- North Americans also formed the melting pot that is Brazil, with the country being one of the few which received Americans who fled the American Civil War, settling in Southeastern and Southern Brazil during the American reconstruction period. In addition, smaller numbers of North Americans immigrated after 1808. The descendants of those Confederate colonies are culturally known as the Confederados sub-group, especially in the countryside of São Paulo, where they founded towns and their presence was stronger - Brazilians of American descent can be found throughout the country, resulting from other periods and the dispersion of the Confederados descendants, who are nowadays mostly mixed with other groups and sometimes mistaken for descendants of British immigrants. Ethnically the Confederados were mostly English-Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German and Scandinavian.