The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871

The Party of Order

jeffrey d. needell

The Party of Order The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871

s ta n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s 2 0 0 6 Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Needell, Jeffrey D. The party of order : the conservatives, the state, and slavery in the Brazilian monarchy, 1831–1871 / Jeffrey D. Needell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8047-5369-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Brazil—Politics and government—1822–1889. 2. Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 1825–1891. 3. Conservatives—Brazil—History—19th century. I. Title. f2536.n44 2006 981'.04—dc222 2006008800 Printed in the United States of America Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/12.5 Minion

Para Fátima

Que a mão do tempo e o hálito dos homens Murchem a flor das ilusões da vida, Musa consoladora, É no teu seio amigo e sossegado Que o poeta respira o suave sono. —Machado de Assis, "Musa Consolatrix," Crisálidas (1864)

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Names, Titles, Spelling, and Translation Maps: City of Rio de Janeiro, Province of Rio de Janeiro, Empire of Brazil

ix xiii xv

Introduction: An Obscured Genesis

1

1 The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

9

2 The Threat of Revolution and the Reactionary Mobilization: 1831–1837

30

3 Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence: 1837–1848

73

4 Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage: 1848–1853

117

5 The Transformation of Politics and the State: 1853–1867

167

6 Abolition, War, and the Vindication of Constitutional Government: 1867–1871

223

7 The Defeat of the Party: The Political Crisis of 1871

272

Conclusion: Legacy and Metamorphosis

315

Genealogical Tables

327

Abbreviations

333

Notes

335

Bibliography

427

Index

443

Acknowledgments

This book has been dedicated to my wife, Fátima, for her support over these many years. It was she to whom I first spoke of this idea; she knows best how much this work has meant to me. Our children, Gabriel, Renata, and Ethan, have grown up with this book. I am grateful to them for their love, faith, and patience. My family’s love has sustained me. Many of those who have guided and supported me have passed away, some quite recently. I mourn the loss of Richard M. Morse, Francisco de Assis Barbosa, José Gabriel Calmon da Costa Pinto, Robert Levine, and Simon Collier. Each of these, sometimes over more than twenty years, took a special interest in my work and my career; now, it is no longer possible to thank them. I can only try to pass on what I have learned from them and bear witness to the fact that each of their deaths is irreparable. The community of historians among whom I work, however diminished by these absences, remains strong. It is an honor and a pleasure to list those among them who have lent me the benefit of their knowledge, their critical sense, their insight, and their encouragement. The preliminary study and research I did was encouraged by the example, support, and the generosity of the Latin Americanists I was privileged to join at the University of Florida: Murdo MacLeod, David Bushnell, Neill Macaulay, and David Geggus, all of whom exemplify the best strengths and the traditions of my field. Joseph Love and Reid Andrews have consistently supported me over the years, recommending my work in an increasingly competitive funding environment; I hope that they will see here some vindication of their confidence. By 2003, with research and writing completed, I found myself no longer able to judge a manuscript drawing upon many years of interrupted research and writing; I entrusted Judy Bieber and James Green with the difficult and delicate

x / Acknowledgments

task of reading the first draft and criticizing it. Their work was done without reward and on short notice, and I am very grateful to acknowledge that theirs was work of signal importance to me in many, many ways, as it helped limit the work’s shortcomings, both large and small. No one who works on Brazil’s nineteenth century is unfamiliar with Roderick Barman’s generosity, I suspect, but I doubt anyone has profited more than I from his scholarship, criticism, suggestions, and archival sources. I am especially grateful for his meticulous and constructive labors with my manuscript, which were invaluable in my revision. Zephyr Frank, in reading that revision, was generous with his appraisal and acute in his critique, for both of which I am grateful. Earlier, Marshall Eakin, at Vanderbilt, Zephyr Frank, at Stanford, and Dain Borges, at Chicago, invited me to share my work at presentations where they and their students honored me with their attention and their queries, often helping me with my arguments by questioning them closely. At a conference panel, B.J. Barickman made a number of incisive points about a résumé of the seventh chapter, and he did so with his characteristic learning and skill. The panel was organized by Jeffrey C. Mosher, whose own pioneering work on Pernambuco has informed mine throughout these pages. As a result of all of this collegial criticism and commentary, the book before you has become leaner, its arguments more acute, and its prose more effective. However, for better and for worse, the book is mine, and I must take full responsibility for what remains obscure or foolish in it. There are many abroad whose support for my research has been fundamental to me. Foremost among them are my wife’s extended family in Rio; their enthusiasm and encouragement for my research has been unfaltering, and their embrace of our family has been crucial to my work in Brazil. Since the 1980s, José Murilo de Carvalho’s own work, as well as his friendly interest in mine, has been an inspiration of fundamental importance. In 1994, the honor of teaching at the Royal University of Leiden was made possible by Marianne Wiesebron; it was during that time that I completed the secondary-source research on the Monarchy and conceived the idea for this book. In 1997, Celia D’Araújo encouraged me join her at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, affording me the opportunity to work though important ideas with engaging students and to complete crucial archival research begun in 1990 and continued in 1996. In my research in Rio, I was once again guided and aided by a number of people whose preoccupation with the Brazilian past is characterized by generosity and personal warmth. Mario Affonso de Carvalho Carneiro shared precious conversation about, and letters from, his Teixeira Leite kin. I made his acquaintance in the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, the great archive of the Monarchy’s statesmen, where something of the era’s milieu remains, and

Acknowledgments / xi

where I was always welcomed and treated with extraordinary courtesy and professionalism by everyone, particularly Regina Wanderley and Maura Corréia e Costa. Sátiro Ferreira Nunes’ expertise and professionalism at the Arquivo Nacional, while exemplary of his extraordinary institution, was particularly important. The courtesy and support of Maria de Fátima Moraes Argon, Maria de Lourdes Parreiras Horta, and Begonha Bediaga of the Arquivo Histórico do Museu Imperial (Petrópolis), made it possible to do a great deal of work in a very short time. Denise Portugal introduced me to rarely used and crucial correspondence housed in the Museu Histórico Nacional; Lucia Monte Alto Silva facilitated my work at the Arquivo Histórico do Itamaratí enormously. Peter Stern, then head of the University of Florida’s celebrated Latin American Collection, worked with Sam Gowan (then associate director of the George Smathers Library of the University) to acquire a unique, extensive microfilm collection of Brazilian government reports and periodicals; I am indebted to them both. Subsequently, Richard Phillips, present head of the Collection, has facilitated my research with that microfilm; his colleagues, Mary Gallant and, more recently, Peter Losche, have seen to it that my way was made easier repeatedly as I used the Collection’s vast and often rare Brasiliana. Marvin Crabbe, also of the University Library, made sure that my microfilm reader worked; Betty Corwine, then of the Department of History staff, made sure I had a reader in the first place; indeed, she also saw to it that I had a good computer and that it worked. A neighbor, Steven Wallace, later did the same. Linda Opper and Kimberly Browne looked out for me as crucial staff people in the Department and thus supported my research over the years in countless ways. Finally, I am grateful to Sarah Eshleman and Gina Scinto, who, with grace and skill, made my maps and genealogical tables technically accessible, despite great time pressure. The University does not provide regular, traditional sabbaticals, and I have had to teach summers to make ends meet; this has slowed my on-campus research and writing consistently since the publication of my first book, in 1987. In 1994, Frederick Gregory and, in 2002, Fitzhugh Brundage, when chairs of the Department, each saw to it that I had a semester off at two crucial junctures in my research. I am particularly grateful to Fitz, who supported my obtaining a semester off when I needed it most for writing, thus expediting the manuscript by at least a year and a half. I would also like to thank Brian and Jenny Ward; during the last phase of my writing and revision, each encouraged and advised me in many ways, large and small, heartening me in difficult days. I first introduced myself and the idea for this book to Norris Pope, my editor, many years ago. He was encouraging then and has remained steadfast in his support for the work since. Readers may appreciate how much this can mean to

xii / Acknowledgments

an author struggling to bring a complicated and lengthy study to a satisfactory end in challenging circumstances. The knowledge that my editor had faith in the project provided crucial moral support, and I acknowledge it with gratitude. The Brazilian research for this book would have been impossible without the generosity of various organizations which paid for the privilege of working in the archives for months at a time. The Division of Sponsored Research of the University of Florida backed me for three months in 1988, and provided crucial supplements in 1996 and 1997; the American Philosophical Society provided significant “seed” money in 1996. The National Endowment for the Humanities, by a fellowship for an earlier project for ten months in 1990–1991, actually supported the beginnings of this project. The NEH joined with the Social Science Research Council to support a return to the archives for a month in 1996 and 1997; a CIES-Fulbright award was crucial to extending the research in 1997 to about four months. Such funding is expensive and increasingly difficult to win; I am very grateful for the opportunity it made possible and I hope that the present work suggests that this was money well spent.

Notes on Names, Titles, Spelling, and Translation

Brazilian usage with respect to names requires some explanation, as does the author’s practice. Brazilians often have from three to five or more names. Frequently, they are known by one or two of these, usually the most uncommon, and this practice extends to formal and written references to the individual. The author has adopted Brazilian usage in the text and notes’ text; however, when a person is first introduced, the author will attempt to provide all of the names, bracketing those cast aside in usage. During the Monarchy (1822–1889), the Brazilian emperors often granted individuals noble titles; the rank might change over the person’s life, and the title itself was extended to the person’s spouse. The title was not, however, inherited, although it might be granted again to another person (though not always in the same lineage). Here, in the text, the author will only use the noble title at and after the point in the narrative when it was granted, to avoid anachronism. For an example of both issues, note that Honório [Hermeto Carneiro Leão] was most often referred to as Honório. After he was ennobled (1852) as the visconde de Paraná (he was later raised to marquês de Paraná), the author refers to him as Paraná. The index will cross-reference the person’s last family name and the name in the title. Spelling practice in Brazil (and Portugal) has changed many times in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author will cite all references as they appear on their title pages; he will employ current usage in his text and notes’ text, and in his translations. All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise indicated by the citation. The author has attempted translations which, while close to literal, are as graceful as possible. Punctuation has been altered occasionally to clarify meaning; bracketed words have been introduced for the same reason. Emphases, in italics, are from the original.

Maps: City of Rio de Janeiro, Province of Rio de Janeiro, Empire of Brazil

The three maps that follow are from the author’s collection. The city map was taken from a German-language map made in 1858; the original map, of the southern part of South America, also featured two inset maps; one of the city and one of the Bay of Guanabara. The author has translated names back into Portuguese. Item 14 on the map, “Mercado de Escravos,” is probably an anachronism from an earlier map; all sources consulted state that the market had been moved to the Rua do Valongo, at the western edge of the Morro da Conceição, earlier in the nineteenth century. The map of the province was made by the author. The map of the Empire dates from the 1870s and was made by French cartographers for Brazilian readers. Aside from the features to which this book refers, it also includes the names of native peoples and their locations. The reader will note the nineteenth-century Portuguese spelling.

City of Rio de Janeiro. (Author’s collection)

Province of Rio de Janeiro. (Author’s collection)

Empire of Brazil. (Author’s collection)

Gentlemen, the great interests, if they do not justify, almost always explain the behaviors which, at first glimpse, are not understood. —Eusébio de Queirós, Annaes, 1852, t.2, 16 July, 254

Introduction: An Obscured Genesis

In 1988, having completed a book on the society and culture of the elite in Rio de Janeiro, I began work on the conservative social and political thought which seemed their intellectual armature and expression. I sought the origins and nature of the Brazilian concerns with authoritarianism, race, and historical exceptionalism. Preliminary studies on the more recent figures in this tradition, Joaquim Nabuco, Oliveira Viana, and Gilberto Freyre, went well enough.1 However, as I began work, about 1992, on the time and the studies of the thinker honored as the most prominent voice of the Conservative Party, the visconde do Uruguai, my assumptions began to dissolve. I found, in studying his work, that this most honored voice of the Conservatives read very much like a liberal. Moreover, neither his published work nor his correspondence jibed with what I understood from the historiography of the Monarchy. By 1995, I decided I would have to study the archival and contemporary evidence from Uruguai’s time if I were to understand his context and his work. I could not understand the thought without understanding the society, the economy, and the politics of the Monarchy, and that has required a great deal of reassessment and historical research. That was the beginning of the book I now present to the reader.2 I was surprised to find out how much in the literature of Uruguai’s era remained either unsettled or unknown. After all, his period was the time when the Brazilian nation was founded and structured, a nation unusual in the region for its relative stability and wealth. As a Latin Americanist, I had always thought this contrast compelling. One might have thought such aspects of a nation’s birth would have made this past more attractive to scholarship. Instead, it remained a somewhat obscured genesis. Yet, a basic narrative can be outlined simply. Traditionally, Brazil’s early po-

2 / Introduction: An Obscured Genesis

litical stability is explained by the continuity of a monarchy from the colonial to the national period. In the midst of the Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese royal family fled a French invasion and established their court in Rio de Janeiro (1807–1808). By 1815, Brazil had been raised to the status of a kingdom. However, in 1820, a liberal revolution in Portugal began and the king, Dom João VI, was compelled to return to Europe (1821), leaving his heir, Dom Pedro, as Prince Regent of Brazil. It was the latter, acclaimed Dom Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, who led the nation to independence in 1822, beginning the First Reign (1822–1831), with the strong support of most politically active Brazilians and many of the Portuguese who had settled in the country. Doubtless the greatest appeal of independence under the prince was his association with traditional social and political order. Order was a sensitive issue for the European-descent elites, given Brazil’s Afro-Brazilian majority (and large minority of African slaves), Haiti’s revolutionary example, and the violent instability of SpanishAmerican neighbors. Despite this, rivalry between monarch and native elites and urban groups soon led to the former‘s abdication (1831) and the Regency (1831–1840), during which the political institutions, territorial integrity, and social order of the country were traumatically affected by numerous revolts. The Conservatives and the Second Reign (1840–1889) emerged in the reaction to these events and the liberal reforms of 1831–1834 associated with them and they responded to both. By 1852, Brazil’s second emperor presided over a state which clearly dominated the nation. As I studied these matters, I decided upon writing a book which explained this achievement and the way in which it had begun to come apart by 1871. This is what has been done. This study will show how specific elite elements resolved the issue of stability and continued prosperity by creating (1834–1837) a reactionary party that was the origin of the Party of Order, the basis, in turn, for what became the Conservative Party. It will also show how, as essential to this partisan organization, these reactionaries joined together to reconstruct the monarchy outlined in Brazil’s Constitution of 1824. This will be done by clarifying links between the reactionaries, their ideology, their maintenance of African slavery, and the presence of successful sugar planting and the rise of the coffee-export interests of Rio de Janeiro. It will be argued that, in the era 1831–1852, slave-holding sugar and coffee planter and merchant interests in the port and province of Rio de Janeiro, tightly integrated with a clique of related magistrate statesmen and allied to similar sugar elites in Brazil’s Northeast, successfully strove to theorize and construct a centralized, authoritarian state. It will also be demonstrated that they identified that state with the nation, and initially gained social and political hegemony as they confronted upheaval and disintegration. However, this study will also show that, in the years 1853–1871,

Introduction: An Obscured Genesis / 3

this party’s leadership and their interests were successfully challenged by the monarch, Dom Pedro II, whose independent constitutional role was central to state authority by the design of that leadership itself. It will be argued that the emperor did this to mute the partisanship theretofore common, to strengthen his own position, and to achieve moderate reforms, particularly the gradual abolition of slavery, which he viewed as a dangerous and dwindling necessity. Clearly a contribution to the broader debate over state power and class hegemony, this study will also provide a telling case study of state-building. It should inform the discussion concerning nationalism and new states that is of such enduring interest in the post-colonial world. Many of the issues contemporary post-colonial societies confront, in terms of political and economic stability; racial, social, and regional divisions; and the prospect of adapting North Atlantic political models, were faced and engaged by Brazilian policy makers with informative, if often depressing, results. This is their story. In Brazil, the Monarchy’s legacy of reactionary centralization has often legitimized the authoritarian political assumptions that beset the prospects for Brazilian democracy. The military dictatorship (1964–1985) from which Brazil has recently emerged was led by men profoundly influenced by this tradition, especially (as has been indicated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and by Francisco Weffort3) in the way it was formulated by such thinkers as Oliveira Viana. I have shown elsewhere that Viana, in particular, explicitly recalled the Monarchy as a crucial counter-model to what he held were the disastrous results of “imported” liberalism.4 Thus, this present book, which will unfold the social and political processes that explain the construction and failure of the Monarchy, also speaks to themes of enduring political significance in Brazil. Studies of Brazilian state formation and nineteenth-century political history have a long tradition. Nonetheless, I have found that the achievement of a common understanding upon which to build is lacking, significant lacunae abound, and scholars remain at odds over fundamental problems. The earliest works deal almost exclusively with political affairs and principal political actors. Constrained by the assumptions of their era, their authors did not consider the socio-economic context germane; slavery, for example, only arises in the traditional historiography as a policy issue in terms of treaties and legislation. The noted fin-de-siècle essays, like the analyses of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, suffer from too broad a stroke and too polemical a subtext. The essayists often saw the Monarchy as part of a natural evolution toward the Old Republic (1889–1930); the later analysts often saw it as a heroic anticipation of authoritarian dictatorship (1937–1945). Many works are marred by a tendency to extrapolate backwards from the later Monarchy and to eschew concern with the role and mechanics of the early parties—the same may be said of more recent works, as

4 / Introduction: An Obscured Genesis

well. The biographers of the Monarchy and those who followed often give us useful but narrowly focussed, partisan studies of noted statesmen. In the 1950s and ’60s, a later generation, though it advanced the field with magisterial reinterpretations in light of the materialist, nationalist, and developmentalist preoccupations of the 1940s and 1950s, often neglected archival research.5 Since the late 1960s archival materials and a fresh sense of the political in terms of nation-building and social history have been brought to bear. Departing from the Weberian and Marxist trends which informed the 1960s interpretations of Raymundo Faoro, Cáio Prado Júnior, Paula Beiguelman, and Nelson Sodré, scholars, some of them American, armed such critical reappraisals with empirical research, a more rigorous approach successfully demonstrated by such pioneers as Emilia Viotti da Costa. Still, basic issues remain unresolved. The nature of the state and of its relationship to society, the role of formal political ideology and parties, the political life of the elites, and the impact of the emperor are all problems debated, dismissed, or subjected to vague reification in much of this work. The successes of José Murilo de Carvalho or Roderick J. Barman are, for the most part, exceptions that prove the rule. The refreshing turn to aspects of political history and culture or regional politics in such studies as those of Thomas Flory, Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, Richard Graham, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Judy Bieber, and Hendrik Kraay has, faut de mieux, often left these basic political problems unresolved or has had to rest upon these dubious foundations and untested generalizations. The same may be said for the rich studies of slavery and Afro-Brazilian agency by such scholars as Robert Conrad, Warren Dean, Sidney Chalhoub, Mary Karasch, João José Reis, and B. J. Barickman.6 The objectives here, then, comprise both a synthesis and the establishment of new positions. I have striven to build upon the achievements of my colleagues and predecessors, particularly Murilo de Carvalho and Barman, by addressing the history of the party generally considered the most significant in the regime. The debt of the author to the historiography concerning the era will be best demonstrated in the notes, where colleagues’ achievements, ongoing debates, and differences between this analysis and others will be clarified for those interested. Here, however, I should note my methodology and my assumptions. The questions pursued involve intellectual and political history in a socio-economic context. To get at them, forty years’ private and public discussion has been closely studied to understand assumptions and perceptions and their relationship to political acts over the course of the era. The socio-economic context has been reconstructed in order to understand the evolving material parameters and pressures of the time, so that the relationships between them and the per-

Introduction: An Obscured Genesis / 5

ceptions and acts of elite political actors could be better understood. In a phrase, the methodology here presumes interaction between ideology and the material world and change over time. It also presumes that, in studying the construction and development of an authoritarian, hierarchical political world, subaltern elements’ agency or the perception of that agency or its potential are essential parts of the analysis. I have worked hard to bring these matters to the forefront of the analysis when appropriate. The focus of study, however, has necessarily been the mentality and actions of the elites who dominated the society and the state successfully. My hope is that others will be able to use this work as the basis and context for more successful research concerning the oppressed. It is this canvas of discourse and debate, knit to an understanding of the society and economy of the time, which is now to be spread before the reader. By conveying the complex interaction between state and society, between interests and ideology, between party and prince, it is hoped that the context and conception of the early Brazilian nation-state, its contradictions, and its legacy will be understood. Certain salient conclusions of this study may be listed briefly. First, that the political elite emergent by 1837 was part and parcel of the socio-economic elites presiding over agriculture and commerce associated with African slavery and tropical export staples. The literature to date debates the relationship between state cadres and the socio-economic elites, with significant scholars urging an important distinction between the two and others claiming that the state was a mere tool of the elites. It will be shown here that the most significant statesmen were intimately related to the planters and merchants; however, it will also be shown that they articulated a vision of the state which, while speaking to the larger interests of their kinsmen and friends, went far beyond them towards a view of Brazilian society and its national capacity and future. The strength of the state that they articulated and constructed allowed for a definite autonomy of action, even against elite interests, which led to the very conflict central to the analysis here. Second, it will be argued that the political elite fraction that emerged as dominant in the leadership of the Party of Order had left behind the decentralizing, more democratic potential of the liberalism of the era 1822–1834 and adapted a reactionary ideology in response to the continued centrality and expansion of a slavery-based export economy and the destabilizing events of the Regency, when subaltern violence, provincial secessionism, and intense elite competition for local and national state power threatened the social order and the nation state. The elite fraction at issue articulated this ideology while simultaneously organizing the Party of Order in the Chamber of Deputies and in

6 / Introduction: An Obscured Genesis

the Province of Rio de Janeiro, where its leadership had both an established socio-economic and familial base in the old planting lowland region and personal contacts among the pioneers of the emergent coffee frontier in the highlands. While some of this has often been accepted in the literature, the way in which this occurred, both ideologically and in terms of party organization, has been only partially explored, and that only at the level of intellectual and political debate and the obvious linkage between two or three key statesmen and highland coffee planters. The overwhelming significance of the lowland and Rio elites and their political representatives has been forgotten or unremarked. Third, it will also be posited that the ideology of the Party of Order emphasized representative constitutionalism and dynastic monarchism in a successful attempt to stabilize political conflict and guarantee the socio-political order by using elements combining new and old charismatic values. This alone would set this study apart within the historiography, which has generally dismissed ideology and political partisan distinctions, or, when it has not, has emphasized only the authoritarian tradition of the Conservatives. The narrative and analysis will also make clear that the monarch in question unexpectedly asserted an increasingly independent political role, initiating political power shifts and state policies which, in turn, undercut the development of a representative parliamentary tradition, the right to hold slaves, and the social order associated with slavery. Indeed, the issues of slavery, slave holding, race, the slave trade, and the abolition of slavery will necessarily form a basic, interweaving set of motifs in this analysis. Such is inevitable, given the interests and the nature of the elite, the society, and the state which make the Party of Order comprehensible. This study, then, attempts two related achievements. First, a new focus on, and political analysis of, a complex period of foundational Brazilian history; second, a revision of any number of consecrated assumptions, particularly the role and nature of the Party of Order and its heir, the Conservative Party. To do these things, the author has had to sift through archival and published contemporary sources and to attempt the mastery of a great many period details. To convey the analysis and conclusions to the reader, the author must use many of these details, weaving them together as clearly as possible. The density of the texture will, I hope, prove useful and enduring. The errors and lacunae in the historiography often demonstrate that without such careful attention to these matters—lives, dates, constitutional disputes, political policies—the meaning of this past is incomprehensible. As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. I have, however, emphasized as clear and accessible a narrative and analysis in the text as the matter will allow; I have also organized the study chronologically, to avoid the ahistorical assumptions and extrapolations so frequent in the liter-

Introduction: An Obscured Genesis / 7

ature. The more scholarly aspects of the work (historiographical issues, finer details, and so on) have been placed in the notes, not only to make my evidence clear, but to provide colleagues further direction, discussion, and debate. In many historical fields, there would be no need to explain the desire to study either the elite or conservative politics, particularly in the history of a nation in which both have triumphed repeatedly. In Latin American history in general, and, certainly, in Brazilian history in particular, not only have these matters been relatively neglected, nineteenth-century political history as a whole has enjoyed relatively little scholarly attention, although Mexico has been an exception to the rule. Most of us, trained in social history or the newer methodologies and concerns associated with post-modernism, have focused on the oppressed, or on the era after the Monarchy’s fall—usually both. In training, it was generally the same with me. Indeed, I first studied nineteenth-century Brazilian slavery with Emilia Viotti da Costa, nearly thirty years ago. Although the reader will find that, when the evidence compels it, I must often dispute Viotti da Costa’s findings here, I have never disagreed with an argument she once made in seminar. She stated something to the effect that the struggle for social justice in Brazil desperately needed scholarly attention to the elites, for it was their triumph which continues to weigh heavily upon all Brazilians. It is their legacy that presents the challenge to those desiring progressive change.

chapter one

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro Regarding the Road of the Police . . . the light repairs lately done to it in the year 1837, in the part between the foothills . . . , could not resist the force of the waters and were so destroyed by them that the Serras de Santa Anna and Botaes already presented a horrible prospect with the first rains at last year’s end. In the season of waters, Gentlemen, it is necessary to have the courage and the resignation of our muleteers to spur oneself to cross these and other sections with herds of loaded beasts. . . . The view of these ruins and obstacles is discouraging. . . . —Paulino José Soares de Sousa, Discurso com que o Presidente da Provincia do Rio de Janeiro . . . fez a abertura da sessão ordinaria da Assembléa . . . no 1o. de Março de 1839, 62

After the fall of the Monarchy, it gradually became a commonplace that its statesmen were somehow alienated from the place and people that they ruled. A noted deputy, poet, and diplomat, Gilberto Amado, may have put this best early on in his career. In 1916, he stood in the old Chamber of Deputies and made a famous speech, “The Political Institutions and the Social Milieu in Brazil,” in which he spoke of the “distinguished figures of one or the other party,” and stated, It would not be an exaggeration to affirm that these and other men carried out a simple ornamental function with respect to what they said about the concrete realities of the country. Educated by European publicists, discussing themes which had no bearing on the milieu, the most brilliant statesmen were certainly not the most useful. . . . It is clear that what all of them lacked was the scientific education necessary to the understanding of a country that more than any other needed constructive policy.1

As one studies the actual words and deeds of the statesmen of which Amado spoke, what he said makes less and less sense. Nor do more recent critiques dismissing the relevance of the development and ideas of imperial politics make more sense.2 Still, it does suggest that one best begins the study of the Monarchy’s political history and the Party of Order by trying to grasp the relationship between the statesmen and their place and people. To do so is to find that these were men who were hardly alienated from their milieu. Indeed, they cannot be

10 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

understood apart from it. They drew life and strength from its earth and its water. In the case of the Party of Order, this earth, this water, were primarily fluminense3—earth and water of Rio de Janeiro.

I. Earth and Water What we call Brazil is about half the continent of South America. Half again of the country is made up of the tropical lowlands drained by the Amazon and its great tributaries. Amazonia lies between two great mountainous formations, the Guiana Highlands to the north and the Brazilian Highlands to the south. These last are the remains of an ancient mountain range. They form the great watershed of the country; their valleys are formed by the headwaters of rivers that flow north into Amazonia, west and south towards the Rio de la Plata, and east and south towards the Atlantic Ocean. The highlands themselves lie parallel to the South Atlantic coast of Brazil and make up the series of ranges and higher terrain between the coastal tropical lowlands and the interior. Indeed, for the Old World peoples who came out to Brazil after 1500, these highlands were the interior itself. Amazonia was a world apart, conquered from the North Atlantic coast bit by bit after the early 1600s, and governed as a separate polity from port cities taken or built in wars with the French in the 1620s. Thus, from the sixteenth century down to the mid eighteenth, the State of Brazil was only the South Atlantic coastal lowlands and the highlands rising almost immediately inland, away from the coast. The state was ruled from the port of Salvador da Bahia. In 1772, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, then conde d’Oeiras, but known later as the marquês de Pombal, changed all that. Chief minister to Dom José I, king of Portugal, he decided the realm would be better served if Amazonia (the State of Maranhão and Great Pará) were joined to the State of Brazil. In this way, Portuguese viceroys could coordinate the defense of Portuguese holdings in South America and more effectively oversee Portuguese illegal trade with Spain’s viceroyalties, rich in silver. In 1763, Pombal had already commanded the State of Brazil’s capital to be moved closer to the war frontier at the Rio de la Plata. The prestige and privileges of the viceregal seat were transferred from Salvador to Brazil’s most prosperous and populous port, Rio de Janeiro.4 Among Europeans, Frenchmen had settled first in the Rio5 area, making alliances with the native Tupinambara. They were dislodged in the 1560s by the Portuguese, who founded Rio in 1565. The town came to head up the southern captaincies of the State of Brazil, including the one named for São Paulo, an interior mission station and frontier town which extended Portuguese knowledge and holdings in the highland interior and river valleys through constant slave raiding, war, and exploration among native peoples in the area. Portuguese men

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 11

in São Paulo founded families and alliances with the native peoples in the region. Their descendants, the first paulistas,6 sometimes called mamelucos,7 led armies of their native kin and allies to surprise and capture peoples of the interior to use in slave labor in São Paulo’s farms and in the southern coastal farms and plantations around Rio. Both their kin and many of their victims were Tupí-Guaraní speaking peoples.8 In the 1690s, paulistas began to find gold and diamonds in the highlands north of Rio. In the decades to come, they found still more, further north and northwest of the port. These far interior holdings—Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso—were administered as captaincies by the Portuguese who came out to rule in the wake of the paulistas. Although at the beginning, trade and people made their way to these places from Salvador da Bahia, Rio was known to be much closer. After paulistas had explored the ranges and valleys between the mines and Rio, they cut a path north between the port and the hinterland, and then another and still others, until a half-dozen were made. Rio’s prosperity and its population flourished. The greatest emporium of the South Atlantic by 1750, Rio’s life blood flowed along rainforest paths.9 Such paths, wretched, unpaved mule trails at best, were a great achievement. Earth and water made them so. The captaincy of Rio de Janeiro resembled the terrain of the port city itself, distinguished by a dramatic contrast of humid lowland and abrupt hills or mountains. It is as if the highland mass had been flung down hard at the sea, so that its remnant ranges scattered in pieces on the lowland coast towards the ocean. Thus, the coast between Cabo Frio and Rio was striking for its forest-clad serras, ranges of mountains, against which the surf broke with dangerous force. The first great range of the highlands toward the interior came soon after; they were so close to the coast that they were called the Serra do Mar; they were so dramatic in their verticle sweep, that the Serra do Mar’s closest stretch, visible from Rio, was called the Serra dos Orgãos, for the line of its peaks resembled the pipes of an organ. The two most important interior ranges north of Rio, the Serra do Mar and the Serra da Mantigueira, cradled the captaincy’s most important river, the Paraíba do Sul, which drained both ranges, and long paralleled the coast, with headwaters in São Paulo and its mouth in the captaincy of Espírito Santo (until 1832, when the region of the river’s lower reaches and mouth was detached from Espírito Santo and made part of Rio de Janeiro10). In its lower reaches, the Paraíba often flooded the lowlands, leaving them marshy. Indeed, humid, alluvial bottomlands, often marshy at the rivers’ mouths, were characteristic of the baixada (lowland) fluminense. Despite the hills and mountain ranges visible throughout the coastal region, it was the humid lowlands between them which caught the imagination of the Portuguese and their descendants, because such earth and water made planting

12 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

sugarcane and shipping sugars possible. This was particularly true around the coast of the great inland bay behind Rio. Guanabara Bay’s litoral was watered by a number of lesser rivers, providing good cane land and easy transportation by river and bay to the great port.11 Indeed, the easy first leg of one of the most important paths to Minas Gerais lay across the bay to the Inhomerim River.12 But things got harder directly. One could sail up this river only a little way, before the earth began an abrupt ascent at the Port of Estrella. This river port town was at the foot of a range linked to the Serra dos Orgãos, towering within sight, formidable first wall of the highlands. Range after range, these highlands were distinguished by fluminenses from the baixada fluminense’s lower coastal ranges with the words serra or serra acima (the range above) to distinguish it from the baixada and its “sea of hills.”13 Like every fluminense elevation, like the hills and ranges within and around Rio, like the lesser ranges of the lowlands, the highland ranges were thickly mantled with rainforest. Foreign botanists found the variety and beauties of these forests of staggering magnificence and reveled in their delightful scents, a captivating experience that might begin while still at sea: As far up the Bay as the eye could reach, lovely little verdant and palm-clad islands were to be seen rising out of its dark bosom, while the hills and lofty mountains which surround it on all sides, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, formed a befitting frame for such a picture. At night the lights of the city had a fine effect; and when the land-breeze began to blow the rich odour of the orange and other perfumed flowers, was borne seaward along with it, and, by me, at least, enjoyed the more from having been so long shut out from the companionship of flowers. Ceylon has been celebrated by voyagers for its spicy odours, but I have twice made its shores with a land breeze blowing, without experiencing any half so sweet as those which greeted my arrival at Rio.14

Foreigners write of the palate of verdures, the flowery yellows, reds, purples, and pinks, the rare orchids flung up and down trees of enormous girth and humbling height, festooned with vines and sporting ferns. They describe and name plants unknown to Europe and the birds, monkeys, cats, sloths, and tapers that lived among them.15 Still, for the mameluco frontiersmen and the Portuguese that followed, such forests were generally but another challenge to their desperate search for passage. Even after they had cut their mule paths through, a formidable task requiring regular maintenance against the forests’ encroachment, they had rivers to cross and further ranges to scale. By the early nineteenth century, the traveller making his way to Ouro Preto, say, could count on a voyage of perhaps three weeks, with the passage a bit easier after passing the first palisades, for Minas itself was less formidable, with more temperate climate, though still hilled and forested.16 If the passages over earth were difficult, they could become impossible be-

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 13

cause of water. By the early nineteenth century, it was claimed that there were two defined seasons, a hot, rainy season and a more temperate, drier one, and it was observed by one traveller that they were made so by the settlers’ destruction of a great deal of the coastal forest. However, one wonders, for in his day, most of the forest remained and the provincial leaders spoke of such a seasonal contrast as traditional; they referred to the rainy season as the “season of waters.”17 The season began gradually in October and lasted to April or May. The air became heavier with moisture, the rains came in great torrents, in gray sheets that swept into the waving, tossing forests. By the first months of every calendar year, the rains became constant and the paths that made much of inland commerce possible were thick with mud and travel between the port city and the plantations, villages, and towns of its hinterland became precarious, except for those which could be reached by boat. The rains not only threatened passage through the serra acima, they slowed and damaged commerce in much of the baixada. Worse, the fevers of the baixada, particularly the marshy land at river mouths and in the city’s valleys and low land, afflicted the population then, being commonly blamed on the rot and the corrupted air of such places. While the foreign traveller wrote with rapture of the city’s setting, of the drama of the near serra and the breezy blue expanse of the bay, the heat, stench, fevers, and mud of the season of waters could turn fluminense highlands and lowlands into a round of threats and dangers.18

II. Commerce, Captives, and Capital Most water ways bore names from the Tupí-Guaraní language. Peoples (the Tupinambá, the Tamoio, the Temomino) who spoke that tongue had conquered the baixada by the time the Portuguese came out. They lived along the coast and especially liked its many river mouths, for there, the fish and shellfish were thick. They had swept other peoples before them over the years, thrusting Gê speakers into the less bounteous interior. Only the Goitacá people (the Goitacases) had withstood them, holding the Paraíba’s lower reaches, so that they were later called the Campos dos Goitacases (the Fields of the Goitacases).19 The first trade between the coastal peoples and the Portuguese had been in dyewoods and other goods taken from the rainforest, but this proved a paltry basis for sustaining European settlement. Settlement, particularly the settlement of families and the establishment of a proper European community in towns, required the attraction of something more lucrative. By the 1550s, the Portuguese settlers in Pernambuco captaincy, to the north, had already begun to supplant Portuguese island holdings off Africa’s Bight of Biafra in the pro-

14 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

duction of cane sugars for wealthy Europeans. By the seventeenth century, the Portuguese settlers of Rio de Janeiro had established smaller cane plantations and mills, as well, lagging a poor third behind the captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco in the number and size of mills and in the production of sugars. They planted in the humid bottom lands along the rivers, as noted earlier, particularly along the northeastern Guanabara litoral near the mouth and near the course of the Macacú River, where a town was made named Itaboraí. Later in the century, settlers on the wet plains back of the Paraíba’s mouth, dissatisfied with mediocre cattle ranching, began to plant cane as well, establishing the town of Campos as an enduring sugar redoubt. As the eighteenth century turned and wore on, fluminense production expanded. Partly, this was because of a flourishing trade in people taken captive in Africa. Partly, this was because of a flourishing market for tropical crops among the growing towns and cities of western Europe. Let us see how these far flung webs of commerce were spun.20 Although native captives had supplied the forced labor of the hinterland mines and the first cane plantations, European disease and their desperate flight soon did away with the great population that had once been close to hand. First, the plantations, then, the hinterland mines shifted from working captive natives to death to working captives from Africa to death. While this may have been a gradual transition in seventeenth-century fluminense sugar making, it was very rapid in eighteenth-century Minas and the further captaincies of the interior. Fluminense planters put in more cane as part of the mining economy because they made aguardente, more often called cachaça, from the cane and this cane liquor was a significant part of the African trade. In West Central Africa, from which most captives came to work in the fluminense cane fields, and from which most of the captive miners were to come as well, cachaça, watered to make it stretch, was called gerebita. This was customarily drunk during the haggling over the captives, and it also made up an important part of the trade goods bartered for people, along with Asian cloth, English cloth and tools, and other manufactured goods. Thus, as hinterland mining expanded, so did fluminense cane production and slavery, in order to put liquor into the hands of Portuguese slavers (negreiros) based in Rio and Luso-African slavers (pumbeiros) based in Luanda and Benguela and trading among the slaving polities that dominated the trade in Angola’s interior.21 Fluminense plantations increased more, however, after 1750, even when hinterland mining began to slow. Along with planters in Northeastern Brazil and, especially, in the Caribbean, they benefitted from both a gradual and a dramatic shift in European demand. The gradual shift came of the greater urbanization and wealth of western Europeans as the century went on. New production of

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 15

cane sugar spread from Spanish islands and coastal lowlands in the Americas, particularly Cuba, to Portuguese Maranhão and Pará. Old sugar areas, particularly the Northeastern Brazilian captaincies and Rio de Janeiro, also profited. In fluminense lands, new plantations and mills were set up in both the baixada and, for the first time, in the serra acima’s Paraíba Valley, even extending into paulista lands. The dramatic shift in European demand was brought on by an unexpected constriction in supply. The African captives of Saint Domingue, the French colony on the island of Hispaniola, began the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. They had made Saint Domingue the premier producer of both sugar and coffee; with the revolt, the exports virtually ceased and led nearly immediately to new possibilities for other producers. The Dutch in their East Indies islands took up expanding supply early on, but others soon did better from the Americas. Cuba profited most directly from the revolt, but so did many other areas, from Venezuela to Brazil. The relative increase in fluminense sugars and cachaça challenged that of the established northeastern sugar lands, and analysts differ as to whether fluminense volume remained behind that of Bahia or of Pernambuco. The fluminense population continued to concentrate in the baixada and its cane lands and towns throughout the nineteenth century. The milling of sugars, both the fine white and the brown mascavado, as well as the distilling of cachaça for African trade gerebita, continued to expand at least up to 1836.22 Although Brazilian planters brought more land into cane and set up more mills in the early nineteenth century, the expansion of sugar production was more than matched by another crop by the 1830s. This other crop was coffee. In competition with Cuba and Venezuela in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, Brazil triumphed over both by the 1840s, beginning its primacy in world coffee production then. By the 1830s, the production of coffee exceeded that of sugar for volume and value among Brazilian exports as a whole; in Rio de Janeiro, this was particularly the case. Indeed, no other province would produce more until São Paulo, a half-century later.23 Yet fluminense sugar, the mineiro24trade, and the trade with Luanda and Benguela are all interwoven in the rise of fluminense coffee. To understand the trade in coffee, one needs to see how this was so. While sugar plantation and production increased in the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro after 1750, the gold and diamonds of Minas and the further hinterlands of Goiás and Mato Grosso played out. For many areas, this meant stagnation and decline. For others, it meant successful adaptation by producing goods and animals for the Brazilian market. Particularly this was so for those regions with farms and ranches that had produced food for mining and urban centers in Minas and Rio de Janeiro. Minas remained the most populous and urban cap-

16 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

taincy in the State of Brazil, even in decline; indeed, it had the largest captive population and continued to buy more. Only now, mineiro captives cultivated manioc, herded swine and cattle, made cheeses, salted meat, prepared bacon, and wove cheap cloth and brought all these things to town, not only to Minas’s urban population, but, even more, for people in the viceregal capital and other fluminense towns. As the great port expanded, especially after the arrival of thousands with the exiled Portuguese court in 1808, the demand for food and oxen only grew, and it did so at precisely the time when fluminense planters were buying more people to put to work cultivating coffee and cane (rather than raising food and herds for the local urban population). A thriving trade grew along the old mule trails between Minas and the great port at Rio. Cattle and swine, cheeses and cloth, the harvest of orchards and fields, and much, much more came on muleback and boat to Rio’s wharves and storehouses and shops; captives from Africa and manufactured goods from Europe were taken slowly back up, into the serras.25 Indeed, by the 1810s and ’20s, Rio knotted together a widely spread net of domestic and foreign commerce. Merchants brought jerked beef and hides from the old southern captaincy of Rio Grande do Sul. They brought sugars, cachaça, and coffee from the fluminense rivers and smaller coastal ports. They brought tobacco, swine, quince marmalade, bacon, cloth, cheeses and beef cattle from Minas. Smaller merchants, or the fluminense farmers themselves, brought heavier or more perishable goods from the nearer fluminense hinterland in the swift, sailed faluas that cut across the bay (or hauled them into the city market from their suburban small farms, chácaras). In this way, Rio’s markets boasted manioc flour, pottery, tiles, bricks, sugar forms, corn, rice, beans, tropical hardwoods, charcoal, firewood, apples, quinces, pears, pomegranates, oranges, limes, bananas, jambucitas, papayas, guavas, passion fruits, a variety of melons, and a multitude of fishes and shellfish. The supply of foodstuffs expanded not only to feed the court and the port’s established population, but to feed the African captives, whose numbers expanded but whose labor was increasingly set aside for plantation field-work.26 This brings us to the most lucrative trades of all—the overseas commerce in sugar, in cachaça, and in people. Merchants engaged in trade such as this tended to do all three and to trade in English manufactures and Asian textiles as part of it. The most prominent of these merchants, generally Portuguese born but settled in Rio and married to Brazilians, might have interests in the coastal trade with Rio de la Plata, trading Africans for Potosí silver. They might trade the silver for Indian or Chinese cloths in Goa or Macao. They might use the cloths, along with English cloth and tools and fluminense cachaça, to buy people in Luanda or Benguela. They might then sell the people in Rio to buy sugars and

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 17

cachaça, and the sugars and cachaça to buy English manufactures and African people. The lion’s share of this African trade was held by the very few with the resources and connections to manage it, but many entered into such commerce when opportunity allowed. Other smaller merchants battened off of it in the last stage, buying up the captives and marching them inland to fluminense and mineiro landholdings, bringing out plantation produce on the way back. The great negreiros were also not above dabbling in the domestic trade, either, particularly the thriving coastal trade which brought sugar and cane liquor or beef and hides to Rio.27 The interweaving of such commerce explains coffee’s rise. Coffee (here, caffea arabica) had originally been brought to the viceregal capital decades after it had come to Brazil (by way of the Caribbean and the Guianas), introduced in 1727 by the noted Portuguese explorer, Francisco de Melo Palheta. Around 1762, the plant, both ornamental and useful, was experimented with in Rio by the noted Dutch practical botanist, Johan Hopmann, and by local Capuchin monks (called barbadinos in Rio) in their suburban chácara on the Rua dos Barbonos (now the site of the military police station on the Rua Evaristo da Veiga), around 1770. Rio’s bishop took interest, planting seedlings on his plantation. From there, before 1780, Padre Antônio do Coito da Fonseca took seedlings and planted them on his plantation at Campo Grande, outside the town, toward the west. From there, in turn, the mineiro trade merchants who regularly made their way back and forth on the trails west and north of the port, with an eye to the obvious possibilities for trade, began to plant coffee on the mulepaths leading west and north of Rio into the serra acima to Minas. Success was rapid; coffee planting began to flourish around 1775 near the eighteenth-century Paraíba Valley crossroads town of Resende. This place is generally considered the center of diffusion for trade and planting in the valley, where coffee was well established by the 1810s in the domestic market. From Resende, coffee cultivation was taken up in either direction, up and down the valley, spreading particularly where other mulepaths to Minas or São Paulo allowed for the regular transportation back to the market at Rio. The bishop’s plantation in Rio also was the origin of the later cultivation of coffee in eastern baixada plantations. Padre João Lopes, in the bay littoral town of São Gonçalo, first introduced the plant there. As its success elsewhere became apparent, planters on the eastern shore of the bay took up coffee, and others followed, spreading coffee cultivation on all of the hillsides of the baixada and the northeastern region of the province, in counterpoint to the sugar of the baixada bottomlands. By the mid nineteenth century, mixed sugar and coffee planting characterized the whole of the captaincy’s cultivated lowlands, except for the Campos region, which, too low and moist for coffee, remained devoted to cane.

