the Palmeiras farm, met the Portuguese João da Cruz, who would become, against the will of the family, her husband. His father, Albert, wanted his children to marry within the community. At the time of the ceremony, the priest, who did not want to officiate because she was a Presbyterian, was surprised. "Shortly before, I had converted to Catholicism, and I showed him the document, which was disconcerted," he says. The father - who would still have to sour the fact that the three other children marry a Brazilian, a German and an Italian - appeared the next day and apologized.

The Brazilians said, according to her, that the chain of the city, inaugurated in 1896, would be used to arrest the Americans. Some of them, rich and famous as badgers, would enter the bars on horseback and ask for drips, which they drank without dismounting. Others, especially the Texans, would take to the streets and discharge their revolvers as if they were in the Old West. Today, the old building houses the Museum of Immigration. 

Racism, although it manifested itself without the violence that characterized it in the post-war southern US, was another hallmark of the community. There are, however, few records of Americans who mistreated slaves. João do Mato had two, Manuel and Anastasia, with whom he had a good relationship. Edwin Britt even left his lands for a slave. Still, Dick Crisp, who had ten children with the slave Damiana, suffered discrimination on the part of his compatriots.

In an episode in 1873, however, portrayed in Judith Mac Knight Jones' book Soldier Rest !, three young men from the community - Napoleon Mc Alpine, Robert Mac Fadden and Dick Crisp - hanged a slave who had slain the Colonel Oliver, owner of the Campo Cemetery area. The farmer had caught him stealing potatoes, and with the same instrument he had dug, the man killed him. 

In disgust, the young confederates, recalling similar crimes in their homeland, hanged the slave and left him hanging from a tree on Oliver's own farm. The three would then make a pact under which they would never denounce. It was only after everyone was dead that the names were revealed. The story recalls the haunting actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the postwar United States.

If, however, there is something that the descendants of the immigrants do not accept, it is the interpretation that their ancestors, when coming here, would somehow want to help perpetuate slavery in Brazil. "When the confederates arrived, slavery was already declining in the country and would be peacefully abolished in 1888," says Daniel Carr de Muzio, one of the most active members of the community.

Similar opinion has the distinguished descendant of a Confederate captain who settled in Rio Grande do Sul, Judge Ellen Gracie Northfleet, vice president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Hamlin Lassiter Norfleet's great-granddaughter. Based on the view of some contemporary historians, she considers that the Civil War was actually motivated much more by the clash between two economic ideas than by racial issues, which would be only part of the explanation for the origin of the conflict. "My great-grandfather never had any slaves or made any manifestation of a racist nature," he explains.

In more modern times, the year 1998 would have left the community a defeat, much less harsh, of course, than that of 1865. In that year, the cross of St. Andrew (in the form of an "x") was removed from the American coat of arms and replaced by that of the patron Saint Anthony. "The Italians asked for the exchange, because they thought the symbol was very noticeable for the Americans and there was not much left for them," explains Allison's wife, Eloisa Nascimbem Jones. 

Although it has declared neutrality, Brazil has never managed to disguise its sympathy for the South of the USA. According to historian Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, our US ambassador to the United States, Miguel Maria Lisboa, feared that the abolitionist movement in that country would spread and arrive here. The Foreign Minister, Magalhães Taques, acknowledged the state of belligerence, admitting the existence in that period of two nations in the current US. Because of the Brazilian position in the face of the war, the two countries have twice suspended their diplomatic relations.

The US ambassador to Brazil, General J. Watson Webb, accused the country of breaking neutrality in favor of the south, because southern ships found, unlike the Northerners, a welcome in Brazilian ports. 
In October of 1864, a cruiser from the north of the United States captured a Confederate ship in Bahia. Brazil protested against the violation of its territorial waters, and US Secretary of State William H. Seward went so far as to say that if the country continued to protect southern ships, it would be preferable to declare war on it. Shortly thereafter, the Americans would apologize for the incident, and Brazil then came to recognize only the central US government.

The fears of our ambassador would be confirmed later. With the abolition of slavery in the United States, Brazil, which was the last country besides Cuba to maintain slaves, would begin to undergo great internal and external pressure to free them. A young Bahian law student, Castro Alves, would publish several poems in Republican newspapers demanding the end of slavery. In 1871, the emperor himself would approach for the first time the subject of the liberation of the slaves in the Speech of the Throne - a kind of accountability of the government to the Congress. Until, in 1888, his daughter, Princess Isabel, would sign the abolition of slavery. A bloody war