Estamos Ainda Confederados

By Gould Hagler · Originally published April 2017 · p. 19

After the shooting stopped most Confederates went home and, encouraged by the words of Robert E. Lee, tried to be as good citizens as they had been soldiers. Most, but not all; some ex-Confederates gathered up their families and emigrated. The most successful emigrants were the Confederates who settled in Brazil. Until the fairly recent past, the story of these Confederados was not widely known. The subject is getting more attention these days. Anyone interested can learn from many sources the tale of these transplants who made new lives in Brazil, and took their Southern culture with them. Do a search on Amazon; you will find a few items: a historical novel and two histories, one published in 2000 and the other in 1995, which is as far as I know the first serious study of the Confederados. Google will lead you to newspaper articles and other items of interest. A search on youtube will reveal some interesting videos and interviews of Brazilians with names like McFadden and Pyles. For many years, their settlement Americana in Brazil, was an isolated island of English speakers. Its people were largely isolated from their Portuguese-speaking neighbors as well as separated from their former homeland. Newer generations of Confederados are assimilated into wider Brazilian society and speak Portuguese as a first language. However, earlier generations spoke only English, and their brand of English opens a door to our linguistic past. The 1995 book, The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil, has a very interesting chapter by Michael Montgomery and Cecil Melo who studied the speech patterns of the denizens of Americana. What these linguists learned was a surprise. Southern American speech has certain well known markers. Anyone listening to a Congressional debate can tell who is the gentleman from Georgia and who is from Ohio. What are these markers? (I promise to avoid technical terms as much as possible.) Imagine the gentleman from Georgia saying “mile high pie,” then listen to the Ohioan. The Georgian pronounces the i in each word as a monophthong; the Ohioan uses a diphthong. (I broke my promise already, but you know what I mean.) Okay, now say pen and pin. If they sound the same you have another Southern American speech marker.

Here is my favorite, the post-vocalic r (Another broken promise). Say Sumter or Monitor. If you can’t hear the r in each word, you have found another marker in Sumtuh. Monituh. This marker isn’t exclusive to the South, of course (just listen to a Bostonian), and many southerners don’t have it, but it is still one of the key markers. How about dropping the g at the end of words that end in -ing? Hillary Clinton did this when she wanted to sound like regular people. I’m countin’ on all you good folks to vote for me and I’m expectin’ to win this election. Again, the marker is not exclusive to the South, but a useful marker nonetheless. Finally, Southerners often prolong certain vowels, or drawl. Bid and pill, for example, are stretched out and sound almost like bee-ud and pee-ul. Got this? OK. But what does this have to do with the Civil War and the Confederados? Linguists Montgomery and Melo listened to the old timers in Americana and got a bit of a surprise. When they analyzed the old Confederados’ speech patterns they found that these markers were largely missing. In some ways they didn’t sound like their cousins whose grandparents stayed home. The men and women said mile high pie like the gentleman from Ohio. Pin and pen didn’t rhyme. As for dropping the g, they sounded more like Mrs. Clinton when she was speaking to Wall Street bankers instead of hoi polloi. If a Confederado doctor gave you a pill the word had only one syllable. The linguists put it this way: “Specifically, the lack of homophony of pen and pin, the lack of drawling, and the relative lack of the glideless pronunciation of [ai] in Americana all indicate that Southern English was closer to other varieties of American English in the nineteenth century than present-day Southern speech is. Changes in pronunciation have apparently taken place that represent a divergence of Southern English from American English in the twentieth century. In short, Southern speech is in some ways more distinctive today than ever before.” The linguists posit two possible reasons for this. One possibility is that the post-war South was more isolated from the rest of the country than the pre-war South. In this later period of relative isolation, the languages diverged. Another possibility is the movement of population within the South, which caused “…the spread of Upper South pronunciation into the Lower South, as many Southerners have migrated out of the hills and into the towns and cities of the Piedmont and beyond, beginning a generation after the war and continuing to recent times.” Robert E. Lee probably asked for a pen when he needed to write a note, and when he mounted Traveller he was going riding, not goin’ ridin’. On July 3, 1863, he probably said, “It is my fault; it is all my fault,” the way an Ohioan would say it, not the way his Georgia colleague would. “It is mah fault; it is all mah fault,” said Martin Sheen’s Lee in the movie. His dialogue coach was pleased with the sound, which was what the audience expected, but Lee probably sounded more as Meade would have sounded had their roles been reversed. There is (fortunately in my view) one marker that the good people of Americana did have: no post-vocalic r. In this regard there was no change between the language of the nineteenthcentury Lower South and the language of the Confederados. When Sheen’s Lee blessed out Joseph Fuqua’s Jeb Stuart on the night of July 1-2 for the cavalryman’s failure to keep him informed, Sheen got it right, “It must nevuh, nevuh happen again!”

Gould Hagler is the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation (Mercer University Press, 2014), available from Mercer University Press, retail outlets, online sellers, and directly from the author (gould.hagler@gmail. com).