18 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

Nonetheless, despite coffee’s growing popularity among baixada planters, the earlier success in the higher elevations of the serra at Resende and then along the whole middle valley was clearly more dramatic. Not only did merchants in the Minas trade move into planting, but the sons of baixada sugar planters, Rio merchants, and upper Crown bureaucrats began to buy up serra lands, to purchase more people, and to set down row after row of the pretty trees. The chief centers were Resende and other towns along the mineiro trails, particularly the cross trail locations directly north of the port. New towns, Piraí, Vassouras, Valença, Cantagalo, grew up. Serra sugar planting was abandoned; in some cases, the earliest fazendas, plantations, simply abandoned the one plant for the other. Most of the new fazendas, however, were rapidly set up with only coffee in mind.28 Still, however lucrative coffee was, the most successful planters and the men who remained the wealthiest fluminenses were merchants or the sons of merchants grown rich in the trade in sugar, cachaça, and slaves. The trade in people is thought the most lucrative of all; especially with coffee and sugar’s expanse, the demand was sharp and rising. The risks and expense deterred competition and inflated the prices. The people brought through the killing journey from the African interior to coast and across the sea were mostly Bantu-speakers from the Angolan hinterland: Bakongo, Nsundu, Mbundu, Kisama, Libolo, Ovimbundu. Peoples from West Africa, particularly the Yoruba, were more likely bought by merchants out of Salvador da Bahia or Recife, and peoples from Mozambique (Yão, Makua, Tumbuka) were rare, because the risk from the longer voyage around the Cape was too great. Like most slave markets in the Americas, that of Brazil needed to be constantly replenished from Africa. People born in captivity who survived to maturity were relatively few, although their gender balance, Europeanization, and disease resistance made it more likely they could have children, obtain better work, and survive. However, these were the least unfortunate, and they were always the minority among Brazilian captives. Most captives were African-born, male, and field laborers, likely to die early on. Planters purchased two boys or men for every girl or woman, on average, so that the possibility of childbearing was poor—not to mention the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and child mortality under such a regime. The labor on cane plantations was excruciating, that of coffee only less so, the hours long, the food wretched, and the disease environment punishing. Even in the nineteenth century, when the trade was contraband (and, consequently, marked by higher expenses)and the plantations often well established, demand for new captives remained extreme, for nearly half of a planter’s captives were expected to perish within five years of purchase. The inadequate rate of reproduction combined with the dramatic expansion in tropical exports after 1750

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 19

ensured the flourishing commerce the fluminense merchants enjoyed. The results may be rapidly sketched.29 To the eyes of a traveller, Rio often seemed an African port by 1831. The people thronging the streets were black, mostly African born, and, if dressed, costumed in African garb. Those who were freedmen, and those who were skilled captive artisans, or “blacks for hire” (negros de ganho), as well as domestic slaves (often creole30 or mulatto), crowded the streets and wharves and port shipping. The unskilled male laborers wore a rag about their loins as they hauled drays, pulled carts, or bore burdens on head, on poles, or strapped to their backs, often moving rhythmically in teams, chanting worksongs. Blacks and mulattos did all of the manual labor of the plantations and ports. On mountain and hillsides, freedmen and their descendants cleared the paths and the rainforest. Africans planted cane or coffee tree, cutting the first, picking from the second. Skilled captives ran the sugar mill. Captive artisans, cooks, and body servants maintained the great houses and served the master and his kin. Captives herded the swine and drove the cattle and butchered both. They planted, tended and harvested the manioc fields, and the fields of beans, of corn, and of rice, and the orchards of European and tropical fruits. They and freedmen ran the muletrains—sometimes captives led them. They sailed the light faluas across the bay’s deep water and rowed the great galleys and barges of the mighty. In the port capital, where most fluminense whites lived, it was still black people who shaped many of the ways and customs of the place. The spicy odor of their cooking and the sweaty stench of their bodies pervaded house and street. Creoles and Bantu peoples alike carried the brocaded sedan chairs and swaying litters in which free people reclined; although barefoot, such crews sometimes managed conveyances of Oriental splendor, and were dressed themselves in European livery. When English or French carriages made their debut, it was black coachmen who drove them down Rio’s narrow, paved streets, past the homes and townhouses and shops of hewn granite and whitewashed adobe and red roof tiles. It was creoles or Bantu speakers, too, who served to bathe and dress and nurse free children, who shaved the master and dressed the mistress, who sewed for, served, and slept with immigrant bachelors. It was creoles or Bantu speakers who brought fish to market, made and sold food in the streets, and carried barrels of excrement to the sea at night and bundles of linen to the fountain and streams of the Campo de Sant’Ana at morning. And if they did this among others of the same African origin, they might be heard to speak one or another variant of the Bantu languages, or to chant one in unison as they bore their burdens. Indeed, on Sundays and other holy days, on plantation and, especially, in the port capital, they often came together, nation by nation, piecing together what they could of their own civilizations as they began to help

20 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

make another one, a Brazilian one. They recalled African religions, dances, hierarchies, songs—recognizing their own royalty, sustaining their own Catholic brotherhoods, worshiping at their own churches—Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Lampadosa. For, if they did not forget what they had been, they could not escape what they had become. They learned to make the most of their complicated circumstances, and to get by as best they could.31 If fluminense culture was pervasively contoured and textured by Africans in sight, in sound, in smell, in its work and in its daily ways, it was also Portuguese in all of them, as well. After all, it was a creole culture in formation; neither wholly African nor wholly European, but Brazilian. The weight and presence of one civilization or the other shifted and merged. Nonetheless, it was a colonial civilization, not just a creole one, and the presence of Portugal was especially clear in its dominant forms. Rio’s first buildings were a Portuguese fortress and a Jesuit church on a hill (Morro do Castelo—the Hill of the Castle). All of the hills which marked the old city’s boundaries were consecrated and crowned with churches and monasteries and most had Catholic names: São Bento, Santo Antônio, Conçeicão (for the Immaculate Conception), Livramento (Salvation), Santa Teresa, Glória (Our Lady of Glory). The city’s administrative and electoral units were its parishes, and the tallest buildings were all church towers. The day of this colonial port was marked and measured most traditionally. It began with the cannon shot announcing the beginning of harbor commerce, at half past five. This was followed by the opening of the shops and homes of merchants and tradesmen. Early mass was signaled by church bells, and it was church bells which marked the day’s turn as they sounded the day’s regular prayers as the sun rose and set. The hour for curfew was sounded at ten by a church, as well. One of the first, common sights in the city was that of members of Catholic brotherhoods seeking alms in the streets and shops, or, perhaps, a lady, humbly barefoot, seeking to fulfill a vow by begging alms with a heavy silver tray covered with rich cloth—accompanied by her body servant, of course.32 Here is how the old port city had been formed, and how it was later marked as the Court. Between the Morro do Castelo and the Morro de São Bento ran the Rua Direita (Straight Street, now named Primeiro de Março, March First)), the ancient commercial heart of town. Most of fluminense trade was still organized around that street in the early nineteenth century, as was the vice-regal government. The most prominent of the merchants had their shops or their offices on Direita or on the nearby streets that intersected or paralleled it: the Rua dos Ourives (Goldsmiths), the Rua da Quitanda (Kabundu for “Marketplace”), the Rua das Violas (Guitars, now named Teófilo Otoni). After the first house was founded for the coffee trade, in 1835, others followed, and in the same area, clustered on the streets southwest of São Bento, a short walk to the wharves. By

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 21

the 1820s, the French merchants had made the old Rua do Ouvidor (Judge) the street of luxury and literary goods. Direita was within a block or less of the bay’s beaches and the beachside squares and warehouses where merchants had traditionally brought their goods, particularly the Praia dos Mineiros (Beach of the Mineiros) and the Alfândega (Customshouse). After 1824, warehousing newly arrived African captives in the commercial center was thought too disruptive and unsightly. Africans were brought instead to another area, on the northern shore just outside the old city, where one street specialized in the sale of people, the Rua do Valongo (Long Valley), ironically situated between the western foot of the Morro da Conçeicão and the Morro do Livramento. Nonetheless, many captives were still bought by merchants and housed for a time in the commercial center, as they awaited resale. Cattle were brought to the southeastern tip of the city, close to the Morro do Castelo. The public slaughterhouse bloodied the beach there, near the army prison, the Calabouço (Dungeon). The Santa Casa de Misericôrdia (a branch of the ancient Portuguese Catholic charity lay brotherhood, the Holy House of Mercy), was located on the beach southwest of both.33 Institutions of the state were housed near the great squares of the city. The most important were on the Largo do Paço (Palace Square), whose northeastern side gave directly out onto the bay, just south of the sharp odor of the Praia do Peixe (Beach of the Fish, the traditional market for the day’s catch). The square was graced with a superb eighteenth-century fountain, fashioned to serve the ships at anchor, for the water lapped just off the ramps and stairs at the edge of the square. On the southwestern side, the Church and the Convent of Our Lady of Carmel stood; on the southeastern, the viceregal palace, flanking much of the square. The northwestern side of the square was entirely mercantile, a series of shops and offices breached by the Arch of Teles, which led to a warren of smaller commercial streets a moment or two from the water. The Rua Direita framed the southwestern side of the square, dividing the palace from the church and convent, and leading northwest toward the Morro de São Bento; the same street was called the Rua da Misericôrdia as it led southeast toward the Morro do Castelo and the Santa Casa. The viceregal palace which gave the largo its name was the residence of the last viceroys and was the first residence of the Portuguese royal family in exile (1808–1821). After independence (1822), the first emperor made it the official palace of the monarchy, but resided at his father’s villa, the Quinta da Boa Vista (Villa of the Good View) in São Cristóvão parish. Hence, the old palace was referred to as the City Palace (Paço da Cidade) to distinguish it from the imperial residence out of town, which was often called the Paço de São Cristóvão. The various imperial ministers had their offices scattered across the city, of-

22 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

ten in old mansions first built for the richest merchants or Crown officials of the late colonial era at what were still the old city’s edges. Some moved often, and are hard to locate; others would apparently be temporarily housed in the homes of the minister of the day. For example, the Ministry of Justice was first situated on the Rua do Lavradio, a late colonial street named after a viceroy, linking the western outskirts of the old port city. A bit later, it moved to the Rua da Guarda Velha (Old Guard), between the hills of Santo Antônio and Castelo, a street on which the Ministry of Empire would be housed at mid-century. In 1832, Justice was moved to the former home of the conde de Barca, which also housed the Navy Ministry then and, later, at mid century, Foreign Affairs. The house stood in front of the Passéio Público, the viceregal park fronting the beach on the city’s southwestern frontier. In the later Monarchy, Foreign Affairs would be moved first to the Campo da Aclamação and, in 1870, further southwest along the bay litoral, to the former mansion built for Brás Carneiro Leão, a great colonial merchant prince, then bought by another merchant, the visconde de Merití; it remained there, situated at the very furthest southwestern edge of the old city, at the foot of the Morro da Glória, facing across a small square toward the water, until the fall of the Monarchy. The Ministry of Empire may have begun at the western side of the old Rócio (Clearing), now the Praça da Constituição (Plaza of the Constitution) several blocks southwest of the Largo do Paço, in the residential districts between the commercial heart of the old city and the great Campo de Sant’Ana (Field of Saint Anne), now Campo da Aclamação (Field of the Acclamation)34 which marked the city’s western frontier. The houses of Parliament had a more fixed fate. The Chamber of the Senate was housed in the newly built palace of the conde dos Arcos, at the western edge of the Campo da Acclamação. The Chamber of Deputies was close to the heart of the old city, housed, with the post office, in the port’s old jailhouse just southeast of the Paço da Cidade.35 It was a small city, one manageable on foot. From the Morro da Glória to the Morro de São Bento was less than three kilometers, and it was about one and a half from the Praia dos Mineiros to the Senate. Most of the town’s people lived in the old city’s commercial and residential districts. Small merchants slept above their shops, their apprentices on the floor and counters, their slaves in the hallways. The free poor lived in larger buildings subdivided into flats accommodating several families each. As merchants became richer, they built townhouses, finer residences a short walk from the commercial center and beaches. The richest built small mansions (palacetes or solares) alongside those of rich planters and upper Crown bureaucrats. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, such notables lived in the Glória area, or along the further, western city-edge Caminho de Matacavalos (Horsekillers Road, now Riachuelo), or on

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 23

the newer streets linking the old western residential districts and the Campo to the southwestern Glória area: the Rua dos Inválidos, and the Rua de Lavrádio. More recently, the wealthiest Portuguese merchants, English merchants, and upper Crown bureaucrats were building palacetes or chácaras out of town in various nearby suburbs: São Cristóvão, northwest of the port city and Catete, Flamengo, Laranjeiras, and Botafogo southwest of it, after the Morro da Glória. On larger lots there, they built their great houses, generally with fashionable neo-classical façades; in the back, they often planted orchards or set down ornamental gardens in which to take their pleasure, enjoying the breeze from the shore and the cooler air of the hillsides.36

III. Emergence of the Fluminense Oligarchies One can see, in these passages concerning an evolving colonial trade, slavery, and port capital, the basis for the rise of families of great wealth. But what of power? How did planters and merchants become powerful in the political sense? They did so, as one should expect, by using wealth and its influence to acquire political positions and favors. Let us take fluminense economic bases as a starting point. People got great wealth in the baixada as planters, producing sugars and cachaça. People got greater wealth in Rio as merchants, knotting together the trade in sugars and cachaça to the trade in captives. And people got wealthy on the muletrails in the serra between Rio and Minas, selling mineiro foodstuffs to fluminenses and captives and manufactures to mineiro farmers and ranchers, and, later, by investing in coffee plantations on the way. Small farmers and ranchers in Rio de Janeiro and Minas might have become well to do locally, but it was not they who became rich. In a phrase, landholders producing for domestic consumption never handled the kind of wealth export planters and export-import merchants, particularly negreiros, did. And these planters and merchants were based in the baixada (sugar, cachaça, and coffee), the serra (domestic trade, slaves, and coffee), and the port (coffee, sugar, cachaça, and slave commerce).37 Here, it is important to recall that Rio was not only the chief port of Brazil’s eighteenth-century economic center, it was also the political center. It was the viceregal court from 1763 to 1808—after 1808, it was the seat of a monarchy. There, the viceroy ( and the king and the emperors who followed him) could hand out honors and privileges, and so they did. Without a substantial state apparatus, they did so to use the locally powerful to sustain and to serve the state. The local landholders and merchants whose property and wealth made them influential and respected at the local level could offer the state the reach and the riches it did not have. Thus, the Crown

24 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

rewarded the donations and service of the port’s merchants, whose property and ready capital provided immediately accessible resources for Crown use and expenditure and whose leisure, education, and influence allowed them to serve the state and command and compel respect and obedience. The state did not often have to compel such donations and service—they were offered. The appeal of Crown service to the wealthy local patriarchs was complex. It was not just a matter of titles and uniforms that spoke to the aristocratic values still resonant in Portuguese culture, it was also a matter of acquiring public legitimation and support that strengthened their local acquisitive powers—lucrative tax farming, control of Crown monopolies in resources, concessions for Crown services, Crown land grants, Crown recognition and support for local domination by commissions in the colonial militia (and, later, National Guard). The latter were particularly attractive, as they gave one the ability to protect one’s friends and relations and harm one’s rivals and their allies. While merchants had customarily corrupted officials and planters had customarily used their dependents to dominate locally, Crown honors and privileges were better. They were legitimate, they offered more obvious guarantees, and, of course, they consequently strengthened one’s hand in corruption and domination.38 If, then, generalizations about families’ wealth and power get us part of the way, another generalization takes us an important step further. As we shall see, most often, the most successful familial strategy for joining wealth to power and establishing them as enduring was through marriage. Planters married their daughters to merchants or merchants’ sons to acquire capital for investment and to acquire influence and contacts at the port capital. Merchants married planters’ daughters to integrate into the established, protected, and prestigious landholding class. Upper Crown bureaucrats were suitable grooms for either planters’ or merchants’ daughters because they brought aristocratic prestige and direct access to favors, titles, and concessions. Planters’ or merchants’ daughters were attractive matches for upper Crown bureaucrats because they provided access to a private income or to the traditional prestige of great landholdings. In the chapters that follow, political perspective and potential will often turn on the relationship of statesmen to the family oligarchies described in general terms in this chapter. To make the generalizations clearer and to tie them up to the family relationships of those statesmen, let us introduce some particulars here about four especially important families. In his report to his successor in 1779, the marquês do Lavrádio, viceroy of Brazil, included a series of local production reports by the militia colonels of Rio de Janeiro. The first man on his list for the bay litoral was [Alexandre] Álvares [Duarte] de Azevedo (see Genealogical Table I). Álvares de Azevedo, a Portuguese immigrant, had become a great landholder in the eastern bay hin-

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 25

terland. His lands thus included some in the traditionally most productive sugar areas of the baixada, principally a plantation dating back to the mid-seventeenth century in the parish of Itaboraí. Álvares de Azevedo married Ana Maria Joaquina Duque Estrada; the Duque Estradas were a very old and well established fluminense landholding family. Their twenty children planted and married well among the landed elite of the captaincy. One son, Domingos, married Mariana Jacinta de Castro e Azevedo Lemos (another Duque Estrade descendant), and among their six children, one married the daughter of a Portuguese regional appeal judge (desembargador); one of her brothers would be a paulista senator, another, an ennobled planter and the son-in-law of the first visconde de Araruama, José Carneiro da Silva, perhaps the preeminent early nineteenth-century patriarch and sugar planter of the eastern coastal seaboard and the Campos area.39 More important, Álvarez de Azevedo’s son, João Álvarez de Azevedo, who held his father’s plantation, Tapacorá, in the Itaboraí parish, married a cousin, Maria de Macedo Freire Coutinho, with whom he had nine children. Of these, Maria married [Joaquim José] Rodrigues Torres, Mariana married [Bernardo] Belisário Soares de Sousa, Francisco married Rodrigues Torres’ sister, Maria Carolina, Ana Maria married Belisário Soares de Sousa’s fraternal nephew, Paulino[José Soares de Sousa], and João married Maria, a second sister of Rodrigues Torres. The other childrens’ marriages were of lesser consequence compared to these, for these marriages linked the Álvarez de Azevedo family to two families (Rodrigues Torres and Soares de Sousa) who were to be of national pre-eminence in the Party of Order and great significance in fluminense planting and commerce. Thus, in the extensive relations of the Álvarez de Azevedo family, one glimpses connections by birth and kin to the plantations of the eastern baixada, the wharves of the Rio marketplace, and the highest ranks of the Brazilian state.40 The marquês de Lavrádio’s report also noted the businessmen reputed to be richest. The first on his list was the Portuguese, Brás Carneiro Leão, a merchant prince and one of the great negreiros. Carneiro Leão’s commercial house was on the Rua Direita; he traded from China to Rio Grande do Sul, from Mato Grosso to Angola and Portugal, often in ships he owned himself. He married Ana Francisca Rosa Maciel da Costa, a fluminense of an old landholding family, and invested in both urban and agricultural properties, including six sugar plantations in the Campos region. It was their mansion at the foot of the Morro da Glória that, after the visconde de Merití’s residence there, housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in later years. Their baixada rural holdings were the basis for dowries and export wealth for nine surviving children who figured in cane plantations, commerce, and Crown service (see Genealogical Table II).

26 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

Brás himself died with a knighthood, membership in the Order of Christ, and the rank of militia colonel in the Candelaria parish at the heart of commercial Rio.41 Brás’s son, Fernando, married a Portuguese cousin, Gertrudes Pedra Leão (daughter of his father’s kinsman and probable collaborator, a great Lisbon merchant), who would later manage a great commercial house and slaving trade herself, leaving behind one of Rio’s greatest fortunes. Fernando himself maintained his father’s firm and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in his father’s militia regiment (and the same aristocratic titles his father held), going on to rise to the colonelship of the bay’s eastern litoral militia cavalry, the position of Rio’s moedeiro da Casa da Moeda (literally, the Mintman of the Mint), membership in the Portuguese order of Vilaviçosa, various positions in the imperial court household, and the title barão, then conde, de Vila Nova de São José. Fernando’s daughter, Guilhermina Adelaide Carneiro Leão, marquesa de Macéio, married the son of Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, first conde de Linhares, Dom João VI’s prime minister. Another of Brás’s sons, a diplomat, took various court titles and became visconde de São Salvador de Campos. Brás’s first daughter, Mariana Eugenia Carneiro da Costa, married a Portuguese merchant and officer in Rio, later ennobled as marquês de Jacarepaguá and made senator for Goiás. Brás’s second daughter, Maria Joséfa, married a Portuguese merchant and negreiro; their son, another negreiro, became a knight and figure at the court. Brás’s third daughter, Ana Vidal, married the visconde da Cachoeira, a Bahian magistrate, customs judge in Rio, palace magistrate, member of two knightly orders, minister for foreign affairs and councillor of state under the first emperor, and later senator for Bahia. Brás’s fourth daughter, Luisa Rosa, married Paulo Fernandes Viana, a fluminense who became a Rio magistrate, a senior magistrate of the palace, a member of two knightly orders, and the first and very powerful police intendant of Rio under Dom João VI. Their children included the conde de São Simão, the viscondessa de Cunha, and the superior commander of the National Guard. Their daughter, Ana Luisa Carneiro Viana, married Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, a fluminense son of Francisco de Lima e Silva, a key military leader of the First Reign, one of the three imperial regents, and the patriarch of a family of honored and ennobled military officers. Luís, planter, minister, member of knightly orders, senator for Rio Grande do Sul, and councillor of state, is known to history as the duque de Caxias. Although hardly a partisan chief in the category of Rodrigues Torres and Paulino, he nonetheless emerged as a key political actor in the Second Reign and a stalwart of the Party of Order. He is most celebrated as the Empire’s most accomplished general. Brás’s fifth daughter, Francisca Mónica, married Manuel Jacinto Nogueira

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 27

da Gama, a mineiro, naval professor in Lisbon, Crown servant in the treasuries of Minas and Rio de Janeiro, member of knightly orders, a deputy for Minas, a minister, a councillor of state, marquês de Baependí, senator for Minas, and a field marshal. He was also a great planter in the serra area around Valença. Their children included the conde de Baependí, planter, provincial deputy, imperial deputy, perennial president of the Chamber of Deputies, later a senator for Rio de Janeiro, a member of knightly orders, holder of various court titles, and provincial president of Rio de Janeiro. Other children of the marqueses de Baependí included two other Valença planters with court titles and knightly memberships and political positions in the serra.42 The third family illustrating the generalizations made earlier goes unmentioned in Lavrádio’s report, doubtless because it was still an obscure lineage in 1779. That itself is indicative, because the Rio-Minas oligarchy of the serra emerged into economic and political importance after that of the baixada and the port capital (the bases for the Álvares de Azevedo and Carneiro Leão families). The third family, Lacerda Werneck, derives from hinterland families grown powerful from Crown service, exploration, landholding, and trade. A Portuguese, or son of one, João dos Santos Werneck, established along the route to Minas at Pilar de Iguaçú, married a fluminense, Isabel de Sousa (related to the Gomes Ribeiro family of negreiros and fluminense landholders) and participated in the explorations of Mato Grosso in the early eighteenth century (see Genealogical Table III). A daughter, Antônia Ribeiro, married a merchant in Minas. Their son, Inácio de Sousa Werneck, married the daughter of his father’s correspondente (commercial representative), and became a great cane and coffee pioneer planter of the serra. Their daughter, in turn, married a Portuguese officer, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda, who also became a planter, bequeathing some of the first coffee plantations of the serra near the coffee crossroads north of Rio to their son, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck, planter, officer (and later supreme commander of the serra’s National Guard), and second barão de Patí do Alferes. The baron’s ancestral linkage to the Gomes Ribeiro family was renewed through marriage to Maria Isabel Assunção de Avelar, daughter to Luís Gomes Ribeiro de Avelar, and sister to the barão de Guaribú, the visconde de Paraíba, and the barão de São Luís, all important pioneering serra coffee planters and descendants of Antônio Ribeiro Avelar, a chief eighteenth-century negreiro in Rio whose descendants also included such great planters as the barão de Capivari and the second visconde de Ubá. The latter married Mariana Velho da Silva, whose father was another of the richest negreiros of Rio; two of his other children became the visconde de Macaé, a planter, and the second baronesa de Muritiba. The baronesa de Muritiba served as a companion to the imperial princess, Dona Isabel, heiress to the second em-

28 / The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro

peror. Her husband served the Crown, following the footsteps of his father, the first barão de Muritiba, Manuel Vieira Tosta, a Bahian magistrate, deputy, senator, minister, and councillor of state, and a preeminent chieftain of the Party of Order.43 One of the children of the barão de Patí do Alfares brings us to our fourth family, for he married a Teixeira de Macedo. If the Lacerda Wernecks represent the serra in terms of the old Minas route to Rio, of Rio negreiros, and of serra plantations, so does the Teixeira de Macedo family. However, the Teixeira de Macedos and their kin, the Queirós Mattoso family (see Genealogical Table IV), had their earliest origin among Luso-African families of Crown service and African coastal commerce. Diogo Teixeira de Macedo was one of four newly established Rio merchants named Teixeira de Macedo involved in the African trade. They were probably brothers who had immigrated from Angola; one, Joaquim, was probably the namesake of their Luso-African father, a Joaquim Teixeira de Macedo based in Luanda into the 1820s. Like other merchant patriarchs who enriched themselves by slaving (including the founders of the Carneiro Leão, Gomes Ribeiro, Ribeiro Avelar, and Velho da Silva families), Diogo transferred his interests from such commerce to fluminense planting by 1830 (when the legal trade in people ended) and secured the honor of a military appointment. Diogo also married well. His bride was Luso-African, too, the sister of Angola’s ouvidor geral (senior judge) in Luanda. Among Diogo’s children, two are interesting to us. Sérgio became a diplomat of the first rank and a minister; Diogo, later barão de São Diogo, became a coffee planter in the serra, a provincial president, a member of two knightly orders, and a judge. Evelina, Sérgio’s daughter, became the daughter-in-law of the barão de Patí do Alferes, as we saw.44 The cousins by way of the elder Diogo’s brother-in-law, the Luanda magistrate, did even better. The magistrate, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho e Silva, became a desembargador (regional appeals judge) and ended life on the Empire’s first Supreme Tribunal of Justice. He and his wife had at least four children: Eusébio, Domingos, Francisco, and Luísa. Luísa married the son of a colleague of her father on the Supreme Tribunal. Her mother-in-law was a cousin to the marquês de Valença (planter, magistrate, and minister of the first rank in the politics of the First Reign). Luísa’s husband, Agostinho Marquês Perdigão Malheiro, would hold various court honors and became one of Rio’s foremost lawyers and magistrates, a deputy, and the preeminent abolitionist publicist of his day. Domingos’s career is obscure, but Francisco rose high in court honors and the magistracy, becoming a member of the emperor’s inner circle as a keeper of the wardrobe, as well as a desembargador in Rio. However, Eusébio, known as Eusébio de Queirós, rose to the highest rank of national political pre-

The Port and Province of Rio de Janeiro / 29

eminence as the acknowledged chieftain of the Party of Order, to whom even Rodrigues Torres and Paulino came to defer. A successor of Paulo Fernandes Viana as police chief in Rio, he became a provincial deputy, an imperial deputy, and a senator for Rio de Janeiro, a minister, and a councillor of state. Eusébio married the orphaned daughter of a prominent Rio merchant with extensive urban holdings in real estate and debts. The merchant’s widow, Engracia Maria da Costa, took as a second husband José Clemente Pereira. José Clemente, a Portuguese and a major political figure in the movement for Brazil’s independence, was a magistrate who became a provincial deputy, an imperial deputy, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, a minister in both reigns, a councillor of state, and a member of two knightly orders. Childless himself, José Clemente made his stepdaughter and her husband, Eusébio, his heirs.45 In these four families, Álvares de Azevedo (in the baixada), Carneiro Leão (in Rio), Lacerda Werneck (in the serra between Rio and Minas), and Teixeira de Macedo-Queirós Matoso (in Rio and the serra), we glimpse the origins and the nature of the families with which we are concerned. Each first reaches some prominence by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century in one place and then, by investment, marriage, or both, attempts to strengthen itself in one or both of two directions: landholding and Crown service. Families beginning in cane, in captives, in domestic commerce, or in Crown service end up, through investment and marriage, in all of these areas, or closely related to families who were. One direction seems common, however—away from commerce. As the genealogical tables demonstrate, there is also another commonality. Given the great size of families, and the relatively small number of marital choices, all of these families would be related, often by marriage, by the mid-nineteenth century, in the migration from commerce towards planting and political power. As we shall see, in tracing out the political complexities of the four decades between 1831 and 1871, the private interests or connections of these families were never far below the surface, and the way in which their political party, the Party of Order, related state and society, had much to do with these matters. These were not statesmen apart from their society, ornamental figures ignorant of their nation’s realities. They were men who emerged naturally from those realities and attempted to cope with them and their challenges. They were not apart from the earth and water of their milieu. They were part of them. They knew forest, lowlands, highlands, rivers and rain. They bought and sold people, got rich from it, and got rich from the crops and commerce their captives made possible. They knew the muletrails, they knew the rainy season, they knew the smells and sights and power of the viceregal port and court at Rio. Grown to manhood in such a society, let us see what they made of the state.

ch a p te r t wo

The Threat of Revolution and the Reactionary Mobilization: 1831-1837 . . . the entire mass of the restorationist party is now going to separate into two great sections. The first, made up of the ambitious, of the restless, of men who joined together with reaction because of pride or the desire to dominate, will embrace the remains of the radical party to make common cause with them, perhaps even raising the standard of Republicanism in their van. As for those that the fear of the accelerated pace of affairs, that political prejudice, or that the sentiment of a false gratitude placed in the restorationist ranks, they will doubtless seek refuge in the social belief that offers the greatest guarantee of order, that, obliged to maintain the doctrines of tolerance and of respect owed to individual rights, cannot without manifest contradiction, investigate past errors, incite the people to persecution and vengeance. These opinions in Brazil will find themselves divided, as in 1831, between Moderates and Radicals, between the men who desire the survival of the constitutional Monarchy, as a necessary element in the country’s liberty, and those who at all cost want the proclamation of the Republic. —Evaristo da Veiga, Aurora Fluminense, 3 December 1834, 3630.

Elias Antônio Lopes was among the wealthiest Rio merchants in 1808, when the Portuguese court, fleeing Napoleon, disembarked at the port. He had just constructed an unusually fine villa for himself. It dominated a hill from which he could admire the near countryside west of the viceregal court and the delights of Guanabara Bay. A traveler noted the villa’s position on a considerable eminence . . . behind it rises a magnificent chain of . . . mountains, forming a dense mass of light and shade. . . . Advancing from this . . . chain, are several smaller hills and knolls covered with wood, smiling in the light with varied lines of rich and vivid verdure; before it lies the bay, expanded with its islands; and sweeping just under the eminence on which the house stands, are the beautiful bays of Alferes and Gamboa. Indeed, nothing, even in Brazil, exceeds the beauty of the prospect from this situation.1

The Threat of Revolution and the Reactionary Mobilization / 31

When the merchant heard of the cramped circumstances of the newly arrived royal family, he refurbished his quinta (country place) to reflect a splendor suitable to the exiles, and offered it to Dom João VI. The reader should not be shocked to learn that the merchant subsequently received a number of lucrative favors from the royal hand. In those days, wealthy people often made gifts to the Crown and received honors, concessions, and court positions in recognition of their loyal generosity. This had happened in the viceregal era, as we have noted, and it was especially marked now. For now, the royal family and its court and government were especially embarrassed for ready capital and, sensitive to demonstrations of loyalty in its time of exile and need, quick to reward such demonstrations with favor. After all, such exile and relative penury were bound to be attended by great and unexpected expense and discomfort.2 The country place of the merchant Elias was known as the Quinta da Bôa Vista, for the spectacular view noted above. The building itself, as we have noted before, would often later be referred to as the Paço de São Cristóvão, for it was in that parish, west of the old city and across the marshy mangrove forest of the Mangal de São Diogo, that the villa stood. Over time, the mangal was progressively canaled and drained, the mangroves cut back, the marshland filled, and a new road built, suitable for the new king’s carriages and the conveyances of the imperial court and ministries that followed. For Dom Pedro I, like his father before him, preferred not only to live but to rule from the place. The Paço da Cidade was used only for the most formal occasions—the presentation of ambassadors, the dynasty’s anniversaries, the grand levées in which the monarch’s hand was kissed (the beijamão), in the ancient rite of the Portuguese monarchy.3 Walsh, the English reverend attached to the 1831 diplomatic embassy of Viscount Strangford, had occasion to visit the rural palace. He found it interesting, doubtless affected by the Romantic sensibilities of his day. He noted the two great pavilions and the open varanda joining them, and remarked upon the Oriental curtains that draped the entrance to each pavilion from the veranda where he had been admiring the view: “At each end of the varanda was a large door-way, closed by an embroidered screen of cloth, exactly like the door curtains of the east; presently one of them was lifted up and the Marquez d’Aracaty [minister of foreign relations] made his appearance . . . and welcomed me in.”4 On one occasion, he had entered unescorted, and found the emperor on all fours, playing with his children, a son and two daughters. He found this unexpected display of carefree affection quite touching. The daughters, Dona Francisca and Dona Januária, were older than the monarch’s son and namesake, Dom Pedro de Alcántara.5 Shortly afterward, on 7 April 1831, the Dom Pedro I abdicated the imperial title rather than accept the de facto ultimatum of the liberal-opposition majority

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that he faced in the Chamber of Deputies, an ultimatum forced upon him by the betrayal of the imperial army. He took as his title, duque de Bragança, the old title of his forebears, made recommendations for three regents, as the Constitution of 1824 required in the case of an heir’s impairment by virtue of minority, and left his son as the uncrowned emperor of Brazil. The boy, a child of five, would not see his father again. Two days later, on 9 April, the child emperor was taken through the old city’s crowded streets to attend a Te Deum at the Paço da Cidade’s chapel; afterward, he was forced out on a balcony of the Paço for the crowd to applaud. On special occasions, for nine years, he would be paraded before the court and his people again and again, repeating the path of that first agony, when he was touched and kissed by a people he only slowly came to know and apparently never came to trust. For most of those nine years, though, the rumor and revolts and wracking politics of the Empire were muffled by the distance and isolation of São Cristóvão. The boy emperor seems to have grown accustomed to that gilded, verdant solitude. He spent most of the time in the merchant’s villa, in its rural setting of chácaras and splendid tropical views of forested hills and sparkling bay.6 Dom Pedro II was tended to by a governess he loved and the sisters with whom he had always lived. His days were carefully planned for him, as were his meals, his books, his rides around the villa’s grounds, and his company. His tutors took special care to avoid any possibility that the child would become the father, now reviled as a tyrant. He never was allowed to read his father’s letters, and his own, first marked by tears, only faintly convey the pain of this complete orphanhood. His best biographer notes that Dom Pedro would, in later years, seek out and treasure anyone who knew his father and could talk about him. When he visited his father’s widow (his stepmother), four decades later in Portugal, the visit was the first one he made upon arrival in Europe, and it was tearful. It seems that this decision to cut the boy off from the influence of the first emperor was accentuated by providing the boy with the most explicit direction regarding what a good constitutional monarch should be. Aside from the admonition of his preceptors, this also meant a constant encouragement to study, that he be a cultivated, wise, and enlightened ruler. Dom Pedro seemingly found here both a shelter from the human abandonment and personal danger of his circumstances, and achievement which won him approval from those upon whom he depended. He became a precocious student and a lifelong scholar, perhaps seeking in the solace and accomplishment of his study and his books the dependable order torn from him in 1831. And while he began to learn of his new life and the world around him, others began the struggles which would shape both.7 Let us leave him in São Cristóvão and turn to those struggles.

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I. Institutions One of the radicals of the time, Cristiano[Benedito] Otoni (1811–1906), tells us that, at the unexpected news of the Dom Pedro I’s abdication on 7 April, Nicolão Vergueiro, one of the key leaders of the liberal opposition, was sought out for a decision by three of the leading street agitators. Should they proclaim a republic? Who should be acclaimed to lead the revolution? Vergueiro paced the room and finally turned to them and solemnly stated: “Long live Senhor Dom Pedro II, constitutional emperor in minority.”8 Cristiano Otoni tells us that although radicals intended to proclaim a republic and had spearheaded the tumults of April, they were quickly outflanked by their moderate allies.9 For most Brazilians, and certainly for the greater part of the local, provincial elites and the politically active, the monarch remained a great force for state legitimacy and social order. Although the conflicts with Dom Pedro I had undercut his particular personal appeal fatally, the faith in the persona and in the role of the monarch remained and settled heavily upon the small figure of his son. Hence the popular furor in acclaiming the child two days after the scene with Vergueiro, as well as the repeated professions of loyalty to the boy emperor in many of the rebellions that would mark the next seventeen years. Both urban and rural populace, when politically mobilized, generally remained monarchist in sentiment. What they challenged were the perceived policies and personal oppression of the local administration of the day.10 Thus, the fate of the child monarch had little to do with his personal nature or qualities, and everything to do with his persona, which had charismatic authority as that of the imperial dynast, and something to do with his formal role, which was central to the Empire’s recent Constitution. Indeed, for those with any political sophistication at all, what had been in debate in the 1820s, and what would be at issue in the Regency of 1831–1840, was the Constitution of 1824 and the relationship of the monarch to the state and to society. To phrase it differently, most significant political actors did not challenge the iconic legitimacy of either the monarch or the Constitution. Rather, they debated what each meant. Indeed, the palpable threat to the established order represented by the abdication—the removal of an active monarch from society and the state— may well have refurbished the stabilizing symbolism and legitimizing power of both Dom Pedro II and the Constitution. The political threat to the established order caused a renewed emphasis on its political symbols in reaction. All of the political actors who had some significant representative legitimacy proclaimed their loyalty to both. Common loyalties, however, did not mean political consensus; they struggled over was what each icon signified. And they did this, first, by taking up the issues of the fallen emperor’s alleged tyranny and of the consequent call for constitutional reform.11

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The nature of the Constitution and its history made this inevitable. The Constitution established a highly centralized state overseen by an actively interventionist monarch. The elected representatives to the Constituent Assembly of 1823 had divided over these matters, particularly over the role of the monarch. The emperor had, not accidentally, dissolved the assembly when the majority looked to be erecting constraints upon that role. The Constitution the emperor handed down the next year was proclaimed to be written by himself with the advice of his Council of State. Afterwards, it came to be known that one or two of the councillors were probably more responsible for its authorship. However, the emperor’s role in the state and his relationship to the nation might just as well have been written in by Dom Pedro I himself, for both gave him the most significant power.12 The Constitution of 1824 modeled the emperor’s role on an idea central to the recent constitutional theories of the esteemed Swiss-French publicist, Benjamin Constant [de Rebeque] (1767–1830). Constant had added a regulating power to the three powers of traditional enlightened constitutional theory, executive, legislative, and judicial. The idea was that this fourth power, in the hands of a dynastic monarch, provided an apolitical oversight to affairs of state, serving the nation (which the monarch represented) by correcting for the political biases or inevitable errors of the other three powers. In a phrase taken from Constant, this was considered the key to the Constitution.13 In the Brazilian charter, this power, called o poder moderador (the moderating power), was exercised in conjunction with a Council of State made up of mature and experienced advisors appointed by the monarch for life. The monarch used this power to appoint senators from a list of the three candidates winning most provincial electoral votes, to convoke Parliament for emergency sessions, to sanction legislation passed by Parliament, to approve or suspend provincial legislation, to prorogue or postpone Parliament or to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies (calling for new elections immediately). He also used it to appoint and dismiss the cabinet (formally, the Council of Ministers—with the emperor, it made up the executive power), to suspend magistrates pending a hearing on grievances against them, to grant pardons for, or moderation of, legal sentences, and to concede amnesty. In all of this, the monarch was held to be legally “irresponsible,” that is, he was accountable to no one.14 The monarch was also the head of the executive, as alluded to just above. As such, he acted through his Council of Ministers. This council was temporary, and often resigned and was replaced. In historical practice, each council and its administration were often referred to as the cabinet. It was the monarch as the chief of the executive who called the Parliament into session at its regular time, appointed the princes of the church and the Crown magistrates, named the

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other Crown agents (including military officers and diplomats), directed foreign affairs, declared war, made peace, conceded naturalization, noble titles, court honors, knighthoods and other honorary distinctions, expedited decrees to facilitate and execute legislation, decreed the funding destined by Parliament for state expenditure, conceded or denied approval for the publication of Church communications if these were constitutional, and provided for internal and external security within the constraints of the Constitution.15 Clearly, the monarch’s constitutional powers were dominant. They provided for intervention through direct actions as well as by indirect ones. Particularly through his right to appoint senators and ministers and his right to dissolve the Chamber and the cabinet, as well as his right to issue decrees or deny approval, the monarch could influence both policy and legislation. The only effective counter-balance to the monarch was the bi-cameral Parliament, particularly the Chamber of Deputies, and the Constitution itself. This Parliament initiated taxes, set public expenses, authorized loans and thus had effective approval over executive finances in terms of ministry budgets and, so, could exercise some check on policy. It could also review past cabinets’ abuses and try ministers and councillors of state. In addition, it also must debate and could amend and defeat executive legislative proposals, for, most centrally, all legislation had to begin and end as Parliamentary projects of law.16 The Constitution, by defining the role of the monarch, also, of course, did set some limits on his role. The state was defined as hereditary monarchical, constitutional, and representative, and the monarch’s title was Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil. Although representing the nation, as Parliament did, and although constitutionally Supreme Chief of the Nation and Chief of the Executive Power, he had no legitimate role outside of the Constitution, which he was sworn to observe and to execute. But, then, he had little to ask for beyond its broad confines, and he himself, if not his ministers, could not be held accountable.17 This preponderance, when combined with Dom Pedro I’s alleged abuses, set the stage for the liberal opposition and reformism of the late 1820s and the challenge to the monarch’s role made possible by the abdication of 1831. With the charismatic figure of the monarch reduced from a very active man to an uncrowned minor, the opportunity to re-evaluate the role of the monarch was both inevitable and possible. As we shall see, the liberal opposition to Dom Pedro I had used the Constitution as their weapon against him and as their measure of his actions. In his absence, they could not only make their views of his proper role prevail, they could reform the letter of the Constitution (and, thus, not only his role, but the nature of the state), as well. Not only did the circumstances of the monarch’s flight allow for this, by removing a reigning champion of the established monarchy from active participation in the debates, but the

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Constitution itself gave Parliament the right to name the imperial regents and to initiate constitutional reform. By electing the regents, the nation’s representatives, effectively, placed the executive under their influence, for the regents appointed the cabinet heading the executive (the child emperor could not, of course, either act as the chief of the executive or appoint the cabinet because he was constitutionally incompetent to fulfill these functions so long as he was a minor). They could also call for an election empowering new deputies to debate and legislate constitutional reforms.18 In a phrase, the abdication of 1831 created a tremendous opportunity for reconstructing the state and thrust it upon Parliament abruptly. It did not do so, however, in a sterile environment of abstraction and calm. It did so in a revolutionary milieu, the ongoing process of a political crisis. As we turn to the debates that took place, we shall see that they were thoroughly informed by the fragile and violent potential of such a milieu and crisis. However, the centrality of Parliament here, especially the Chamber of Deputies, suggests the importance of some notion of the institution and its practices. Let us begin with the challenge that the country itself presented to Parliament. The reader may recall how the land was laid out in the Province of Rio de Janeiro and, indeed, much of the South Atlantic coastal and near hinterland provinces of the Empire, where most Brazilians lived. There were coastal lowlands walled in from the interior by often mountainous highlands. Unlike the Province of Pará (encompassing most of Amazonia at that time), no river here allowed easy travel between coast and interior or within the hinterland; instead, cataracts hindered travel again and again. Voyages to the Court were consequently difficult, carried out over tortuous muletrails during the drier season or by coastal sea voyages which, even with steamboats (beginning only in the 1830s), were of weeks’ duration. In 1833, the trip between the Empire’s two greatest ports, Salvador and Rio, could take three weeks; that between Belém do Pará, at the Amazon’s mouth, and the Court could take ten weeks. As one deputy put it in 1831: “Note well the geographic position of the provinces in Brazil; it is easier to go from England to Jamaica, and from Pará to Portugal, then to come from Pará to Rio de Janeiro.”19 Moreover, the climate and the rains made the season of waters quite difficult for travel and uncomfortable for debate for months at a time. Thus, parliamentary life took place in the drier, cooler months, beginning formally on 3 May and generally suspended four months later, sometime in September.20 The sessions began with preparatory April meetings. The debates themselves were begun after a brief joint session in the Senate building which stood on the western edge of the Campo d’Aclamação. Once the palace of the conde de Arcos, it has been described by the Reverend Walsh. Two storied, in a plain neo-

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classical style painted the imperial colors (yellow and green), the first floor was given over to reception rooms; the second had a gallery at either end of a small hall. One gallery seated diplomats, the other, the public. The senators, numbering fifty in 1826 (for nineteen provinces), sat in a semi-circular, double row facing one of the hall’s sides, where an imperial throne was placed. Before the throne rested a table covered with green velvet where the senate president and his staff sat, with a silver bowl for balloting before him on the table. Senators rose at their places when they were called by the president to speak. They dressed in the formal black frock coats, vests, and trousers of European men. Ministers of state who were members of either the Senate or the Chamber often wore gold embroidered blue coats and white trousers on more formal occasions.21 The Chamber of Deputies, a two-storied, oblong pile of three parallel rectangles in the colonial style, just south of the Paço da Cidade, has also been described by Walsh. Once the town hall and the jail, it had housed royal servants in 1808 and the Constituent Assembly in 1823. It was much larger than the Senate house, and could hold two to three hundred people. Sessions were held on the second floor (the first, in 1830, was the post office). The public had galleries at either side of the hall there. Unlike the Senate’s public galleries, these were generally full. There were also raised tribunes for the debate recorders just underneath the four corners of the hall, over which there were private boxes reserved for diplomats. The Chamber debates always commanded the close attention of the politically active. At first, accounts of the debates from both houses had been either summarized or published verbatim; soon, they were recorded verbatim and published in one or another daily until the early Regency, when the Jornal do Commercio became the official journal of record. The deputies were arranged in a double semicircle of benches with backs and front rails along one side of the Chamber facing the other. There, the monarch’s throne was centered, canopied, and draped from view. Before the throne and facing the deputies was a long, wide table at which the President of the Chamber sat, flanked by his secretaries, with two silver bowls for balloting before him on the table’s green cloth. Deputies numbered 102 in 1826. Ministers appointed from among the deputies sat in their regular places; the other ministers had special chairs, facing the deputies’ semicircle at the right side of the president’s table, from which they could rise to defend the cabinet or their own actions when called to the Chamber. As in the French Chamber, the cabinet’s opposition sat on the left hand of the Chamber’s president, its supporters, on the right. Deputies wore the same formal clothing as senators. Walsh noted that “when a man rose to speak, he laid his hand on the front rail of the seat, and waited for a moment, as if to bespeak attention. He began

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with a quiet gravity, and rose gradually with his subject into a strain of rapid eloquence, accompanied by the most passionate action.”22 Walsh also took pleasure in the decorum of proceedings and the verbal finesse of the orators. Yet, most deputies and senators said nothing. The cabinet’s ministers and one or two supporters among the deputies or senators generally spoke for the current administration. The opposition’s champions were also few, often numbering a half-dozen at most, generally fewer. The other members in either Chamber participated by apartes (brief barbs, denials, accusations) and comments of approval or disapproval (“very good,”“supported,”“not supported”) or the indistinct murmuring, hissing, applause, or noisy private expostulation recorded as “sensation,” “applause,” and “uproar.” The apartes were often intended to distract the speaker from his argument (which was not read, but memorized or extemporaneous) or to embarrass him and undercut his credibility. Voting was generally done by standing; names were taken only if a majority voted for it. Ad hominem attacks and the use of personal names were out of order. One referred to a colleague with formal circumlocution. No direct criticism of the monarch was permitted; he was constitutionally sheltered from responsibility. Instead, obvious but indirect references were used—a reference to a “higher sphere,” word-play involving a master, a palace, etc. However, respectful references to the emperor were customary in response to the first session’s initial speech, a fala do trono (the speech from the throne), read by the monarch at the formal opening of Parliament before a joint house, meeting in the Senate chamber. The fala do trono was worked out by the cabinet and the monarch (when he came to reign, after 1840) as the formal summary of the executive’s views of the state of the nation and the policies required for its welfare. It comprised one of the first tests of a cabinet’s strength. The debates beginning the first day afterward clarified the cabinet’s support and opposition in the Chamber. If the opposition could win a near-majority vote opposing the fala, the cabinet was clearly threatened. The other early test was the balloting for the various key standing committees in the Chamber. Each such vote, by putting in or leaving out known orators or other stalwarts of one party or another demonstrated their respective strengths in the Chamber. Finally, oratory was highly prized and indispensable to political leaders in Parliament and among their constituencies in the reading public. A leader’s public status depended upon coherence in his ideological and partisan positions over time, logic, critical acuity, learning, wit, literary allusion, and apposite references to English parliamentary history and contemporary French politics.23 References to foreign precedent were often entirely opportunistic; an orator used them to legitimate his position; they comprised, in a sense, the in-

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tellectual preparation and milieu of the Monarchy’s political world. Thus, one would be foolish to conclude that the political leadership in Parliament sought to imitate Anglo-French precedent. Rather, they sought to learn from it and to adapt it; the most influential Brazilian statesmen were well aware of the distinct character of Brazilian socio-political realities. Thus, while one prominent orator noted that “the face of Europe . . . is a great book for study,”24 others were quick to suggest the limitations of what one read there: “all the laws should be in harmony with the circumstances, character, virtue, and opinion of the nation where they should be executed . . .”25 Within these places, formal parameters, and informal usages, Parliament addressed the political crises that followed 7 April 1831. Parliament, like the Constitution, was a formal structure, seemingly at some remove from the dirt and fear and blood of revolution and repression. Yet, as we shall see, Parliament would be the cockpit of political struggle, with at least as much importance as the passionate conflicts taking place outside its walls, and clearly resonating within them.

II. The Liberal Movement From the time of the political mobilization associated with the independence movement of the early 1820s, there was a broad political consensus in Brazil supporting constitutional monarchy. In this sense, most of the politically mobilized were liberal, in that they accepted or promoted the idea of a monarch constrained by law and governing with a representative parliament. As suggested earlier, the conflicts of 1823 had to do with the relative weight of the monarch and Parliament. Another related conflict clear in the 1823 assembly was nationalism.26 The emperor was a Portuguese. As his father’s heir, he retained dynastic interests in the Portuguese succession, and he was surrounded by councillors and ministers who were Portuguese. These facts, when coupled with the general perception that his temperament and his policies were absolutist and often flouted constitutional practice and parliamentary government, tended to conflate hostility towards the Portuguese and hostility towards absolutism. Lusophobia was deeply embedded in the Brazilian masses and members of the middle reaches of urban society. Portuguese administrators and petty merchants and newly enriched landholders were the immediate, local face of most Brazilians’ oppression and consequent resentment, and to this European distinction was often added a racial one, for many Brazilians among the free population, if not most, were people of color. In some areas, such as Amazonia, this proportion was quite extreme. It was often assumed by the poorer free throughout the

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Empire that the landholding and administrative elites were all Portuguese, since they were all white and, thus, issues of race, class, and nationalism often tended to be mixed together.27 So, when liberals in Parliament and the political press attacked the emperor as a Portuguese or lamented the exclusion of Brazilian patriots among his cabinet ministers and councillors, they mobilized considerable support. Indeed, among the most radical liberals, the exaltados (literally, the enraged), there was a very significant number of agitators and journalists who urged a Brazilian republic and the exclusion of both Portuguese monarch and the resident Portuguese community. This most radical edge of the liberal opposition was linked to others, reformists, especially in the Chamber, who merely wanted a more decentralized parliamentary monarchy with the Crown and the executive reformed so that they could not threaten local liberties or provincial interests.28 While many of the exaltados have been associated with the Afro-Brazilian urban poor and educated leadership (self-taught or graduates of Brazilian seminaries or the military schools), the more reformist group had a different background. They often represented provinces and landholding groups which were not part of the pre-eminent Portuguese establishment in Rio and the baixada fluminense or similar groups with similar interests in other provinces. Thus, landholders in Pernambuco or São Paulo, or Minas or Bahia, or even many native landholders in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, whether or not they were directly associated with flourishing export production, resented their lack of leverage within the imperial state and the favored access of Rio’s Portugueseborn elite, and came to oppose the first emperor. It was the cabinet and the monarch in the Court, after all, who imposed taxes, allocated benefits, and distributed local positions and favors, and such provincial landholders, particularly the distant ones, had relatively little opportunity to influence such policies or win such favors from the monarch and the cabinet. Moreover, such men were nearly uniformly Brazilian-born men of substance, led by relatives with a law degree from Portugal’s University of Coimbra (the most prestigious qualification for law and politics at the time) and a sharp sense of the constitutional liberalism of the day. They were thus men linked to local power in the provinces, provided with an articulate and capable leadership, but often denied entrée at the key level of centralized state power in the Court. Nowhere was this conflict more acute than in the province of Rio de Janeiro and its mineiro hinterland.29 If one glances at these issues in terms of the great families and interests discussed in the first chapter, the conflicts may surface more dramatically. The families based in the baixada and in Rio would tend to split over support for Dom Pedro I or for his opposition. In the baixada and in Rio, families headed

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by Portuguese merchant-planters would tend to support the emperor. These men were, in fact, the real or perceived targets of the exaltados and reformists. Rich, powerful, and foreign, they dominated the upper Crown bureaucracy, they figured among the First Reign’s ministers, and their wealth and connections gave them a preponderant say in policy and in access to favors and imperial patronage. However, among Rio and baixada families headed by Brazilians, the situation was complicated. Those whose court connections were strong (often the sons of very successful Portuguese), tended to favor the emperor, but even among those with close relations at court or in the merchant community at Rio, opposition might take root. Nationalism, fear of the emperor’s Portuguese ambitions, and a committed interest in a constitutional monarchy in which provincial interests articulated in Parliament informed cabinet policy weighed heavily with such men. They supported the Monarchy, but they desired one sensitive to their interests and their national pride.30 For families linked to the mineiro economy through the serra, such reformist opposition was strong. While some recent serra planters were closely linked to the privileged families of Rio and the baixada, many were of mineiro or paulista origin with strong links to the domestic orientation of the hinterland economy. Even those who had broken into coffee planting might not yet possess the privileged connections of those with kin residing in the Court. Brazilian-born and with strong provincial interests in fluminense, mineiro, or paulista landholding and commerce, they, too, would resent a Court apparently unresponsive to their views.31 The liberal opposition of the late 1820s was formed by both radicals and reformists, despite the quite varied nature of their backgrounds and their perspectives, because they quickly realized that they had no strength at all without the strength of numbers. They needed each other to make a majority in the Chamber and to gain popular support in the streets. The issues which served as common cause were antagonism towards Portuguese interests and domination, a condemnation of the emperor’s perceived tyrannical lapses from constitutional practice, and a desire for policies and constitutional reform to address both. To compel the emperor’s acquiescence, they emphasized the legislative and budgetary role of Parliament and used it to attack the emperor by obstructing his policies and embarrassing his ministers. The role of the exaltados was significant; although they were a minority in the Chamber, they were crucial in the streets and political press of Rio and the other port cities. Street agitation and rioting, as well as the attacks in the press, were central to the political mobilization and milieu of crisis and violence which brought about the breakdown of support in the military at court. This had forced the emperor to his fatal choice.32

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In a phrase, between 1823 and 1831, the political consensus supporting a constitutional monarchy had broken down into two parties in Parliament: those supporting the emperor and those opposing him and seeking reform. The liberal opposition in the Chamber was itself a majority comprised of an alliance between reformists and radicals (who had strong support in the political mobilization of the towns). The abdication, however, may have been more than the liberal opposition expected or wanted. Certainly, they immediately divided over what direction to take; indeed, the abdication immediately radicalized both the emperor’s friends and enemies. After 1831, all those favored by the emperor lost political positions and protection and were thrown into a desperate opposition to the emerging order, forced to defend their interests and themselves. These included not only ministers and senators and Portuguese merchants (great and small), but planters, Crown magistrates, and officers, both Portuguese and Brazilian, whose honors, holdings, and careers were associated with the successive administrations of the First Reign. Those who had distributed favors and positions, and those who accepted them, were likewise threatened by the reversal of fortune in Rio. These, and many who soon came to fear the uncertainty and violence of the era, joined together either as a conservative opposition or as outright restorationists (in Rio, they were called caramurús—other provinces often used different local epithets). The restorationists and the conservative opposition would seek to attack the Regency cabinets’ policies in the Chamber; some would organize for a restorationist coup, hoping the duque de Bragança would accept the title of tutor to his son and return from Portugal to rule again.33 The radicalization of the liberal opposition in 1831 took the form of by splitting them between the reformist majority and the radical minority, as each was ideologically defined by a distinct political project. The reformists broke with the radicals after ascending on their backs to power. In the memorable phrase of one of the radicals, the abdication was thus the journée des dupes. For the reformists, between 7 April and 17 June, as the majority in the Chamber, elected three of their own as the regents. As the divide between the former liberal-opposition allies became clearer, the exaltado leader, Teófilo [Benedito] Otoni (1807–1869), published a call (25 June) for a series of radical constitutional reforms, pushing the revolution back to the left. The reformists, known now as moderados (moderates) in pointed distinction to the exaltados, continued to consolidate state power. They sought (5 July) to maintain their left flank and appeal by supporting [Diogo Antônio] Feijó (1784–1843), a radical priest strongly identified with constitutional reform but a proclaimed monarchist. In this way they may have hoped to maintain their revolutionary credentials and, thus, undermine the exaltados’ appeal while securing the Monarchy. In this,

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they had the crucial support of the most celebrated political polemicist of the day, the liberal firebrand Evaristo [Ferreira] da Veiga (1799–1837), deputy for Minas, and, more important, editor and author of the leading opposition periodical, Aurora Fluminense.34 Feijó’s work to consolidate the moderado position was spurred on nearly immediately by an exaltado coup attempt on 12 July. In the cabinet Feijó organized in response, on 16 July, the essentially cautious and opportune breadth and appeal of the moderados is clear. It was a cabinet which accepted the era’s need for reform while clearly linking the state to established, dominant elements of society. Feijó’s ascent was not the only one indicative of this. The acknowledged leader of the Chamber’s liberal opposition had been [Bernardo Pereira de] Vasconcelos [1795–1850]. The son of a Portuguese Crown magistrate in Minas, and related to distinguished magistrates of Portugal, he had taken a Coimbra degree (1818), entered into Crown service (1820), and then taken up politics, elected to the Chamber’s first Legislature (1826–1830). Apparently supported by his father’s connections to established mineiro landholders linked to the Rio trade, Vasconcelos had become the most articulate spokesman for their concerns. He was a well known champion for parliamentary government and an articulate spokesman for the maintenance of the African slave trade. Indeed, he thought the emperor’s 1826 treaty with the English, which banned the African trade and took effect in 1831, spoke to D. Pedro I’s unconstitutional, absolutist rule, for the treaty had been undertaken without parliamentary participation. Here, at the outset, in constitutional debate as well as in the society analyzed in Chapter One, slavery cannot be unraveled from our discussion. Although Vasconcelos (as minister of finance) was a crucial addition to the cabinet because of his political status, his legislative skill, and the acuity of his vision and his oratory, Feijó (minister of justice) was the cabinet’s acknowledged chief. He was the more reformist of the two and the moment was a revolutionary one. However, he would also demonstrate a firm and unrelenting will to repress the regime’s opposition. Feijó, too, came from the hinterland. Born the illegitimate son of an important local paulista family near the town of São Paulo, he had gone through seminary, become the owner of a small cane plantation, and had acquired political stature early. In the constitutional ferment of 1821, Feijó was elected to represent the liberal paulista redoubt of Itú at the São Paulo Electoral Junta; there, he was elected a deputy of the province to the Portuguese Cortes. It was the beginning of his rise in Brazil’s early liberal ranks. By the late 1820s, he enjoyed the strong personal support of Evaristo. As suggested earlier, the latter’s support was significant. Although Evaristo began life humbly, as the son of a Portuguese schoolteacher and bookseller in Rio, he had been at the heart of the reformist liberal political mobilization of the 1820s,

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in which his own Rio bookshop had served as a political club and his paper, Aurora Fluminense, the foremost battle standard. Feijó’s position was secured not only by Evaristo’s support outside the cabinet but by the presence of [José ] Lino Coutinho (1794–1856) within it. Appointed minister of empire, Lino Coutinho was eminent among the opposition; a physician from Salvador with a Coimbra degree, he was known as the “deputy of the gallery” for his popular rhetorical skills.35 If these three ministers, who dominated the cabinet, represent the more reformist wing of the moderados necessarily in ascent at the time, the three remaining ministers suggest a deft attempt to assuage more conservative interests. The minister of foreign affairs, Francisco Carneiro de Campos (d.1842), a Bahian deputy and magistrate with a 1790 Coimbra degree, was a link to the First-Reign establishment. He had been appointed to the emperor’s penultimate cabinet (1830–1831) and then picked again for a portfolio by the provisional regents on 7 April (a transition government between the last administration under Dom Pedro I and the moderados’ ascent, appointed by the regents chosen by the emperor and temporarily accepted by Parliament). Indeed, one of those regents, José Joaquim Carneiro de Campos (1786–1836), marquês de Caravelas, was his brother and one of the first emperor’s councillors of state. The minister of war had similar linkages to the last days of the old regime. He was Manuel da Fonseca Lima e Silva (1793–1869), a military officer whose loyalty to the Monarchy had been demonstrated in repressing provincial rebellions in 1817, 1822, and 1825–28. Nonetheless, like his brother, Francisco de Lima e Silva (1785–1853), he had apparently been a supporter of the emperor’s abdication; both had distinguished between the Brazilian monarch as a person and the Brazilian monarchy as an institution. Indeed, there are good grounds to suggest that Francisco, as a key commander in the Court whose support was crucial to the emperor in the last days of his reign, had thrown in with the political mobilization which toppled him. Certainly, it was he who had made it clear to the emperor that his resistance to the liberal opposition was futile, by informing Dom Pedro I that he could no longer rely upon the troops during the increasing threat of violence on 6 April. The emperor’s appraisal of the man had been pragmatic; loyal or not, he alone might stand between the survival of the Monarchy and a republican coup. He picked Francisco as one of the three provisional regents upon his abdication. Francisco’s military role in thus facilitating the abdication and then subsequently preventing a complete breakdown of public order was apparently appreciated by the Chamber, which reappointed him regent on 7 April. His success and the need to maintain public order explain, as well, why it was Francisco de Lima e Silva who, alone of the provisional regents, was confirmed by the moderado Chamber on 17 June.

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Whatever the quality of their personal loyalty to the former emperor, both brothers had been key figures in the former emperor’s military establishment, and were, by descent and kinship, obvious supporters of the Monarchy and the established Luso-Brazilian elite in the Court and the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Their father, a Portuguese, had been a noble knight of the royal household and a field marshal; he had married into a fluminense family of military tradition (the Fonseca Costas). The regent’s son did even better. He is someone we have already glimpsed in Chapter One: Luís Alves de Lima e Silva (1803–1880), who married into Brás Carneiro Leão’s family, wedding the daughter of the magistrate and royal police chief of Rio, Brás’s son-in-law, Paulo Fernandes Viana.36 If established interests in the First-Reign court and the baixada found these two ministers reassuring, they and newer, powerful interests in both places were probably even more hopeful with respect to the new minister of the navy. This was [Joaquim José ] Rodrigues Torres (1802–1872). In Chapter One, we met Rodrigues Torres as one of the sons-in-law of João Álvares de Azevedo, patriarch of a great established planter family of the baixada, with lands from Itaboraí to Araruama. Rodrigues Torres himself was born in Caixas, the sugar port at the mouth of the Macacú, son of a Portuguese merchant who had done well in the trade out of Itaboraí. It seems safe to suggest that this commerce was the basis of the early relations between the two families, bound tightly by two other marriages between children of the two patriarchs.37 Rodrigues Torres, after preparatory studies in religion and the humanities at the select Seminary of São José in Rio, had taken a Coimbra degree in mathematics (1825); he returned to teach at Rio in the School of the Navy in 1826. He sailed to study in Europe again, taking courses in Paris (1827–29). Upon his return to his professor’s post in the Court, he became noted as a liberal journalist at the height of the liberal opposition. Although not a member of the Chamber, he nonetheless became a friend of Evaristo da Veiga and a mentor to younger liberals, particularly among his students. He would continue talking politics with the younger men, some of whom would become exaltados, as they walked the short distance from the naval school at the foot of the Morro de São Bento to Evaristo’s bookshop and press, which served as a well-known liberal club on the Rua dos Pescadores. The relations with Evaristo and Rodrigues Torres’s liberal journalism had a great deal to do with his appointment to the first moderado cabinet, the beginning of Rodrigues Torres’ long political career.38 Either through his father or his new wife, Rodrigues Torres also soon became a coffee planter in the baixada, near the coastal town of Saquarema. As minister of the navy, he would take a great house on the Morro da Glória. If the foreign affairs and war ministers represented links to Brazilian families tightly linked to Crown service in the court, Rodrigues Torres represented a strong link

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to the liberal opposition and to the most powerful baixada planting families by marriage and to the baixada merchant community through his father. Indeed, his brother, Cándido José Rodrigues Torres, apparently succeeded to the paternal business, as a great merchant with interests in the lowlands and an office in Rio.39 Under Feijó, the moderado cabinet achieved crucial, if short-lived, success. They held the Empire and the state together and carried out energetic repression of both restorationists and radicals. By May 1831, their partisans had founded the Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independência Nacional in Rio, an institutional venue for civil support of the regime which would be the model for similar, allied organizations in Valença, São Paulo, Pouso Alegre, Baependí, São João d’El Rei (these last three in Minas), Alagoas, and Recife. By August 1831, to displace the army, whose worrisome troops were linked to both restorationist and radical movements, Feijó (supposedly urged on by the Socidade Defensora and attracted by the paulistano national guard already organized by his home province), created the National Guard, a nationally organized local militia, headed up by merchant and planter supporters of the new regime, whose officers were hand-picked to secure it. Both restorationists and radicals attacked the cabinet for its police repression and surveillance, both of which were in full cry by late 1831. On 4 February 1832, the exaltado Teófilo Otoni, one of Rodrigues Torres’s former students, was calling for new elections to an assembly empowered to reform the Constitution. In the repression that followed, his paper, Sentinela do Serro, folded. The cabinet’s opposition, restorationist and radical, became desperate. An exaltado coup attempt took place 3 April 1832 and was stifled. Then, the cabinet foiled a caramurú military coup on 17 April. Exaltado revolts were smothered elsewhere, as well. In Recife, for example, there were radical risings in May, September, and November of 1831. In Salvador, radical risings in September and October 1832 also took place, and there were exaltado risings in Pará and in Maranhão (both in São Luís and the hinterland). Radicals were not the only ones, however. In Ceará’s sertão a restorationist rebellion broke out and spread throughout the hinterlands of neighboring provinces, gaining particular strength in Pernambuco (where it smoldered from 1832 to 1835).40 The sense of danger remained particularly strong in Rio, however, and it increased after the failed coup of April 1832 and the opening of the legislative session in May. Vasconcelos, a key figure in the cabinet’s call for protecting the established order, was repeatedly savaged in the press for alleged incompetence as minister of finance. He finally resigned his portfolio on 10 May 1832.41 This resignation is a curious one, and may point directly towards the cabinet’s sense of peril. It is doubtful the resignation had to do with opposition at-

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tacks. Vasconcelos always gave better than he got in such exchanges. The record, however, is obscure. The Jornal do Commercio claimed that Vasconcelos stepped down temporarily because he was gravely ill. His place was taken in the interim by Rodrigues Torres. However, it is worth noting that by this time the cabinet was under great pressure. It became clear in April 1832 that the caramurús had reached out to the exaltados in an unusual alliance to overthrow the administration. Clearly, extraordinary measures would have to be taken and, perhaps, Vasconcelos was opposed to those Feijó and others in the party preferred. It was not a time when the cabinet might have been willing to entertain internal differences, particularly with a chief of Vasconcelos’s distinction. While the cabinet had enjoyed a majority in key Chamber votes during the session of 1831 (nearly 50 to the opposition’s 15), the early signs in the Chamber sessions of 1832 were that the moderado cabinet’s support was slipping fast. On 12 May, on a crucial vote, the cabinet’s majority was only 39 to 30, and the opposition support in the gallery had to be threatened. Under such circumstances, Vasconcelos’s illness may have been an excuse to purge a minister who was accustomed to lead and whose health, while obviously poor, had never (and would never) separate him from political leadership. Certainly, as we shall see, he did not take a prominent position supporting the radical measures that Feijó and his supporters among the moderados undertook subsequently.42 Over June and July 1832, the opposition in the Chamber, clearly furious with the grinding repression of the cabinet and its supporters, was rumored to be planning another coup as in April; and, again, it was to be a restorationist one, in which the child emperor’s tutor (Dom Pedro I’s old advisor and minister, José Bonifácio [de Andrada e Silva] [1763–1838]) and his brother in the Chamber (Antônio Carlos [Ribeiro de Andrada Machado e Silva] [1773–1845]) were alleged to figure. An attempt to oust José Bonifácio from the Quinta da Bôa Vista failed, stymied by a vote in the restorationist dominated Senate.43 That took place 10 July 1832. It proved bitterly frustrating to Feijó and his supporters among the moderados. Between 28 and 29 July, the moderado leadership met and debated a response; Feijó’s supporters had the majority, and they decided upon a counter coup. The decision was taken in private meetings; it must have reminded many of the meeting held at the same place only fifteen months or so earlier. There, at the Chácara da Floresta, in March 1831, the liberal opposition leadership had worked out the ultimatum sent to the emperor which had led to the abdication shortly afterward. The chácara was just outside of the old city, a short walk from the Chamber on the Rua da Ajuda, named after the Ajuda convent nearby, and situated on the sloping edge of the Morro do Castello. The place was owned by Padre [José] Custódio Dias, a prominent mineiro moderado and staunch ally of Feijó. One imagines they felt sure that

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yet another fateful turn in the nation’s history had been taken. The cabinet, it was decided, would resign and then pressure the regents to quit as well, using the excuse of the ongoing coup crisis, exacerbated by the cabinet’s retreat. Then, they decided, a motion would be raised in the Chamber calling for a vote to transform the Chamber into a national assembly to carry out radical constitutional reform. The threat of a restorationist coup and frustration with the Senate had convinced Feijó and his closest allies in the party of the need to adopt Teófilo Otoni’s radical reforms, shifting the government dramatically to the left. Otoni’s reforms called for decentralizing the state and changing the three regents to one nationally-elected regent (garnering provincial support for greater autonomy and radical support for the United States model of a federal state and elected president), destroying the Senate (bastion of the restorationists’ party), and disbanding the Council of State (symbol and instrument of the monarch’s hegemony as the moderating power).44 Not all of the moderado leaders were willing to throw in with this dramatic radicalization, not even among the mineiros who were such a key group. Indeed, as alluded to earlier, Vasconcelos was opposed; he refused to support the growing radicalization among the cabinet’s supporters months before and was consequently excluded from the planning on the Rua da Ajuda. He was not alone in his opposition, however. Among the most prominent of the liberal opposition of the 1820s was Honório [Hermeto Carneiro Leão] (1801–1856). Honório had taken a leading role in presenting the March 1831 ultimatum to the emperor, when that had been put together at the chácara the year before. Now, he stepped back. The son of a military man whose family had settled in Paracatú in Minas in the eighteenth century, Honório had left to study in Coimbra, perhaps backed by a rich merchant uncle in Rio. After taking his law degree (1825), Honório had returned, married his uncle’s daughter, Maria Henriqueta Neto Carneiro Leão, and taken up politics and his uncle’s business affairs, which were typical of the Rio-Minas commerce, focusing on slave trading and money lending in Minas and in the new planting frontier in the serra. A judge in Minas by 1826, he also served as a judge in Rio; his local connections in both places multiplied. He knew [Bernardo] Belisário [Soares de Sousa], Rodrigues Torres’s brother-in-law, from Coimbra. Belisário shared another common connection with Honório; their families both came from Paracutú. Along with Belisário and Evaristo, Honório was elected to the Chamber in the crucial Legislature of 1830 (Vasconcelos, elected in 1826, was the acknowledged mineiro leader). Honório’s courage and presence quickly brought him to the opposition’s first rank, in which mineiro liberals were central.45 If, in the 1831 meeting, Honório had emerged as a leader, now, in the same place, he apparently decided to hold back. He watched as the events planned by

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Feijó and the others at the chácara unfolded during the following day, 30 July. Word of the cabinet’s decision to resign and that of the regents to follow suit were quickly followed by the appointment of an ad hoc committee in the Chamber, designated to issue an opinion on the formal presentation of the motion for a national assembly. After a lunch recess at two in the afternoon, the committee came back to the hall. After their return, events began to pick up. It was just past the time of day when the Chamber usually adjourned—about four in the afternoon, in a heating context in which officers of various Rio parish units of the National Guard were increasing the pressure by alerting the Chamber to the city’s destabilizing milieu. They demanded that the Chamber act to save the nation, as night approached. The ad hoc committee then called for the vote on a national assembly. The debate began, and counter moves to adjourn instead, made by the restorationists or moderados anxious at the clear danger, were rapidly defeated. The moment for the decisive vote had come. Then, before others among the moderados could begin to speak on behalf of the vote, Honório rose from his bench. Never noted for literary grace or rhetorical finesse, he spoke for only a few moments. With cutting logic, he pointed to the undeniable fact that the vote on a national assembly was both unconstitutional and unnecessary. He called, instead, for a constitutional solution to the issue of reforms. He urged the regents to remain, thus preserving public security, and rapid but constitutional measures to speed up the process of reform. The key phrases in his comments preceded the immediate measures he suggested. The phrases were simple. Referring to the Constitution of 1824, he argued “Let us not violate it, since it is our only safeguard. I conclude by stating that in defending the legal order and obedience to my principles, I do true service to my fatherland and to my friends.”46 This speech, given in perhaps five minutes and made in the growing darkness of the Chamber, brought on a debate of two days’ length. As it turned out, however, Honório’s first blow was the fatal one. The coup was foiled. It was the moderados’ decisive moment. Afterward, the party, already wounded by Vasconcelos’ resignation, began a slow process of weakening and dissolution that would linger four years. During this time, the moderados were a party that often seemed held together only by a slipping grasp on power, by fear of their opposition, and by the word and political skills of Evaristo. No period is more confusing nor more significant to what followed, as we shall see.47 Indeed, within three days of Honório’s speech, the regents appointed a cabinet of conservative, restorationist hue, in a sudden, sharp reversal towards the vanished order of the First Reign. It could not last. Though the moderados were now divided, they remained the Chamber majority; thus, lacking support, the new cabinet soon fell; it became known derisively as the Cabinet of Forty Days.

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Honório headed the moderado cabinet that replaced it, but his own position among his old political friends had become difficult; personal and political differences made his new leadership ephemeral. In fact, in the aftermath of the failed coup of 1832, such moderado divisions only grew and became more bitter, and were reflected in the cabinet’s membership. Ministers resigned and were replaced in rapid succession from 1832 to 1835. This cabinet’s greatest successes would be survival, a reformist political program, and the defeat of the restorationists in Rio, particularly the 1833 removal one of their most prestigious leaders, José Bonifácio, the boy emperor’s guardian. One minister seems to have been most dominant in this tormented cabinet’s affairs; indeed, he held three portfolios (justice, empire, and foreign affairs) at one time or another during this administration. In many ways the enigma of this era and that which followed, this minister was Aureliano [de Sousa e Oliveira Coutinho] (1800–1855). Aureliano was a fluminense and an 1825 Coimbra graduate, son of a woman of distinguished fluminense plantation stock and an officer who was the protégé of Dom João VI. Aureliano had served as a judge in Minas and married a merchant’s daughter. Although he had been a deputy for Minas in the 1820s, he was the son of a royal protégé and had already enjoyed the particular favors of Dom Pedro I. Thus, he played no part in the abdication; indeed, he was provincial president of São Paulo at the time. Whatever his personal loyalty to the first emperor, however, Aureliano put it aside, and committed to the new dispensation. A man of great capacity and charm, his ascent was rapid. He served the moderados in key positions at Court in the immediate aftermath of the first emperor’s departure, defending the new regime against the destabilization threatened by restorationist conspiracy. Clearly in Feijó’s fraction of the moderados, he apparently had their support and, after the disaster of 1832, was appointed to the unstable, moderado cabinet that succeeded the Cabinet of Forty Days that year. Newly risen as a moderado chieftain, soon Aureliano’s worst enemy was not among the restorationists, but among displaced moderado rivals, most particularly, Vasconcelos. Aureliano and Vasconcelos may well have disliked each other in earlier years. Aureliano, as a protégé of Dom Pedro I, had not been in the liberal opposition and had nonetheless successfully been elected (1830) in Vasconcelos’s mineiro redoubt. Moreover, Aureliano had been appointed Feijó’s police chief the year (1832) Vasconcelos and Feijó had had their falling out. Finally, as minister in 1832–35, Aureliano was obviously part of the Feijó fraction and made a political alliance with the liberal reformists associated with Feijó and with [Antônio Pinto] Chichorro [da Gama ](1800–1887), another liberal with mineiro support, who was appointed minister of empire in 1833–1835. It was with Chichorro that Aureliano adroitly managed the triumphant ouster of

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José Bonifacio, in 1833. Such success, both in Minas and in the Court, had apparently drawn Vasconcelos’s hatred. Certainly, Vasconcelos and Aureliano were soon locked in a desperate battle of accusation and recrimination over past and present policies, particularly those related to finance, as Vasconcelos struggled to return to power and leadership among the moderados and seemingly saw Aureliano, in power and with a mineiro political base, as a key rival. Indeed, Vasconcelos, who, as we shall see, expected a portfolio in exchange for supporting the Feijó fraction in 1834, blamed his disappointment on Aureliano, just as he blamed Aureliano for the frustration of his Senate ambitions that same year. Nor was Aureliano the only moderado whom Vasconcelos sought to topple. After 1832, Vasconcelos also disputed the domination of mineiro politics with Honório, successfully sapping the younger man’s position in Minas and in the Chamber. It was Vasconcelos who, through rumor and accusations of treason, had compelled Honório to resign his portfolio (14 May 1833) and rebuild his provincial political base. Indeed, the moderado cabinet of 1832–1835, wounded and limping from its constant resignations and the moderado leadership rivalries and policy disputes with which it was associated, suggests dramatically the disarray of the party after July 1832. The cabinet drifted left in an attempt to gain strength against restoration (and to take strength from the radicals), only to increase the divisions among the Chamber moderados over the question of constitutional reforms. Emblematic of moderado implosion, the cabinet was increasingly ineffective. Only the minister of war, Antero José Ferreira de Brito, remained in the cabinet for its entire tenure (13 September 1832 to 16 January 1835), the apolitical Crown servant of what became a politically ambiguous administration.

III. The Crisis of Reform In effect, the crisis over constitutional reform and the associated threat of restoration explain the confusing personal and political relations of those years. Reform and restoration were necessarily related. Many moderados accepted exaltado ideas about destroying the Senate and constraining the monarch’s constitutional role because they feared that the duque de Bragança, after winning the dynastic struggle in Portugal for his daughter, Dona Maria da Glória, would return to Brazil to rule for his son. Such a reversal of fortune would clearly bring with it catastrophe for the moderados as a party and as individuals. Reforms eliminating the Senate and the moderating power and transforming the centralized nature of the state (which facilitated the monarch’s domination of local patronage and affairs), made sense in the face of this possibility. Moreover, the political mobilization of the late 1820s had made the exaltados a political

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force to be reckoned with, both in the Chamber and in the streets. Reformist and lusophobic harangues were commonplace in 1831 and 1832 in the debates, the streets, and the press, and a failure to address reforms could lead to national destabilization and, very possibly, secessionist rebellions.48 Thus, although Honório and the majority who voted with him in 1832 stopped Feijó’s radical coup, they only delayed the debates about the reforms. The radical agenda dominated Chamber and national politics until 1834. On 18 October 1832, the Chamber which had backed Honório’s defense of constitutionalism voted a law initiating constitutional reform powers for deputies to be elected in 1833 for the sessions of 1834–1837. These elections, held in March 1833, returned a very strong moderado majority. However, given the disarray of the party, this did not mean that there were not very significant divisions already at hand. Despite this election supporting the contested leadership associated with a vindication of reformism, events would prove that the more conservative tendencies rallied by Honório in 1832 were very present indeed. Nor was Honório the only one who appealed to them.49 As indicated earlier, by 1833, Vasconcelos began to attempt prying his old allies in the moderado leadership from power and influence. By late 1833, he became the pen behind O Sete d’Abril, a political paper criticizing the moderado cabinet, particularly Aureliano. He also began to attack Evaristo, whose political influence in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro and Minas was formidable and the key to party control and support for the cabinet and for the moderados loyal to Feijó (who had retained enough political support after 1832 to ascend to the Senate for Rio de Janeiro in 1833). Vasconcelos’s pressure and his established political strength finally led to an 1834 attempt to coopt him by Feijó’s dominant fraction. The moderado chieftains around Feijó apparently overcame their personal difficulties with Vasconcelos as they contemplated the party’s disarray and the crucial session of 1834. Vasconcelos remained one of the Chamber’s foremost orators, retained enormous political influence in and out of the Chamber, and was recognized as the best legislative mind of the era. If Feijó and the others wanted to pursue reform, they could use Vasconcelos to draft and defend the legislation in the Chamber. Certainly, they did not need his continued opposition. Vasconcelos, in turn, anxious about the course of reform, frustrated by his exile from power, allowed himself to be wooed back into party ranks, believing a portfolio would be offered to him in exchange.50 Others, increasingly disenchanted with the moderado chieftains and their reformist direction, were not reconciled in similar fashion. In the elections of 1833, Evaristo had been the chief architect of victory, organizing moderado slates in the key provinces of Minas and Rio de Janeiro (these two provinces alone sent 30 deputies to the Chamber, nearly a third of the 105 who sat there)

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and promoting the moderado candidates from the influential Aurora Fluminense. Evaristo was overjoyed to organize a victory in which representatives of the old baixada families took their seats as moderados. Chief among them was Rodrigues Torres. Like Honório and Vasconcelos, Rodrigues Torres remained within the moderado party after July 1832. Indeed, he served as minister of navy from November 1832 to just before the debates of 1834. Perhaps he resigned then because of misgivings about those reforms. Nonetheless, he remained a moderado, as so many troubled by the reforms did, even as late as 1836. For men like Honório and Rodrigues Torres, just as for Vasconcelos, there was simply no other choice. With their political ideas and their past partisanship, there was no other party they could have gone to—neither the restorationists nor the radicals were a possibility, and, until 1836, those were the only organized alternatives. Vasconcelos’s late 1833 move away from the moderados had started talk of another party but had ended with his cooptation back into moderado ranks in 1834. So, too, both Rodrigues Torres and Honório returned to the Chamber of 1834 as moderados—but not as supporters of the radical reforms. As veteran liberal oppositionists of the late 1820s, they supported parliamentary, representative government and a monarch constrained by a constitution, but they were unwilling to decentralize the state or weaken the monarch. Yet, for the most part, they did not speak up in 1834. During the months of the debate, the fear of a restorationist coup was nearly palpable in the Chamber and the streets of the Court and the successful decentralized federal model associated with the United States and its republic was being proposed.51 Silent through much of the debate, which was largely fought out between Evaristo and Vasconcelos on the one side, and prominent restorationists and radicals on the other, such moderado dissidents seemingly refrained from talking, possibly so as not to be seen as moderado traitors and tainted as restorationists in a moment of great danger to the regime. Nonetheless, their sentiments could be glimpsed.52 On one occasion, on 16 July 1834, Rodrigues Torres could not bear to keep silent when a radical called for the actual abolition of the Monarchy. He rose from his bench to state I am profoundly convinced that it is appropriate for us, that it is necessary for us, to sustain the Monarchy in Brazil. It is necessary to sustain the Monarchy . . . because the throne of Senhor Dom Pedro II has been the anchor of salvation that has delivered us from political storms and shipwrecks. It is necessary to sustain the Monarchy because the throne of Senhor Dom Pedro II will continue to be the standard around which all Brazilians must join together, all patriots who desire to see the unity of the Empire maintained and to promote its grandeur. It is necessary to sustain constitutional monarchy because it is the only form of government compatible with our cultural formation [educação], with our habits, with our customs, with even our prejudices. In sum, it is

54 / The Threat of Revolution and the Reactionary Mobilization necessary to sustain the Monarchy because to that one can wed all of the liberty we can and desire to enjoy.53

So strong was the radical pressure to reform, however, that most of the arguments against the most extreme proposals were made by the reform legislation’s chief author, Vasconcelos. He found that the draft proposal that he himself had written was taken over by a more radical committee which apparently sought to reduce the executive to an instrument of the Chamber and to weaken its powers, as well. It was a shift towards a weakened, decentralized state under parliamentary control which Vasconcelos argued was a ridiculous adaptation of American ideas, ideas rejected in the United States itself and completely unsuitable to Brazil: in the United States everything was harmonized to establish the best federal system possible; in Brazil, such harmony does not exist. . . . We, with so many characteristics contrary to federation, do we have the authority to make so considerable a reform? Won’t this be very dangerous? I don’t think it appropriate for anyone to oppose the direction in which the century is moving, but, nonetheless, I don’t want to make such leaps forward that we go backward, instead of producing the effects civilization expects; in such affairs, the most appropriate thing to do is to follow experience, which avoids such leaps . . . why experiment with such theories at the expense of the Brazilian people? . . . it is appropriate to pay attention to our degree of civilization.54

Perhaps only a moderado whose liberal and reformist credentials were so impeccable would have had the courage to make these points at the time. Yet, even he, the acknowledged leader of the Chamber’s liberal opposition in the 1820s, was called an absolutist for his pains. His own reaction against the reforms doubtless began in these debates, but, perhaps weakened by his enduring political ambition, he stood with the solid majority of his party, and he voted for the legislation.55 The Additional Act, as the legislation was called, was less radical than Vasconcelos and others feared but clearly measures the highwater mark of liberal reform in early nineteenth-century Brazil. Together with judicial reforms passed earlier on (which liberalized criminal penalization, introduced juries at the most local level, and established the election of local judges), it undermined the traditionally authoritarian and centralized practices the colonial regime had passed on to the Monarchy. It enlarged the powers of the provincial assemblies considerably, at the expense of the national government and not least by the lack of clear boundaries between the two. It created a single regent elected by national vote every four years.56 It suppressed the Council of State, thus effectively crippling the monarch’s moderating power (which could not be exercised without it).57 Monarchy itself was spared, as was the Senate, but the victories of the moderado reformists and the radicals were clear. The vote sustaining the re-

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forms passed by 64 to 20. The minority in opposition was a telling one; it included restorationists, radicals, and dissident moderados, an odd alliance presaging much to follow. On its face, however, the session of 1834 was clearly a triumph for the Feijó reformist moderados of the cabinet.58 Yet, it was not an enduring success. Indeed, it spurred the opposition of key leaders almost immediately. Even in this radicalized milieu and with the threat of a restorationist coup in the air, both Rodrigues Torres and Honório voted against the act. In the following months, Vasconcelos, deeply troubled by the turn the reforms had taken, denied the portfolio his ambition demanded, and confronted with the possibility of Feijó’s election as the first single regent, cut himself off from the moderado reformists and went into open opposition. The common antipathy of these three renegade moderados with respect to both the reforms and Feijó led to their emergence as reactionary leaders as early as the end of the 1834 legislative session, on 1 October.59 However, while this explains the emergence of the reactionary leaders, it does little to explain how they were able to organize a majority party in the Chamber and the Empire over the next few years. After all, most moderados in the Chamber had accepted the support and direction of Evaristo, Feijó’s champion, in the election of 1833. Victorious in that election, which had turned on the issue of reforms, they had continued to accept the dominant moderado faction’s lead, and voted for the Additional Act. Now, in late 1834, there was every reason to expect them, and those voters whom they influenced back in their provinces, to support the election of Feijó on the set date of 7 April 1835. How did the renegade moderado leaders successfully begin to challenge the moderado hegemony among the politically active? What accounts for the apparent ebb of political momentum among the reformists of 1834? Three seminal factors explain this. First, one factor was an attempt orchestrated by Honório to defeat Feijó in the upcoming election for sole regent. Honório began this by at least 9 October 1834. Just as deputies and senators were making their way back from the Court at the beginning of the season of heat and rain, Honório wrote to one of the most prominent liberals of the 1820s liberal opposition, [José da] Costa Carvalho (1796–1860). Costa Carvalho was a Bahian magistrate with a Coimbra degree who had become politically prominent as a deputy, a journalist, and a law professor in São Paulo. There, he had married into the most powerful clutch of planter families in the province. The combination of established political leadership and planter wealth was a formidable one, and he had been one of the three regents elected by the Chamber in 1831. His was a perfect balance: his political credentials as a liberal were impeccable, while his social and political rank offered every assurance for those fearing radicalism.60 Honório sought to woo him into opposing Feijó in the elec-

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tion; he failed. However, these early letters make clear Honório’s sense of political possibility and his pragmatic skills at opportune alliances. They show, for one thing, his capacity to overlook their previous enmity in order to consider Vasconcelos in the struggle contemplated. Most intriguing, he had already begun to sound out and bind together key elements among the most conservative of the moderados’ established opposition in the Chamber. Honório began his letter to the Costa Carvalho by noting the danger of an electoral “triumph of the Same traitor who made the 30 July [1832 coup attempt] to ignominiously tear down the Regency which had appointed him. . . .” Honório then went on to state that Feijó’s opposition wants to win, something they think difficult and perhaps impossible with any other candidate but a member of the present Regency. . . . The Cavalcantis, Araújo Lima, Barreto, Galvão, who are charged with . . . naming the candidates for whom the North’s opposition is to vote, promise and commit to adopt Your Excellency as the principal candidate if Your Excellency . . . presents yourself [as a candidate] . . . . I am persuaded that Your Excellency [thus] would achieve the majority of the votes in . . . Bahia, Sergipe, Pernambuco and Paraíba, beside many others in the . . . North and South. . . . If Your Excellency comes, it is necessary to negotiate with Vasconcellos; he opposes Feijó and his admirers, and he will probably campaign for himself against Feijó. . . . [Still,] he knows that he will not win and that what has lately occurred between them would apparently make any reconciliation difficult; however, . . . if he tells the Mineiros to vote for Senhor Costa Carvalho and himself, or to vote at least for Senhor Costa, then it is completely possible in my judgment that Your Excellency might win, and Feijó lose. . . . Your Excellency must know me well enough, but I will not conclude this letter without saying to you that the support that I want to procure for Your Excellency in the opposition is not from restorationists but rather from those who either for principle or for ambition to rule have opposed the present influences.61

Thus, this factor was a well conceived, rapid plan to provide more conservative moderados and their provincial electorates, as well as elements in the opposition, a viable alternative to Feijó and his more reformist moderado direction. In itself, such planning and negotiation obviously provided the foundation for future alliances in opposition to Feijó and his supporters. Second, another seminal factor was the organization of the key provincial base among reactionaries that came together in the Province of Rio de Janeiro after the Additional Act. This was a combination of personal and provincial loyalties, undergirded by both political affinity and family linkages in the Court and its near hinterland. Doubtless the key figure here was Rodrigues Torres. On 14 October 1834, despite his vote against the 1834 reforms, he was appointed by the moderado cabinet to be the first president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro (now detached from the Court by the Additional Act). Perhaps this was a last attempt of the reformist moderado leadership to retain his support; after all, he

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had a great deal to offer or to deny, given his electoral strength. In 1833, he had been by far the candidate winning most votes in both the province and the city of Rio de Janeiro. If he backed away from the moderados, others might well follow out of confidence in him. The 1835 election to the first fluminense provincial assembly is very suggestive of this. Although Evaristo’s electoral influence remained central, the provincial deputies themselves were often people who would soon shift with Rodrigues Torres towards reaction. Indeed, the new opportunity to meet and work in the assembly was probably crucial to Rodrigues Torres’s political organizing among them. Of the forty provincial assembly deputies who took a seat in the new provincial capital at Niterói, more than a third would later be counted among the reactionaries. Indeed, four would emerge as the reactionaries’ national leaders.62 Rodrigues Torres brought unique strengths to such partisan work. He was followed not only for his past political leadership, ideas, and success, but for his personal position and relations in fluminense provincial society. This sort of thing is crucial to our understanding of the nature of provincial politics. As we have seen, he was the scion of a provincial merchant family and a planter himself; more important, he was also knit by multiple marriages to an extensive clan of significance in the baixada fluminense, the Álvares de Azevedo family. Thus, two of his three brothers-in-law were planters, one was a magistrate, and all were influential in local electoral affairs; moreover, his two planter brothersin-law married two of his own sisters. His family relations have other things to tell us, as well. Among those elected in 1835 to the new fluminense assembly were the husbands of two of his sisters-in-law, [Bernardo] Belisário [Soares de Sousa] (d.1861) and Paulino [José Soares de Sousa] (1807–1866). Belisário was a magistrate who had represented Minas in the Chamber since 1830; now, he would bring his established political skills and contacts to support Rodrigues Torres. Paulino, Belisário’s fraternal nephew, was a more recent acquisition, and had little established political capital to share. However, to trace his early career as it was emerging in this era is to trace precisely the sort of fluminense political organizing at issue. Paulino had been groomed by his father for the law, going to Coimbra, where he met Belisário and made the acquaintance of Honório. Paulino completed his degree in the newly founded law academy at São Paulo in 1832, where his evident judicial capacity earned the protection of the regent, Costa Carvalho, and of Feijó. Between them, he was appointed to successively higher positions in São Paulo’s magistracy. Honório, in the 1833 cabinet, then gave Paulino prime appointments in the Court; there, he apparently met and impressed Rodrigues Torres. This quick ascent was capped by his 1833 marriage into the Álvares de Azevedo family. This, at once, secured his support for Ro-

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drigues Torres and provided him, in turn, with the latter’s protection and Álvares de Azevedo provincial electoral support at precisely the moment before the 1834 beginnings of reaction. It is indicative of the transitional quality of the era that Evaristo, recognizing his potential and the significance of his new connections, sought to insure his loyalty to the dominant moderados through protection. Despite his youth, Paulino was offered a minister’s portfolio (justice) in 1835; he refused it, and merely accepted Evaristo’s support in that year’s election to the new fluminense provincial assembly. The 1835 choice against a moderado ministry and for greater integration into the mobilizing political affairs of Rio de Janeiro suggests the significance of the coalescing fluminense political bloc at the time. Indeed, Paulino’s choice seems to callibrate the rapid political shift towards reaction, and the regional and personal forces at work in it. His appointments and his new family network had opened his eyes to the drift in politics. By 1835, Paulino, already successfully integrated into the familial network led by Rodrigues Torres, accepted Evaristo’s additional support to gain access to the new assembly, where, with his more established kinsmen, he would strengthen his provincial relations and his personal status. Within a year, he had accumulated enough of both to succeed Rodrigues Torres as the province’s second president. In 1841, Paulino recalled he was part of the fluminense reactionary group which publicly broke with the moderados and Feijó, something he described as being done with “friends, and the circle in which I lived,” in 1837. That circle, and those friends, a provincial group that had come together under Rodrigues Torres between 1833 and 1837, comprised the matrix for the reactionary party’s central, fluminense base.63 A third seminal factor in the formation of the reactionary party is perhaps the most decisive: the unexpected death of Dom Pedro, duque de Bragança, in Portugal. While it actually took place on 24 September 1834, before the maneuvering of Honório or the beginning of fluminense reaction around Rodrigues Torres’s leadership, it was not their cause, for a ship only brought the news to Rio on 24 November. Nonetheless, it would add immeasurably to the reactionary shift. As indicated, the duque had been feared as the leader of a restorationist coup during all of the session of 1834. Indeed, it was well known that he was being courted by leaders of the restorationist party in 1833 and his military successes in the Portuguese civil war seemed to portend his triumph in Europe, freeing Dom Pedro to return in arms to Brazil. In November, all of this ended. The Empire’s first monarch had died of tuberculosis shortly after his military and political triumphs in his native kingdom.64 At once, the political firmament shifted. On 3 December 1834, Evaristo wrote that the restorationists would divide based on either conservative or opportunist interests, going to the moderados or their radical opposition, respectively. Doubtless in the expectation of this partisan realignment, and faced with

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Vasconcelos’s public break, Evaristo urged the Sociedade Defensora, the partisan organization of the moderados, to define the party’s political principles, probably as an attempt to marginalize Vasconcelos and other renegades by clarifying the ideological distinctions between liberal reformists and radicals, to attract conservative members of the restorationists.65 In effect, however, he misunderstood the fatality of the 1834 divisions among the moderados. In the end, those restorationists to the right of the moderados who would come over, would come over the shortest distance: to the right wing of the moderados, that is, to their renegade, reactionary fraction. Such restorationists had no taste for Feijó, who had persecuted them unmercifully during his administration in 1831–1832 and remained dominant among moderados since. They certainly had no taste for the radicals in the opposition or the reforms Feijó and his followers had promoted, with their threats to the Senate and the monarchy and the Portuguese, for they were identified with each. The third factor, the death of Bragança, drove restorationists into the arms of the renegade moderados, and provided them with significant support and resources for the emergent party of reaction. These three factors, then, help us to understand the origins of the reactionary shift in the Chamber’s majority after the session of 1834. First, the decision of many more conservative moderados, initially led by Honório, to break with their former reformist moderado allies, grouped around Feijó, and, in the company of conservative elements drawn from the moderados’ opposition, to seek another standard-bearer for the regent’s election in 1835. Second, the mobilization of many fluminense provincial leaders under the direction of Rodrigues Torres, whose political ideas and kinship network, strengthened by the provincial presidency and the political medium of the first fluminense assembly, provided a successful basis for organized reaction between 1834 and 1837. Third, the death of Bragança in 1834, thus eliminating the raison d’être of the restorationists, and freeing them to embrace, and to be embraced by, the renegade fraction of the moderados. All three factors engendered processes which were mutually reinforcing, and all three processes were crucially strengthened by the election of Feijó and the experiences associated with his reign. Now, let us turn to that regime. Only by bringing these factors into play with the context of Feijó’s triumph and fall can we attempt to demonstrate how all these beginnings came together in a new party.

IV. The Emergence of the Reactionary Party Sometime in late 1834 or early 1835, Honório, having failed to lure Costa Carvalho into leading electoral opposition to Feijó, returned to negotiations with conservative elements in the moderados’ Chamber opposition. In a bid to ally

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with them to defeat Evaristo’s political influence and Feijó’s moderado and radical following, he made a desperate tactical offer to support the candidacy of [Antônio Francisco de Paula e] Holanda [Cavalcanti de Albuquerque] (1797–1863). Holanda was one of the great orators of the opposition to Feijó and the moderados in 1831–1832, and had been a chief among them ever since. Scion of one of the oldest landholding families among the cane planters of Pernambuco, Holanda, although an officer and professor at the Military School in Rio, retained enormous influence in the Northeast and figured as a great political chieftain in his divided province. Although his attitude towards the Court was ambivalent when it came to defending the local influence of his provincial oligarchy, he was, nonetheless, a former minister under Dom Pedro I, a visceral monarchist, and an intransigent defender of the unreformed constitution.66 As his first letter to Costa Carvalho shows, Honório obviously hoped that Costa Carvalho and Vasconcelos could combine successfully against Evaristo’s influence in Minas (the largest single provincial delegation of votes). He doubtless thought that Rodrigues Torres could do the same in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, and that Rodrigues Torres and Holanda could bring in the opposition conservatives and restorationists who dominated the Court and Holanda the northeastern cane planters, moderado and oppositionist alike. In the end, Honório’s judgment was nearly vindicated. During the electoral struggle, the recent partisan animosities and loyalties were often overcome, but apparently not soon or often enough. In fact, the opposition to Feijó split; it did not rally entirely behind Holanda. Vasconcelos, though he supported Holanda, may not have done so early enough or with enough coordination. In the event, Feijó won, but the opposition to him and the reforms was such that he did so only by a plurality of 2,826 electoral votes; Holanda won 2,251. Indeed, Feijó’s plurality was overshadowed by the majority, a total of 5,082, won by his divided opposition. Most of these votes were won by two former regents who were allies of the renegades, Costa Carvalho and Francisco de Lima e Silva, and by Holanda and [Pedro de] Araújo Lima (1794–1870). Araújo Lima, a member of the conservative element in the moderados’ opposition, was another pernambucano cane planter, deputy, and Coimbra graduate (1819), who had been a First-Reign minister, as well.67 Thus, Feijó’s narrow victory was one that foreshadowed defeat. He won not because of the strength of support for moderado liberal reform, but because the reaction to such reform had not yet been successfully unified. So it was that Feijó took power, on 12 October 1835. He had only a minority mandate and very powerful enemies. Both became rapidly clear in Rio, where they were soon reflected in the Chamber. The reaction originating in 1834 and indicated in the 1835 election would now begin its phase of successful partisan organization among deputies. The national context is crucial here. The percep-

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tion and reality of state power were probably weaker in 1835 than they had ever been in the new nation’s history. For four years, the authority of the Crown had leeched out under the heavy rain of abdication, a dependent regency, political divisions in the dominant institution (the Chamber), and ideological conflict. By 1834, with the Additional Act, Crown authority had also reached a low tide with the decentralizing impact of a series of reforms. At that point, the great landholding families in the far-flung provinces contemplated the culmination of the new liberal era, begun with the judicial reforms of 1827, 1830, and 1832. Decentralization created greater competition for local domination and patronage, particularly at the provincial level. In the Northeast and the South, secessionism would haunt the nights of the provincial presidents sent out from the Court. Moreover, the repeated ideological and legislative attacks on the state’s authority drained away the legitimacy of Crown magistrates and provincial presidents and was beginning to unravel local political order from its imperial legitimacy and constraints.68 For a half-continent whose local rulers had looked to the monarch and the Court for both direction and ordered authority, this posed new opportunities for liberty of action and new dangers of subaltern and rival elite-faction violence. In January of 1835, the rival partisan violence typical of many provinces, particularly in the Northeast and Amazonia, took on a new character in the province of Pará. An exaltado coup metamorphosed into a class and race war that tinctured the Amazon with blood from the heart of the continent to Belém in six years of pitiless bush warfare. Perhaps a fifth of the population perished. In Rio Grande do Sul, a ten-year war of secession began. In Salvador da Bahia, Muslim captives attempted to take the city in a planned uprising, the latest and most serious slave revolt in Bahia’s early nineteenth century.69 The threat of slave revolt and the fear of it were quickly contained. Not so the anxiety to buy more captives. The middle 1830s were precisely the era when, under the weakened imperial governments of the divided and besieged moderados, a great contraband trade in African peoples began. As we have seen, by 1830 the wealthy negreiros of the legal trade apparently withdrew from active African commerce and invested in lands, took titles, and became men of affairs in money lending and urban real estate. One also suspects, however, that they loaned capital, connections, and expertise to the new Portuguese merchants willing to start up the trade out of Angola again. The purchase of people spurted in 1835; it would gush by 1837. In all, the contraband trade brought in more than 700,000 people before it ended (c.1850). Most were sold in Rio (perhaps 69.2%), swallowed up in the expanding fluminense plantations or trekking in to the related farming and pastoral labor in Minas. And, although planters, particularly in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, were compelled to buy

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thousands and thousands of people to plant and cut and process their cane and, increasingly, to plant and pick their coffee, they had growing concerns. They must have been worried about a state whose instability offered little security for the increasing investments and risks at play. And one can imagine that they wanted statesmen willing to support the trade with Africa.70 Among the reactionaries, they found such men. In the newly founded fluminense provincial assembly’s second session (1837), a committee headed up by José Clemente [Pereira] (1787–1854) petitioned the Chamber to repeal the hated abolition of the trade imposed on the Empire of Brazil by Dom Pedro I and the English. In the Chamber itself, Vasconcelos, old enemy of the trade’s abolition in the 1820s, had already spoken out for the resumption of the legal trade in July 1835. These were statesmen fluminense and mineiro merchants and planters could support.71 Perhaps matters would have been different had Feijó faced easier crises. He did not. The caretaker cabinet of early 1835, as well as the four cabinets Feijó appointed during his reign (12 October 1835 to 18 September 1837), had not the strength to overcome the revolts nor the confidence to do so. Feijó despaired of repressing the revolts or the liberal call for federation, and was frustrated by the growing opposition of reactionaries in the Chamber which obstructed his failing efforts, north or south. Both in the Court and the provinces, the threat to the established order was patent. In writing to one of his provincial presidents in January 1836, the regent was clearly distraught: I am a cardboard regent, a bystander at what is perhaps the burial of Brazil. The anarchy which has been planted has grown and is progressing in the shadow of Parliament, it has undermined the edifice, which totters on all sides and falls. Humanity and duty oblige me to greater efforts to see if Pará can be conquered, saving our happy Maranhão from contagion. . . . I have greater concerns in the South, because if the [idea of the] American Federation catches on there, the evil could in little time turn contagious and farewell Monarchy. . . . My good Antônio Pedro, we lack laws, we lack strength, and we lack the rest! And will your Parliament be capable of paying attention and planning as circumstances demand? I will never expect so.72

It is in this milieu that the renegade moderados slowly worked to marshal an opposition majority in the Chamber. The achievement is remarkable, even in this context of Feijó’s failure. Feijó was still the regent. He and his ministers still had a great deal of patronage to dispense and repression to mete out. Feijó also retained the key support of Evaristo, whose oratory, journalism, and electoral influence remained formidable.73 Yet, over two years, Vasconcelos, Honório, and Rodrigues Torres, in their new alliance with key figures from among the former opposition in the Court and the Northeast, successfully cultivated and harvested a majority vote. Let us reconstruct how this was done; for this reac-

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tionary majority brought into being both of the great parties of the Second Reign. While the national milieu of instability, danger, and economic expansion is important to take into account, it only provides us with a general notion of perspective, of fear, of a desire for recovered stability. It does not provide us with a specific, historical understanding of how partisan organization took place. In these terms, the centrality of fluminense affairs, already introduced, is crucial. It is well known that the party traditionally called the Conservative Party had its hard kernel in the Province of Rio de Janeiro.74 Accordingly, one must focus there. In terms of traditional political influence (the established capacity for garnering the support of others) and position (Crown appointments and honors), the Court and the baixada are the best places to start. As has been shown, in the first chapter and this one, the Court, during the early Regency, was dominated by Portuguese-born merchants and Luso-Brazilian members of the upper Crown hierarchy (bureaucracy and courtiers), the sort of people exemplified in the families connected to Brás Carneiro Leão or to Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho e Silva. As such, they had often opposed the moderados, both because they were threatened by the lusophobia common to the exaltados and the moderados or because they resented their loss of power at the hands of the moderados. The natural affinities of such people were with the baixada, where most had kin or investments. Such links were buried, at least politically, by the moderados’ triumph in 1831. The baixada planter families, such as those of the Álvares de Azevedos or the Carneiro da Silvas, either bided their time or threw their support to the moderados in the very early Regency. Doubtless they did so because they were confident in Rodrigues Torres’ presence in the government and anxiously interested in stabilizing and influencing the fragile monarchy’s new administration. It is significant that Evaristo was clearly anxious over this support; it was crucial to the 1833 elections, which were effectively a referendum on moderado rule and leadership.75 The serra, the reader may recall, also tended to support moderados. Although, like many baixada planters, serra planters might have ancestral and commercial links to the Portuguese merchants dominating Rio, they were often Brazilian born themselves and, particularly among those of mineiro origin, had often been denied leverage at Rio during the First Reign and were interested in wresting some from the more established families in the Court. These were people for whom Vasconcelos, Evaristo, and even Honório could speak.76 However, for both political and demographic reasons, the serra was less important in party history than either the baixada or the Court. History has always suggested that coffee planters were crucial to the Conservative Party, and

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has emphasized the correlation between the expansion of coffee in the serra and the emergence of that party in the 1830s. This correlation is coincidental and serra support anachronistic as a causal explanation. Coffee’s expansion was concurrent with the party’s origins, to be sure, and its planters’ support was and would be important, but serra coffee planters were relatively insignificant in both the origins of the party and in the origins of its leadership. Both of these lay in the baixada and Court circles traditionally associated with the production and commerce of sugar and slaves.77 Brazilian elections were indirect in this era (and would be for most of the Monarchy). At this time (1833), citizens resident in a parish and qualified by gender, age, and financial independence voted for a parish college of electors. These electors, in turn, voted on who would be the province’s deputies to the Chamber; they did so by choosing between all of the candidates competing for the seats in the Chamber allotted their particular province. In the case of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, the number of deputies allotted in 1833 were ten. In the electoral accounts of the time, the parish colleges of electors were grouped under eleven municípios (counties); the analysis here is based on the location of these municípios. In the 1830s, most fluminense electors were concentrated, first, in the Court, and, second, in the municípios of the baixada. The municípios of the serra were a poor third. Specifically, Rio’s electors numbered 254, and the baixada electors numbered 234—the serra’s numbered only 100.78 Thus, simply in terms of electoral strength, lowlands and port had to be the political basis for fluminense power. Moreover, one must reflect that this was a political culture in which lesser, dependent landholders and professionals and middling folk in the towns were either related to, or dependent upon, the great planting or merchant families and deferred to the political direction of their patriarchs. These “influences,” as they were called, looked in turn to the Chamber deputies for direction, because they trusted them. After all, these deputies might be termed organic intellectuals, men who were either the most articulate and educated among their kin or men whom the patriarchs had accepted as their own and elected for their capacity to represent their interests. In 1833, fluminense votes were fiercely disputed between restorationist candidates and moderado candidates; the moderados won the majority, electing an entirely moderado slate with some support from the exaltados. After 1834, half of the fluminense deputies elected to the Chamber in 1833 as moderados shifted, and quite clearly came together in support of the renegade moderado leaders over the key years 1834–1837. In the 1837 election for the next Legislature, at least seven of the ten fluminense deputies were reactionary, demonstrating the growing support of the electorate.79 The reasons for this partisan shift are simple. In June 1833, Evaristo had de-

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fined the opposition to moderados as made up of restorationists, conservatives, and radicals. In the aftermath of the Additional Act and the duque de Bragança’s death, he glimpsed a re-alignment, but erred in his conclusions. Evaristo thought that the moderados would attract the conservatives in the opposition and he failed to foresee the fission of the moderados. The restorationist minority were no longer separated by past loyalties to Bragança, and they and the conservative oppositionists shared not only old social and economic ties with prominent renegade moderados, but ideological and political ones. They were all staunch monarchists and opposed to the 1834 reforms. They were all hostile to Feijó and to the radicals in and out of the old moderado party. Thus, as the renegade moderados split away from their old party, they gradually made a new one with these conservative and restorationist opposition members. The gradual emergence of this natural coalition is clear. One sees it first in the vote for the sole regent in 1835. Then, Honório first (October 1834) courted the conservative opposition, as seen earlier. Doomed by the lack of a consensus candidate, the electoral interests mobilized nonetheless indicates the potential for the coalition. The gradual transformation of that potential occurred in the developing opposition to Feijó in the Chamber sessions of 1835, 1836, and 1837, and it would be strengthened by both the increasing national threat to order and the leadership towards reaction of the renegade moderado chieftains.80 This reaction, traditionally labeled as such (o Regresso),81was managed and articulated by Vasconcelos, Honório, and Rodrigues Torres, as well as two or three other very significant recent recruits. The careers and politics of these recruits exemplify the emergent reactionary trends and their expression. Among these key recruits was Paulino, as noted earlier. We have noted that although he enjoyed Evaristo’s protection as late as 1835, his 1833 marriage into the Álvares de Azevedo family and his relations with Rodrigues Torres meant that he was early bound socially into the fluminense Regresso. However, connections, though significant in his rise, must be understood in relation to his capacity and his political ideas. Paulino’s position was dramatically strengthened by his particular skills and his distinguished intellectual commitment to the Monarchy in the sense of an ordered, hierarchical society guaranteed by clear and authoritative law. It was his ability to articulate and effect this commitment that was the key to his rapid elevation in the new party. In the fluminense provincial assembly of 1836–1837, Paulino served a rapid apprenticeship with the provincial president, his brother-in-law, Rodrigues Torres, and with a leading oppositionist conservative, José Clemente. He did not come unprepared. As a young magistrate in 1833, he had already studied the confusing impact of the liberal reforms of 1827, 1830, and 1832. Now, he continued this analysis on a key assembly committee with José Clemente and two other former

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opposition conservatives. For all such men, the local implications of the Additional Act of 1834 were of great concern. By 1836, Paulino’s connections, talent, and political skills had ensured early eminence. This was made clear in his appointment as the second president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, succeeding Rodrigues Torres. By this time, he, “his allies,” and his “circle” were clearly moving towards the partisan opposition that surfaced in 1837. He used his presidential position to begin to lay the groundwork for a political network in the serra, allying himself with Francisco de Peixoto Lacerda Werneck (1795–1861), a local National Guard officer. The reader may also recognize Werneck, from Chapter One, as a pioneering coffee planter, scion of a well-established merchant-planter kin network. Paulino promoted Werneck and took him into political confidence as he reached out through Werneck into the planter’s kith and kin in the serra. That same year, 1836, after being voted into the Chamber, Paulino apprenticed again, and this time under Vasconcelos, to whom he afterwards referred as his mestre. He worked with him in the key Chamber committee of the Regresso, the Provincial Assemblies Committee, which Vasconcelos and Paulino used to draft a counterreform against the liberal reforms of 1834: the Interpretation of the Additional Act. The latter would be the centerpiece of reactionary legislation over the next several years. This, then, is how Paulino’s ascent illustrates the strands and interweave of the new party. Paulino climbed up on the political base he had in baixada kin and, through the talent and political perspective which had made him attractive to that kin, reached out from there to new allies he garnered through political patronage and shared views in the serra, while simultaneously collaborating in the leading circles of the fluminense assembly and the Chamber to champion the legislative counter-reform central to the Regresso.82 Another illustrative recruit to the emerging party was the elder statesman with whom Paulino had worked in the fluminense assembly, José Clemente. A Portuguese, José Clemente had begun his Brazilian career as a magistrate with a Coimbra degree and guerrilla experience in Portugal’s French War (1808–1814). In the independence movement in Rio, he had served as a key intermediary between Portuguese merchants and Brazilian liberals and as one of the foremost leaders of constitutional monarchy in Brazil. Exiled for his liberalism in 1822–1823, José Clemente returned in political triumph; he was elected a deputy in 1826 and returned to the emperor’s favor and an 1827 appointment as Intendant of Police in the Court. Indeed, his loyalty to the monarch was rewarded with two cabinet appointments (1828, 1829) during the First Reign, and led to the exaltado attacks upon him in 1831–1832. His political strength among his old Rio constitutency remained firm. Elected a deputy in 1830, he rarely appeared in the lusophobic Chamber of the early Regency, and apparently left

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politics briefly in 1833, attending to his private affairs, instead. If anything, these affairs may have strengthened his standing in Rio, for, in 1834, he married a wealthy widow, Engracia Maria da Costa Ribeiro, who brought him a good deal of urban real estate, thirty-one captives, and an enviable amount of interestgathering loans. To his considerable political standing, he had now added great personal wealth and social standing. He had already been elected a member of the Santa Casa de Misericôrdia in 1829, most ancient and prestigious of the port’s religious lay organizations. Now, in 1838, he became the institution’s provedor (steward), a position of supreme, traditional prestige. It was probably at this point, too, that this man of wealth and public piety took steps to become a planter. Thus, it is no surpise that José Clemente was elected to the first Rio de Janeiro provincial assembly in 1836 and to the Chamber, again, as a fluminense deputy in the election of 1837. In both places, working closely with Paulino and with Vasconcelos, he re-emerged into the first rank of national orators and jurisconsults, as a spokesman for the emergent new alliance between the moderados’ former conservative opposition and the renegade moderados associated with Honório, Rodrigues Torres, and Vasconcelos. Doubtless, he was a formidable acquisition of the new party because of his honored past, his long-standing links to the Portuguese merchants of the Court, and his new connections to the Luso-Brazilian planter interests of the province.83 Perhaps it was José Clemente’s 1836 return to politics that brought the party the acquisition of his new son-in-law, Eusébio [de Queirós Coutinho Matoso da Câmara] (1812–1868). The reader may recall Eusébio from Chapter One. Born in Angola, where his family was established in the magistracy and the slave trade, he had been brought up in Brazil. He had been schooled in Rio at the Seminário de São José, as Aureliano and Rodrigues Torres had; however, he had been unable to attend Coimbra as they had done. The hostility of the Portuguese during the independence era had led to the establishment of two academies of law (1827) in Brazil to provide the new Empire with its own schools to prepare its prospective political elite. Eusébio was in the first entering class at the northern academy, then at Olinda, and graduated in 1832. The reader may recall that Eusébio was the son of a Supreme Tribunal judge and was related by marriage to the Luso-African merchant-planter family, Teixeira de Macedo. Eusébio strengthened the prospects born of such connections by remarkable personal attributes; an acclaimed prodigy, he was appointed a judge in the Court the same year as Paulino was, in 1832, and by the same justice minister, Honório, who then, in 1833, named Eusébio chief of Rio’s police. As such, Eusébio succeeded Aureliano (and José Clemente), and crossed paths with Paulino, the intendency’s juiz expediente in 1832. The old Intendencia Geral had just been re-

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formed (by the liberal 1832 Code of Criminal Procedure), and the head of police was now styled chief, rather than intendent. Eusébio was the first. Shortly after this early triumph Eusébio married José Clemente’s new stepdaughter and heir, Maria Custódia Francisca Ribeiro, in 1835. Although as police chief Eusébio had won praise from both wings of the moderados, his political position changed over the mid 1830s. By 1838, he had followed his father-in-law into the fluminense assembly. The prestige of his father and José Clemente, the family tradition of Crown service, his role in maintaining order in the restorationist redoubt of the Court in an era of violence, conspiracy, and political conflict, and his family’s links to the merchant-planter elites of Rio and the serra—all make the transition to the new party of reaction easy to understand. As he retained his police control of the Court at the same time as he entered provincial politics, he was obviously an especially influential and useful recruit.84 If the organic relationship of such men to the fluminense oligarchies of port and province helps us to understand what the reaction meant in Rio de Janeiro, other political leaders must now be mentioned to explain the party’s success nationally. Again, as was the case in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, given the political culture and the moderado electoral success of 1833, we need to understand how such leaders shifted position and how this might then have been reflected in the provinces they represented. In a phrase, we need to see how a change within the Chamber’s leadership led to change among Chamber deputations and, then, out and down into the great provincial families who dominated provincial and local politics and elected the deputies and looked to them for direction and protection. The careful study of the debates and the final vote on the 1834 Additional Act make it clear that even then there was a largely silent Northeastern opposition minority. In the nominal vote of 30 July 1834, which passed the act in the Chamber, they were most of the twenty deputies who stood at their benches in opposition to the liberal reforms. Among them, there were leaders such as [Francisco] Gonçalves Martins (1807–1872) of Bahia and Araújo Lima of Pernambuco, as well as thirteen others from those two key provinces and one from Sergipe. They made up half of all the Northeastern deputies: sixteen voted for the act, sixteen voted against it. Although at least five of the sixteen, Holanda and his brother, Luís [Francisco de Paula] Cavalcanti [de Albuquerque] (d. 1838), as well as the radical Ferreira França brothers, would not support the reactionary opposition forming by 1837, many did. Indeed, in the crucial debates of 1837, in which the reactionary leaders finally achieved a majority following in the Chamber, Northeasterners were among the four orators who led the reactionary advance. Beside Vasconcelos and Rodrigues Torres, the other two were

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[Miguel] Calmon [du Pin e Almeida] (1794–1865) and [Antônio Peregrino] Maciel Monteiro (1804–1868), representing Bahia and Pernambuco, respectively. Combined with Gonçalves Martins and Araújo Lima, these two orators suggest a formidable Northeastern reactionary shift, because all four men had already established themselves as provincial leaders. Gonçalves Martins, as Paulino had, attended Coimbra in the late 1820s, and completed his degree in São Paulo (1830). Son of a wealthy sugar planter, he made his way quickly into the provincial magistracy and the National Guard between 1831 and 1834. In that last year, he was made police chief of Salvador (1834–1837) and entered the Chamber as a suplente (runner-up replacement) in 1833. We have noted Araújo Lima’s background earlier, as one of Feijó’s rivals in the 1835 regent’s election. It speaks to a similar, representative background, combining planter antecedents, a Coimbra education, and early election by his peers. Gonçalves Martins had probably established special respect among the regional elite by repressing a slave revolt in Salvador (1835), credentials enhanced in late 1837 and 1838, in the equally pitiless quashing of the exaltado Sabinada revolt in that same beleaguered port. Araújo Lima’s credentials were already of a national quality by 1837, as a former president of the Chamber and First-Reign minister. Of the two great orators among these Northeastern leaders, Calmon’s stature is similar to Araújo Lima’s. A Bahian, scion of a planting family of seventeenthcentury antecedents, he had taken a doctorate at Coimbra in 1821, been elected by his province to the Constituent Assembly, and represented Bahia again in the Chamber Legislatures of 1826–1830, 1830–1833. He was defeated in the election of 1833, but returned as a suplente in 1837; like José Clemente (and Araújo Lima) he had been a minister of Dom Pedro I. He was considered one of the great orators of his generation, and a diplomat who took pleasure in European refinements and sophisticated amenities. His rival in fame as an orator, Maciel Monteiro, was educated in France (1823–1829) in literature and medicine, though he was noted as a poet more than a physician, and more as a politician after he left clinical practice for the Chamber after the 1833 election. It is difficult to explain his rapid rise save for his early membership in the Sociedade Harmonizadora of Recife, which in the early 1830s brought together the provincial oligarchy and urban conservatives in the face of Pernambuco’s unique mobilization of exaltados. Founded under the auspices of the most established planter oligarchy, Maciel Monteiro might well have found there a particularly important network of protectors; they, in turn, found a superb voice to represent their views with immediate distinction. By the debates of 1837, Maciel Monteiro had completely vindicated such support. Thus, there was not only a significant Northeastern regional cast to the 1834 minority opposition—by 1837, there was a central Northeastern role in the or-

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ganization of the new reactionary majority party in the Chamber. While one cannot know how many of the 41 deputies of the region supported the new party, the prestige and socio-political strength of the Northeastern leaders noted here are very suggestive.85 While reactionary support from the great Northeastern provinces is significant, it must always be recalled that the largest provincial delegation in the Chamber was mineiro. Here, it is also important to remember that both Vasconcelos and Honório were mineiro deputies with great influence in that province, as well as in Rio de Janeiro. Since the beginning of moderado division, in 1832, both men’s influence had been more than balanced by Evaristo’s prestige. As has been shown, the journalist held the party together and won Feijó’s election for him in 1835. Then, Feijó’s champion began to tire. With Feijó’s apparent incapacity to defend the state from rebellion and secession, and the rising tide of reaction, Evaristo’s concerns grew and his support for the regent dwindled. This was seemingly part of the dismantling of the moderado institutions over which he had presided. Evaristo gave up the Aurora Fluminense in December 1835; in 1836, the Sociedade Defensora disbanded, victim of the moderados’ divisions. Finally, in 1837, Evaristo’s personal support for Feijó, so influential in Minas and Rio de Janeiro, came to an end. After months of disillusion with the regent’s efforts, and a difficult personal meeting, the moderado chieftain withdrew his support at the beginning of the parliamentary session. He died shortly thereafter. His loss was catastrophic to Feijó and the moderado stalwarts. It was part and parcel of Feijó’s political decline, for Feijó had thus been denied his most potent voice in the Chamber and the support of the greatest political journalist of the age. That sword and that shield had staved off reactionary opposition in the 1835 and 1836 sessions and might have been invaluable in the fatal, tortuous obstructionism and criticism of the 1837 debates. Worse, in Evaristo’s place, [Justiniano José da] Rocha (1811–1862), seconded by Josino do Nascimento Silva (1811–1886) and Firmino Rodrigues da Silva (1816–1875), three talented fluminenses with superb political pens, took up the reactionary cause in a new periodical, O Chronista (1836–1839), and began a merciless onslaught that accentuated the isolation and vulnerability of the regent.86 In retrospect, then, the nature of the new reactionary majority in the Chamber can be reconstructed not only in terms of the opposition to decentralizing reform and animus towards Feijó, or the desire for a strong state in an era of revolts and secession, or the appeal of pro-slave trade statesmen among planters and merchants. It can also be understood in terms of electoral numbers and provincial political organization. By 1837, the fluminense provincial government and assembly were under the

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domination of the reactionary leadership, leadership with organic links to the provincial oligarchies. Minas, which clearly outweighed any other province, was, at the very least, divided between Feijó (whose mineiro supporters were apparently slipping away from him, following Evaristo) and Vasconcelos and Honório, now allied against Feijó and with strong mineiro roots. In the Northeast, the conservative opposition had strong champions in some of the Chamber’s greatest orators; they would not always support the reactionary party, but clearly, almost none supported reform or Feijó in 1834–1835 and some did, indeed, go over to the reaction in 1837. This qualitative analysis can be seconded by some primitive quantitative notes. In 1837, the number of deputies in the Chamber was 104. Even in a session which was clearly charged with importance and passion, the actual number participating in any particular debate was between 60 and 80. Of these, a close study of the debates and the historiography indicates that some 20 or so of the deputies were among the committed reactionaries; given these numbers, it is easier to see how the slim majority the reactionaries marshaled for the crucial votes of 1837 could come about; only about ten to twenty other deputies needed to be persuaded to vote with the reactionaries. The votes make it clear that they were successful in their persuasion. In a context of failure and faltering support for the regent, the reactionaries clearly dominated the debates of 1837. The four reactionary orators noted above, Vasconcelos, Calmon, Maciel Monteiro, and Rodrigues Torres were all celebrated tribunes in a generation known for the finesse and grandeur of its rhetoric and its taste for oratory. The regent’s champions were fewer, less frequent, and, for the most part, his ministers, a demonstration in and of itself of a poor showing of Chamber strength. Finally, the issue of provincial delegations is also central. The four provinces represented by the four dominant reactionary orators, Minas, Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro, had delegations of 20, 14, 14, and 10, respectively—a total of 58. The reactionary orators, in every case, were among the most (if not the preeminent) respected deputies and orators of each provincial delegation. If most provincial delegates followed them, that, too, would explain the reactionary majority. As these provinces also had similar relationships to plantation exports and slavery, the reasons for their representatives to support the reactionaries become more apparent still. It might have taken two or three years, but, in the end, the emergence of the party of reaction is completely explicable as the capable creation of articulate leadership speaking to and for established, manifest socio-economic and ideological interests.87 Feijó doubtless knew all of this better than anyone. By 1837, exhausted, frustrated, ill, and clearly unable to govern against the votes of the new party, the regent was unwilling to continue. Thus, at session’s end, he turned to the most

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important of his remaining moderado stalwarts in private meetings, trying to persuade one of them to accept the portfolio of minister of empire. Whoever accepted that portfolio, by constitutional succession, would be provisional regent should Feijó resign, and it was clear that that was the regent’s intention. Feijó failed in his cajoling. A gathering of key stalwarts, unable to name a successor, ended in tumult. No one in his circle would accept such martyrdom; the portfolio lay untouched. In the end, it was someone entirely outside his party who picked it up. Feijó, frustrated among the moderados, successfully convinced Araújo Lima to succeed him. Feijó’s choice seems difficult to fathom at first; Araújo Lima had been among the moderados’ early opposition and had been a minister in the First Reign. He clearly was now in alliance with the reaction led by Vasconcelos, Honório and Rodrigues Torres. Perhaps Feijó, knowing he could only be succeeded by someone outside of his party, was impressed with Araújo Lima’s calm presidency of the divided Chamber in 1837, so like his statesmanship in the past era of the old liberal opposition of the 1820s, when Araújo Lima had enough prestige among the deputies to preside over the Chamber, despite his taint as a former minister of the emperor. Perhaps Feijó thought him relatively impartial. Perhaps spite played a role. In the end, when, in September 1837, Feijó left the throne, he had effectively accepted his own defeat without clearly ceding triumph to the renegade moderados who had led the reaction. At least, he had chosen someone who was not one of his former allies.88 It would be the new regent who would do that. On 19 September 1837, Araújo Lima, provisional regent, named a council of ministers known afterwards as the Cabinet of the Capable. He clearly designed it to be one that would end the deadlock between the Chamber and the executive, one with the potential for national leadership, achievements which Feijó had never been able to manage and which the new regent clearly needed to bring off. It was a cabinet with regional balance and a clear claim to the support of the reactionary majority in the Chamber, for it was marked by the presence of the four reactionary leaders noted above. Vasconcelos clearly led the cabinet, taking the key political portfolios of empire and justice; Calmon took finance; Maciel Monteiro, foreign affairs; Rodrigues Torres, navy. Honório remained a deputy, to lead the reactionary majority in support of the new cabinet. The party of reaction had come to power—not through a coup, not through a dynast’s favor, but through the conquest of a representative majority in the Chamber.89

chapter three

Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence: 1837-1848 Never has the behavior of a party been so admirable as is that of the friends of the throne and of order in the present context; never have we been so proud of struggling in its vanguard. . . . the party of the throne [is now] persecuted in the name of the throne. . . . in a country as profoundly and constantly revolutionized as Brazil has been since 1822, the doctrine of authority is the only saving doctrine . . . —[J. J.da Rocha,] O Brasil, 28 September 1844, 1.

Since 1840, it seems to us that what has been promoted is the doctrine that the Crown loses strength and dignity whenever it agrees with Parliamentary opinion, both in appointing or dismissing cabinets. This radically erroneous doctrine tends to do nothing less than to pervert representative government, whose normal progress essentially demands unity of action in its component powers. The right to appoint and to dismiss ministers conferred by the Constitution on the moderating power is not absolute, nor is any other. . . . Representative monarchical government is not the government of one will, but the government of legitimately verified public opinion. —[Firmino Rodrigues da Silva,] A dissolução do Gabinete de 5 de maio ou a facção aulica, (1847), 34–35.

The reactionary party in power on 19 September was regionally balanced between Rio and its mineiro hinterland and the Northeast. The core leadership was made up of fluminenses and mineiros who had broken with moderado liberal reform and made a natural alliance with the regional oligarchies triumphant in the First Reign. We have seen this in the previous chapter; nonetheless, it bears further discussion. The threat to the established order, the growing perception of national destabilization, was fundamental to the new party’s appeal to established planter-merchant interests, north and south. The alliances of

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these interests and the Chamber leadership of respected provincial chieftains from both regions had persuaded enough of the moderado majority and of the restorationists and conservative oppositionists to provide the emergent party’s leaders with the votes they needed in 1837. They dominated the Chamber because they represented the greater provincial oligarchies, men made rich through slavery, sugar, and coffee, men organically linked to the new party’s chieftains by blood, marriage, and perspective. In the course of the crucial debates of 1837, Vasconcelos, above all, had established a coherent set of ideas, a vision for the party. It was a vision that would comprise the ideology of the new party and clarify the relationship between Vasconcelos’s liberalism of 1826–1834 and the reaction triumphant after 1837.

I. The Reactionary Ideology The issue of ideology has had a poor reception among later historians. Many have dismissed or disparaged the significance of political ideas as, effectively, window dressing for class interests and, thus, matters of little or no significance. Moreover, the historiography generally extrapolates backwards from the party labels and political positions established in the Second Reign. That is, historians discuss the Conservative and Liberal parties as though they were fixed, static organizations going back to 1837 or even earlier. While such assumptions are made, the actual nature and development of the parties and their ideas go unexplored. The real continuities among the party that became the Conservatives go unremarked; the same can be said of the significant discontinuities and ideological incoherence of the opposition alliance that became the Liberals. Barman and Murilo de Carvalho are instructive exceptions to much of this, because they follow closely what the actors themselves thought and did. Indeed, it is useful to begin here with one of Murilo de Carvalho’s observations. In his close study of the published records of imperial politics, he pointed out that partisan ideology in the Monarchy is not published in party programs and proclamations until the 1860s; before that, it must be searched for in the debates of the Chamber. The reasons for this are clear from what we have seen already. Party ideology emerged partly in partisan struggle in the Chamber, and that struggle is evident, first, in the speeches of the opposing leaders and, second, in the political press in which those leaders or their publicists wrote. Ideology, like the two major parties that would dominate the Second Reign, emerged in the Chamber as the contending leaders laid out their differences and sought to garner support among the deputies and among those who elected them.1 Vasconcelos, the acknowledged chieftain and spokesman of the party of re-

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action, did not define his position as reactionary. Regresso and regressista were terms his former allies first used. They did so in the clear attempt to taint the great liberal leader’s credibility, by slurring him as ideologically incoherent with his liberal past and, thus, politically untrustworthy. Vasconcelos simply taunted them, by playing with the terms liberal, progress, and regressista to demonstrate their ambiguity in Brazilian circumstances. Crippled, coarse, and ill, Vasconcelos, as an orator, gave speeches that took on the slashing agility of the fencer as he warmed in combat. Though he successfully eviscerated his opponents’ arguments with oratorical thrusts, he was also working seriously to make the new party’s position clear. Several of his key points delineate what his party represented: exceptionalism, state authority, and a representative, parliamentary monarchy. They can easily be understood in three important moments in the emergence of the party: 1834, the debate over the reforms; 1837, the attack on Feijó’s cabinet as unrepresentative; and 1838, the defence of the first reactionary cabinet administration. 2 In the debates over the 1834 reforms, Vasconcelos repeatedly made the point that the liberalism of Europe and, especially, the United States, was peculiar to the societies and traditions of those nations. Vasconcelos emphasized, in contrast, that Brazil’s needs were for the adaptation of liberalism, an adaptation suitable to its relative lack of a liberal political culture and citizenry and an educated society prepared and suitable for Anglo-American institutions. In a phrase, he argued that Brazilian society and its citizens were incapable of sustaining or being sustained by others’ institutions: they must adapt liberal theories and experiences to their own needs.3 In the debates of 1834, 1837, and 1838, Vasconcelos held that the constitutional monarchy was precisely one of those necessary, adapted institutions. Brazil, as he often repeated, required a strong state. From 1831, when he stood with Feijó against the exaltado threat following Dom Pedro I’s abdication, he had made the case for such a state. He argued then and thereafter that part and parcel of that strength was legitimate authority, which in Brazil must derive from the monarch and a constitutional, representative, but clearly supreme national state. His separation from the Feijó moderados derived partially from his perception of the Additional Act they continued to defend. Vasconcelos argued quite explicitly that the reform of 1834 weakened the state and thus must lead to social anarchy and national dismemberment. The nation was not only unprepared for more democratic institutions or decentralized government, it was fatally threatened by both.4 Finally, as Vasconcelos had done as the chieftain of the liberal opposition of the 1820s, he emphasized the centrality of the Chamber in a legitimately representative government. In his opposition to both the prince and the priest, in

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1830 and 1837, Vasconcelos stressed the role of the Chamber in policy-making and legislation. He also emphasized that, as a consequence, the cabinet could not stand simply with the Crown’s support; it had to have that of the Chamber’s majority. Without it, an administration lacked the requisite legitimacy of representative, constitutional government and should resign in favor of a cabinet which did. A number of points followed: the importance of the elections, the importance of parliamentary debate, and the importance of public opinion and of the press.5 Indeed, in regard to this latter point, the campaign against Feijó and in favor of his party’s reactionary legislative program were sustained by the most capable publicists of the day. In O Chronista and, later, O Brasil, Justiniano José da Rocha and his colleagues championed the party’s positions and repeated and reprinted the debates of the reactionary orators because the party leaders took public opinion very seriously. There and in the later debates regarding electoral reform, Vasconcelos’‘s concern with the legitimacy of the Chamber’s role as representative is patent.6 In 1837, it was the idea of Feijó’s lack of legitimacy because of his lack of Chamber support at which the reactionaries had hammered away. Upon ascending to power themselves, they made it clear that they held that their own legitimacy derived from the same source: they ascended not only through the confidence of the Crown but because of their support in the Chamber. Consequently, and most important of all, when they determined, in 1839, that their relationship with the regent and their support in the Chamber were irredeemably crippled, they resigned. Their ideology was not a façade. It was a compass. The issue of a constitutional, representative monarchy was just that central to the party’s principles.7 This clear position on a parliamentary monarchy, this principled quality of the party leadership, points to the ideological influence clear from the party’s beginnings. In much of the reactionaries’ thinking, foreign ideological models and theory were apparently quite present. Although Vasconcelos condemned the use of foreign models and thought when they did not jibe with Brazilian realities, he was quite explicit in his admiration for certain thinkers. His discussion of United States constitutionalism owed much to a careful reading of the Federalist Papers. He used this to refute radical reformism in 1834. His discussion of the separation and balance of powers owed much to the study of Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant. However, the most influential theorist for Vasconcelos (and, apparently, for those who stood with him) was Guizot. When Limpo de Abreu noted the influence of Guizot and the doctrinaires on Vasconcelos and the reactionaries, the Regresso leader was quite clear in accepting the allusion with pride. The reasons for Guizot’s prestige among the party leaders are not far to seek.8

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By the late 1830s, François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) had achieved both intellectual and political stature in the francophone world in which Brazilian readers participated. Some of the first bookstores and presses in Rio, concentrated on the Rua da Quitanda and neighboring streets in the old city, were in the hands of French emigrés in the 1820s and 1830s. French books were a mainstay of Brazilian booksellers, as well. Those who could not afford such wonders had free access to the imperial library of some 60,000 volumes, then housed on the Rua de Tras do Carmo, in one of its two cool and airy grand salons. Those who read in the Court could easily keep up with French literature and politics, and it is a commonplace in Brazilian history that they did so. Guizot was a key figure in both literature and politics in France, especially in the 1820s and the 1830s, and his circle, the doctrinaires, figured in the liberal opposition to Bourbon absolutism in the 1820s and helped to define and to lead the July Monarchy (1830–1848) which replaced it. A literary man and a political publicist from 1807, a professor of history after 1812, Guizot entered politics in 1814, as a ministerial official and, after 1830, as a deputy, minister, ambassador, and prime minister (1847–1848). A member of the liberal opposition and a moderate royalist in the 1810s and 1820s, Guizot was forced out of official and university positions in the 1820s. It was then that he wrote the seminal works which the Brazilian liberals probably studied, particularly Des moyens du governement et d’opposition (1821), Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828), contributions to the influential periodical, Le Globe, and the 1820s and 1830s speeches, lectures, and political pamphlets foundational to his later Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif (1851). 9 Guizot’s circle, the doctrinaires, a very small but influential group of publicists and statesmen, originated around 1816 or 1817. They represented a moderate liberalism in the context of the reaction of the Bourbon Restoration and its radical opposition. In a milieu of personal ambition, enduring historical prejudices, and pragmatic partisanship, they sought to achieve political solutions by working out fixed principles as a guide to political action. The principles Guizot and the others embraced involved an attack on others’ ideas of sovereignty, ideas that they condemned as unreasonable and leading to extremes and absolutism (either that of the monarch or that of the masses). Instead, Guizot emphasized the sovereignty of reason as a way to discover truth and justice. Politically, this led to solutions midway between the absolutist tendencies of the restored dynasty and the democratic radicalism of the Revolution of 1789 and its heirs. The doctrinaires were thus associated with political moderation: a middle way between the reactionary nobility and the revolutionary people. In their celebrated phrase, they stood for the juste milieu: a government balanced between monarchy and republic. Although Guizot firmly supported the necessity of monarchy, he did so emphasizing the rise of the bourgeoisie, constitu-

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tionalism, a government identified with a harmony between its constituent powers, and a government characterized by parliamentary deliberation by a select elite, striving to discover reason and justice and to lead the nation.10 While specific French thinkers and French political experiences alike have been suggested as models for the Regresso or the Monarchy as it emerged by 1841, they have not been explored. Guizot has been generally neglected, as part of this larger lack of interest. However, it is easy to see, given the political narrative of Chapter Two, the appeal of Guizot’s thought to Vasconcelos and the party he led.11 Indeed, once one is aware of them, the doctrinaire positions seem very evident in those of Brazil’s reactionary leadership. The emphasis on coherence to political principle; the emphasis on moderation; the emphasis on monarchy; the emphasis on elite, representative parliamentary government; the emphasis on justice and the rule of law. They made up an ideological congeries which suited the socio-economic interests which the reactionaries represented, interests that they led as their kith and kin among the highly educated magistrates. They also provided a coherent position, associated with a prestigious ideological source, that made up a sharp, advantageous contrast to the contradictions evident in the opposition party. The latter, very much like the opposing factions in French politics, had no ideology, no principles in common—they were a pragmatic alliance involving everyone from republican radicals to moderate reformists to liberal monarchists to former restorationists. Doubtless this provided a special weight to the explicit relationship between what Vasconcelos said and the thought of Guizot and the doctrinaires. A few examples are in order. Thus, in the midst of the Additional Act debates of 1834, Vasconcelos stated, in response to one of the most noted exaltados of the time, [Venâncio] Henriques de Resende (1794–1866): I lament that the gentleman is ignorant of the fact that between petty and prodigious there might be a middle way [meio termo], and that is the one of economy, of moderation. Sectarian of the party of the juste milieu [justo meio], I rejoice that I have not slipped away from the principles of that school, since the exaggerated opinions [of my opponents] exclude and reject the work of the committee to which I belong, the only work that seems to me to be adapted to Brazil’s circumstances.12

Again, when the moderate reformist, [Antônio Paulino] Limpo de Abreu (1798–1883), sought to catch Vasconcelos out in 1837, he noted: “I will not do more than cite the opinion of the doctrinaire, Guizot, whom the noble deputies of the opposition respect.” Characteristically, Vasconcelos responded by criticizing Limpo de Abreu’s understanding of Guizot. However, Vasconcelos then went on to proclaim: As I have not much confidence in my intelligence, when I find material already finished, prepared, I memorize it, and I rest certain, at least, that if I err, I will err as a great au-

Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence / 79 thority does. I am not ashamed to admit this, nor embarrassed in repeating the speeches of great men when I find them applicable to our circumstances; on the contrary, I take great pleasure in the certainty that I am approximating the truth in some measure.13

In that same year, Vasconcelos discussed progress, revolution, and the parliamentary search for reason in a fashion implicitly paraphrasing Guizot, particularly with respect to the centrality of reasoned discourse in government. Referring to the 1833 debates over counterfeit copper coinage (a contentious issue of great, immediate import, because of its destabilizing effect at the time), Vasconcelos stated I judged that in such a case it was best that we proceed with much circumspection; that we attempt to interest public opinion, clarifying and illuminating it, in order to revoke the law when this opinion was calm and tranquil; because it is only in the calm of passions that opinion merits worship as the queen of the universe.14

Yet again, in 1838, as leader of the Cabinet of the Capable, Vasconcelos defended his administration’s unyielding, repressive policies towards the rebels in Pará by arguing against granting amnesty as a lure to unrepentant rebels in the field. He attacked such expediency as unprincipled and, thus, an unstable foundation for conciliation: to have conciliation it is necessary that there be justice and something fixed and determined. As the celebrated Guizot said, uncertainty, scepticism, the exaggerated passions of certain thinkers in which battles are trials, and victories, verdicts; in which in politics there is neither truth nor falsehood, justice nor injustice nor right. . . . produce or continue disorders and cause uncertainty in all minds. In such a case, conciliation of the parties is impossible. Perhaps the present cabinet is mistaken; but it has the pleasure of expressing in this chamber the well known theories of the statesmen whom the world most esteems: in this matter, it has followed great models.15

Finally, Guizot’s influence seems to underlie the fundamental assumptions in the Regresso’s key legislation, the Interpretation of the Additional Act, the work of Vasconcelos’s apprentice, Paulino. In Guizot’s political thought, the search for fixed political principles and the emphasis on justice and law are fundamental to legitimate government, to sovereignty. It is thus, perhaps, indicative of his influence that Paulino, in introducing the Interpretation’s specific arguments, stated that “There can be nothing more sinister than uncertainty and instability in the organic and constituent principles of national public law.”16 and, further, that “the most superficial examination of our juridical legislation and that of the most civilized nations, will suffice to convince one that order and all of the rules of civil and criminal procedure rest upon the following basis—judicial organization.”17 This search for legitimate order based upon just law, reason, and clear, fixed

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principles, so redolent of Guizot’s thought, is manifest again in the same opinion, when Paulino introduces the solutions he drafted on the committee’s behalf, by alluding to another of Guizot’s known positions, the role of Parliament in searching for reason: It is not possible, however, that this August Chamber, in decreeing the Additional Act, did so in such a manner that instead of tightening the bonds of [national] union, it loosens them, introducing in the judicial and administrative laws a fertile seed of interminable conflicts and of insoluble confusion and anarchy. It is a current principle of hermeneutics that whenever a law understood in a certain way leads to grave inconveniences and absurdities, one must not give it that interpretation, and this is so particularly when its words admit another interpretation avoiding these inconveniences and absurdities.18

Guizot, then, and the doctrinaires, seem to have provided the reactionary leadership with the ideological example and the political parallels so useful in facing the harsh choices of their own circumstances. It was in the philosophy of the juste milieu and the constitutional balances of France’s July Monarchy of 1830 that they studied the lessons they would interpret for Brazil. Their first crisis, ironically enough, would derive from the dramatic, unconstitutional emergence of the monarch whose regime they sought to reconstruct and defend.

II. The Majority Movement The new regent, Araújo Lima, enjoyed respect from both sides of the Chamber and the reactionary majority had seen several of its most respected leaders made ministers. The obvious exception to this was Honório, who apparently accepted the role as the party’s leader in the Chamber itself. Paulino was still too new to the Chamber (and too much the apprentice jurisconsultant) to be considered a political chieftain; instead, working closely with Vasconcelos, he had been given the task that would do a great deal to provide him with his future party prestige—the drafting and defense of the Interpretation of the Additional Act which would be the great project of the party in the Chamber in a close combat with the minority opposition over the next few years. The other reactionary legislation which Paulino would help prepare reformed the 1832 Código de Processo into the 1841 procedure code which reshaped the judicial reforms of the recent past, re-centralizing the local judiciary of the Empire into agents and legitimate representatives of the state. These two legislative projects, as well as a project to restore the Council of State, were the reactionary party’s great burden in 1837–1841, and comprised the reversal of the reform victories of the previous decade.19 The success of the legislation was hard fought, hence the long delay. The vic-

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tory of the party in 1837 necessarily created an opposition minority party. What we know of it is extrapolated from its varied spokesmen. Former restorationists such as Antônio Carlos and conservative oppositionists such as Holanda, apparently too strong and too inflexible to accept the leadership of their former moderado enemies, remained opposition stalwarts, ready and eager to criticize the failures of the new party to end the wars in Pará and Rio Grande. Now they were joined, faut de mieux, by the remaining Feijó moderados and the exaltado firebrands in the Chamber: Limpo de Abreu and [Francisco Gê Acaiaba de] Montesuma (1794–1866), Feijó’s former ministers, and such exaltados as Henriques de Resende and the formidable Teófilo Otoni. Despite their past and present differences, the common hostility of such men to the reactionaries (for personal or for ideological reasons) forced them into an opposition party together. It would be this Chamber alliance which, over the next decade, would forge the second great party of the Monarchy, becoming the Liberal Party of the mid–1840s. However, in the late Regency, this lay in the future. Now, the opposition generally referred to itself only as such, as the opposition, or as the minority party. The exceptions to this are instructive. Early on, at least once, Otoni, in referring to the minority party in opposition to reactionary cabinets of 1838 and 1840, called this emergent minority coalition “liberal.” More interesting, Otoni, in attempting to define the opposition politically, claimed that it was distinguished by adherence to certain principles: oversight and frugality regarding public expenditure; defense of the oppressed; and respect for public liberties, particularly the “provincial guarantees” (probably an allusion to the Additional Act). The vague and negative nature of such a platform clearly speaks to the origins and incoherent composition of the party. They hardly comprised an ideology; indeed, as one deputy objected, “They are citizens’ rights.” As for Honório, the reactionaries’ spokesman in the Chamber, he simply tore the “platform” apart in the following session. It was not so much a platform derived from a distinct, liberal ideology as a pragmatic opposition stance, a condemnation of the alleged administrative abuses of two reactionary cabinets.20 While the opposition’s attempts to attack the ideological credibility of the renegade moderados or to slow down their reactionary legislation were constant, they were not fatal. Nonetheless, the cabinet did not endure; it resigned after little more than a year and a half. It is true that the Cabinet of the Capable’s apparent incapacity to end the wars and the skills of their Chamber enemies in attack and obstruction did wear away at the ministers’ important aura of success. Yet, whatever slackening of support this failure brought, this, too, was not the damning blow to their rule. Indeed, they resigned with majority support, however weakened, and it was not the minority opposition from

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whose ranks their successors came. Their resignation was forced, instead, by fatal differences with the regent.21 Pedro de Araújo Lima, a former First-Reign minister and statesman, whose prestige preceded the triumph of the reactionaries in 1837 and was independent of it, was apparently unwilling to accept the leadership of the reactionary chiefs. Particularly, as was the case with so many others, he found Vasconcelos personally insupportable. He doubtless also remembered former differences from the 1820s, and it probably did not help that his political base was Northeastern and that the reactionary party found its political core in the regional oligarchies of Rio de Janeiro and Minas. It is also significant that the antagonism between the regent and Vasconcelos’s cabinet began after Araújo Lima (with fluminense and mineiro support) won the election of April 1838 as regent in his own right. Such electoral legitimacy would have made his desire and ability to resist Vasconcelos’s domination even stronger.22 As it happened, Araújo Lima’s new independence coincided with the cabinet’s first legislative session. Their war failures, their legislation’s delays, and his own personal incompatibility with Vasconcelos came to a head over the nomination of a senator. The cabinet wanted the regent to appoint someone of their choice. Vasconcelos, especially, preferred Calmon, who had proven such a useful ally and was no doubt seen as key to the Northeastern flank of the reactionary party. Calmon was particularly prized since he was willing to accept the direction of the new party’s founders, in clear contrast to the regent, a Northeasterner who prized his independence and primacy. Others in the cabinet wanted José Clemente, who had re-emerged as a key statesman in fluminense politics and party orator in the Chamber. The regent, however, picked his own man, instead, [Caetano Maria] Lopes Gama (1795–1864)—a Coimbra-trained (1819) pernambucano magistrate and visceral monarchist, a favorite of the first emperor and a close friend of Araújo Lima.23 This clear defiance and embarrassment, in a frustrating context of failure, led to the reactionaries’ resignation on 16 April 1839. The cabinet made it clear that this was a matter of principle. Disagreement of such an obvious nature indicated a lack of confidence by the regent, something fatal to the cabinet’s constitutional role. They resigned, returned to the Chamber to lead the majority’s legislative struggle, and had to watch the regent attempt to rule without their active support and in the face of the opposition’s frustration and unforgiving hostility.24 As had occurred when Feijó had attempted to rule with weak partisan support in the Chamber, Araújo Lima found that the two successive cabinets he appointed were clearly ineffective, as well. The cabinets in question rose and fell between April 1839 and May 1840, and are very suggestive of his relationship

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with the fluminense-mineiro kernel of the new majority party. Each of the two cabinets had common characteristics: ministers who were seasoned, non-partisan Crown servants or non-partisan Northeasterners, ministers with FirstReign antecedents, and ministers who were clearly ineffective in garnering Chamber support from either of the two emergent parties. In a phrase, unwilling to rule dependent upon the new reactionaries, the regent attempted through cabinets dependent upon him alone to rule without them and, ipso facto, without the necessary Chamber support. In 1839, then, the Chamber was delivered over to a frustrating session in which each party attempted to defame and obstruct the other and the executive had little leverage for any forward movement. While the reactionaries had presided over the collapse of another Northeastern rebellion (the Sabinada exaltado revolt in Salvador, November 1837 to May 1838), the Balaiada revolt had begun in Maranhão (1838–1841) and the wars in Pará and Rio Grande went on. The only success in the Court seemed to be the slow but steady progress of the reactionary legislation through committees and votes. People continued to bleed, statesmen seemed unable to prevent it, and the odor of political stalemate hung about everywhere. By May 1840, the committee elections in the Chamber suggested that the reactionary majority was fragile. Indeed, the presidency of the Chamber actually fell to an opposition candidate.25 Despite this, the opposition’s plight was far worse than that of the reactionaries. One wonders which prospect preoccupied the opposition more: their exclusion from power as the Chamber minority or the prospect of the looming reactionary counter-reform legislation (which would effectively empower the cabinet with unprecedented influence over the next election, due in late 1840). In a phrase, what was clearly at stake by April 1840 was not only which party was in power, but which would entrench themselves there through electoral influence from the Court. In mid-April of 1840, just after an extraordinary budgetary session began, either prospect was doubtless motivation enough for the opposition leaders to meet together at the home of senator José Martiniano de Alencar (1798–1860). Alencar’s home was close to the Campo de Sant’Ana, on the Rua do Conde. A prominent moderado and one-time revolutionary republican, Alencar called together a mixed group of oppositionists and former restorationists from the Senate to plot for the proclamation of the early legal majority of the boy emperor, now all of fourteen years old. They clearly anticipated that success would buy them the monarch’s favor. His favor, in turn, would mean their ascent to power through their appointment to his cabinet, regardless of a lack of majority support in the Chamber. Such an appointment, in turn again, would mean that they could use the cabinet’s new influence to “fix” the next election and, in effect, the new Chamber majority.

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Although the historiography often calls the unfolding conspiracy a Liberal one, it is most accurately characterized as an opposition plot; there was no unifying political ideology. The initial group was a combination of former restorationists and of Alencar’s personal relations, prominent among them, Antônio Carlos. It was later joined by former moderados and exaltados. Such an alliance indicates the lack of any particular partisan color. Indeed, the entirely opportunistic aspect of the conspiracy is a clear example of the opposition’s ideological incoherence and a unity derived from opposition in and of itself and a consequent ambition for attaining power. The relationship between such national politics and that of the provinces is obscure, but is probably best understood in precisely such opportunist terms; at least, much may be suggested by one case for which we have some evidence: that of the Cavalcanti oligarchy of Pernambuco. They threw in with the conspiracy, apparently in response to a recent, expedient alliance of the radical pernambucanos (their enemies) with the reactionaries in Rio. These opportune alliances at Court also reflected both ideological and purely partisan divisions in Pernambuco. In 1835, Holanda, the reader will recall, had made an alliance with the moderado renegades who soon emerged as the reactionary leadership. However, Holanda then broke with them; by 1838 he allied himself, instead, with the Feijó moderados to run against Araújo Lima (in the second electoral struggle to be the sole regent), to whom the reactionaries were necessarily committed. Holanda subsequently remained in the reactionaries’ opposition after his defeat. His provincial enemies, the more radical liberals who opposed Holanda (and his provincial, reactionary kinsmen, the Cavalcanti-Rego Barros oligarchy) consequently made the non-ideological, opportune alliance with the reactionaries in the Court noted just above. Ironically, the Pernambuco radical liberals thus found themselves compelled to support the reactionary leadership in Rio in the ongoing struggle over the Interpretation of the Additional Act. Their alliance also explains their support for the reactionaries in the struggle over the Majority. In both cases, they maintained their alliance with the reactionaries both to weaken Holanda and the Cavalcantis in Rio and to secure some measure of support from Araújo Lima and the reactionaries in Pernambuco. The reactionary leaders welcomed them for their votes in the Chamber and in order to sap Holanda’s provincial political base. These opposing alliances were personalist, as well. The Cavalcantis may have backed the Majority because it would necessarily bring down Holanda’s former rival, Araújo Lima, and his protégé, Lopes Gama, appointed the minister of empire on 18 May. Aside from past wounds, Holanda and the Cavalcantis were probably eager to topple them because their imperial power and provincial

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clientele both undercut Cavalcanti domination of provincial affairs. This doubtless drew the radical liberals’ interest, too. They could expect to lose in Pernambuco if the Cavalcantis’ allies won in Rio (and vice versa). Finally, one of their most prominent spokesmen, Padre Miguel do Sacramento Lopes Gama (1791–1852), was particularly interested in the survival of the Araújo Lima cabinet—he was Lopes Gama’s brother. Such Court-provincial complications are illustrative of the ensuing struggle’s tangle of opportunism and ideology; they certainly make a mockery of the historiography’s neat labeling. Indeed, a few days after the first meeting at Alencar’s home, along with the commitment of former mutual enemies among prominent moderados and exaltados, recruitment “fora do parlamento” (outside of Parliament, that is, probably, useful journalists and street agitators) was begun. The only unembarrassing element in the conspiracy was its façade: the idea of bringing about the emperor’s early majority; thus, the conspirators called themselves the Club of the Majority. It was their common end, alone, which really united them, and that end was political triumph over the cabinet and the reactionary majority. The emperor was the means.26 The club conspired to create a movement in both houses of Parliament, under organized pressure from their press and followers in the street, to pass a decree proclaiming Dom Pedro II legally of age, so that the regent could be dismissed, and his cabinet replaced by the conspiring opposition leaders. Such a decree was unconstitutional, of course. The dynast’s majority and the regency were detailed in articles of the Constitution that left no room for interpretation or change (save through constitutional reform).27 Nonetheless, on 13 May 1840, a little more than a week after Parliament opened, the idea was broached in the Senate, as agreed upon by the conspirators. The implications were transparent. The reactionary party responded immediately. They understood the Majority as it was—the threat of an oppositionist coup d’etat. In May, Honório wrote to describe the Majority movement as “this attempt . . . equal to that of 30 July [1832].”28 Honório rapidly initiated the party’s three-pronged response. First, on 18 May, he proposed a constitutional reform of the monarch’s age of majority. Second, on 20 May, he and the others successfully organized their majority in both chambers to deny the conspirators the votes required for their Majority proposal. Third, by 23 May, he and the other reactionaries reached out again to the regent, who appointed two preeminent reactionary deputies, Rodrigues Torres and Paulino, to a new cabinet. Honório’s 18 May counter-project was a move designed to contain and use the popular pressure mobilized by the conspirators by acceding to the idea of the monarch’s early majority, but in a way designed to keep power in the regent’s and the reactionaries’ hands. For a constitutional reform, by law, necessarily required discussion in a series of regulated, delayed votes. Here, the delay, coupled with the reformation of a reac-

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tionary cabinet allied to the regent, was a masterful stroke. The reactionaries knew that the reform process would keep the Majority project under the control of a Chamber they controlled and that, once they had passed it, it would empower only the next Legislature, meeting in the next parliamentary session, to carry out the reform and enthrone the emperor. And the next Legislature, they knew, would be another in which they had majority control. The reason for that is clear. They now had renewed their alliance with the regent and dominated the cabinet, and by the end of the present session the Interpretation of the Additional Act would place the electoral process more completely under cabinet control. It seems clear that the regent had agreed to all of this, albeit the negotiations seem to have dragged over ten days. Nonetheless, by 23 May, the regent put aside past differences to defend his regime and the Constitution and, as noted, appointed Rodrigues Torres and Paulino to his new, third cabinet, in a transparent bid to win reactionary support in the Chamber for the struggle ahead. They were superb choices because of their political credibility, their lack of personal enmities, and their direct relationships with the hard core of the new reactionary party. 29 The regent’s decisive resistance is very significant. He was as much a monarchist as the former restorationists who met with Alencar. Indeed, he had scandalized Chamber moderados and exaltados alike in September 1837 when, early in his regency, he had knelt in the street to kiss the boy emperor’s hand, giving the ancient beijamão of Portugal, a ritual of respect and submission. Yet, here, he recognized the threatening intent behind the pious monarchism of his opposition, and sought to deflect the shrewd blow intended.30 However, this adroit and complex constitutional response of the reactionaries and regent was, in the end, outflanked by the Majority conspirators’ obstruction of Honório’s project and their successful overtures to populace, prince, and prejudice.31 By 15 July, Honório’s project had been successfully stalled by opposition delays and the propaganda of the Majority conspirators was clearly having an effect in the Chamber and in the streets. On that date, Paulino wrote to his serra ally, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck: After long resisting, I accepted the portfolio of justice, in spite of the gloomy apprehensions the bad state of affairs inspires in me, principally in the Chamber of Deputies, where I recognized that the Demogogues covered with the cloak of Monarchists, to better finish with the Monarchy, only attempt to exacerbate passions and slow down the march of affairs with interminable harangues, and seem to want to prepare everything for a dissolution of the Union of the Provinces. May Divine Providence, which until today has aided us, help us!32

By 18 July, a Saturday, Honório suddenly reversed positions. He argued in the Chamber that the opposition’s delay on his alternative project’s vote had

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forced a political crisis and divided the reactionaries themselves. He withdrew his project in a debate of great length, heat, and drama, calling for an immediate decision on the emperor’s majority. Limpo de Abreu, a moderado stalwart, with support from José Clemente, a key ally of the reactionaries, agreed to present a motion for a committee to enable such a vote, on Monday, after the Sunday break.33 On 20 July, that Monday, the session was electric with expectation. Limpo de Abreu proposed a special committee be elected to propose the appropriate measures for the Majority’s realization. Beguiled by Honório’s reversal, the conspirators thought that the reactionaries had given in. They now hoped to achieve the Majority by a Chamber consensus and a vote. The reactionary majority, however, while diminished, was still numerous enough to ensure that they dominated the committee elected, winning by barely four or five votes. On 21 July, the committee opined that the Senate ought to elect a similar committee to consider the matter jointly. This was seen as a clear attempt by the reactionaries to put off the Majority and to keep its process in reactionary hands. The conspirators immediately mobilized new support in the Chamber, and forced a vote to forestall this. In effect, on this day, the opposition finally broke the reactionary leadership’s hold on the Chamber and acquired just enough new recruits for a majority. The committee’s recommendation was put aside in favor of a motion to vote immediately on the issue.34 The reactionaries had gambled and lost. It seems clear now that Honório’s surrender on the 18th may have derived from his calculation that the increasing political pressure orchestrated by the conspirators was eroding his Chamber majority. Either then or over the Sunday break, he and others in the reactionary leadership apparently decided to attempt a desperate feint and new counter-attack, rallying their majority to attempt delay. They had appeared to acquiesce to an unconstitutional early Majority; now they would again seek to delay and take it away from the opposition conspirators, in order to effect it under their own auspices on the emperor’s birthday, in December. They apparently hoped to use their ebbing majority and the issue of the conspirators’ coercion as a means and justification for such a delay. A delay would bring them everything. With a delay, the reactionary cabinet would remain in power, influencing the new elections scheduled to take place after the Chamber’s regular session. With a delay, the reactionary cabinet would be the council presiding over the monarch’s enthronement. Presumably, both the monarch and the new Legislature elected under reactionary influence would then support the reactionaries’ continued power afterward. The monarch would do so out of gratitude for his ascent, the Chamber would do so out of partisan support.35 All of this depended upon exploiting the increasingly coercive quality of the

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conspirators’ tactics. Of this, there was, in fact, a great deal: the rising use of street agitation and personal and general threats (in the streets and in the Chamber); the rising use of orchestrated interruptions, applause, and vocal attacks on deputies from the Chamber galleries. There must also have been a growing, palpable fear among reactionaries that if the Majority conspiracy triumphed, the emperor might be offended by those who opposed it and a cabinet of opposition leaders would be appointed, which would inevitably carry out reprisals. Thus, fear and intimidation were manifest and significant. Certainly, contemporaries recalled them. Senator Alencar’s kinsman, Alencar Araripe, remembered later that after their 20 May defeat in the Senate and the Chamber votes, the conspirators decided to “attempt in the Chamber the repair of the blows suffered in the Senate, based on the development of public opinion in favor of the idea of the rapid and immediate enthronement of the monarch.”36 Alencar Araripe also cites the use of planted agitators and printed propaganda.37 A veteran reactionary, Pereira da Silva, later recalled what was apparently the result of this mobilization. When he frequented the Chamber in July, he witnessed the debates as they became more agitated. He describes how the Chamber was repeatedly flooded by the street supporters of the Majority, against all precedent and regulation. He tells us that there were in the salons, in the corridors, in the rooms, in the antechambers, in the galleries, in the Chamber itself, reserved exclusively for the sessions, a copious multitude of spectators that continuously shouted, argued, threatened, applauded, encouraging various orators, imposing silence on others, anxious to drive the Chamber as it wished. . . . Outside of the building and in the interior corridors the enormous gathering of people was no less frightening, a crowd that wandered, rose, and fell, went back and forth from one side to the other, in groups, gangs, and pieces, talking, preaching its opinions, repeating deafening cheers.38

It was the task of the reactionary orators to deal with this pressure, but it had clearly become more than could be easily managed. The rising tide lapped at Honório’s own feet by the 17th. On that date, the rising intimidation erupted in apartes to a speech by Honorio’s great ally, the reactionary orator, Maciel Monteiro. Suddenly, something apparently unexpected occurred. A rather provocative, indiscreet deputy named Antônio Navarro de Abreu, turned on the reactionaries without warning, breaking off his support for them, a support that had endured since, at least, 1839. His comments had no clear reference to Maciel Monteiro. Rather, they were a disconnected combination of personal insults, references to Honório’s being corrupt, and a defiant response to what he perceived to be a threatened knifing. His outburst could not be contained by the Chamber’s president; it simply subsided into the quiet of the annals. Not for long. On 20 July, Navarro erupted again at a moment of great tension, as debate

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over Limpo de Abreu’s proposed Majority committee was joined. The anger and frustration of the moment seemingly fed Navarro’s own private turmoil. He attacked Honório and the regent’s cabinet as corrupt traitors; he insulted their loyalty to the monarch, and thereafter, in an ascending fire of aggressive provocation, peppered the session with scandalous insults. Finally, he had to be forcefully restrained from attacking Honório physically. At that moment, as Navarro moved towards Honório, he reached into his coat and Honório claimed that he saw a dagger. Navarro, forced into his seat, drew out a handkerchief instead; at that, the galleries broke out in fiery response, bringing down the Chamber with an unprecedented tumult of vivas to the emperor, which led to an extended shouting match between the galleries and the deputies.39 Navarro had ignited the conspirators’ allies in the gallery; he also played into the reactionaries’ hands, by giving a special edge to the general, coercive pressure. The reactionaries argued against taking any measure toward the Majority under such circumstances. Limpo de Abreu realized the threat of such an argument immediately. He advised the Chamber president not to close the session. Honório and other reactionaries pointed to the tumult as part and parcel of the opposition’s intimidation. While they may well have thought so, they may also have seen the uproar as an opportunity, one which they were prepared to use. They could use such coercion rhetorically to strengthen the nerve of their followers in the Chamber for the votes about to come (by defying the gallery, using language turning on personal courage, they could shame the panic-prone among the majority back into solidarity). They could also use the issue of coercion to strengthen public perception of the Chamber as out of order and threatened, in order to justify their closing the legislative session. There is evidence that the reactionaries had prepared for such a conjuncture. Aside from the similarity of the reactionaries’ speeches about the coercion, which suggests that they were planned, there is a crucial bit of coincidence in the Senate. There, Eusébio, chief of police in the Court and staunch reactionary, reported to the upper chamber that very day that the Chamber was in tumult and that daggers had been bared there. The conspirators were not fools, and realized what the reactionaries were apparently trying to do. They publically disavowed Navarro, and disputed his carrying a dagger. They proclaimed for the record that the gallery was well behaved; indeed, they sought to argue that the gallery were the people and were proof of the popularity of their cause. Such an argument was answered most ironically. It was the pernambucanos Henriques de Resende and Nunes Machado, men known for their radical backgrounds (but now allied to the reactionaries against their provincial enemies, the Cavalcantis), who pointed out that even if such men were “the people,” they could only represent fluminenses. Both radicals pointed out that there was no sign of

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popular support for the Majority outside of the Chamber, much less in the provinces.40 The reactionaries’ gamble on the use of coercion had succeeded, at least for a moment. They held on to their majority that day, 20 July, and, as the reader will recall, ensured that the committee to introduce the Majority elected then was reactionary in its composition. If it was their tactical use of the coercion issue which made this possible, it was an ephemeral victory. The reactionaries’ nerve and majority were fraying. As described, a second day of debate and tumult sliced through both, cutting their votes by a crucial few; on 21 July, their committee’s recommendation for a Senate committee’s election and joint chamber deliberation, clearly intended to ensure delay, was discarded by the Chamber, which apparently could bear no more. Pereira da Silva remembered that: The Chamber approved, by a majority of a few votes, the decision to debate Antônio Carlos’s [Majority] project . . . the session ended in the midst of noisy, unceasing cheers for the Majority and for the Chamber, which the spectators found inside and outside the building repeated to those who were in the adjacent streets, and, for some time, they echoed around the neighborhood of the building, surrounded by waves of people, that were convulsed and impatient with agitation. By evening and during the night, the squares and streets overflowed with people, jubilant bands appeared, and clamorous cheers multiplied everywhere.41

A debate on immediate Majority was set for the next day, 22 July. The regent, the cabinet, and other reactionary chiefs joined at six that evening in a desperate meeting to confront the crisis.42 There was little choice left. An open debate and vote in the Chamber would most likely end with fatal proof that they had lost the Chamber majority, in a devastating, public defeat. Such a defeat meant their their humiliation and disgrace, the triumph of their enemies, followed promptly by their enemies’ appointment to the emperor’s first cabinet, the consequent political reprisals, and, soon thereafter, opposition control of the pending election to the next four-year Legislature. Little wonder, then, that one of the meeting’s participants reports only one choice. This was to avoid such a vote by the legal ploy of immediately adjourning the Chamber until November, and then convoking it to vote in favor of Majority then. This would mean that the interim elections would still take place under reactionary influence and that their party would be seen as bringing about the emperor’s triumph, enhancing their prestige and influencing the emperor’s perception of who his friends were. The justification for the adjournment, an unprecedented (albeit entirely constitutional) act, would be the tumult and coercion of the sessions. They would thus delay and strip the Majority of its revolutionary character.43

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The cabinet was apparently so intimidated by the clear success of the Majority conspirators in the Chamber and the streets that they demurred at adjournment, fearing explosive resistance. They had to be talked into the measure, and they were, by Vasconcelos. It is a measure of the regent’s apprehension about the opposition’s triumph that he had accepted Vasconcelos’s presence, despite their mutual personal distaste. It was Vasconcelos, now, who strengthened the cabinet’s resolve and urged them to adjourn Parliament and to use force if necessary. The regent apparently was compelled to recognize that Vasconcelos himself was the best, the only man for such a crisis. After hours of deliberation, he asked Vasconcelos to take up the portfolio of empire. Early that morning, then, on 22 July, Vasconcelos accepted the responsibility.44 Vasconcelos quickly wrote out an adjournment, which was delivered late that morning, shortly after the session’s opening. He also advised the regent to order the emperor’s removal to his country place, fifty miles away. The regent agreed, but the emperor’s guardian refused to acquiesce. The regent then went to the emperor at São Cristovao, to explain the adjournment. He was careful, as well, to affirm their decision to enthrone the emperor in December. The emperor accepted all of this. Then, the regent returned to his own residence, on the Rua dos Arcos, between the hills of Santa Teresa and Santo Antônio, where the cabinet waited. While they did, in the late morning hours, the Monarchy shifted in the balance.45 When Vasconcelos’s ascent and the adjournment were announced in the Chamber, the opposition was both terrified and enraged. They rose to their feet and shouted for action. Led by Antônio Carlos, they and their gallery following left at 11 o’clock and made their way rapidly through the old city, surging one and a half kilometers through its narrow streets and across the Campo de Sant’Ana to the Senate, picking up street support and a crowd in the campo as they went. In the Senate, one of the Majority conspirators, the Senate’s president, had quietly avoided the reading of Vasconcelos’s adjournment. The Senate was, thus, still open, though still without its quorum. Now, cheered on by the movement’s street support, about three thousand people, the opposition called a joint session. The constitutional absurdity of this is patent. Less than a half of Parliament was present and the session was illegal, given the adjournment. Indeed, there were only some 57 men present from both chambers out of a total of roughly 124 to 139 present in Rio. They acted quickly, well aware of the problematic legality of their actions and Vasconcelos’s capability. In a few moments, done before noon, they had proclaimed the Monarchy in danger and the regent illegitimate, and sent a delegation headed up by Antônio Carlos to wait upon the monarch, to ask his support for immediate proclamation of his own majority.

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The regent’s home was a bit more than a kilometer from the Senate. News of the conspirators’ actions came quickly, around noon, along with the somber news of a declaration of armed support for the Majority by the Court’s commander at arms and by the commandant of the Military School. National Guard units had already joined the multitude in the Campo de Sant’Ana that morning. The regent’s use of armed force was now checked; strength could only come from one source, the same one being approached by the Majority conspirators. The delegation of conspirators was reasonably sure of their reception at São Cristóvão. Before their plotting had gone very far, the Club of the Majority had used contacts at São Cristóvão to sound out the emperor. Their message simply stated the desire of the Andradas and their friends to bring the boy to legal majority if he agreed. He did, they were told, and they confirmed his support by a second exchange. In later years, the emperor would claim that he was completely absorbed in his studies at the time.46 Certainly, the boy was busy with his books. For years, they had provided him with his only freedom and achievement; he had become an avid and successful scholar. Largely confined to the villa, except for the tedium of occasional ceremonies at the city palace, the boy had followed a rigid schedule of classes, prayer, meals, and regulated exercise. If Dom Pedro were aware of the wider political world through reading and statesmen’s visits, it was likely he thought it a milieu of danger and treachery. It was that world which had taken his parents from him in 1831. It was that world which had taken away José Bonifácio, the guardian his father had chosen, in 1833. It was that world which had attacked his constitutional powers, crippling them in 1834.47 What of the statesmen of that world? Vasconcelos, suddenly a minister again, had headed the opposition to his father, and now headed a cabinet opposed to his taking power himself. Antônio Carlos, on the other hand, was José Bonifacio’s brother and a restorationist, known to have traveled to Portugal to invite his father to return. As for the others, few statesmen had come to the villa to pay him court. Since 1833, however, he had been assiduously waited upon by Aureliano, a man of great charm, and out of power since his enemy, Vasconcelos, had organized the Regresso, in 1837. Although Aureliano had not been a restorationist, his monarchism and Crown service was well known and, though tightly associated with the Feijó moderados of 1832–1837, he had shifted his support to the reactionaries by 1840.48 Now, however, he figured among the Majority advocates. In which side could one trust? Clearly, Antônio Carlos and Aureliano, as well as Aureliano’s former allies among the moderados, had much to recommend them, particularly in contrast to a cabinet associated with Vasconcelos. In the end, however, the boy probably trusted no one; orphaned by poli-

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tics, flattered by inferiors upon whom he could not depend, courted by ambitious men whose sincerity could not be tested, he would have been foolish to do so. If he did listen to his courtiers and his tutor, hand-picked by Aureliano, they were likely to urge his acceptance of the conspirators’ overture. The appeal of an early majority to his entourage is obvious. Such a turn of events would put them in a position of great political advantage, as the circle closest to the monarch, the obvious medium between the dynast and those who would exercise power in his name.49 Finally, although the emperor later claimed that he was oblivious, he was, nonetheless, a good student. While both sides probably presumed that the emperor would be a political innocent in the hands of his first ministers, they may have presumed too much. For nine years, Dom Pedro had doubtless made a close, desperate study of his own precarious position, because its limitations, its dangers, and its potential were made clear to him in his formal training, in court gossip, and in the ways of those around him. He knew that he would have great power if he were crowned and none at all so long as he were not. He knew statesmen could not be trusted, that they changed their partisan loyalties, and that they were avid for power. He knew that, increasingly, they needed him. He knew that his role, constitutionally, was to dominate, but to dominate for the nation; he might also have known, by the lesson of his father’s fate, that he must also dominate with discretion, behind the cloak provided by the ambitions of others. The statesmen may well have thought then (and later), that they were taking advantage of the boy—it may well have been the other way around.50 In the end, here is what happened.51 In the early afternoon, the conspirators’ delegation arrived. They were quickly received by the boy. They described to the emperor a city in which his monarchy was under attack, the loyal people were rising to its defense, and his soldiers and cadets were pledging their adherence. Antônio Carlos asked the emperor to support an immediate acclamation of his majority. The delegation then retired to another room to allow the boy to reflect and to consult with his villa entourage. The key figures among the latter were under Aureliano’s indirect influence.52 It is easy to imagine what kind of advice they gave. At this point, however, a servant arrived to announce that the regent had returned for an audience, accompanied by a minister, Rodrigues Torres. The regent’s arrival followed much personal agony. He had, upon hearing of the conspirators’ success in the Senate, the military’s adherence, and the delegation to the emperor, contemplated resigning. However, frustrated by his enemies’ looming triumph and knowing that he would be held responsible for any disorder associated with his abdication, the regent changed his mind. Indeed, he apparently decided to surrender his regime to the emperor himself, sidestep-

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ping the conspirators and demonstrating his loyalty. It is possibly for this reason that he left for the palace without Vasconcelos. Although the minister most indicated by the occasion, as the cabinet chief, Vasconcelos could not have been expected to agree to the regent’s surrender. Moreover, Vasconcelos was personally too partisan a provocation for the circumstances in which the regent may well have expected to confront the conspirators in person. Instead, he went with Rodrigues Torres; while only the minister of the navy, he could represent the reactionaries without representing repression or the kind of bitter personal associations Vasconcelos did. Thus it was that these two made their way alone to São Cristóvão. It must have been excruciatingly unpleasant. During the roughly six-kilometer journey, they must have been torn between humiliated pride, frustration, fear, and anxiety. They probably took the western outskirt roads, to pass the multitude at the campo and the swamp of the old mangroves between the old city and the villa, before being ushered into the presence of their monarch. The regent discussed the violent response to his morning adjournment of Parliament and asked the boy to decide between being crowned in December or acclamation now. In effect, the emperor was being asked to decide between a civil war and taking immediate power. The Majority delegation was re-admitted into the chamber, then, and the regent explained to the conspirators the choice he had put to the monarch. It must have seemed obviously to everyone there that the regent himself had plainly decided that the regency was at an end. His actions suggest that he wished to relinquish it in obedience to the emperor, and not as a fait accompli forced by men he despised. He likely reasoned that his duty lay in preserving civil order and the Monarchy and, as a visceral monarchist, only the emperor could relieve him of this responsibility. Vasconcelos, however, may well have thought this an abdication of constitutional and political responsibility; certainly, Vasconcelos would rather have met the conspirators’ challenge, and defend the constitutional order and its party, regardless of the adhesion of the Court’s military. The emperor made the obvious choice. When the regent asked him to choose between taking power in December and taking it now, Dom Pedro said “Quero já” (“I want it now”). At the insistence of the conspirators, and with the agreement of the emperor, the regent agreed to call for a joint session of Parliament for the next day, to acclaim the emperor, rather than wait until Sunday, to avoid further agitation and disorder. Vasconcelos alleged soon afterwards that Antônio Carlos took the opportunity of this complete triumph to slander Vasconcelos and the cabinet to the emperor as traitors to the monarch, and to threaten them. As Vasconcelos observed, Antônio Carlos’s outburst was a poor

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lesson in statesmanship. It is very suggestive, too, of the political world dawning. In this 1840 coup, personal ambition and partisan struggle had given the emperor opportunity and justification for personal intervention. It would not be the last time. The conspirators, returned to the Senate in triumph, did not rest easy. Fearing a counter-coup, they sent a delegation to Araújo Lima in his own residence, and demanded that the regent immediately publish the Parliament’s convocation for the emperor’s acclamation. At first, the statesman thought to resign, instead. Clearly, this challenge to his honor and to his word were too much to bear. Then, once again, his sense of duty and appreciation of the circumstances impelled him to accede. The convocation announcement was drafted on the 22nd and published in the Jornal do Commercio over his and Vasconcelo’s names on the paper’s first page on 23 July. With it, Vasconcelos published notice of his resignation, done to avoid any bloodshed. He had been a minister for nine hours—he described them as “the most honorable of all my public life.”53 The regent and the rest of his reactionary cabinet resigned as well, before Parliament, in the Senate chamber, acclaimed Dom Pedro II’s majority and empowerment. Violence and charismatic authority had triumphed against the party which had defended and defined the Monarchy as a constitutional, representative regime. The contradiction would be an enduring one.

III. Political Apprenticeship Apprenticeship can suggest youth and inexperience. Here, what is meant is learning within a world of new possibilities. For none of the actors before us were inexperienced. Even the emperor, who was acclaimed and came to power on 23 July 1840 at fourteen, and was crowned 18 July 1841 at fifteen, can not be considered young and inexperienced. He was unnaturally matured by the circumstances of his childhood and his political experience can be said to have begun after waking up in an abandoned palace at the age of five. One also would not care to suggest that what begins after July 1840 had no relationship to what went before. What historian would? Indeed, we begin not with stark novelty, but with a central motif of the Regency. We begin with violence. The reader will have noticed the importance of violence in the narrative and analysis up to this point. The daily violence of racial hierarchy or slavery, which were actually a central, constituent part of the social order, is not meant here. Rather, what is meant is the violence that speaks to the threats to that order. What is meant is the violence to change the world of the Brazilian Monarchy, the violence that led to the social and racial wars in the sertões in the early 1830s or 1837–1838 in Salvador, rebellions that had been smothered in the dirt and

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blood and sudden fear of bush warfare and street fighting. Or the great rebellion in Pará, or the revolts in Maranhão, revolts still being fought out with passionate cruelty born of fear and loathing. These, and the secessionist war in Rio Grande, imparted a very significant atmosphere of instability, of threat to the era. It had helped the reactionaries to power to put the threat down—it had helped the emperor to his throne to do the same. Many people who were free and property owners, no matter what their color, wanted an end to the faltering political order that threatened their status and their holdings and their hopes of maintaining or improving both. The fact that most of the popular violence was linked, initially at least, to elite political conflicts and competing leadership, does not contradict this. Rather, one imagines it increased the fears of the elite, for it demonstrated the limits of their controls. They often began a revolt, but time and again they were helpless to end it when they wished. This aspiration to return to a stable political order was thus a pervasive element in the political milieu and the desire for monarchy was obviously most identified with that past stability and the legitimacy of tradition and the known. Such fear of popular violence, however, apparently did not mitigate the willingness to use another kind of political violence associated with the masses. The urban masses had figured in regime change in the Court through the use or threat of street violence. The reader will recall, for example, the use of this violence in Rio in 1831 and 1832, and, just now, in the case of the Majority. There is more to this than has been noted so far. It should be stated that the controlled use of the violent urban poor, people generally Afro-Brazilian or African, to intimidate constituted authority or, in episodes still unmentioned, to intimidate or eliminate rivals during elections, makes its appearance early on in the Monarchy’s history. It is an urban phenomenon because of the traditional urban site and orientation of formal political activity in Brazil.54 In Rio, the phenomenon may be related to the early urban violence of the 1820s. The presence of African and Afro-Brazilian street fighters, capoeiras, in the political violence has been remarked upon in published accounts and analysis for some time. Capoeiras were street fighters who practiced an Afro-Brazilian form of hand-to-hand combat (called capoeira, as well); they were a fearsome element in the Empire’s ports. Their fighting involved rapid feints, blocks, and blows of all of the limbs and the head, often accompanied by the deft slash of a knife or a straight razor. They were considered a kind of urban plague by commentators. However, one wonders if the tradition well established by the end of the Monarchy, in which organized gangs, maltas, associated with the old African enthnicities, called nações, were recruited by parish political bosses for election “duty,” does not go back to the 1820s, too. Certainly, Araújo, a late nineteenth-century police historian, is suggestive:

Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence / 97 it was slavery that furnished the greatest contingent of the army of capoeiras. Organized in frightening maltas, that category of true malfactors became a real force during the Monarchy, ably exploited by the political bosses who dispensed protection to them and had them at hand for electoral jobs.55

For our particular purpose here, we can, perhaps, hazard something better than a generality; a connection to the Andradas shimmers in contemporary accounts and is especially interesting. It is well known that in the 1823 street violence associated with the Constituent Assembly, the Andradas indulged in both press provocation and the popular demagoguery that helped mobilize the popular (often Afro-Brazilian) violence against the Portuguese.56 This is most particularly true of Antônio Carlos, “the man of the people, the gigantic tribune of our liberties.”57 The Andradas’ nativism may well have been opportunistic; in any case, it faded over the 1820s; they were reconciled to the emperor and restored to his favor. Seemingly, exaltado lusophobia and the Andradas had parted company, for if the Andradas abandoned the attacks on the Portuguese and the monarch’s tyranny, these were basic to the liberal opposition, particularly its exaltado elements, as the 1820s closed. Indeed, the reader may also recall that this urban lusophobia was a significant element in the 1831 abdication, to which the Andradas were opposed. Yet, it seems clear now, afterwards, the exaltado lusphobes made an opportunistic alliance with the restorationist Andradas in the aftermath of the abdication and the moderados’ ascent, an alliance soon visible both in Parliament and in the streets and barracks. Within a short time, certainly by May 1831, restorationists figured in the first rank of this opposition and enjoyed opportune relations with the exaltado street agitators, known thugs, gallery hecklers, and, in April 1832, the attempted coup discussed earlier. Perhaps Antônio Carlos simply renewed personal links to Rio’s exaltados and desordeiros (hoodlums—literally, “disorderly ones”), as part of this common front against the moderados.58 Certainly, the link between the Andradas, their old street allies, and the struggle against the moderados was well understood by Evaristo da Veiga. In the stifled violence of the aftermath of the fall (12 September 1832) of the Cabinet of Forty Days (the ephemeral opposition administration appointed as a consequence of the failed moderado coup of 30 July 1832), Evaristo observed that government’s supporters and origins with contempt and triumph.59 In an epitaph especially enlightening with regard to the issue of urban violence, he made an appraisal of the cabinet, its links to the Andradas, and their failed, last attempt at intimidation, taking care to taint the Andradas by association with the names of well known thugs: What took place 12 September must teach a good lesson to the ambitious whose intrigues and manoeuvers afflict the fatherland. After 31 July, a certain party believed that

98 / Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence their popularity was immense, that everything would be easy for it, and that Brazil was at its disposal, like a young pupil in the hands of his guardian. They were mistaken; their circle was narrower than they supposed, and the mass of the population only wanted order, law, and obedience to constitutional authority. It is true that some mindless ideologues, believing this party a refuge against the precipitous changes which they feared, and ensnared . . . tended towards the side of the ambitious; but when the perfidy was unmasked, they necessarily had to abandon these false leaders. September 12th arrived; the ambitious arranged so that the people would arise from all sides at their command, or the command of their deplorable agents, and that the movement’s public opinion would serve as a ladder to the completion of their plans, and would ease their way to supreme control. However, . . . only their faithful soldiers presented themselves on the field; the agents whom they employed since 1822, for reprisals and plots, and some ambitious fanatics, drawn by the magic of agreeable bombast and bound to the chariot of the giants. Some of the malcontents of 7 April; unemployed officers, heroes of the abdication riots, tough guys of the violent repressions of 1822, former police spies during Pedro I’s regime joined together; but the heterogeneous mass which formed [and] the types who led the gangs together clarified the fragility of such a party, its lack of means, [and] the very incapacity of those who led it. What honest man, whatever his party, would want to join the battle-standard of a Girão, of a Porto Seguro, of a Lafuente, and of a José dos Cacos? Thus, we saw some of the better sort of person, who political fanaticism or contracted obligations added to those groups, lowering their eyes, as if ashamed to be seen in such bad company. The city remained in the greatest tranquility and repose, and the Regency was supported by its natural constituents; the propertied, the businessmen, and we other men of industry could not be stirred. . . . What is there in common between this population, worthy, friendly to order, to law, bound to the Constitution and to the constitutional Monarch, and some troublemakers and malcontents commanded by Girão and Porto Seguro?60

In the Majority movement eight years later, the employment of press and gallery provocation and street agitation is quite clear in the published record. Here, once again, Antônio Carlos, the principal figure in the Majority agitation, is involved, as well as some of the key exaltados. In a phrase, one wonders if these brief sightings in the annals and periodicals indicate a network of political violence involving individuals among the free Afro-Brazilian urban poor and certain political chieftains of the highest rank. One might suggest a situation in which elite provocateurs, such as Antônio Carlos, using expedient links to more politicized lusophobes and democratic street agitators (the lower edges of the exaltados) and established patronage links to professional street fighters (the capoeiras), might mobilize both when their interests coincided. The exaltados might be brought into play for political and class issues, as part of an expedient political alliance of opposition, the capoeiras out of personal bonds of loyalty and patronage protection. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that Eusébio’s report on violence in the Chamber, as reported by Antônio Carlos himself, specified the presence of men

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with knives. Whether true or not, Eusébio’s message was a direct one—the political process was threatened by the urban desordeiros. True or false with respect to the “people” in the Chamber that day, it was a calculated warning, calculated in the sense that the urban elite and middle class knew precisely the danger to which the seasoned police chief alluded. The Majority movement doubtless profited from the intimidation inherent with the use of such people because they were a commonplace fear to men of property. This is clear in Evaristo’s 1832 observations; he can name desordeiros as he does because they and their kind were infamous. Noted malefactors were clearly a part of an oral history in the city. In a more impressive example, Eusébio’s son, as late as 1885, can cite the name of an infamous 1830s salteador (someone who practices surprise robbery or killing), knowing that his probable readers in Rio will be familiar with his name and the milieu of urban violence and unpunished crime common in the era. In another example, Tavares de Lyra can name the 1820 assassin of Gertrudes Angêlica Pedra Carneiro Leão as Joaquim Inácio da Costa, “known as Orelha [Ear], who had a great name, after Independence, as a chieftain of thugs and a skilled agitator” and cite Vieira Fazenda, connoisseur of Rio’s local history, as his source, noting that “Vieira Fazenda knew a son of Orelha, now old, Venâncio, in bygone days the perfect example of a thug and an agile capoeira . . .” Doubtless it was just such an oral history of urban desordeiros that informed Luís José Melo e Matos. This political historian, born only in 1839, yet chronicled the Andradas’ intimidating allies at the culminating phase of the Majority coup in July 1840 as though an eyewitness, describing them as “sinister figures, once well known in Rio de Janeiro in the years 1831, ’32, and ’33, but who, it would have been thought, would have disappeared from the capital of a civilized country some time ago. Anonymous threats were directed at the principle chiefs of the party opposed to the Majority. . . . ”61 After 1840, such combinations of high politics and popular street violence would continue to coincide, but the politicized popular mobilization of the 1820s and 1830s would occur less and less often, as we shall see. Not so, however, the patronage of professional thugs for electoral and partisan purposes. This will become part of traditional election violence and post-election repression, in which partisan toughs, in and out of police uniform were employed, and it will be manifest not only in the great port cities, but in the rural county seats, as well. The violence and corruption of the electoral process have been treated as static and ahistorical. However, they are more accurately understood as the historical result of the political and legislative process at issue here, beginning with the election of 1840 and effectively systematized by 1852.62 This has a great deal to do with the apprenticeship, the world of new possibilities which has been mentioned earlier. Two general trends are central in the

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political events of the 1840s. First, the emperor, as the new, unchallenged authority in high politics, could and did have an impact on the rapid transition of cabinets made up of men from one party or the other, or both. Politically, this served to emphasize his new authority and to sap the independence, power, and prestige of the parties and their chieftains. He also chose to block the reactionary party from the cabinets altogether for nearly five crucial, consecutive years (the “Liberal Quinquennium” of 2 February 1844 to 29 September 1848). Second, the triumph of the Interpretation of the Additional Act in 1840 was followed by the related reform of the 1832 Código de Processo Criminal (most often referred to by its date of passage, 3 December 1841). The two combined did more than simply eviscerate the liberal reformism culminating in the Additional Act of 1834. Indeed, this legislation, drafted by Paulino and his colleagues, placed unprecedented powers of patronage and authoritarian, centralized control in the hands of subsequent cabinets by making the minister of justice responsible for appointing judges and police agents from Rio out and down to the most local levels of society in the provinces. This meant, of course, that rival local landholding families came to be compelled to ally themselves with one party or the other because whichever party held the cabinet decided upon who controlled the monopoly of legitimate state power at the local level. Particularly at election time, such families used their dependent thugs to either maintain the ruling party in power or, if they had enough informal local influence (and thugs), to defend their interests against the protégés of the state. In either case, local political violence related to partisan cabinet turnovers and Chamber elections quickly became a generalized characteristic of the national regime. Thus, the various elections of the 1840s, which were more frequent because of the emperor’s frequent appointment of new cabinets, brought about a new, increased level of local political violence in town and city.63 The political narrative is crucial to understanding these two phenomena and what their impact was. Immediately after his acclamation, on 24 July 1840, the emperor chose a cabinet composed of chiefs from among Majority conspirators and a personal favorite of his own: the two Andrada brothers, Limpo de Abreu, Holanda and his brother, Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, barão de Suasuna, and Aureliano. The cabinet ministers disputed primacy with one another, particularly regarding the Rio Grande revolt, and divided along the obvious fault line: Aureliano challenged the Andradas for the cabinet’s leadership. The cabinet found no resolution and resigned. Aureliano, however, was reappointed by the emperor to his second cabinet (23 March 1841). Aureliano’s survival was a success that did much to make his reputation in the political world to be that of the emperor’s most trusted statesman in the early 1840s. This was confirmed when he went on to dispute primacy with the reactionaries

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who were among the ministers of the second cabinet, as well. This was a cabinet clearly chosen to support the emperor, probably smarting from the hauteur of the Andradas; it was characterized by First-Reign veterans, with only one of the younger reactionaries, Paulino, among them. Aureliano took the portfolio for foreign affairs, the emperor’s tutor, Araújo Viana, took empire, and the marquês de Paranaguá, a key figure in the Majority conspiracy, took navy. Reactionaries made up the rest: Paulino took justice, Calmon (made visconde de Abrantes in July) took finance, and José Clemente took war. Although loyalty to the emperor and his father were common to these ministers, little else was, particularly if one recalls Aureliano’s past among the Feijó moderados of the mid1830s. Political and personal disputes in the cabinets did not overshadow events of a more general importance; they naturally tended to intertwine with them. While the Andradas, Cavalcantis, and Aureliano held power together, they oversaw the scheduled elections of 1840 in October and November. They had used the previous months to purge the provincial administrations of reactionary stalwarts and to impose men of the opposition or others merely loyal to them personally (or, at least, hostile to the reactionaries). They were especially careful to do this in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, where the reactionaries had their strongest political base and where Aureliano and his brother, Saturnino [de Oliveira e Coutinho], were born and had ambitions for a provincial political bulwark of their own. The idea was to deny the reactionaries their votes and to elect opposition deputies, particularly loyal to Aureliano, in their stead. This use of the cabinet’s power was easier planned than done, and was violently contested by the reactionaries, whose kith and kin in the province were very powerful. Indeed, the consequent electoral violence was so unprecedented, and the results so obviously fraudulent, that they were called the “Elections of the Truncheon.”64 After that first cabinet, the Majority ministry, fell, Paulino was appointed minister of justice, as noted, as one of the three reactionaries who were appointed alongside Aureliano in the second cabinet. Unsurprisingly, he and the other reactionaries prepared to complete and implement the reactionary judicial legislation they had proposed in the Regency, along with enabling reforms to strengthen the emperor himself. The Interpretation, of course, had already been passed in May 1840. A project for a new Council of State was revised, debated, and passed: thus, the emperor’s supreme council, sign and instrument of the moderating power, was restored in November 1841. The reform of the Código, crucial to the Interpretation, was signed 3 December 1841, as noted earlier. All of this was possible because the sitting Chamber was the same one that had been elected after the reactionary triumph of 1837; it had been sitting since

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1838, it had a reactionary majority, and one now eager to please the newly enthroned monarch. The opposition, whose chiefs had briefly been empowered in the Majority Cabinet, now could only bide their time. They waited for the deputies elected under the auspices of that Majority Cabinet, in the “Elections of the Truncheon” mentioned above, to replace the present Chamber with its reactionary majority. Then they would have their day, with an opposition majority seated in the Chamber at the start of the next Legislature, set to begin in May 1841. Once these new opposition deputies were seated, it was assumed the manufactured opposition majority that had been achieved in that election could be used to block the second cabinet and force the resignation of its reactionaries. The opposition doubtless expected the ministers replacing them would be picked from among their Chamber majority and would then use the new powers the reactionaries had provided to the state to protect and promote opposition interests. Some of the more radical elements in the opposition may also have hoped that the opposition majority might revise aspects of the new reactionary legislation to restore or reimpose reforms.65 On 1 May 1842, however, two days before the new opposition majority expected to take their seats, the reactionary cabinet and, more important, the new Council of State (whose twelve members, most visceral monarchists and reactionaries, included Vasconcelos, Honório, and Costa Carvalho) advised the emperor to dissolve the new Legislature elected to the Chamber as tainted by the nature of its election. Dom Pedro II agreed. On 17 May, the opposition, now defeated in both the legislative struggle of 1837–1841 and in their hope of taking power through the election of 1840, desperate at the thought of their enemies in command of a more empowered state, and already suffering from the cabinet’s dismissal of opposition appointees across the Empire, began an armed rebellion in the provinces of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro.66 These provincial revolts of 1842, although small-scale and poorly organized militarily, were perceived with great alarm by the reactionaries and thought to be of tremendous political significance. The leadership of the rebellions was made up exclusively of many of the former reformist moderados (such as Feijó) and exaltados (such as Teófilo Otoni). This clearly suggests the enduring division in the opposition to the reactionaries. The opposition was characterized by two wings: this group, the more reformist, radical wing of the opposition and a more moderate, pragmatic wing, led by men closely identified with the Monarchy by their personal careers or provincial interests (e.g., Aureliano, Alves Branco, Limpo de Abreu on the one hand, and the Cavalcanti “liberals” on the other). The regional cast of the rebellion is also interesting, for the radical opposition in the Northeast did not rise. This may have been because the most important radical party there, the chimangos (literally, birds of prey) of Per-

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nambuco, had supported the reactionaries and the regent against the Cavalcantis in 1840–1842. It may also have been because the barão de Boa Vista, a stalwart of the reactionary wing of the Cavalcantis, dominated the province successfully. No matter; they did not rise, and the rebellion was all the more easily crushed because of it. The reactionary party chieftains and publicists used the thwarted rebellion of 1842 to taint all of the opposition party, regardless of wing or region, as “anarchists.” The reactionaries had for some time argued that the liberal reforms of the 1830s would lead to disorder. After 1842, they could, and did, claim that the opposition party promoted disorder and violence and rebellion and were thus anarchists, beyond the pale of the reactionaries’ ideal, the constitutional order of a representative monarchy.67 The reactionary cabinet undertook rigorous repression and judicial punishment of the rebels and their leadership. The military phase in 1842 was carried through by the joint efforts of the imperial army under the barão de Caxias (Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, son of the former regent, Francisco de Lima e Silva, kinsman of the Carneiro Leão merchant-planter clan, and now a fluminense planter himself) and the newest president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, Honório, who organized a small army of planters’ thugs in the threatened highland frontier with Minas, an army led by National Guard officers from among the middle and eastern Paráiba coffee planting elite, with Francisco de Peixoto Lacerda Werneck as their commander. It is a perfect embodiment of the state and society alliance for which the reactionary party spoke. The revolts clarified still more the process of political ideological identification, party discipline, and partisan organization the reactionary leadership had begun in the mid 1830s. Order, identified with the constitutional monarchy, was at risk. The party, identified with and recruited from the state and society which that order guaranteed, now mobilized to defend it. Its partisan chieftains worked as one to do so, whether as leaders of the state or leaders of the society. In most cases, they were both. Now, they rose to a challenge which seemed transcendent and thoroughly partisan simultaneously. No doubt was admitted at the time. When Paulino, as minister of justice, hesitated (perhaps thinking of the political repercussions) to implement the measures Honório thought crucial to striking the rebels, the provincial president made the defining character of the moment manifest: if Your Excellency hesitates over this consideration, we are lost, since the Government will be unable to conquer and overthrow the vast conspiracy, whose first scenes have played out in Sorocaba . . . Queluz, Silvas, and in Barbacena. One is not dealing here with the defense of Minas, but, rather, that of the Monarchy, and this is debated sword in hand. . . . Thus, my friend and milord—Either the Government triumphs over the vast rebellion or no. . . . If the Government does not triumph, then, my friend and milord, Your Excellency should know that your moderation will not be taken into account, we the friends of the Monarchy will call it weakness, and we will say that the Government

104 / Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence was unequal to the circumstances, and those fellows will mock your weakness and not even then will they pardon the accusations that they already have against you. . . .68

The concern with the attack on the ordered society of the Monarchy was felt with particular immediacy by the planters who rallied to the reactionary standard. In one letter, the issue of a rumored slave revolt is broached in a way that nicely demonstrates the conflation of the actors’ state and social roles, as it is a letter from one National Guard officer to another, regarding the threat to their property in an era of disorder: The National Guardsman João Gomes de Souza . . . requests that I intercede on his behalf with Your Lordship so that he may be dispensed [from service], something I find just, first, because he has a brother-in-law [in the field], second, because he lives in my neighborhood; and as Your Lordship knows, he dwells at the foot of the Plantations of the Brothers [Teixeira Leite?], mine, Secretario, and that of the Sogro; these [plantations] together have more than a thousand slaves: at those points almost everyone is mobilized, there are few to aid the patrols that are very active because of the terrifying news that was put about (and which was fortunately false), but there is no guarantee, and complete vigilance has become necessary.69

Order was not an abstract benefit to such men; it sustained power and wealth against a very real perception of potential anarchy and rapine. The mobilization of the state and the response of the planters was successful. The rebels were quashed piecemeal, in São Paulo, western Rio de Janeiro, and, finally, in Minas. There, the last rebels were defeated at Santa Luzia (20 August 1842), and the reactionaries’ order was maintained. It was, in partisan terms, a great victory. In the aftermath, the reactionaries purged the Crown bureaucracy in favor of local allies, rewarding friends and ensuring election of a reactionary majority to the Chamber in late 1842. Indeed, private correspondence suggests that the only election disputes were patronage and electoral rivalries between reactionaries themselves. The judicial repression of the former rebels and their sympathizers went less well. Many rebels, members of local regional elites, although mercilessly persecuted by reactionary magistrates, were eventually exonerated by local juries. Others found protection, even among local reactionaries, which sheltered them from more partisan, rigorous punishment. This lack of local support for the cabinet’s policy of thorough persecution may also have had repercussions on high. The zeal of the cabinet in its electoral and judicial policies, although uncriticized by the emperor at the time, may have dissatisfied the monarch and confirmed his concerns about the ways in which a powerful party could abuse state power.70 Indeed, the reactionaries’ continued grasp of state power was unsteady. The apparently inevitable disputes over political primacy Aureliano’s presence in the cabinet created led to the resignation of the ministers on 23 January 1843. In the

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immediate aftermath of the revolts, however, the emperor was probably loath to consider a cabinet drawn from the opposition party, whose reformist and radical chieftains had led those revolts and were now in exile or under prosecution. Thus, despite his favorite, the emperor turned, again, to the reactionaries, summoning Honório and Rodrigues Torres to São Cristóvao. Honório was particularly uncomfortable with the burden of accepting cabinet leadership in the aftermath of the cabinet dispute between his reactionary friends and the emperor’s favorite. There was no reason at all to assume that his relations with Aureliano would better. One of the two preeminent reactionary chiefs, a man who, like Vasconcelos, hated Aureliano for his role among the post–1832 Feijó moderados and in the Majority movement, Honório was also, like Vasconcelos, a man who expected to lead and to command deference. Aureliano was unlikely to follow or to defer. However, Honório decided to accept the emperor’s call.71 Honório explained his decision to the monarch in terms of loyalty to Crown and state, but, clearly, one can see that personal ambition and partisan loyalty also must have played a part. Honório had been forced to resign his first and only ministry in 1833. Now, a decade later, he was one of the two foremost chieftains of a victorious party. It made no sense to save the state which that party had only recently reconstructed and defended, only to abandon it now; it made no sense to lead a party in the Chamber and the provinces and then eschew its leadership and the opportunities for patronage from the commanding heights of the executive. Perhaps his understandable concerns about Aureliano’s role were assuaged by the favorite’s absence from the cabinet he and the emperor negotiated. Indeed, the emperor’s acquiescence on this point may well have been due to the increasing rumors about Aureliano’s influence over him and Aureliano’s role in the destabilization of the previous two cabinets. Still, Honório apparently determined to strengthen his hand still further. After a time, he asked the emperor to appoint Paulino to the cabinet. If Aureliano had initially decided to hang back this third time around, the appointment of Paulino, his particular rival in the previous cabinet, was a fatal provocation. Aureliano apparently influenced the emperor to delay Paulino’s ascent for five months; he may also have influenced the emperor’s refusal to allow Honório to return the portfolio of Justice to Paulino. This nearly compelled Honório to resign. As the emperor had not, at that point, failed to support the reactionaries’ repression of the rebels of 1842, his blocking Paulino from Justice was apparently not a rejection of that policy (a policy with which Paulino had become necessarily associated, as its author). Why, then, did the emperor do it? It may well have been a reprisal for Paulino’s abuse of Justice in the electoral coercion in the 1842 elections. The emperor may have been concerned with such scandalous partisanship, which consolidated reactionary strength in Crown ap-

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pointments and the Chamber. The election had outraged Aureliano as well, but on more personal grounds, because, of course, that coercion helped reverse Aureliano’s personal tide in the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Despite the emperor’s decision, however, a deal was apparently struck and the crisis ebbed for a moment; Paulino accepted Foreign Affairs instead of Justice and Honório agreed to stay on. Then, Aureliano, perhaps emboldened, challenged the reactionaries again. His brother, Saturnino, one of those denied a seat in the Chamber by Paulino’s electoral coercion, still remained head of the customs bureaucracy in Rio. He now began to attack the cabinet’s financial policies and to put himself forward in opposition to the cabinet’s favorites (including Rodrigues Torres) in the senatorial election for Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1843.72 Honório and his party perceived this, inevitably, as a more formidable challenge. For him and the reactionary leadership, the idea of Crown confidence implied that the ministers governed as they saw fit until they lost that confidence or that of the Chamber whose majority they should represent. This was one of the basic constitutional assumptions of his party. He had been willing to serve, despite the threat posed by Aureliano’s private relationship with the emperor, on the understanding that, as the leader of the cabinet, he retained the Crown’s confidence. He had seen the latter made far too ambiguous in the emperor’s hesitant support for Paulino’s appointment, which the emperor had delayed and diverted from one portfolio to another. In late December, Honório apparently decided he must strike back against Aureliano; too much was at stake, both in fluminense politics and in the cabinet’s relations with the Crown. He slipped Paulino into Justice as interim minister; just in time to fix the fluminense senatorial race which Aureliano and Saturnino had obviously hoped would shore up their provincial political base (14 January 1844). Honório wanted still more. Not content with having humiliated the favorite and his brother in their electoral defeat, Honório went to São Cristóvão and made it clear to Dom Pedro that he made the dismissal of Saturnino from his remaining Crown appointment a question of Crown confidence. The cabinet could not retain credibility if a Crown appointee mocked it without reprisal; Saturnino must go or the cabinet itself would. Either the state was led by a cabinet enjoying full Crown confidence or it was the plaything of a prince’s favorite.73 Honório had made these points early on in the cabinet’s tenure, when he first threatened resignation over rumors of Aureliano’s criticism of his handling of foreign affairs, as well as the favorite’s interference with Paulino’s portfolio. He had written then to the emperor, attempting with crude implication to tie the emperor’s decisions and Aureliano’s role to the larger question of Crown confidence: I will say to Your Imperial Majesty that the motives which decide Your Imperial Majesty [regarding Paulino’s appointment] being hidden from me, I am forced to believe that I

Political Theory, Partisan Practice, and the Emperor’s Emergence / 107 do not enjoy the same confidence with Your Imperial Majesty, to accept the significance of the rumor that came to my ear that someone was displeased with the direction that I gave to foreign affairs, and that he did not desire my remaining in that position. Thus, I must satisfy the pledge that I made [to Parliament, to leave power rather than govern without Crown confidence], persuaded of the idea that I do not enjoy the confidence of Your Imperial Majesty to the same degree [as before] . . . I understand that if I were to remain Your Imperial Majesty would Judge me to be without dignity and would Think that desirous of maintaining myself in power I would accept any position to conserve it.74

Although the emperor had apparently acceded to that early, first threat of resignation, the steady increase of his minister’s strength (and his favorite’s humiliations), as well as the very public nature of the conflict, apparently compelled the emperor to refuse now. It was a fatal conjuncture in the Monarchy’s constitutional history. As was inevitable, the issues were both constitutional and personal for the minister and the monarch. If Honório’s reasoning is clear, so is that of Dom Pedro. Seventeen, a beardless youth, being imposed upon by a statesman grown gray in Crown service, but a statesman of a notoriously overbearing temperament, the boy saw the latest ultimatum as a choice between being a puppet and being a prince. In the end, he had to protect his own position. He accepted Honório’s resignation and that of the cabinet, rather than be seen by Honório or anyone else as a monarch who might be pressured into compliance. As he put it, a quarter of a century later, I understood that the dismissal [of Saturnino] was unjust, and by the way in which Carneiro Leão insisted, I understood that if I yielded they would think me weak. No one influenced me in this decision, and after my character was understood, I would have agreed, just because experience has shown me that political vagaries correct the injustices they originate over time.75

To his daughter, Dona Isabel, the emperor later elaborated. He argued that he had accepted Honório’s resignation because Saturnino’s dismissal was “not . . . just, and, above all because it seemed a demand made to someone young, little experienced, and therefore presumably without the qualities necessary to fight the demand.”76 The emperor now may well have decided that he could not comfortably turn to the reactionaries again. Certainly, one cannot imagine Aureliano favoring such a course. As rumors of a turn to the opposition suddenly flew about the Court, Honório was outraged and alarmed. He had understood the resignation as a personal decision, not a partisan one; a question of an individual minister, not one party over another. Given the emperor’s acquiescence to the reactionaries’ policies, Honório had apparently expected the emperor would recruit yet another reactionary ministry, in order to continue those policies and to maintain an executive with support among the reactionary majority in the

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Chamber. The appointment of an opposition cabinet, instead, would inevitably bring with it the threat of new elections, fixed results, partisan reprisals, and policy shifts. Honório, aghast to hear of an opposition cabinet, perhaps one with even radical ministers in it, wrote immediately to Araújo Viana, the emperor’s former tutor: My friend and Milord, I have just been informed that, meeting yesterday in the home of Ernesto [Ferreira França] messers. José Carlos [Pereira de Almeida Torres] and Alves Branco, in order to come to an agreement about the people who ought to complete the new Cabinet, that this last gentleman proposed Limpo [de Abreu] and [Teófilo] Otoni. Limpo has good qualities, is educated, and I am even aware that he has much modified his political ideas, however, what can I say about Otoni? Just departed last month from jail in Ouro Preto, and now proposed 1 February as a Minister of Milord Dom Pedro II!! I am told that the idea was dismissed, but does not the simple proposition demonstrate enough the tendency of these gentlemen? Must not one warn the emperor? His Majesty was always in agreement with the Cabinet of which I was a member in questions of foreign and domestic policy: the divergence appeared in a small personal question. Should that divergence give origin to a change toward the politics of the rebels? I asked His Majesty the emperor if he hoped to modify domestic politics, and His Majesty responded no to me. In view of these data I ask Your Excellency if it would not be appropriate to warn the emperor. . . . May Your Excellency respond promptly. . . . 77

The letter was sent on to the emperor immediately.78 The most important response was prompt, indeed, but it was hardly reassuring. That very day, a cabinet was appointed and announced, and one without obvious links to either radicals or reactionaries, a cabinet of moderate pragmatists, drawn from the opposition and non-partisan Crown servants. From the appointments the emperor made for this cabinet and those that followed over the next five years, he, and possibly Aureliano, made it clear that the emperor was determined to avoid sharing power or risking another confrontation with the leadership and disciplined ranks of the reactionary party, whatever his support for the reactionary policies of 1841–1844. The emperor may well have felt that the reactionaries were too powerful, too independent of the monarch; certainly, Aureliano would likely have advised as much. However he was advised, however he felt, there is no question about how he acted. Although his decisions were often blamed on the reactionaries’ bête noir, Aureliano, they can also be seen to fit the fears and insecurities of the new monarch fairly well. The emperor, between 2 February 1844 to 31 May 1848, appointed a series of six moderate, pragmatist opposition cabinets which, in turn, oversaw and fixed the elections for two Legislatures (that of 1845–47, and that of 1848). Indeed, the emperor cleared the way for this opposition era, the “Liberal Quinquennium,” by dissolving the sitting Chamber in May 1844, because its reac-

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tionary majority was inevitably hostile to the cabinet with which he replaced Honório’s. He also cleared the way for rapprochement between the Crown and the opposition (and between the moderate pragmatists and reformist-radicals within the opposition) by the 14 March 1844 amnesty of the rebels of 1842, seemingly as part of a deal with the first cabinet of this era. That cabinet must have sought this out of political necessity, for it had to have opposition support if it could not have that of the reactionaries. However, this cabinet and those which followed were hand-picked for acceptable moderate pragmatists in the opposition, which meant that they were often at odds with the Chamber, where the more reformist-radical wing of the opposition party attempted, with little success, to reverse or reform the reactionary legislation of 1840–1842.79 The results of this Liberal Quinquennium were politically disastrous for everyone except, perhaps, the emperor. For the opposition party, the apparent inability of the party to find ideological and policy coherence between the successive pragmatic cabinets and the more ideological, more radical Chamber led to the opposition reformist-radical wing’s frustration, increased radicalization, and perception of unending exclusion from power. There were public protests about the cabinets’ failure to push for radical reform in May of 1845 and in the sessions of 1846. In the aftermath of France’s 1848 revolution, Chamber divisions and disgust with the moderate-pragmatist cabinet of the time led to stalemate and crisis. Indeed, by 1848, the opposition party was regionally and politically incoherent to an unprecedented degree. The Northeastern radicals, particularly in Pernambuco, remained committed to the constitutional reforms and lusophobia of the past; the paulistas and mineiros, chastened by the failure of 1842, were divided between a minority of die-hard radicals and a larger fraction, a fraction which accepted the pragmatist leadership, the state as the reactionaries had reconstructed it, and the established status quo. The stalemate was clearly dysfunctional and radical disdain for politics became unrelenting. The ensuing crisis would lead to violence, revolt, repression and retreat (here, the most famous case is Teófilo Otoni, who left politics entirely for twelve years after the fall of the last opposition cabinet of 1848). Particularly, the leadership in the cabinets was increasingly seen by radicals and reactionaries alike as bought off by the desire to acquire the emperor’s favor, to retain power, and, consequently, as unwilling to oppose the emperor’s influence or to challenge the reactionary legislation that made cabinet power so necessary and attractive to protect or to promote one’s local and partisan interests.80 Ironically enough, it was in the earliest part of this Quinquennium that the national opposition and the reactionary parties were first given more enduring names. In 1844, the reactionaries had taken to calling the opposition party luzias, in reference to the rebels’ final defeat in the 1842 revolt on the battlefield

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of Santa Luzia, in Minas. By 1844, Honório also referred to luzias as Liberals. The terms became interchangeable by 1848. At the same time, these years of trial and political loss became the final tempering phase of the reactionaries. After 1842, certainly by 1844, the party referred to itself as the partido ordeiro (Orderly Party) or the partido de ordem (Party of Order) in a clear attempt to contrast itself with the luzias, whom they accused of disorder and anarchy. But the party, and particularly its leadership, were also called saquaremas. Like luzia, saquarema was a term that spoke to the political violence of the era. Rodrigues Torres owned a coffee plantation in the hilly, coastal lowland region near the fluminense town of Saquarema. The political control of the area by Rodrigues Torres and his kith and kin was firm. In 1844, however, Aureliano, now president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, apparently decided to take his vengeance for the recent humiliations sustained in fluminense elections. He began a ruthless electoral campaign to scour out the partisan base of his enemies, who had denied him and his brother fluminense political influence. A local judge, one of the myriad inserted into local fluminense affairs by Aureliano’s influence, sought by the most scandalous and violent fraud to deny the election to the reactionaries in Saquarema itself. This shocking challenge to the local established order and the corresponding mobilization of the fluminense reactionaries to defend it identified Saquarema with the baixada hard core of the reactionary party and its leadership, particularly Rodrigues Torres, Eusébio de Queirós, and Paulino. The chieftains of the nation’s Party of Order now had a name that spoke to the fluminense origins and strength of the party.81 For the saquaremas, then, these five years were difficult ones. In that first year, 1844, under Aureliano’s heavy hand, the Province of Rio de Janeiro itself became an opposition bailiwick. No fluminense reactionaries were elected to the Chamber. Indeed, in the Empire as a whole, only a few among the reactionaries were elected from other provinces, and two of those refused to accept, given the obvious taint of the cabinet’s meddling. The only members of the former reactionary majority who were re-elected were those who went over to the new cabinet. Eight reactionaries faithful to the party’s discipline were newly elected; they hailed from Bahia and Piauí In 1846, the death of a luzia fluminense deputy allowed Paulino, a runner-up replacement, into the Chamber; his prestige immediately assured leadership of the tiny reactionary minority. These few were known as the “patrol.” They, and the reactionary journalism of Justiniano José da Rocha in O Brasil, kept the party alive by maintaining their ideas and their positions before the political public through the debates in the Chamber and in the Senate (where Vasconcelos, in 1838; Honório, in 1842; and Rodrigues Torres, in 1844, had ascended) and through the polemical essays and analysis of their paper. Although the demoralization of the Liberals’ second

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cabinet was great by 1846, Honório dismissed the possibility of a saquarema cabinet replacing it. The fate of the party was dismal in these years; indeed, Rodrigues Torres threatened to retire to his provincial plantation rather than attend the Senate. He, at least, had a choice; most reactionaries lost public office and political influence. The electoral reprisals of 1844 had been made possible by a dramatic purge of Crown appointees among the party’s faithful throughout the Empire. Persecution in the party’s bailiwicks in Rio de Janeiro and Minas was particularly necessary for electoral victory and partisan revenge, and was thus egregious until 1848. Indeed, to defend themselves and to attack Aureliano’s supporters, the saquaremas allied with the more radical wing of the Liberals in the 1846 Chamber in a tactical, ephemeral alliance against the favorite, his supporters, and the cabinet. Only such divisions among the Liberals and the fiercest defense of their rights allowed a larger group (sixteen) of saquaremas into the Chamber after the second Liberal-controlled election of 1847.82 The reactionaries’ response to this plight was twofold. In O Brasil, Rocha kept up coverage and criticism of the Liberals and pointed consistently to the contrast between their hypocrisies and violence and the principles and the behavior of the Party of Order. After all, the Liberals could be attacked for rising against the state in 1842 when they lost within the parameters of the Constitution, for abusing the powers of the state when in power, and for failing to reform and curtail the state power (created by the Party of Order) despite their previous attacks on such power as tyrannical. The Party of Order, Rocha argued, had, in contrast, retired from power when principles demanded it in 1844 and accepted their exile from power and their unjust persecution without armed revolt against the state, faithful to the constitutional, representative, centralized monarchy which they had designed and defended since 1837.83 In the Senate, however, a second response became clear as early as February 1844. As noted earlier, Honório, upon resignation, had apparently hoped that the emperor’s new cabinet, if not made up of his particular friends, would still be made up of reactionary allies within his party, who might enjoy support among the reactionary majority in the Chamber. The choice for a cabinet with no strong linkage to the reactionaries, a cabinet with opposition stalwarts such as Alves Branco and Ernesto, seemed to fly in the face of a parliamentary, representative form of government, for it was a cabinet without significant Chamber support. Honório and Vasconcelos thus attacked the cabinet appointments and the consequent volte face in politics as contrary to parliamentary logic and implied that it was the work of Aureliano.84 This attack, emphasizing the principles of representative, constitutional government and contrasting it with the way in which cabinets were recruited and disposed of, became a common coin of criticism by radicals and reactionaries

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alike in the Quinquennium. The common target in this criticism was Aureliano and his allies, who were blamed as the agents of this corruption of the state’s relationship with society. The phrase for the favorite and his coterie was the faccão áulica (the “hall faction,” an allusion to the halls of the emperor’s villa). Reactionaries thought that theirs was a party whose loyalty (indeed, paternity) with respect to the Monarchy and constitutional, representative government, was beyond reproach. Their exile from power, and its usurpation by what they viewed as a series of incompetent, politically incoherent, and unprincipled cabinets were understood as the abuse of the moderating power through the extraconstitutional influence of Aureliano and his cronies, or, as Rodrigues Torres put it in a private letter to Paulino, “of that immoral and indecent faction which is losing Brazil.”85 One of Rocha’s journalist colleagues, and a close ally of Paulino, the reactionary publicist and politician, Rodrigues da Silva, finally brought matters to a head with the anonymous publication of a pamphlet analyzing the phenomenon. He wrote it shortly after the fall of the Liberals’ third cabinet: The Dissolution of the Cabinet of 5 May, or, the Hall Faction, published at the end of May 1847. The work attacked Aureliano, championed parliamentary government, obliquely attacked the emperor’s role, and called for electoral reform and partisan reconciliation in the face of the challenge. On balance, the criticisms at the time (and the observations of posterity), lean towards those attacking Aureliano. That his personal relationship with the emperor was fundamental to the statesman’s power, and that he used this power against the Party of Order in elections, in Parliament, and in the cabinets, seems manifest. The larger question is whether this influenced the distortion of the developing political practice of a parliamentary monarchy. One would have to state that it did.86 In any case, the outcry certainly reached the palace. Perhaps in response to this critique, the emperor made clear at this time one of the characteristics of his rule: a great sensitivity to the appearance of constitutional proprieties. He must have been aware of the attacks on Aureliano for some time and was doubtless uncomfortable with their reflection on his own independence and capacity. After he had appointed Alves Branco to lead a Liberal cabinet again (22 May, just before Firmino’s pamphlet came out), he raised him to a new rank, in July 1847: president of the Council of Ministers (i.e., the cabinet’s prime minister). The decree thinly veiled the intent in its wording. It spoke of the new position as better suited to representative government and of its purpose in organizing the cabinet. In essence, however, concerned with having himself attacked indirectly and directly for a series of failed cabinets, the emperor was creating a new target for public criticism; a minister who was charged with the responsibility for naming the new ministers (and, thus, a person upon whom

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the blame for its composition and its success could be attached). Before, although neither the monarch nor, certainly, a favorite, was constitutionally responsible before the Chamber or the public for such appointments and their policies, political gossip naturally had attributed the nominations, decisions, and policies of the ephemeral Liberal cabinets directly to Aureliano or to his master. Now, such decisions could be attributed to the prime minister—another obscured window between the Crown and the cabinet had been set in place. If this was the emperor’s hope, it would quickly prove ingenuous. It was a bit harder to see the detail of what went on, but no one would fail to remark the shadow of the main figure.87 This decree to create a prime minister has also been seen as an attempt by the emperor to declare his independence of Aureliano, by creating a constitutional, representative, responsible minister to fulfill the function of organizing and leading the government, rather than relying upon the charming fluminense for advice and decisions. Certainly, it seems to have had something like that effect, but not, perhaps, as the emperor wished. First, Alves Branco soon made a public split with Aureliano and Saturnino. Both had been made vulnerable by Rodrigues da Silva’s pamphlet, and Alves Branco had been strengthened dramatically by the extra measure of confidence implied by his elevation under the emperor’s own hand. Such a public fall must have strengthened the credibility of the previous attacks. Second, the replacement of the favorite by a prime minister did not shield the emperor, as he might have hoped; rather, it bared the emperor to more direct attacks by the radical liberals. Aureliano had drawn much of the fire; now he was gone. As the fourth, fifth, and sixth Liberal cabinets failed in unusually rapid succession (8 March, 31 May, and 29 September 1848), and in the electric ideological radicalization that followed news of the victory over France’s July Monarchy by its own Liberal opposition, the farce of the moderate-pragmatic cabinets, and that of the elections, were laid at the feet of the emperor in the Chamber and street. It was a radicalization that characterizes the milieu in which another pamphlet, Libel of the People, was written. Although the piece was published in 1849, after the Quinquennium’s dusk, its origins and its attacks are emblematic of the radicals’ disgust. It was written anonymously, by Francisco de Sales Torres Homem (1811–1876). Torres Homem, son of a priest and a quitandeira (an African or creole street vendor specializing in food), studied medicine in Rio and law in Paris. Posted to France as a diplomat, he was noted initially as a Romantic littérateur. He shortly established his radical credentials as a journalist, veteran of the 1842 revolt, and a deputy (elected in 1848). He published the pamphlet as a personal attack on the emperor for his role in the 1840s in undermining and frustrating the inevitable glories of liberalism by the corruption of constitutional government and the

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traditional tyranny of his dynasty.88 Thus, by the end of the Quinquennium, as exemplified by Rodrigues da Silva and Torres Homem, the emperor’s role in government was bitterly condemned by the ideologues in either party as a perverting intervention at the expense of Parliament and the Constitution. In this way, then, the era of 1844–1848, disastrously divisive and demoralizing for the Liberals and an era of bitter persecution for the Party of Order, made clear the hegemony of the emperor. It did so, however, in a way that clearly cost the monarch a great deal. In 1840, he had been rhetorically defined as the nation’s salvation. Despite their opposition to the Majority, even some of the reactionaries had broken ranks at the thought of his early coronation; reactionaries and their opposition alike vied to serve him. By 1848, he was perceived quite differently. His abuses and the perceived abuses of his favorite, as well as the fragility of representative government, revealed by his actions, had obviously alerted figures in both parties to the potential for danger ahead. Although radicals remained in the late 1840s who continued to attack the reactionaries’ reconstruction of the Monarchy itself, the swelling criticism of most political actors was less a response to the Monarchy’s institutions, and more a response to the impact of the monarch. To speak of the reactionaries, they had apparently expected an emperor who would gratefully recognize the past good works and present virtues of their party and empower them to continue. They were bitterly disappointed to see him influenced by the counsel of an enemy and picking ministers from a party they viewed as patently disloyal and increasingly incompetent. They tended to explain the emperor’s decisions as due to the influence of the façcão aúlica, however. To attack the emperor directly contradicted their ideological sacralization of the Monarch, a theme to which we shall return. For the Party of Order, the representative, constitutional monarchy that they had designed and legislated remained sound. The problem had been its abuse by a non-representative, palace faction. As for the Liberals, the radical fraction saw in this era the fulfillment of their nightmare of the Monarch as an abusive tyrant. For them, the fundamental issues remained an authoritarian political order and an inevitably dictatorial prince. The moderate-pragmatists among the Liberals, the main benefactors of the Quinquennium, well, they had written no pamphlets nor made any criticisms; raised to power by the monarch, they would continue to wait in the hope of serving. By 1848, their inability to dominate parties, much less the Empire, had become patent. They could serve the state, but had no organic relationship to society.89 Despite its disastrous impact upon the parties and perception of the emperor, with its dire consequences for the regime, one can also view the era of 1837–1848 as a positive one for Dom Pedro. He had emerged from the imperial

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villa an unusually mature prince who had successfully manipulated the Empire’s elder statesmen, pitting them against one another, shirking dependence upon one party over another, defying the personal authority of such formidable chieftains as Antônio Carlos and Honório. This initial instinct for independence and entitlement matured, year after year, into a sense and a practice of confident political mastery and a growing sense of a personal, “civilizing” mission. All of these were doubtless strengthened by traditional measures of adulthood; his marriage (in 1843) and fatherhood (1845–1848), as well as by the 1845–1846 trip he took to the provinces of the south, where he was free of the constant oversight of his customary entourage to act as he wished and to mingle without intermediaries. Thus, by the age of twenty-three (1848), Dom Pedro II had made it clear that he was no figurehead. By then, for better or for worse, it was clear to everyone in the political world that it was the emperor who commanded.90 Ironically, he owed something of this to his favorite: Aureliano, by providing him cover and direction, had given the apprentice monarch a way to secure political independence of statesmen and parties when the monarch was most vulnerable and might have been manipulated by them. Now, the emperor was an independent, supremely powerful political force. He inevitably proved it at the favorite’s expense. In April 1848, he dismissed Aureliano from the fluminense presidency. He would never present his former favorite access to real power again. In that year, indeed, the monarch was clearly feeling the necessity, and his own capacity, for a return to rule through the Party of Order. The three Liberal cabinets of 1848 were apparently incapable of coping with the radical political mobilization of the time, a mobilization born of the French example and the radicals’ increased frustration over five years of farce. The emperor was certainly not interested in the reformism of the last Liberal prime minister, Paulo Sousa e Melo (31 May 1848). On that date, in a great moment of political crisis, the emperor had apparently made Sousa e Melo’s appointment only to contain the radical majority in the Chamber; he did not intend to empower them. Nor did the radicals themselves favor the new prime minister; however idealistic he was, he remained a moderate, and they wanted one of their own. He sought to appease them, to little avail. Indeed, this last of the Liberal prime ministers of the era helped to bring on the final crisis by the hopes he raised. The crisis took place as the radical majority pressed hard to exert its hegemony in the Chamber to achieve dominion over the cabinet and entrance into the Senate for its standardbearers, only to be frustrated in one trial after another. In the Chamber, the political press, and, especially, in the Senate, the radicals were met and matched by the political manoeuvres and rhetoric of the saquaremas. In Pernambuco, by 1848, now the base of the most radical element of the Chamber’s

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Liberal deputies, the frustration and the provincial partisan struggle matured into violence. Bloody local battles in the countryside and lusophobic mobilization in Recife tore the province apart and alarmed statesmen in the Court. Such threats, however, were not reserved for the distant reaches of the Empire. In Rio, the pernambucano radicals who had been elected to the Chamber brought the same strategy into play. On 7 September 1848, José Clemente, that old stalwart of both Rio’s restorationist and Portuguese oligarchies and the fluminense reactionaries, was a candidate in a Rio municipal election. The old lusophobic violence of the desordeiros and exaltados of the 1820s and 1830s boiled up again around the polls, called up by the pernambucanos in the Chamber; the cabinet was attacked by the Party of Order’s chieftains in both the Senate and the Chamber for its inability to safeguard order. It was accused by some of collusion in the alarming events swirling in the streets. José Clemente’s son-in-law, Eusébio (no longer Rio’s police chief, but a fluminense deputy and a superior magistrate in the city), responded in the Chamber to Liberal charges of exaggeration with specific, irrefutable facts. First elected in 1842, and strong enough to be among the few saquaremas elected in 1848, Eusébio had emerged as the principle orator of the saquaremas. Never was he more daunting. The Liberal harangues and the saquarema attacks went on all month long, without the Liberal cabinet mounting a credible defense either before the public or in the emperor’s councils. The monarch, profoundly concerned with this rising urban violence and the turn towards radicalization in both Court and the Northeast, and increasingly worried about such domestic troubles and government instability in the face of the increasing pressure of foreign affairs, decided to act.91 At September’s end, Dom Pedro II made clear his displeasure to the cabinet, compelling its resignation. He then called upon two grand old men to set up a new cabinet on 29 September 1848. Beneath the finery of noble titles, old faces. The cabinet was organized by one of the first regents, Costa Carvalho, now visconde de Monte Alegre, and was formally headed by the last regent, Araújo Lima, now visconde de Olinda. The security that comes with established reputation. But what of order? Neither old man was noted for the deft use of power such as to secure a weakened state, threatened by rebels and foreign dangers. The youthful monarch had learned to listen, however, and had agreed upon Eusébio to be minister of justice. No one with an instinct for political realities would doubt that the real power in the cabinet lay in the palm of this minister; a cabinet novice, he was nonetheless the new voice of the Party of Order in the Chamber. Unlike Olinda and Monte Alegre, he held no noble title. In a short while, however, Eusébio would earn the most significant title of all: o papa dos saquaremas—the saquaremas’ pope.

chapter four

Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage: 1848-1853 Gentlemen, the mission of government, and principally of a conservative government, is not to make war upon and exterminate families, to sow antipathy with names, to destroy influences based upon great landholdings, on wealth, on social importance; the mission of a conservative government must be to take advantage of those influences in the public interest, identify them with the Monarchy and with its institutions, giving them proofs of confidence in order to dominate them, direct them, and neutralize their extremes. If you represent the conservative idea, how can you wish to destroy the influence based on great landholdings? — Nabuco de Araújo, “Ponte de Ouro,” 6 July 1853, quoted in Nabuco, Um estadista, I: 154–55.

One often reads of the Empire of Brazil at mid-century as a place and time of economic and political success. By 1850 or, certainly, 1853, there is something to be said for this. In 1848, however, when the visconde de Olinda became prime minister, he faced an alarming state of affairs at home and abroad. This is why, of course, the emperor had called upon him to serve. The emperor may have been particularly interested in Olinda’s presence because of the political crisis in Olinda’s home province, Pernambuco. The consequences of Liberal failure and the monarch’s interventions in the 1840s in terms of national politics have been noted, but they also need to be understood in terms of the provinces. This is particularly so in Pernambuco, where, as we shall see, the common fact of provincial partisan alignment, conflict, and empowerment, directly related to the parties and cabinet changes in Rio, was especially volatile and led to the last great provincial revolt of the Monarchy, the Praieira Revolt of 1848. Nonetheless, it would be best to approach the provincial political milieu of mid-century after casting a glance at the more general trends in the Empire as a whole at this time. It is a context in which domestic affairs were complicated not only by the regime’s increased local impact, but by the consequent local adaptation to that

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impact, by regional economic shifts, and by looming foreign-policy crises touching upon the most fundamental aspect of Brazilian society: African slavery.

I. The Empire at Mid-Century Pernambuco’s volatility may well have been exacerbated by the increasing regional economic disequilibrium of the mid-century. Olinda presided over a nation state much wealthier than ever before because of the steadily increasing customs revenues. These were by far the greatest item of state revenue, making up eighty percent of it by the 1840s. However, between forty and fifty percent of that revenue came from the Alfândega in Rio, the imperial customs house a short walk from the Largo do Paço and the Chamber. It came from taxes levied on commerce to and from the Provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo. In these provinces, coffee, obviously, was the most dynamic factor. The production of sugar, traditional mainstay there and in the Northeastern provinces, was lagging in its value and in its portion of state revenues in both regions. By the 1840s, it had fallen to a bit more than twenty-five percent of the imperial revenue. So, while the state was stronger from wealth taken from the coffee trade of the south-central provinces, the Northeast was limping into economic decline. The 1860s spurt in Northeastern cotton, born of the United States Civil War, was relatively ephemeral.1 Economic decline in Northeastern sugar production led to dwindling plantations among elite families and those who hoped to join them. A gradual process of status decline could best be avoided or slowed down by supplementing or sustaining planting by acquiring a public salary. In some cases, planters’ sons left the humid, black soil forever and sought, by a profession or a public position, to maintain respectable status in the towns and cities. Certainly, by the 1850s, youths with law degrees (bachareis), were far too plentiful to find places easily, even in the growing number of Crown positions created by the reactionary counter-reforms of 1841–1842. In a word, by the 1850s the need for state patronage, and the political positions which provided the protection necessary to such patronage, became particularly important in the region. This exacerbated local political conflicts enormously, as the parties, and factions within the parties, strove with one another for the power that meant protection.2 The growth in state employment for the elite was a small part of a general urban expansion in the era. Indeed, the pleasures of life in the provincial capitals and in the imperial Court were never so attractive. Increased state revenues, leading to increased state bureaucracy and public works, particularly in Rio, were part of this, but part of it had to do with increased contact with European

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urban life, the desire to emulate it, and the new wherewithal to do so. Even in Recife and in Salvador, new public buildings arose, made in the neo-classical style now fashionable in the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. For France, the great model for European civilization generally, had been accepted by the Braganças in Portugal and Brazil for some time as the source of high culture. The emperor’s grandfather, Dom João VI, had sent for a French fine-arts mission in 1816, to found a School of Fine Arts (1826) suitable for the new Kingdom of Brazil. Vasconcelos, in the first reactionary cabinet, had founded a secondary school for the elite ( the Imperial Colégio Dom Pedro II, 1837) modeled on the French lycée. The emperor had become the patron of an historical and geographical institute in 1838, pairing the Romantic and nationalist impulses of the era. In all public building and institutions, state patronage meant French inspiration, including the new medical schools (1808, in Salvador and in Rio) and military schools (1810, in Rio) founded under Dom JoãoVI. The same would be true of the academies of law, founded in 1827. There were two, one established among the northern provinces at Olinda (later moved to Recife, in 1854), another among the southern provinces, at São Paulo. Each was designed to provide what Coimbra traditionally had given: prestigious training in various kinds of law and the humanities, in which the texts and perspective of Europe were assumed and the common languages were French and Latin.3 In elite domestic life, mid-century would mark a similar process of frenchification. The old sugar families and new coffee families alike began sending their sons or taking their families to Europe, particularly France, occasionally to complete their formal education or, more likely, merely to have the direct experience of Civilization. In Rio, the new residences going up on the outskirts of town, particularly in Catete, Laranjeiras, and Botafogo, were entirely French in their architecture, gardens, and much of their decor.4 In the old city itself, the port became the center of this frenchified Brazilian culture. From the 1820s, as noted in Chapter Three, all bookshops were French and the French luxury shops of the Rua do Ouvidor were well established. The new wealth coming through the port by mid-century, however, made for other amenities, often of a more practical nature, and some times of English or American origin. Steam boats plied the bay between the Court and the new provincial capital of Niterói by 1835, and there were regular omnibuses drawn by mules rolling through Rio’s parishes by 1837. In 1843, a regular steam line skirted the city, and regular lines of coaches connected its parishes by 1850. Garbage collection was regularized by 1847, new port works were begun by 1851. In 1852, regular postal service to Europe by steamboat was inaugurated. Other amenities would follow more quickly in the later 1850s and afterwards, as we shall see.5

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Yet all this wealth and European refinement, striking in coffee’s capital and visible in the old sugar ports, belied not only the growing difference between various regions’ prosperity, but stood in stark contrast to the social and economic basis of it all: African slavery. Olinda and his ministers had been boys nursed by captives, boys who had played with captives’ children, boys who had had personal body servants from among captives, boys who may have sexually exploited domestic captives, and boys who had lived in cities and towns where most people were captives or their descendants. Doubtless, as they rose from bed to take their oaths and offices that morning in September 1848, there was a captive sleeping on their hallway floor who rose to dress them. Other captives had then served their morning meal, made of food planted, cultivated, harvested by captives, food herded and slaughtered by captives, food now cooked and brought to table by captives. In 1821, the city’s population of 97,162 contained some 37,137 captives; in an 1849 population of 205,906, there were 78,855 enslaved. Slavery was not simply a rural mainstay, it was central to town life, as well. Eusébio, for example, was no planter. He was an urban professional and the son of an urban professional. Yet, when Eusébio’s father had departed from the Court to a northern province to take a Crown appointment, his 1827 passport shows his household included twenty captives; twenty to serve a family of six. Still, if slavery was central to towns, most captives lived and died on plantations, with which all of the ministers were surely familiar through their kith and kin, if not their own holdings. After all, Olinda was a sugar planter; Monte Alegre was a planter of sugar and maybe coffee, as well; and Rodrigues Torres was a baixada coffee planter. Nor should we expect a different pattern among most Liberal statesmen. The captivity of people was ubiquitous in city and fields, in Northeastern provinces and south-central provinces, among both political parties and among all ranks of free people—including the Afro-Brazilian majority. Even some African freedmen held slaves.6 Nor was slavery fading. The reactionaries’ objections to the English imposition of a ban on the Atlantic slave trade in 1831 have been noted elsewhere. So has the fact that a contraband trade had begun shortly afterwards, in 1833. Some have charged that support for such trade came from the reactionary party alone. The statistics show, however, that it began under Feijó and flourished throughout the Liberal Quinquennium. Statesmen from either party agreed on the obvious—no slavery, no economy.7 Indeed, in the 1830s, with coffee’s expansion continuing to spread down the Paraíba in the serra and beyond the fluminense lands into São Paulo and Minas, the demand only increased. Honório got into coffee planting in the 1830s, and José Clemente Pereira, whose rich widow wife brought him the capital to buy two plantations and the captives to work them, may well have done so as

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early as that himself. As for the established planters in the reactionary ranks, the 1840s were a period of yet more expansion. Between 1840 and 1850, the volume of coffee was 17,121,000 60-kilogram sacks, compared to 9,744,000 sacks for the previous decade. Lacerda Werneck, who inherited from among the first serra plantations, owned scores and scores of people for every plantation, and so did some of his neighbors. He continued to buy land and people through the 1850s. When he died, 1864, he owned seven plantations and at least a thousand people, nearly all of whom would have been bought by 1850, replacing the hundreds who had died on his lands in previous years.8 In fact, the volume of the 1840s African trade was unprecedented. Moreover, the greater part was funneled through wharves and beaches near the imperial court. Of some 718,800 people estimated to have been sold illegally in Brazil between 1831 and 1852, 563,600 were sold in Rio alone. Over the 1840s, all of this led to an increasingly delicate diplomatic impasse with the English, whose repeated frustrations led them to conclude that Brazilian statesmen could not be trusted to meet their treaty obligations. By 1845, the English began to attack the trade (and Brazilian shipping) unilaterally, essentially abandoning the official joint efforts established by previous diplomacy. This extraordinarily complicated problem would be one of the two most important ones in foreign affairs that the new administration faced.9 The other made a more immediate impact on the cabinet itself. It concerned Buenos Aires. The Spanish vice-royalty of La Plata, dominated by that port, had been established partly because of the old colonial antagonism with Portuguese America. For years, Lisbon had claimed the “natural” frontier of the Rio de la Plata, with its obvious commercial and military advantages. After the Spanish vice-royalty fell apart in the struggle for independence in the 1810s, Brazil wanted to keep Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay separated and tractable, in order to afford Brazil a greater role in the riverine complex that comprised the nation’s best route to its western frontier and interior provinces. In the 1810s and 1820s, Rio had taken and held Uruguay as its Cisplatine Province. The Empire had been forced by England to cede its pretensions in 1828, after an unsuccessful war with Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, feared the enormity of the Empire of Brazil and its ambitions for Uruguayan control, and nourished the ambition of reuniting Uruguay and Paraguay to Argentina, to recover its past grandeur and to act as a counterweight to the Brazilian monarchy.10 Juan Manuel de Rosas, dictator of Argentina since the 1830s as caudillo of Buenos Aires, its richest province and its major port, was the heir to these ambitions and had taken the offensive. He had consolidated control over the interior provinces of Argentina after earlier wars and he had fairly completed his

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use of Uruguay’s fraternal struggle to reduce that republic to a dependency. It was his client party there which held most of Uruguay’s countryside. Montevideo, however, withstood his pressure in the late 1840s, sustained by support from England, France, and Brazil. These monarchies had come into dispute with Rosas over his abuse of their merchants and their commerce. As mentioned, England had compelled the Empire of Brazil to relinquish Uruguay in the 1820s, ending a war with Argentina (which naturally disputed Brazilian claims) and creating the Republic of the Eastern Shore as a buffer state, to the great satisfaction of the Uruguayan patriots who had struggled for independence since the 1810s. Now, England, with the French and the Brazilians, sustained what was left of an independent Uruguay against Rosas, part of a hostile diplomatic gambit in which they had been blockading Buenos Aires to punish Rosas and secure their commercial interests.11 In 1848, however, Anglo-French diplomacy had reached a modus vivendi with the caudillo, and European blockade and support for the Montevideo regime ended. The Empire of Brazil faced Rosas alone. For a year or so, Brazilian diplomats sought to reach a diplomatic resolution with Rosas in a series of notes. This was Olinda’s great challenge when he took up the prime ministry, for he himself took up the portfolio for foreign affairs. Perhaps more confident because of his success with the European powers, Rosas finally ended Olinda’s diplomatic overtures with an insult. This response, a note of 4 October 1849, confirmed the views of the emperor and the other ministers that a more aggressive policy was required. Olinda’s personal identification with the failed policy apparently decided the emperor on a painful bit of political surgery. Closeted with Eusébio, the monarch made it clear that, while he was pleased with the cabinet, he had lost confidence in his prime minister.12 The reader may recall that Olinda (then Araújo Lima) had been an uncertain ally of the reactionary party in the years 1837–1840, when regent. These foreign policy differences and now, this dismissal, could not have helped. Proud, accomplished, and older than the saquarema chiefs, he had first been a minister when some of them were boys and he remained a visceral monarchist. Thus, while he could not, apparently, blame his emperor for this disgrace, he may well have resented being singled out for it among his cabinet colleagues. The salt in the wound was the novice chosen to replace him: Paulino, apprentice of Olinda’s old rival, Vasconcelos. Paulino, with little diplomatic experience, was apparently chosen because of the esteem he enjoyed among party leaders. It probably did not help Olinda that, as we shall see, Paulino’s tenure as foreign affairs minister was a spectacular success. As Paulino’s brother-in-law, Rodrigues Torres, had already been moved into the Ministry of Finance (13 June 1849), this cabinet shake-up had clear partisan meaning: saquarema control was now complete.

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These references to the cabinet’s internal development take us a bit farther than introductory notes on the milieu properly should; however, they provide the reader with something of the players as well as the stage. Let us return to the drama, then, to see how these statesmen handled the roles that they were given.

II. Political Consolidation and Its Costs and Contradictions The cabinet in power from 29 September 1848 to 6 September 1853 is considered one of the two longest and most successful of the Monarchy. It was called the Cabinet of the Eagles. Formally, it was actually made up of two administrations, for there were resignations more than the one time just noted; after Monte Alegre succeeded Olinda in 1849, he, in turn, was succeeded by Rodrigues Torres as prime minister in 1852 and other resignations forced entirely new appointments then. Nonetheless, even with this important 1852 transition, to be discussed later, the two cabinets of these five years were considered one administration by contemporaries, and its tenure may be viewed as an arch of political triumph with great challenges on either side. Let us see what faced them on their entry.13 The first year, under the prime ministry of Olinda, was a year of failure not only in terms of Platine diplomacy, but in terms of political consolidation. Chapter Three noted how the legislation of 3 December 1841, the reform of the Código de Processo, both increased the potential for authoritarian centralization and the potential for violence. This was the principal electoral weapon of whichever party dominated the cabinet. State power and the ability to intervene in the judicial and police appointments at the local level meant that a party could deny the vote to its opposition and sustain its local allies with the use of the imperial judiciary and National Guard and thus not only reward its followers with provincial and municipal positions and power but ensure an overwhelming majority in the Chamber. We have also seen that while the luzias had successfully used this to strip the saquaremas of power throughout the Empire and to persecute them locally afterwards, that their Chamber majority had done them little lasting good. Indeed, divisions between the more radical, reformist wing and the pragmatic moderates had seriously demoralized the party and actually mobilized the radicals in frustration with their moderate cabinets and the emperor. In fact, to varying extents in various provinces, the penetration of the imperial state over the course of the 1840s and increased cabinet strength had spread a process of partisan mobilization and formation at the provincial and local level. The reason for this may be apparent. In urban areas, differences of class and race had already provided a fertile ground for partisan organization since the 1820s. As we have seen, the great port cities, from Belém to Rio, had seen ex-

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altado lusophobia and nationalism and, by the 1830s, the reaction to it in Rio and among merchant and planter counterparts to the fluminense reactionaries in many of the other port cities and their nearer hinterlands. We have remarked, for example, that this was the context for the rapid alliance made in the Chamber between the fluminense-mineiro reactionary leaders and the representatives of the sugar interests of Bahia and Pernambuco. This was, in effect, the origin of the Party of Order as a national party. However, there was some distance between such alliances, made between provincial leaders in the Chamber, and the construction of provincial units of a national party, as we might understand it now. Still, while it is quite clear that the party as it existed in and after 1837 differs from what one often takes the word to mean now, contemporaries had no doubts about the significance and the development of the parties in their own terms. In the course of that development, there is no doubt about state consolidation and penetration and the increasing importance of provincial partisanship in the 1840s.14 In this process, however, local variations and realities remained central; the process could not be uniform either in timing or result. By the end of the Liberal Quinquennium, for example, rooted, organized provincial allies of the two great national parties struggling in Rio barely existed throughout the Empire. Nor, given both national and local realities, should we expect more. Although its political ideology was indispensable for its appeal, the national party was highly personalized in its leadership and knit to local familial networks in its origins—why would one expect something different later in distant provinces? Given such a pattern of recruitment and organization, the process would necessarily be delayed and variable. In the 1830s, the reactionaries began by making political alliances in Rio with the deputies of other provinces during the Chamber sessions, deputies attracted to their ideas and their growing power. Whether these deputies could have created a structured, uniform, organized local party when they returned to their own provinces annually during the rainy seasons is dubious. Besides, why would they think to do so? There would have been no precedent or basis for such. What little research has been done suggests they did something else, something which makes perfect sense in their circumstances.15 Outside of the port cities, where the political press and greater class and political consciousness and mobilization made for the early partisan distinctions already noted, the countryside was dominated by great oligarchies of landholders. In many cases, these were divided among themselves by traditional rivalries for local political domination of the counties (municípios), rivalries derived from the need to use local political power to defend and extend one’s local interests and organized, often enough, on the basis of extended networks of kin, godparenthood, and blood feuds. What the 3 December 1841 law meant was

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that those local rural oligarchs who had not yet chosen one of the two political parties at Court for ideological reasons had to do so now simply to defend themselves. Without an attachment to one of the two parties, one had no way to demand and expect that local Crown appointments would favor one’s interests, at the expense of one’s local enemies. Ideological issues for some of these families were of little consequence; party loyalty, however, became a matter of life or death. Over the course of the 1840s, the national chieftains of the saquaremas and the luzias in Rio attempted to reach out to such families to secure their support; patronage (appointments and protection) could be offered in exchange. Correspondence from the saquarema president of the Province of Piauí to Eusébio in 1850 may well exemplify the results and a more general predicament. The president, Inácio Francisco Silveira da Mota, the son of a Portuguese magistrate in Brazil, had been born in Goiás but had taken a degree at São Paulo, married into the distinguished Araruama clan (the Carneiro da Silva family) of established fluminense sugar planters, and cultivated a refined interest in plants and agriculture, later publishing in French journals. Appointed to the province in late 1849, he wrote a precious series of letters to Eusébio over the course of 1850 which are very suggestive. They make it clear how the Party of Order conflated its interests with those of the state, and how its agents perceived their party, their national society, and their provincial mission. His first letter (9 January) notes that he was received with the pleasure of novelty, as much by the saquaremas, as by the liberals, here called carapatos [i.e., carrapatas, ticks]. I am, however, very certain that I shall be unable to please one or the other, because they are profoundly divided, to the point of personal hatred and disagreement. . . . What the parties wanted [from my predecessor] was a president that lived under their tutelage, and Mr. Peretti [the ex-provincial president] did not do as they wished, either during the domination of the liberals, or after the change in administrations.16

In a letter, marked “private,” later that month, the president confided “In this Province, there are no neutral persons. The parties are very extreme, and it is rare that partisan interests do not intervene in judicial questions.”17 By February, Silveira da Mota wrote that his prosecution of a local priest as an assassin in the hinterland had mobilized not only local partisans but “that of his protectors here, who are some saquaremas” and went on to detail how the victim was caught up in a web of local conspiracy and murder. Silveira da Mota went on to discuss the difficulty of trying such a case since in this land of Patronage it is rare to obtain a decision against any accused person who has a protector, it will be even more difficult when one deals with a trial in which the accused is a rich and powerful man who is the chief of one of the parties of the

126 / Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage Province. Any step that the public attorney takes in that direction will be translated into an act of atrocious political persecution and with some reason, there not being sufficient evidence for any formal trial. The Saquaremas also fear pursuit of the matter because the assassination . . . was decreed in reprisal . . . by . . . influential persons . . . among them some [who], if they went over to the Liberal party, could reveal secrets today with a view to persecuting their adversaries, if they themselves were persecuted. The people of these hinterlands not only fail to appreciate nor understand service done to promote justice. They also view poorly the administrator burdened with this branch of government who is careless about the miserable politics of this place. In view of this, I consider it a very repugnant and incompatible affair to play the role of a good administrator and good politician, because to be a good party man, they demand protection for assassins and thieves, and on my part, that I obstruct justice instead of creating it. All that I have exposed to Your Excellency has convinced me of the impossibility of governing this Province in a way that will make the Parties happy while following the just and impartial views of the Imperial Government.18

In May, Silveira da Mota responded to provincial charges Eusébio relayed to him, charges obviously made by the provincial saquaremas that he had favored the provincial Liberals, their enemies: I have not strengthened the opposition, rather, on the contrary, I have clearly fortified the Saquaremas. Frankly, however, I ought to tell you that I do not find it appropriate that the government’s prestige be wasted with useless energetic actions against an opposition clearly resigned once they understood I would treat them according to their behavior. . . . In a semi-barbarous Province, it often happens that the parties do not judge themselves satisfied when they do not see their adversaries trampled; however, the Government that understands its mission, ought to convince itself that it also represents an element of civilization here, and no one can say that one civilizes exterminating and annihilating those who might not wish to be convinced by just and humane means. If anyone, then, shows himself little satisfied with my administration, Your Excellency ought to believe that it is because it has not used the repression so desired by those more blinded by party spirit.19

It is worth noting that either through his wish or Eusébio’s better judgment, Silveira da Mota was removed from Piauí and transferred to the presidency of Ceará. Neither his own integrity, nor his concept of the imperial state and the Party of Order, had proved compatible with the provincial partisanship in which he, that state, and that party had been inserted. Nor should we assume such dissonance between the party in Rio and in provinces was unique to this case, perhaps born of the particular incapacity of an urbane intellectual in a rustic setting. Hand-picked by Eusébio, Silveira da Mota was a seasoned provincial judge and a provincial deputy (in the fluminense assembly), and would go on to another provincial presidency after that of Ceará. The question is not whether this president was adequate; it is a question of distance. Not merely the forty-five days by coastal and river steamboat to get to Oeiras from Rio, but the

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distance in provincial political realities away from the south-central region. The values of an ordered society dominated by a strong, civilizing state, imposing impartial justice, the values of which Silveira da Mota wrote, were not his alone, they were those of his party. They jibe precisely with those of such party spokesmen as Paulino and Honório, in their pronouncements as ministers of justice in the early 1840s,20 and of Honório, in his private correspondence with Eusébio from Recife, when he was posted there as president of Pernambuco: The majority of the property-holders seem to me not to support [the radical] party, but I note with disappointment that a good part of them are guided by a sentiment of vengeance, of pride, of personal interest, and that they do not sincerely adhere to the principles of order, and even that they are capable of disturbing order, if not of rebelling, by carrying out acts of oppression and violence that make them resemble a sort of feudal aristocracy. . . . Not to speak of the hinterland, where authority and justice have no impact at all, small is the impact that they have in the districts near the coast as well, populated by sugar planters. . . . Almost all the county and local magistrates of this province are men without education, without energy, without impact, subordinated and intimidated by the powerful and without means to do justice impartially. With such auxiliaries it seems impossible to improve the state of the province and even with good magistrates this is not going to be quick work. . . .21

In both Silveira da Mota’s and Honório’s letters, then, the sense of the exotic and the barbarous in provincial politics is clear. It is not that either man was an impractical theoretician without a political sense for the nitty-gritty of local affairs (who could say that of Honório?). It is that both men were seeking to impose the values of their national party on friend and foe alike in a provincial context where both such a state and such a party were novel and did not immediately fit into the local political puzzle. Instead, overwhelming local pressure by local chiefs was applied to adapt the national state and the Party of Order to get them to fit local political necessities. In other cases, it seems clear that the fit between the national party and its local allies was relatively facile: party values and local necessities jibed. In São Paulo, where saquarema party organization was without provincial structure or leadership, there were, nonetheless, many saquaremas among the established sugar and coffee planters in the east of the province, just as there were distinguished luzias among town dwellers, small cane planters, and ranchers detached from exporting and Rio. The same phenomenon was apparent in Minas, where town dwellers throughout the province and local landholders of the northern sertões without Rio networking saw a value in the Liberal emphasis on more democratic and local governance.22 In both provinces, Party of Order chieftains in Rio had successfully estab-

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lished personal linkages to local influences who accepted their ideas and leadership. In the depths of the Liberal Quinquennium, for example, Honório, the most effective organizer of the party in the Chamber (1837–1844), made it clear in discussing the party’s chapa [slate, in the sense of the list of preferred candidates], that he still counted upon personal and party networks for success in the coming electoral struggle. Writing to direct and reassure Paulino in 1847, Honório gives us a sense of how identified ideological traditions and local partisanship had become in such conflicts; indeed, the terms used here for local reactionaries—caramurú, cascudo, patacão—indicate the mixture of both the ideological and the local partisanship at issue here (we’ve seen caramuru; cascudo and patacão might be translated as “thickskinned” and “old money,” respectively): In addition to the letter that I write to you today and that . . . will be directed to Mr. Vasconcellos, I have to say to you that I also must sign the [electoral] circular of which I speak; however, [I will do so] only in the case that Firmino, Rocha, Paulo Cândido, Domingos Manuel de Azevedo Americano, and José Joaquim de Lima e Silva—if he is a candidate—are nominated in it. If these names are not included, I cannot consent that mine figures in the circular of recommendation. Let Your Excellencies remain sure that in the South of the Province of Minas the chiefs of the caramurus, cascudo or patacão party is [sic] Vasconcellos, Honorio, and Paulino.23

Similar relationships were encouraged when the saquaremas returned to power in 1848. Power in Rio provided them with the opportunity (and necessity) to reach out to the provinces to strengthen old allies or organize anew. This, at least, seems to be the context of the following letter to Eusébio from a party militant, Pereira da Silva, writing from São Paulo, in 1848, with his recommendations for provincial king-making and patronage: What our people here lack is Union—center—and chief. Our party is only just starting everywhere. . . . And this is a great weakness—almost insuperable. . . . The person, the only capable person for action that I see is Pacheco: he is decided, has extraordinary vigor, [and] relations . . . throughout the province; the whole new party esteems him, he is the first man of the party; he has, however, exaggerations and defects: still, he merits the national Government’s consideration; he is a powerful ally. Carlos Carneiro is worthless and generally lazy. Silveira da Mota [a brother of the provincial president] is without credibility among our own people, and no one, if he is chosen, would give him support because generally it is thought he is imposed by Monte Alegre. I had a very high opinion of him before seeing this, but I saw that here he is accepted but not esteemed. From now on, therefore, he can be a candidate, but never the chief. . . . Look, this is very private, do not compromise me. It would be appropriate to restitute Nebias [as county magistrate] to Itú district, José Alves to that of Mogimirim, and to [give] Doctor Hipólito, Paulino’s Brother, the position of fiscal steward: give something to Dr. Lino, who has his circle. . . .

Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage / 129 This letter has become too long; I end here, for I also want to write to Felizardo, Paulino, and [Rodrigues] Torres.24

In Bahia, it is noteworthy that the old established sugar families of Salvador’s recôncavo were often early reactionary adherents, but that the province as a whole was largely divided or non-partisan during the 1840s. Partly this was because so many cabinet ministers during the Liberal Quinquennium were Bahians who apparently exercised highly personalized patronage in their native province, dividing the Bahian deputation. Indeed, although Bahia would always be associated with many of the most important saquarema leaders, as it was from the party’s beginnings, the consolidation of the party’s hegemony in the province only came late in the 1840s. Then, it came as a reaction against an attempt by the Liberals to impose their candidates in the province. Bahianos had jealously guarded their political independence despite saquarema pressure, and resented Liberal intervention even more. João Maurício Wanderley’s ambivalence and opposition to the saquaremas early on, and then his final alliance with the party, points to this. As shall be seen, however, the Bahian saquaremas early fractured into at least two rival patronage networks, although both would be articulated to the saquaremas in Rio.25 In no province were so many of these variables, whether ideological, local oligarchical, or intervention from Rio, on display with more drama than in Pernambuco. Recife had traditionally been a port city divided between a native planter and Portuguese merchant elite and an Afro-Brazilian majority, free and captive. Resentments along social, racial, and class lines had led to political mobilization early on. By the 1830s, as we have noted, Recife was a battlefield of exaltados and restorationist reactionaries, much as Rio and Salvador were. In the countryside, the planters were divided between moderado (and even exaltado) tendencies and restorationists in the early Regency. Indeed, republican revolts in 1817 and 1824 had strengthened such divisions. There was a new group of planters in the northern coastal area, associated with cotton, who wished a greater share of provincial power. They challenged the established sugar oligarchy, which wished to preserve its privileged position, and which continued to hold forth from Recife and the old southern littoral, where their ancestors had first planted and milled cane in the sixteenth century.26 These older families, densely interwoven by marriage and descent, were themselves divided over the issue of the province’s relationship to the Court. All were attached to the monarchy, part and parcel of a traditional hierarchy which had always benefited them. However, one small group among them desired more independent control of provincial politics and resented intervention from Rio. For this reason, they had opposed both the moderados and the reactionaries during the Regency, since they had seen both parties as hostile to their

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provincial ambitions, simply because both parties controlled the state. For this reason, this faction had always thrown its strength to the Chamber opposition, without regard to more general issues of ideology. They were led during the Regency by Holanda and his brother, Luís Cavalcanti. By the 1840s, Holanda, of course, was a noted chieftain among the former opposition, now called the Liberals, and had ascended to the Senate.27 The larger faction of the older families feared the local, provincial exaltados (known as chimangos, birds of prey) more than encroachment from Rio. These oligarchs (known as guabirús, rats) desired a state that would act as the traditional guarantor of the established order, a sword and shield against newer planters and the Afro-Brazilian urban “rabble.” This faction was inevitably led by chieftains who were close kin to Holanda, including two of his brothers. Its distinct political position led to a split among old planting families, particularly after most became allies of the reactionaries emerging between 1834 and 1837. These local reactionaries were linked to the national party through pernambucanos who had allied with the reaction in Rio, particularly the regent, Pedro de Araújo Lima (now visconde de Olinda), Maciel Monteiro, and the senator and minister, Lopes Gama, Araújo Lima’s friend and protégé. The division deepened because of Araújo’s rivalry with Holanda in the regent’s election in 1838. Within the province itself, this oligarchy was led by scions of its premier families, particularly Holanda’s own clan, the Cavalcanti Albuquerque, and their cousins, the Rego Barros. Indeed, Francisco do Rego Barros had been appointed provincial president by the first reactionary cabinet under Araújo Lima, in 1837, and had imposed partisan control until he was dismissed by the Majority Cabinet. With the return of the reactionaries to power in 1841, he was made a baron and reinstated, now barão da Boa Vista, from 1841 to 1844.28 By those years, the opposition to the reactionaries in Pernambuco was divided between Holanda’s party and a distinct, separately organized and mobilized radical faction, derived from the so-called chimangos of the Regency, and now known as praieiros (from their headquarters in Recife, on the Rua da Praia). They ranged from one-time moderados such as Urbano Sabino [Pessoa de Melo] (1811–1870) and Padre [Miguel do Sacramento] Lopes Gama (1791– 1852) to such firebrands as [Joaquim] Nunes Machado and [Antônio] Borges da Fonseca (1808–1872). Nunes Machado was their foremost champion in the Chamber, and Borges da Fonseca, their most celebrated street agitator (and an unrepentant republican).29 As has been noted in Chapter Three, over the course of the Liberal Quinquennium, the chimangos had been working desperately to take advantage of events in Rio. Perhaps this was a lesson learned the hard way. In Pernambuco’s 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s risings, after all, the province’s reformists and radicals

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had been repressed several times by alliances between the provincial oligarchy, the Cavalcanti Albuquerques, and the imperial government in Rio. Under Rego Barros’s first provincial presidency (1837–1841), matters had become confused.; the chimangos had decided to try their own luck with alliances in Rio. They had allied to Araújo Lima in Rio and his reactionary allies there, throwing their support to the Regresso, in the apparent hope of gaining the reactionaries’ support against Holanda and his clan, the Cavalcanti Albuqerques. It must have made sense. The Cavalcanti Albuquerques, split between Araújo Lima, as regent, and his kinsman and rival, Holanda, looked to be more vulnerable than ever. After 1842, though, the hopes of the chimangos were cruelly dashed. Rego Barros, now the barão da Boa Vista, entrenched local reactionaries, particularly the network of Cavalcanti Albuquerque and Rego Barros (all his kin) still further. The chimangos radicalized in response, desperate and frustrated. They turned against the saquaremas in Rio, who had backed Boa Vista, and allied themselves with the saquaremas’ great enemy, Aureliano. Once again, they hoped that a powerful ally in Rio would pry Pernambuco loose from the control of the Cavalcanti Albuquerques. In Aureliano, a former moderado, and his old ally, Chichorro da Gama, the chimangos (now called praieiros) had better luck. Chichorro, a Regency moderado and minister (1832–1835), was appointed president of the province from 1845 to 1848; he allowed the praieiros, finally, the opportunity to reverse the local role of the imperial state in their favor. They did so with fervor, appointing praieiros to key positions and using state-sanctioned violence to obtain relief, revenge, and the possibility of entrenched provincial power. It had not gone all their way, though, not by a long shot. Holanda, in power at Court as a minister from May 1844 to May 1847, had done much to counter the praieiros’ provincial triumphs. Holanda had blocked praiero candidates to the cabinet and the Senate. Holanda’s actions, as a key Liberal minister, had faced relatively little antagonism in Rio. After all, in the Court, the praieiros’ struggle had little sympathy from either Liberal pragmatists or radicals in the south (who remembered the support Pernambuco chimangos had provided the reactionaries from 1837 through to the luzia revolt of 1842). Moreover, the southern Liberals were increasingly opposed to Aureliano, something which would not help his northern allies. Still, at least in the province, with Chichorro as president, the praieiros had their day. As alluded to earlier, a mass purge of reactionary partisans was followed by praieiro appointments to their places as judges, police chiefs, and National Guard officers. A wave of violent repression against the established reactionary landholders and their dependents ensued, extending to the invasion and take over of plantations, in some cases. The praieiros not only settled old scores, they armed their local partisans, as the re-

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actionaries mobilized their dependents, armed them, and led them into battle in the countryside and county seats, attempting to defend their plantations, avenge their losses, and defy the praieiro presidency. By 1847, the countryside was politically mobilized and armed and continual, piecemeal violence made clear the potential for provincial civil war.30 Nonetheless, the praieiros’ failure to place representatives in nationally influential positions in the Senate or a cabinet threatened enduring provincial success. Neither França nor Chichorro, put forward and popularly elected more than once, were allowed to take seats in the Senate, whose majority was led by saquaremas who repeatedly denied the legitimacy of the provincial elections (notorious for praieiro coercion). The praieiros’ frustrations were worsened by the fall of their key ally, Aureliano, and the 1848 removal of Chichorro from the provincial presidency in favor of a more moderate Liberal. The praieiro deputies in Rio began to call for a constituent assembly to carry out a series of reforms against the Senate, the reactionary laws, and the emperor’s authority. Praieiros, particularly Nunes Machado, figured prominently in the agitation and mobilization that led to the street violence during Rio’s elections in September 1848. They hoped to compel a cabinet resignation and Chamber mobilization that would facilitate the triumph of the Chamber’s Liberal radicals. What they got instead was the saquarema cabinet of 29 September, headed by Araújo Lima, now Olinda. If Olinda had been an ally of Pernambuco chimangos against Holanda in the late 1830s, those days were long gone. His reactionary politics and his natural relations with Cavalcanti Albuquerque kinsman in his province made him a staunch foe to the praieros, a foe who organized a cabinet inimical to everything for which they stood.31 The provincial presidents whom Olinda and, then, Monte Alegre sent north to Pernambuco suggest the complexities and costs of saquarema political consolidation. The first president, Herculano Ferreira Pena, undertook an initially gradual transition in the local Crown power structure, holding off a purge of the praieiro partisans for many days and then proceeding dramatically in some places and not at all in others. The praieiros were not mollified by this relatively cautious approach, and decided to mobilize immediately for war, partly in the hope of later support from the Liberal majority still seated in the Chamber. This Legislature, adjourned in October, would presumably return in May 1849. By early November, the saquaremas in Pernambuco (both agents of the cabinet and their allies among the provincial oligarchy) began to purge the praieros and take their places in the province. The Praieiro Revolt began in mid-November. At December’s end, a bahiano magistrate, Manuel Vieira Tosta (1807–1896), who had studied at Coimbra and São Paulo with Paulino, and had been a reactionary stalwart in the Chamber since 1838, arrived to direct personally the piti-

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less political repression of the praieiros in Recife and their subsequent military defeat in the streets of the capital and the fields and rain forest of the countryside. This initial victory of reactionary order was complete by April 1849.32 In July 1849, the saquarema cabinet sent Pernambuco one of their party’s great chieftains, Honório. As new provincial president, Honório came out to impose an imperial peace after Tosta’s fire and sword. Here lies the germ of much future division within the Party of Order. For Honório, like other presidents who took ship for Pernambuco, was advised by the emperor not to lend himself to the complete annihilation of the Pernambuco praieiros. Yet, Honório was also being pressured by the Cavalcanti Albuquerque oligarchy, provincial allies of his party, to carry out a merciless program of purge and reprisal. Added to this, Honório found himself pressed by his saquarema cabinet colleagues to fix elections and appointments in favor of these provincial protégés.33 There is also the personal element to remember. Honório was the elder statesman of the Party of Order—only Vasconcelos could dispute his preeminence. Yet he was doubtless blamed by many in the party for the terrible Liberal triumph that followed the loss of the emperor’s favor and the cabinet resignation of 1844. In private, the party’s great publicist, Rocha, referred to that disaster as another “of the big, shitty messes of Honório.”34 Now, one might assume Honório accepted the difficult Pernambuco mission to regain the favor of his emperor and to strengthen his position among his party colleagues. He found himself far from his family, in country which was entirely foreign to him, and dealing with a provincial planter aristocracy whose ambitions for complete provincial control and scouring repression he found politically ill-advised. As we have seen, he made a distinction between his party, which he identified with the imperial state and with constitutional, statist authority and order, and their politics, which he saw as a parochial and entirely self-serving mixture of patronage and partisan repression, without particular ideological attachment to the reactionaries’ project. Being Honório, his sentiments were probably made clear without much finesse.35 The results were threefold, and of great subsequent importance. First, pacification was crippled, as the planter oligarchy allied to Honório’s party were offended by his coolness and attempted even-handedness and denied him full support until he compromised. This delayed complete pacification until 1850.36 Second, Honório found his policies and decisions second-guessed and contradicted by the cabinet, particularly Eusébio. As minister of justice, Eusébio was now consolidating his position within the party as its great national political strategist. He was keen to conciliate and to influence the provincial reactionaries, because he saw them as an obvious bulwark of order in the north. Better selfish allies than no allies in a region where the the praieiros and other radicals

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were an established force inimical to imperial order and integrity.37 However, for Honório, such treatment was unbearable.—he was pursuing a peace difficult to obtain under the best of circumstances, and cabinet interference was insupportable. Honório was also suffering in the equatorial lowlands from various maladies, which affected his intestines, his liver, his strength. Whatever unusual charms the province possessed—he sent his family pineapples, a caged pair of maltese cats, a beautiful songbird, three exotic birds from Pará, and a pretty little macaw—they failed to beguile him. Honório asked repeatedly to resign. To accept service to a cabinet of men he may well have considered junior to him was hard enough; to be contradicted and undercut while doing that service must have seemed a calculated insult. He made that clear to Eusébio: What any President would feel, I thought myself entitled to feel doubly; because beside the consideration owed to the position [I hold], I expected that the friendship with which the lord ministers honor me would have spared me such disgust. It was a disappointment that had to strike my self-respect and pride: I am punished enough [estou assaz castigado].38

He was hardly the man to forget or forgive such treatment.39 Third, the Pernambuco reactionaries began here a process of alienation from the Rio saquaremas. Although Honório was finally forced to compromise with them, he and other saquaremas, in Rio or sent out as the party’s agents, would not ever give the Pernambuco reactionaries the free hand and patronage in provincial affairs to which the planter oligarchs felt entitled. Although Eusébio had attempted to assuage their thirst for power in the era of the revolt, over time the emperor and the saquaremas would tend to view them much as Honório had, that is, as a particular provincial planter oligarchy engaged in a program of provocative and partisan annihilation against their local foes. The deputies the Pernambuco reactionaries sent to the Chamber would, in turn, form a kernel of opposition within the national reactionary party to which they were allied. The fruits of this pernambucano opposition would ripen within the party in 1851 and 1852.40 Although the Praiera Revolt indicates the limits of the national regime, as a failure to either contain the praieiros within the established political parameters or to fully satisfy the pernambucano reactionaries, it also comprised a party victory in the imperial state’s national consolidation. The saquaremas, by 1850, had quashed the last Liberal revolt. They had demonstrated, for the second time that decade, that they had the will and the capacity to use the state to secure the Empire’s integrity and the newly re-established monarchy. They also demonstrated the will and the capacity to use the state to consolidate their party as part of the same process. Afterward, certainly by 1855, with the issue of civil order within the Empire laid to rest, the Party of Order and its saquarema

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leadership took to calling themselves Conservatives, perhaps to indicate not so much the struggle to defend the national order as the determination to conserve it.41 In these years of regained and contested power, however, there was no sense of complacency; the struggle was ongoing in the minds of the saquaremas, and their party’s consolidation was an integral part of it. We have seen how this played out in various provinces; let us return to the Court to see how it was understood and constructed in the cabinet. In the immediate aftermath of being called to power, 5 October 1848, the cabinet persuaded the emperor to adjourn the Chamber, dominated by the Liberals, to 23 April 1849. On 19 February 1849, however, in the depths of the rainy season and the Praieira Revolt, the saquarema cabinet went much further. The emperor was persuaded to dissolve the Chamber altogether and allow for new elections for a new Chamber, to meet in December 1849, well into the next rainy season. In other words, the emperor gave more than a year’s free hand to the cabinet to confront both domestic and foreign problems without having to deal with a Chamber at all—and then to assemble a Chamber elected after the division and demoralization of the Liberals, elected after the victory over the praieiros, and elected under their auspices. It is little surprise to note that it was a Chamber completely dominated by saquaremas and their allies.42 From 29 September 1848 until his resignation, 11 May 1852, the statesman who had most impact on such domestic political affairs was Eusébio. As minister of justice, and as the party’s emergent political chief, he oversaw crucial appointments to local judicial and political positions. Noteworthy as a deputy in 1843–1844 (when he was already a party chief), celebrated as the prestigious voice of the saquaremas in the Chamber of 1848, he had already garnered considerable national prestige for the precision and acuity of his speeches. A saquarema memoirist recalled that “At that time, Eusébio de Queirós won fame as a persuasive orator, logical in argumentation, delicate in phrasing and concepts, agreeable for his suave voice and correct gestures and style.”43 Eusébio’s family background and connections, his apprenticeship in the crucial position of Rio’s police chief (1833–1844), his experience and relations as a fluminense deputy (1838–1840), these had already consolidated his local base. Now, however, enjoying the esteem of his older cabinet colleagues, Paulino and Rodrigues Torres, and in close contact with the party’s publicists, he began a process of party organization designed to tighten national discipline and strengthen provincial partisan organization across the Empire. His correspondence demonstrates not only a very close attention and control in provincial elections and politics in Rio de Janeiro, then and later, but the attempt to install capable saquaremas as provincial presidents and to identify and support provincial al-

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lies of the Party of Order throughout the Empire by appointment and by clear direction regarding partisan policy, repression, and elections.44 In a confidential letter, probably to a provincial president, Eusébio’s assumptions about the interweave between national and partisan consolidation are patent: Pernambuco is pacified: in all the other Provinces, calm reigns. Those wanting constitutional reforms look to the elections, and as few of them are hopeful [of victory], they intend to see if the agitation that they normally create prevails in order to disturb order. I believe that they will achieve little, however; the people now understand them. I must request that Your Excellency, while not directing the elections, nonetheless, does not dismiss them completely; in this form of government, they represent a role so important that it would be an unpardonable error to let them go; Your Excellency knows that, in that Province, as in all the others, we have political friends, who always support order, prize Monarchy, and defend good principles, just as we have adversaries who do the opposite. To be indifferent to the triumph of one or the other would certainly be unreasonable. Your Excellency will not do me the injustice to think that with this I advise that you sacrifice justice, dignity, and even the public interests of greater importance to the political interests of the election; for this reason I limit myself to what I’ve stated. Friends of ours worthy of attention are obliging themselves a great deal to have Gaspar Gomes Dias appointed superior commander [of the National Guard] of Piratinim. In this regard, I ask nothing; but if Your Excellency understands that the man is suitable, I would much appreciate it if you appointed him in the interim . . .45

The reader will note that Eusébio exercised his pressure with a barely discreet finesse. The reason for the pressure, of course, is explicit. He wished to secure the state’s survival, which he assumed under threat by the Liberals. Most tellingly, Eusébio explicitly defines the Liberals by their opposition to his party and the state, which are conflated here, and associated with order, the Constitution, the monarch and “good principles.” There is no reason to doubt that the saquaremas commonly made and believed in this conflation, given what we have demonstrated up to this point. Nonetheless, it is important to note another reason for the discretion and the conflation in the letter. They may well be partly explained by the emperor’s aversion to partisan politics. Indeed, the emperor had emphasized his desire for non-partisanship in state appointments and policies; thus, Eusébio apparently sought to avoid confrontation with his monarch by deft, selective partisan moves and appointments whenever possible. Indeed, Pereira da Silva, a party veteran, noted that the cabinet’s appointments were remarkable in that no wholesale purge was carried out. Liberals were spared, if competent, in non-political positions. This recollection seems to have had some truth and importance to it; certainly, the ministers’ friends complained about their appointing Liberals, which would apparently confirm this policy. However, saquarema occupation of the politically sensitive positions

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was, of course, the most significant issue, and this was clearly promoted by the ministers. Still, Eusébio and other saquaremas (as we have seen) were sensitive to the partisan abuse that the reactionary legislation of 1841 had allowed. Indeed, Eusébio reformed some of the troubling aspects of the 3 December code.46 However, it is also abundantly clear that Eusébio was actively engaged in partisan organization through saquarema appointments to the most sensitive positions, through the use of confidential reports from trusted saquarema stalwarts, and through fostering party periodicals. One suspects that it is in this era that he lay the groundwork for his fame as the “pope” of the saquaremas, the political leader to whom even Rodrigues Torres and Paulino deferred. Joaquim Nabuco, whose father was quite close to Eusébio in the 1840s, noted the differences between his father and Eusébio in telling fashion: Eusébio dealt exclusively with facts. Nabuco [de Araújo] was a thinker, he had a creative imagination in constant motion, which to a certain degree incapacitated him for the personal side of politics, for attending to the local interests, necessities, and demands, which are everything in the politics of small [sic] countries; Eusébio was a party chief, a patient and systematic organizer, a connoisseur of men, made for pleasing a Chamber of politicians; he had feminine qualities in his voice, his manners, in his seductive way and in his character, allied to great energy; he was a cabinet man, of deep political intuition, who knew in a superior way to work, motivate, and take from every person what they could best provide.47

Although Rodrigues Torres and Paulino, referred to as the saquaremas’ cardinals, had seniority over Eusébio in the history of the party, it was thus Eusébio who was taking over the command of the party’s organizational and electoral strategy. Consequently, the potential for conflict with the emperor was manifest. Early on, Pereira da Silva noted that the emperor exerted considerable pressure in the cabinet’s affairs (except for the portfolios of foreign affairs and finance, in which he clearly agreed completely with the policies of Paulino and Rodrigues Torres).48 No where was this pressure more careful and painstaking than upon the Ministry of Justice, for obvious reasons. The legend is that this constant interference in Eusébio’s work proved excruciating, and was said to have played a great part in Eusébio’s exhaustion, disgust, and ultimate decision to resign and never to serve as a minister again. While Eusébio’s son denied that this was the reason for the phrase associated with this legend (Eusébio supposedly said: “in Brazil one cannot be a minister twice”), he did state that “in regard to Councillor Eusébio . . . he knew that he no longer merited that complete confidence of the Crown, without which a minister’s position becomes very difficult.”49 As we have seen, the minister of justice and his colleagues saw the party’s

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ideology and consolidation, its interests, as congruent with those of the state which it had done so much to defend and to define. The emperor, on the contrary, clearly saw the state as congruent with the interests of the nation, under the legitimate oversight of his personal authority and mission as that nation’s representative. As he would demonstrate with increasing clarity, such a state’s interests must be distinguished from mere partisan concerns, which, too often, were corrupted by past conflicts, personal ambitions, and petty provincial strife.50 As a child and an adolescent, Eusébio and his colleagues had been nurtured in privilege and trained in Crown service. As young men, they had identified both such established privilege and such Crown service with the party to which they had devoted themselves. The party was, historically, the guarantor of established society, the constitutional monarchy, and the nation’s future. The emperor understandably saw matters differently. Dom Pedro II, as a child and adolescent, had seen his privileges, indeed his family and his mission, threatened by political parties and their chieftains. As a young man, in the 1840s, he had devoted himself to dominating both. The Constitution itself proclaimed the emperor the guarantor of established society, of the constitutional monarchy, and, presumably, of the nation’s future. These contradictions between saquarema statesmen and their monarch are essential. As they were in the Majority, so, again, these differences are like lightening in the darkening sky, indicative of the coming storm; they provide the charged atmosphere of the Monarchy’s political history.

III. The African Slave Trade Shortly after the rebellion in the Northeast had been crushed, and during the year when Eusébio began the process of party consolidation, the cabinet was forced to deal with an extraordinarily complicated problem. It touched upon a basic element in the established order with which their party was identified. The English began to use unilateral force against the Empire to compel compliance with the ban on the Atlantic slave trade with Africa.51 The issue and the crisis were not unexpected. They both derived from Anglo-Brazilian relations a quarter-century old. The English had brokered Portuguese recognition of Brazilian independence in 1825 partly in exchange for the first emperor’s acquiescence to obligations his father had accepted. Dom João VI had granted the English preferential tariffs and had agreed to the phased abolition of the African trade. Dom Pedro I accepted both, but negotiated the deferment of abolition until 1831. The enforcement of the ban was to be carried out by a joint commission in Rio and by English naval patrols on the African coast. While the English had enjoyed the fruits of the tariff arrange-

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ments, they had been far from happy with the results of the ban. Something like a million people are estimated to have been brought to Brazil as captives between 1800 and 1850. As noted earlier, of these, the lion’s share, some 718,800, were brought in as contraband after 1831, some 563,600 to the south-central provinces served by Rio’s port. The reader should note that the best analysis of the legal trade suggests that the deaths in Africa related to capture, transportation, and sale approximated the numbers actually exported. That is, the figure for the dead before the sea voyage itself was about the same as the figure for those who left for Brazil. One must assume a similar or worse demographic impact for the contraband trade. And numbers only indirectly suggest the traumatic nature of the trade on the African societies affected.52 Although a significant number of captives were from West African peoples, bought and sold by Portuguese merchants established in Salvador and Recife, where such peoples were traditionally preferred, most Africans brought over the water were from elsewhere. Most were of the peoples taken from the West Central African ports—Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda—and most were bought and sold by Portuguese merchants out of Rio who sold their captives into the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas, and São Paulo, as we saw in Chapter One. The trade was conducted openly, however illegal, and operated at known points along the coast near the great port or at beaches on the outskirts of the city itself. The small number of negreiros involved were reputed by English diplomats to be the wealthiest merchants in Rio, where they were well known figures and, so the English claimed, influential among ministers, senators, and deputies. As has been indicated, the trade flourished under both reactionary and opposition cabinets, saquaremas and luzias, beginning in 1833 and remaining voluminous after the reactionary triumph of 1837 and during the late 1840s. Ministers of justice routinely acknowledged the flow as though it were a part of nature, the response to the obvious pull of the economic tide: no Africans, no labor, no commerce. In a plantation system in which most captives died within five years of purchase, in which two males were bought for every female, in which the disease environment was harsh and in which the captives’ food, clothing, and shelter were wretched, mortality was pervasive and natural reproduction clearly inadequate to supply the steadily increasing need, fueled by the hope of lucre and the reality of merchant debt.53 The barão do Pati de Alferes, who wrote a manual for landholders, found the captives’ extraordinary mortality a frustrating and expensive business loss: Still the immense mortality to which they are subject, and which devours colossal fortunes, increases and brings the infallible ruin of honored and laborious planters. . . . It is a pity to see the backwardness of most of our planters, bearing a burden that weighs more than their strength, producing little for their creditors, and in the end [seeing] it

140 / Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage all go for sale, not even amounting to a sum satisfying their debts! And why? Because their slaves died on them and they are seen, arms folded, lamenting their luck!54

English frustration and moral hauteur increased when the reactionary cabinet of 1843 resisted threats and entreaties. They increased even more dramatically after their preferential tariff arrangement lapsed in 1844 and the Liberal cabinet of the day refused to renew it. English diplomats began to step up their criticism of Brazilians’ contraband slave trade and to press on both issues, seeking also to link them to English support for Brazilian interests threatened in the Rio de la Plata. The Brazilian ministers of that cabinet and those that followed it sought to negotiate on the issues separately and viewed the outrage and threats of the English as unrealistic, patent hypocrisy, and extortion. In 1845, the English issued a unilateral declaration (called the Aberdeen Bill by the Brazilians, in reference to the English prime minister of the time) which justified English use of force against Brazilian ships which English naval officers deemed negreiros.55 Brazilian frustration and concern may be imagined. The initial treaty had been undertaken in 1826 by Dom Pedro I without parliamentary agreement. It threatened the vital economic interests of the Empire directly and, through the overwhelming significance of custom revenue, the state’s fiscal basis. Although there was no significant Brazilian defense of African slavery on moral grounds (indeed, Dom Pedro I and many solitary statesmen called for the abolition of the trade or slavery itself in the 1820s and 1830s), Brazilians may have viewed English moral disdain with some understandable resentment. One notes, after all, that the English had profited from the slave trade and slavery with twohanded greed in the eighteenth century and that English merchants in Brazil continued to maintain the contraband trade with key supplies of manufactured trade goods for the African markets (just as United States citizens supplied the negreiros everything they could, from ships, to insurance, to crews, to their flag). The issues noted by contemporaries, however, were the issues of sovereignty and the manifest link between pressure for renewed tariff preferences and enforcement of the ban.56 Nonetheless, whatever the centrality of slavery to the Empire of Brazil, and whatever the centrality of the African trade to sustaining slavery, and no matter what the moral issues were, the Aberdeen Bill made it clear that something would have to be done. If enforced, the immediate impact of English intervention against Brazilian shipping and commerce could be devastating and the indirect impact on society and the state clearly destabilizing. The problem was, of course, that the Liberal cabinets of the later Quinquennium were progressively weaker. The Paula Sousa cabinet of May 1848 actually put together a project to effect the enforcement of the ban, but clearly lacked the strength in the divided Chamber of the day to attempt anything so controversial.57

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If nothing could be expected of the luzias because of their weakness, what could be expected out of the saquaremas because of their strength? Socially and economically, that strength owed everything to slavery and the wealth derived from it; indeed, the party was attacked by luzias for the direct associations between it and the contraband traders. As early as the late Regency, the English diplomats referred to Vasconcelos as supported by the “Slave trading Party in this Capital and in the chambers.”58 In fact, in the first reactionary cabinet of 1837–1839, Vasconcelos, Paulino, and other reactionary chieftains had blithely handed out to their partisans some of the Africans supposedly freed by English capture (such re-enslavement was the common fate of these supposed emancipados). The reader may also recall that the party’s leadership had close personal links to negreiros and slaveholding. Eusébio’s uncle had been a negreiro, and this uncle and his son were planters. Rodrigues Torres’s father had grown rich from slave-made sugars and cachaça, his brother from slave-made sugars and coffee, and Rodrigues Torres and most of his wife’s kin were planters. The same was true, of course, of Paulino’s in-laws, because he had married into the same family, as had his uncle. Honório’s uncle had been a small-time slave trader between Rio and the hinterland, and Honório had liquidated those affairs and used much of the capital and slaves that resulted to become a planter himself. José Clemente Pereira had apparently done the same with his wife’s fortune. And the reader may well recall José Clemente’s public defense of the trade; he had joined Vasconcelos in leading calls for its legal re-instatement, though no one compared with Vasconcelos in his attacks on the English policy—indeed, no statesman was more widely known as a champion of the African trade, unless it were Honório, the other great standard-bearer of the Party of Order.59 If the saquarema chieftains’ interests and past were so clearly intertwined with the trade in people, what of their allies and supporters? The reader will recall the central role of the Northeastern merchant-planter interests in the Regresso of 1837 and its party. Naturally, they remained dependent upon slavery and the African trade. Indeed, except, perhaps, in Pernambuco, the bone and sinew of the party across the Empire, in provinces and port cities alike, were local influences organically knit to the slave trade—merchants, farmers, and planters in sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, and the landholders rich from domestic trades in crops and swine and cattle for the plantations and the towns. The preponderence of the trade in Rio since the late eighteenth century points to the particular significance of fluminense interest in Africa. Indeed, although research on the identity of Rio’s contraband negreiros remains unfinished, it only makes sense to assume links to the negreiros who had left the trade for planting or other commerce. Given their past knowledge of the trade and ready investment capital, many of the merchant-planter families in Rio and the provinces tied to it, people traditionally and intimately knit into the Party of Order, were

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probably investors, advisors, and allies in what was universally agreed to be the most profitable and necessary trade of the port.60 Yet, the fact is that the saquaremas put an end to the African trade in 1850. The question, then, is obvious. How could such a cabinet of such a party propose and carry out such a policy? How could such slaveholders deal with it personally, and how could they deal with it politically? As early as 1852 the essential answer was stated by the luzias and the English—the party had been forced to ban the trade by the English navy’s pressure. Yet, such an answer is far too simple. After all, English pressure had been applied since the early 1840s to luzias and saquaremas alike. What changed by 1848? And what made the legislation not only politically viable but practically effective, particularly given its impact upon the personal interests of most members of Parliament and their very powerful constituencies? A generation ago, Bethell demonstrated precisely how the English pressure was brought to bear and how the saquarema ministers engaged it. Bethell, however, was analyzing diplomacy, and did not explore the actual Brazilian political articulation making that diplomatic policy effective. More recently, a number of historians have diverted the question into another area entirely. They have argued that the cabinet was compelled to end the traffic not because of English diplomacy and threats, but because the slaveholding elites had become progressively terrified at the threat of a massive slave revolt, especially after the 1835 slave revolt in Salvador, another revolt in the serra in 1838, widespread rumors of a broad conspiracy throughout the serra in the 1840s, and the rising numbers in the slave population of the late 1840s, as well. Finally, these historians have argued that the arrival of yellow fever in 1849, a malady associated with the African captives, added yet another reason for panic and abolition of the trade.61 Given the centrality of the trade and of slavery to the Party of Order in particular and to the Monarchy in general, and given the contradictions among contemporaries and historians regarding the decision to abolish the trade, this is clearly a problem which must be addressed here. Let us begin with the most recent explanations: that the Party of Order abolished the African trade because of the fear of slave revolt and the threat of slave-borne disease. The issue of revolt cannot be divorced from some notion of the nature of Brazilian slaveholding. Brazilian captives have been studied with respect to various regions, but the foci have been on the Northeast, especially Bahia, and the south-center, especially Rio de Janeiro, Minas, and São Paulo. There has been no archival research competently comparing the regions and work addressing the larger comparisons possible to other areas of the African diaspora is in its infancy. Nonetheless, one can make a preliminary assessment of certain aspects of Brazilian slavery in the early nineteenth century, as a way to address basic questions and, at least, hazard a beginning.62

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The research on slavery suggests that, for the most part, Brazilian captives had worked out unusually successful patterns of resistance and were held within a regime characterized by a broad and elastic moral economy. The need for slave labor and easy access to the African trade had reinforced one another for three centuries. The result was that captives were plentiful and exploited in every form of manual labor, including positions of great personal independence and trust. They were also categorized in important ways, not only by African origin, but by status in captivity, from recently arrived boçais (used generally in field labor), to ladinos (Europeanized Africans, often taught or encouraged to use an artisanal or domestic skill), to crioulos (American-born, more-or-less Europeanized people of entirely African descent, often skilled), to mulatos (people of European and African descent, generally very Europeanized, relatively favored, and skilled, and possibly with recognized kin relationships to the European-descent master).63 The variations in employment, birth-place, ethnicity, and color, as well as the associated level of approximation to the white minority, created a great variation in treatment, opportunities, and perspectives. In a phrase, one’s life chances, though limited by color and legal status, were never limited in the same way. This meant that a sense of racial solidarity, or the perceived need for such solidarity, rarely existed. Certainly, freedmen and their descendants had even less reason for perceiving a common cause with captives on the basis of African descent because, in their circumstances, their degree of distance from African birth or from the status of slavery created the degree of their opportunities. They and the boçais did not have a common fate; indeed, the distance between them defined the measure of their advantages.64 These observations make it easier to understand why, despite the fact of a common white oppression and the fact that most people in Brazil were, to some degree, of African descent, Africans and Afro-Brazilians did not rise up along Haitian lines. Their society and their history did not compel solidarity against the white minority. In the main, individuals worked out the most advantageous relationships and opportunities they could within the established, racialized, socio-economic hierarchy they understandably accepted as natural. For a person born free but of African and slave descent, like many of the most noted literati of the era, this might mean finding and cultivating a patron to enlarge the number of options available. For a freedperson, the patron was most likely one’s former master. For city and house slaves, the opportunities for greater security and possibly freedom were greater than field slaves, but depended entirely upon cultivating one’s master by obedience and good service. All of this meant that those whose skills and knowledge were, potentially, the most apt for leadership in a rebellion were, in reality, the least likely to challenge the established racialized hierarchy. Because they were privileged within it and

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had a manifest possibility for social mobility within it, they were unlikely to risk torture and death by attacking it.65 The least privileged captives were the majority of captives—the field slaves in the production of export crops. For the most part, what little we know suggests that they had a relatively greater scope of personal freedom within their captivity than many captives elsewhere, and that they made the most of it. They often had plots of their own, the opportunity to recreate certain aspects of African cultures, the opportunity to take time for their own purposes on Sundays and other holidays, and, in certain respects, an established tradition of paternalism allowing for medical care, the right of appeal, and established notions regarding the amount of work and the harshness of punishment. These were gains captives had doubtless won over time through resistance and the sober realization of their masters, masters who commonly lived among them, that such concessions facilitated more efficient exploitation of their work force and less incentive for resistance or flight. On the great number of smaller farms linked to the export economy by supplying cane, food, beasts of burden, or tobacco to the ports and larger plantations, the number of captives was often very small and the moral economy correspondingly more liberal. On the largest plantations, the wealth and expertise involved might mean something like the carefully calibrated paternalism in the manuals one or two of the more literate planters published. One suspects that the hardest lot was on new or expanding plantations where the profits were initially poor, the debts greater, the masters more probably hard-driving, and the captives largely boçais.66 The two areas where this worse-case scenario was most likely realized in the first half of the nineteenth century were the Northeast and the fluminense sugar and coffee lands. Sure enough, we find a very unusual record of violent risings and plots in Bahia and rising concern and some action in Rio de Janeiro. However, resistance of captives in Brazil was generally the day-to-day resistance of slow-downs, petty sabotage, and the like. It was also always very, very common to take flight if a particular captive was unable to negotiate a modus vivendi or if a particular slaveholder was unusually inept or brutal. In Caribbean terms, Brazilian captives engaged in both petite marronage and grande marronage, that is, brief absences followed by return and token punishment and a newly negotiated relationship with the master, or flight with the intention of permanent escape by joining a community of fellow fugitives (usually called a quilombo in Brazil). These quilombos generally existed on clearings in the rainforest on the frontier of the plantation area, and depended upon the plantations’ economy for stolen manufactured goods, the sale of the community’s crops, and recruitment (sometimes forced) of new members, particularly women. When quilombos became too threatening to the established regime of

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the nearby plantations, capitães do mato (literally, forest captains), armed bounty hunters, generally of Afro-Brazilian descent, expert at this kind of forest tracking, combat and capture, were sent out to find and storm the quilombo and sell their inhabitants back into captivity. In the nineteenth century, National Guard units (if the size of the quilombo required it), might also be sent out, but far less often.67 This was the nature of resistance in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, for the most part. The great exception was a mass rising of more than 250 captives affecting three plantations and leading to a failed flight to establish a quilombo in 1838. This was a rising that took place on the coffee frontier of the time, at Vassouras; it was quashed by National Guard and irregular troops led by Lacerda Werneck within a week of the flight. There is also evidence that a few planters feared a coordinated rising along Haitian lines in the 1840s. The evidence for this 1840s rising, however, is very problematic. It consists of rumors and police communications to follow up on the rumors with investigation. To date, no evidence has been found that anything was discovered in the investigations. In all, then, fewer than a score of plots or rumors of plots have been detected for fluminense slave risings. None came to anything—they point, rather, to the reasons why captives chose other means to resist the brutality of their oppression. As the 1838 rising demonstrated, captives who attempted violent resistance faced resident masters, often men skilled in the manipulation and measured violence of the regime; they also faced an organized provincial National Guard, and a free rural, dependent population hostile to such risings. Finally, they also faced their own difficulties in organizing, given their varied ethnic origins, the fundamental chasm between creoles and Africans, and their lack of preparation for armed struggle. There was, after all, no slave community, in the sense of a class or organized group with a self-conscious sense of a common plight based on race and status. There was, instead, a mass of oppressed people of varied African descent, divided by significant differences in status, opportunities, origins, and experience, a mass exploited by a variety of strata who did, indeed, possess a common interest in their oppression and a very evident potential for violence. In the 1838 uprising in Vassouras, it is instructive to note, first, that Lacerda Werneck treated it as the frustrating result of one slaveholder’s spectacular mismanagement; second, that fewer than 300 captives rose up, in an area where their owner held more than 500 and the neighborhood more than 1,200; and, third, that the local and provincial authorities were rather dismissive about the event. They knew what was at risk, they knew what to do about it, and they did it.68 In Bahia, one can speculate that the much greater incidence of violent risings and plots may have had to do with significant differences in the captive

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population, compared to that of Rio de Janeiro. The fluminense captives, sold out of West Central African ports, were probably peasant farmers and even servile farm laborers. These people would be captives who could more easily adapt to the rural slave labor demanded of them. For centuries, in contrast, Salvador’s negreiros had traded out of the factories of West Africa for captives. They thought such captives not only more conveniently close, but more intelligent and skilled. They traded for such people along the traditional Mina Coast—the English “Slave Coast”—between present-day Ghana and the Niger Delta, a commercial region so called after the old Portuguese factory, São Jorge da Mina (now Elmina). By the late eighteenth century, the peoples supplied to them there were often war captives: mostly fighting men captured by the militarized slaving states in the wars of the coast’s closer hinterlands. Such captives would be less able to adapt to the rural slave labor demanded in Bahia and better prepared, psychologically and organizationally, to risk violent resistance. Moreover, the slaving in Bahia in the 1820s and 1830s brought a large number of its captives from the same one or two peoples, allowing for greater solidarity and organization along ethnic lines. Most important, with respect to the famous 1835 Malê rising in Salvador, the participants were not only of a common ethnic background, they were bound together as Muslims. Indeed, Malê, as Reis tells us, probably meant “Muslim.”69 Nonetheless, in terms of the nature of slave resistance in Brazil, it is most telling that the violence and insecurity apparently marked in Bahia during the era between 1800 and 1835 was successfully contained by measured violence meted out by local forces. The revolt of 1835 itself, the most discussed event, involved relatively few people (100 to 600 rebels, and never all at once) over the course of the early morning hours of one day. Repression was rapid and violent, with up to seventy deaths among the rebels (and nine among their enemies). In a phrase, it was atypical of Brazil and, effectively, inconsequential regarding slaveholding in Brazil generally or in Bahia, at least after 1835. Its greatest impact was on the desperate captives who rose up and were cut down, on legislation (which increased the penalty for armed resistance to death), on police work (which increased in the immediate aftermath in an effort to follow up alleged conspiracies and harass suspects) and on marketing (the people bought on the Mina Coast, called minas, from whom the Malês were drawn, fell out of favor among the contrabandist negreiros running the Atlantic trade and among the merchants who sold people between provinces).70 The historians who have argued that the 1830s uprisings caused an enduring panic and terror among the slaveholding population that led to the 1850 ban on the African trade find only sparse evidence from the copious official correspondence of local and national Crown officials. They focus upon the official

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police work noted above (and exemplified below). They do not reflect upon the possibility that momentary surprise and concern (or even ephemeral panic among widely dispersed planters, surrounded by African captives) might be easily explained as the obvious response of slaveholders used to a general complacency unexpectedly interrupted. Slaveholders were surprised and concerned because, while they had understandable, practical concerns about the potential for spontaneous violence by one or two captives, they did not expect organized, violent resistance by large numbers. This is the most significant aspect—the lack of expectation. They acted, and so did their official representatives, and they acted successfully, to eradicate the source of their concern, through rapid and violent containment and erasure of the few risings which actually did occur or through the efficient but fruitless search for the source of rumored risings. Here, for example, is Rodrigues Torres, writing to the minister of justice, Limpo de Abreu, in December 1835, when Rodrigues Torres was provincial president of Rio de Janeiro. This is how he concluded a report on fluminense rumors in the aftermath of the Malê revolt of an insurrection conspiracy involving the provincial towns of Maricá and Itaboraí, and Rio itself: Private letters also tell me that some blacks [pretos] confirmed that there was an accord between them and those of the city [Rio], and that one Andrade, a mulatto freedman [pardo forro], who has a grocery shop on the Rua do Rosário, is one of the agents of the plan that is to be executed. I don’t give these particulars to Your Excellency as very trustworthy, but because they might provide the police some clarification. . . . I must still assure Your Excellency that the memoranda from various authorities and private correspondence which I have received seem to me excessively dyed with the color of fear; but it behooves me also to confess that the uniformity of the declarations of slaves, from distinct points, moreover, seems to prove that something was attempted or is attempted . . . and that for this [reason] I have continued to take the measures within my grasp to prevent evils that might follow.71

During the same troubled era, late 1835, Eusébio, then Rio’s police chief, also responded to a memorandum on such matters sent to him by Limpo de Abreu: I had the alleged coachman of André Roiz summoned; he told me he had heard the object of the denunciation from Albino José de Sa, a sawyer on the Rua de São Pedro no. 191; I had him summoned to my presence, and he declared that, passing by a confections shop near the Largo do Capim, he heard a sargeant, whom he does not know, say: There are three thousand blacks [negros—often used interchangeably with “slaves”]; they cannot resist so many whites [São três mil negros; não podem resistir a tantos brancos]. And it is to this that the denunciation is reduced. Nevertheless, I continue to investigate, and I will communicate what I discover.72

Apparently there was little to discover, as the next minister of justice, Alves Branco, reported: “nothing was possible to discover in this respect, despite con-

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tinuous alarms that spread in the City.” To date, subsequent research has not only failed to show evidence of such plots, it has also failed to demonstrate enduring, widespread fear of such risings over the era as a whole, once the immediate concerns of 1835 were laid to rest.73 What the records do show is something historians have yet to address in this debate: the obvious argument posed by the successful, expanding market for African captives in this era of supposed common, growing panic. The clearest proof that Brazilian slaveholders were not interested in ending the Atlantic slave trade because of a panic over too many Africans and a consequent, general slave revolt is the plain fact that they kept on buying Africans, and in increasing numbers. Indeed, the era between 1835 (the date of the Salvador rising) and 1838 (the date of the Vassouras rising) was the era when the contraband trade first flourished. The era between 1838 and 1849 was the era when, contraband or no, most captives were sold in Brazil on a per annum basis in the whole history of the Atlantic slave trade. How terrified of Africans could the slaveholders have been if they bought them with such eagerness? It seems more probable that they bought in such great numbers then because of their dramatically expanding labor needs (associated with a surge in the Atlantic market for Brazilian exports) and, particularly after the Aberdeen Bill of 1844, the obvious concern that their access to that labor source might be hampered or cut off.74 Indeed, the political significance of the rise in captives’ violence in Salvador and the increasing numbers of captives under control was probably to enhance the political appeal of the Regresso of the mid 1830s. The evidence makes clear that the slaveholders and merchants wanted to maintain the African trade; but they obviously would have wanted to do so in a secure and stable environment. This also may well have been the reason, for example, that the racialized appeals to the largely Afro-Brazilian urban masses, mobilized by the so-called “mulatto” press of the early 1830s, dropped off dramatically in the mid–1830s. While the threat of political upheaval from the possibility of a restoration of the Portuguese emperor disappeared with notice of his death in late 1834, the general destabilization and subaltern violence of the Regency increased after that date and the volume of Africans entering the Empire did as well. It seems clear, then, that neither reactionaries nor, for the most part, their opposition (who bought and exploited Africans, too, and were part of the same racialized hierarchy), would want to risk a general conflagration by emphasizing the common racial origins among the most oppressed ranks of Brazilian society. Thus, racialized liberalism, what contemporaries condemned as “haitianismo,” the use of race to mobilize the Afro-Brazilian masses against the established order, began to ebb and nearly vanished, as political discourse retreated to a safer language emphasizing differences over governance and birth place, not racial background.75

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One might also point out that the political appeal of certain reactionaries was probably enhanced by their part in the violent episodes and rumors of violence noted. Their capable repression of slave violence or their authoritative response to its rumor doubtless enhanced their political reputations and credibility. The repression of the Malê revolt, which took place under the liberal regency of Feijó, was nonetheless the work of Gonçalves Martins, who had already emerged in the foremost reactionary ranks as an opponent of the 1834 reforms, and who would remain one of the two most important chieftains of the Bahian allies of the saquaremas. His standing probably increased still more as a figure in the defeat of the 1837 Sabinada. The rumors of post-Malê conspiracy among fluminenses were quashed, as we have seen, by Rodrigues Torres. The repression of the 1838 Vassouras revolt was done by Lacerda Werneck, under the supervision of the provincial president of the time, Paulino. The police official who investigated and quashed the rumors in Rio during the 1830s and the early 1840s was Eusébio. In sum, the containment of violent resistance, the investigation of conspiracy, and the secure maintenance of stable slavery could easily be associated with the reactionaries and strengthen their political standing among slaveholders. Ironically, it was this very standing and credibility which may help us to understand one of the reasons why the saquaremas were able to act in 1850: the statesmen who figured most closely in repressing the African slave trade in 1850 were key figures in maintaining the security of Brazilian slavery in the previous two decades. It seems reasonable to assume that they had earned enormous standing among the great slaveholders by acting efficiently, allaying concerns about the security of holding people in captivity. It is also no surprise, as we shall see, that none of them called for the trade’s repression out of fear that slavery itself posed a fatal security risk. After all, they were the very men who had managed that risk. The danger lay elsewhere, and they had the status among slaveholders to be trusted to point the danger out and confront it. Another issue has been raised recently and must still be addressed, however. There are some historians who argue that the slave trade was ended in 1850 partly because it was associated with the transmission of yellow fever. Such an argument is interesting, but suggests a poor grasp of the facts about the epidemic, their appreciation at the time, and the political realities of the era. It is true that yellow fever, absent from Brazil since the late seventeenth century, reappeared in Salvador and in Rio suddenly in late 1849, just before the trade was effectively abolished. It is also true that the fever was frightening. Although fevers in the region were common and traditional enough, yellow fever was unexpected and noted for its terrifying symptoms: a jaundiced appearance, fever, vomiting, bleeding, and stench. Our best estimate for the impact that first

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year,1849–1850, is clearly sobering. The epidemic struck during the region’s hot, humid season of waters, and more than a third of Rio’s 266,000 inhabitants contracted the disease, although only four thousand or more died.76 That historians might think its sudden onslaught prompted a dramatic policy change makes sense. However, as we shall see, the impact on the policy issue of the African trade was inconsequential. It was quickly established that the disease had been conveyed to Salvador and then to Rio by shipping associated with slaving. As Chalhoub has noted, physicians at the time, in Europe and in the tropical world, debated yellow fever’s origin and transmission: some held for environmental causation, some for direct infection. Environmental causation certainly made sense for Rio, where the rainy season, with its moisture, great heat, and supposedly fatal impact on the “miasmas” (the gaseous air rising from flooded low-lying areas typified by organic waste and rot) was traditionally associated with seasonal fevers. Such a geography of disease was typical, of course, of the Empire’s port cities. But in Rio, this school of thought was eclectically joined to the other, which held that the fever was borne by contagion. Brazilian physicians posited that the disease was initially introduced to such areas, where it developed and spread, through contagion from affected victims. In Rio, these initial victims were thought to be the African captives. One French specialist argued that the captives caught and conveyed the disease because of the poor hygiene they suffered in the trans-Atlantic voyage into slave labor. José Pereira do Rego (1816–1892), later perhaps the most celebrated Brazilian public-health authority of his time, discarded part of this argument in his contemporary analysis. He opined that the trade merely conveyed the infected people from one site to another, where they then propagated the disease. Although Pereira do Rego is cited by historians urging yellow fever as a reason for the end of the African slave trade, his work, even as it is paraphrased by one of the historians, only ambiguously supports the idea. For, as Chalhoub makes clear, Pereira do Rego’s thesis was that yellow fever was most dangerous for newly arrived Europeans rather than for people born or acclimated in Brazil or for Africans. What, then, in the good doctor’s diagnosis, would urge the dramatic policy reversal of an imposed end to the African trade? Why make a traumatic attack on the labor source crucial to the economy in order to protect a relatively small, foreign fraction of the population?77 Historians, however, in seeking to tie the fever and trade abolition together, have pointed to the linkage made between the trade in slaves and yellow fever by members of Parliament and other officials, arguing that the administration bowed to such public pressure when it abolished the trade. Chalhoub has also cited an English diplomat’s claims that this connection was usefully exploited by the abolitionist press. These arguments are fatally weakened once one takes

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into account that the parliamentary speeches and official reports cited were very few, made mostly by opposition members (who, thus, would have negligible impact on the saquarema cabinet), and, most important, were almost all dated in the months after the cabinet’s public decision to move against the trade had been declared and defended in public (January 1850). As for the English diplomat’s point, it is misleading. It was a report by James Hudson, the agent of the English cabinet’s abolitionist policy in Rio, and seems most likely to have been filed to impress his superiors with the success of local abolitionism. Moreover, he merely claims that the abolitionist press had made good use of yellow fever. He could not, of course, have proved that their articles had actually convinced anyone. Indeed, there is every reason to assume that such articles had no political impact at all. Bethell concluded years ago that the abolitionist movement in Brazil at that time was so small that it was inconsequential, and he has noted that the abolitionist press, for lack of sufficient paying readers, depended upon English secret subsidies.78 Most troubling of all, this recent scholarship has ignored Bethell’s painstaking analysis, or dismissed its conclusions, or simply failed to engage it.79 Moreover, it has not addressed the most obvious evidence for discussing a policy decision such as this: the most pertinent correspondence, the secret administration discussions, and the public statements of the statesmen who actually made the decision to end the trade. Let us leave behind these revisionist claims, then, and address the past itself. It is the evidence left behind by those who made the policy to which we turn now to explain the 1850 legislation ending the contraband African slave trade. Bethell’s argument can be easily summarized. He demonstrated that the English cabinet, despite increasing parliamentary opposition, decided to force abolition upon the Empire. They did so because past diplomacy had convinced them that only unilateral action would compel Brazilian compliance. They were able to muster the requisite naval forces to pursue Brazilian slavers in 1849 because of the success of their negotiations with Rosas. The ships freed up from blockading Buenos Aires could now be used along the Brazilian coast.80 Their first attacks and pursuit of Brazilian shipping created a dramatic political crisis. The imperial cabinet was forced to take action against the African trade to avoid further violence. Bethell, however, was too good a scholar not to point to the importance of the nature of the cabinet. Indeed, among other suggestive points he made in passing is the way in which the saquaremas apparently anticipated English actions and then successfully coped with them and with the political constituency which they represented. It is these points which must be developed here, given the concerns of this study, for they get at the capacity of the saquarema statesmen and their relationship with their state and society.81

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Before the English had fired a shot, the saquaremas had already determined to repress the traffic. Eusébio, who must have known precisely who and where the negreiros were because of his background, connections, and recent role as Rio’s police chief, was the fortuitous agent of this policy, as minister of justice. He began to enforce existing laws against the traffic in the Rio area in late 1849. On 14 January 1850, in his first report to the Chamber, he noted these actions and the intent of the cabinet to pass enabling legislation to finish with the traffic. He made it clear that this would not threaten present holdings; rather, it would end the trade of the negreiros, whom he portrayed as foreign financial parasites. In this way, he reassured slaveholders and put the immediate onus of the policy on the contrabandists alone.82 This speech was made a mere week after the first incident with the English navy (7 January). For the remainder of 1850, the cabinet would have to deal with two fronts: the embarrassing pressures of the English off the coast and in the Court, and the pressure from the Brazilian public. The latter had two main aspects, one noisy, one discreet. The Liberal opposition was noisy. It used its Chamber minority and the gallery to attack the cabinet with ferocity. They charged the cabinet with unwillingness to end the trade immediately, at times attributing this to an indifference indebted to their negreiro connections. Contradictorily (and while the cabinet’s repression gathered strength), they attacked the cabinet’s actions against the negreiros as a display of unpatriotic, cowardly compliance in the face of English naval attacks. The discreet pressure was from the saquaremas’ constituency, as represented by private conversations in the halls and chambers of the Court, which combined the desire to confront the English and to maintain the trade.83 It is in the private and public way in which the saquaremas faced these pressures that we can get at their motivation and at their capacity. The evidence and logic alike suggest their motivation. Saquarema chieftains, well informed as former ministers, as members of Parliament, and as members of the Council of State in the 1840s, knew full well that the English were determined to pursue abolition. They also must have foreseen, from both the language of the Aberdeen Bill and English actions in the Rio de la Plata, that the English were willing and able to move against Brazilian commerce to extort compliance. Thus, the reasons to repress the traffic seem clear. They acted in 1849 to eliminate the trade to avoid English actions which would be fatal. Fatal, first, to the Brazilian economy, and, fatal, second, to the Brazilian state, which depended upon that economy and which would be forced into either a war it could not win or an immediate capitulation, with catastrophic political consequences. Paulino, especially, was sensitive to yet another issue, one interwoven in Anglo-Brazilian diplomacy since 1842. Unless the British were appeased regarding abolition, the Brazilian policy against Rosas would founder. The Empire needed

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English neutrality, if not support, against Buenos Aires. They could hardly risk war there if they were engaged in coastal hostilities with the English squadron.84 These matters are suggested by circumstances and supporting documents; they are also demonstrated by direct evidence. In part, we have this in the actions and statements by which the saquaremas effected their policy. After introducing it in the Chamber, they began to defend it to their own constituency through the most influential reactionary publicist of the old Party of Order. Within a week of Eusébio’s first speech, in January 1850, Justiniano José da Rocha reprinted parts of the speech and began a series of articles defending the same points in the party’s old paper, O Brasil.85 Within the Chamber, the ministers and other saquaremas (particularly Silveira da Mota) answered the Liberal accusations with great oratorical skill. As the English attacks suddenly escalated in June 1850, Paulino met repeatedly with the English diplomat in charge as he and the others faced the rising tide of Anglophobia with care and circumspection. In the most difficult conjuncture, in July 1850, after repeated English provocations, Paulino rose from his minister’s seat in the Chamber and spoke for more than an hour.86 Part of the speech comprised policy history and cabinet apologia, pointing out the commonalities in both parties’ inaction; he then outlined the honorable way in which the cabinet had responded to the English diplomats, and what the cabinet’s policy was designed to do. Perhaps the most significant appeals, however, were naturally put at the end of the speech: I sincerely believe that it is indispensable to leave this situation in which we find ourselves, that it is necessary to provide ourselves with a broad, sincere, frank solution to all of these questions [Applause]; to these questions which provoke conflicts every day, which may bring others greater; to these questions which obstruct our progress toward the development and prosperity of the country. [Applause.] I could avoid entering into the question of the convenience of continuing the traffic; I could leave aside the examination of whether its repression might seriously prejudice our agriculture; but [instead] I will ask those who think that the continuation of the traffic is appropriate, could it possibly continue for very long? [Applause.] When a powerful nation such as Great Britain, pursues with untiring tenacity the pledge to end the traffic over the space of more than 40 years with a perseverance never questioned; when she resolves to spend 650 thousand pounds per year only to maintain her cruisers to repress the traffic; when she obtains the acquiescence of all of the European and American maritime nations; when the traffic is reduced to Brazil and to Cuba, can we resist such a torrent, that carries us along, as surely as the world in which we exist? I do not believe so. [Applause.]87

The allusion to an English blockade, to war, and to forced compliance was hardly subtle. There was nothing subtle at all in Paulino’s conclusion, a carefully placed demand for the party’s support: I believe, gentlemen, that I have explained myself with candor. [Applause.] Before concluding, however, I have to make a request to the Chamber. If the Chamber understands

154 / Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage that the situation is grave, that the hour presents difficulties, and that the cabinet has the courage, the intelligence, and the dedication sufficient to resolve them as the dignity and true interests of the country require, give it full and entire confidence [applause], lend it broad and complete cooperation. [Much applause]. And if the Chamber understands that the present cabinet is incapable of overcoming the difficulties of the situation, I ask it to declare it now. [Nay] [Lively shows of support. The orator receives the congratulations of many honorable members]88

This was very skillful manipulation. A vote of no confidence would mean the cabinet’s resignation. Cabinet resignation, in turn, would likely mean the return of the Liberals to power. A Liberal cabinet, faced with a saquarema majority, would inevitably ask the emperor to dissolve the Chamber, as had occurred in 1844. The resulting election for a new legislature, under the Liberal auspices of the new cabinet and a consequent purge of saquarema office holders, would mean the return of a fixed Liberal majority, and, thus, a rapid reversal of fortune at the local and national level—a Liberal triumph and a painful, inevitable settling of accounts. We can also learn of the cabinet’s reasoning obliquely. Its private debates and its private persuasion of its constituency can be teased out of hard evidence and post facto reports. The hard evidence consists of the secret deliberations of the ministers with the Council of State just before Paulino’s speech in the Chamber. Given the crisis posed by English naval escalation, the need for the advice and support of the Council of State (whose prestige within the monarchy and whose membership in and of themselves carried great weight) was obvious. In these council deliberations the desire to avoid war because of its obvious catastrophic consequences is palpable. It is also here that Paulino points out the complications regarding Buenos Aires (something to which he could hardly allude in the public speech, because his Platine diplomacy was secret). A less reliable, but entirely feasible, bit of evidence is the subsequent report of an English diplomat of a conversation he had with Paulino. Paulino had supposedly mentioned to the Englishman that he had had to take great pains in his private talks with important party stalwarts, to point out that abolition had to be effected to avoid war. This was later corroborated by a key veteran of the party, as a demonstration of how the party leadership had characteristically acted to sustain support when forging controversial policy.89 Finally, in this connection, it is important to note that the emperor was fully supportive. This was not only important in terms of the constitutional issue of Crown confidence in the cabinet, but in terms of the cabinet’s constituency. Indeed, at one point, Dom Pedro II made this clear by his private, firm response to the most recalcitrant party supporters, who pressed the monarch to withdraw his confidence from the cabinet because of this policy.90 In sum, the legislation which ended the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil was un-

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dertaken by the saquaremas to avoid a fatal commercial blockade and a catastrophic war with the English and to gain a free hand in the Rio de la Plata. None of the evidence connected directly to these statesmen suggests that either the fear of slave rebellions or the fear of yellow fever figured in their motivations.91 The policy was first undertaken before English violence and effected despite that violence, which could easily have provoked war. Saquaremas carried it out through initial police action, adept diplomatic negotiation with the English, and the skillful leadership of their Chamber majority, strengthened by the support of the emperor, the Council of State, and the most influential reactionary publicist. Their credibility with their constituency and their party, derived from fifteen or more years of ideological and political leadership, was central to their capacity to persuade the most powerful socio-economic elements in their society. Liberal chieftains had recognized the necessity of such a policy, but with weak, ebbing political support, had been unable to carry it forward. It is difficult to imagine another, much less a better, cabinet which could have accomplished such a complicated and difficult task. They put an end to the trade without war, without destabilization, and without the loss of political support or position. Indeed, the Eusébio de Queirós Law was only one early achievement of the saquarema cabinet, and many of these could not have been accomplished if the cabinet’s political strength had been early and lastingly diminished by their abolitionist policy. The most obvious of these subsequent successes is their policy in the Rio de la Plata, to which we turn now.

IV. Platine Victory and Political Nausea With our spirit surrendered to the most profound consternation, we cannot find a way to express to readers the immense loss just sustained by the Empire. This plague over which God has compelled so many tears among us, over which so much anguish has been wrung from Brazilian hearts, has now just chosen a victim among our statesmen, and what a victim, great God! Senhor Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos.92

In this way, the customary black-framed article in the party paper proclaimed the unexpected fate of Vasconcelos on 1 May 1850. For many years, death was something both Vasconcelos and the political world had expected, for Vasconcelos, suffering a variety of terrible symptoms, was slowly crippled by syphilis for over two decades. In the end, however, he was the most illustrious victim of that first season of yellow fever, instead. Thus, though a founding statesman of the ruling party, fear of contagion was such that his casket went to Catumbí cemetery accompanied by fewer than a dozen members of Parliament at half-past four on 2 May. As was the custom, this official entourage was drawn by lot. The senatorial contingent, walking the short distance from the Senate

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building to Vasconcelos’s residence on the Rua do Areal, included two of his old enemies, Lopes Gama and Alencar. His crippled, withered body was so small that his remains were fitted into a child’s casket.93 Death dragged Vasconcelos from a stage now dominated by others. Whatever his influence in the Senate or the Council of State, he had been exiled from the direct exercise of power since the Regency. In the early 1840s, his old enmity with Aureliano had probably ensured his political ostracism. Even now, however, with the saquaremas’ return to power, he remained behind the scene. Pereira da Silva, a young reactionary in the 1830s, suggests the personal and political qualities that had helped isolate the man among other party leaders: Bernardo Pereira da Vasconcelos was not esteemed as a private citizen, nor did he even attract political proselytes, however much he had exercised notable influence in the high positions he had occupied, and, out of power, he imposed himself upon everyone and made himself feared by his robust talent. He did not inspire in the Party the confidence necessary for someone who wishes to be a chief; he could not mix with the rank and file because of the eminent gifts which adorned him; he was considered more of an ally, however much an awkward one, rather than a dedicated partisan.94

Even if personal isolation and overbearing style had not had effect, Vasconcelos’s challenges to the dynasty might have been enough to ensure political marginalization. Perhaps Dom Pedro II could not forgive Vasconcelos for leadership of the opposition to his father in the 1820s or his proud resistance to his own early majority. The only man who could rival Vasconcelos in the history of the Party of Order shared only a slightly better relationship with the monarch. That man, of course, was Honório. As the cabinet leader in 1844, Honório had presumed to challenge Dom Pedro II over the basic issue of political authority, forcing the young emperor to choose between his favorite and his appointed minister in the legitimate exercise of power. The reader will recall that the emperor, in effect, had chosen himself, refusing to accept another’s demands, thus compelling Honório to resign. When the emperor finally recalled the saquaremas to power five years later, Honório languished outside the cabinet, alongside Vasconcelos—both nicely swathed in the splendors of the Senate and Council of State, but distanced from action. Nonetheless, the younger chieftains of the party did not forget Honório. As we saw earlier, the saquarema ministers had used (and abused) him as their proconsul in Pernambuco; differences and distaste for the position had finally led to his resignation. Honório, ill and deeply wounded by Eusébio’s treatment, returned to the Court in mid 1850. Honorio was not the only one convalescing there. Along with the emperor, most of the cabinet had come down with yellow fever by March 1850. Paulino,

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minister of foreign affairs, sickened in April. His return to health was problematic, and his return to work, gradual. And it was hard work. Eusébio shouldered the burden of justice from the ministry office overlooking the pleasant walks and garden of the Passéio Público; Paulino’s ministry was housed at the same address. However, he often worked elsewhere. Fearful of espionage, he maintained his own secret correspondence from his residence on the Rua dos Inválidos, four or five blocks away. Paulino was in the midst of the first phase of his diplomacy with the besieged government of Montevideo. More than a year after Honório’s return, by September 1851, that phase was nearly complete. A series of alliances was being arranged which would bind Montevideo to Brazil and to the Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Entre-Rios. With war in view, Paulino recalled Honório to action in the Plate region as plenipotentiary minister. The foreign minister had known Honório since Coimbra in the 1820s and had worked with him since the 1830s; he trusted Honório’s political instincts, leadership, decision, and domestic political credibility to sustain him.95 Honório’s mission was given to him without much warning, in mid-October 1851. He had to assemble his thoughts and a small staff quickly. His choice for chief assistant on the mission must have surprised and dismayed many in his party, for he chose a young Liberal named [José Maria da Silva] Paranhos (1819–1880). Paranhos was no obscure Liberal either, especially to fluminenses. A brilliant and ambitious Naval School graduate and professor, Paranhos had launched his political career as a Liberal journalist and freemason. In the early 1840s, he had become a protégé of the first of his great patrons, Holanda. Then, he attached himself to Aureliano, being named the latter’s provincial secretary and, then, vice president when Aureliano, presiding over the Province of Rio de Janeiro from April 1844 to April 1848, was attempting to grind the saquaremas out of their political strongholds. Indeed, Paranhos, under Aureliano’s auspices, had been elected a fluminense deputy to the Legislature of 1848. When the new saquarema cabinet of 1848 persuaded the emperor to adjourn and then dismiss that Chamber, Paranhos began to drift from the Liberal ranks. As a staunch monarchist, Paranhos was also unwilling to support the Praieira Revolt of 1848, Still, he remained in Liberal journalism for a while, an editor of the newly named Corréio Mercantil, the party’s great daily, housed in the old city’s heart, on the Rua da Quitanda. By 1850, however, Paranhos had left partisan journalism for the staid columns of the Jornal do Commercio, by now grande dame of the Court press, the journal of record and the most widely-read paper in the Empire.96 It was in the Jornal do Commercio’s office on the Rua do Ouvidor that Honório found him. Honório’s interest in Paranhos might be taken to reflect the non-partisan emphasis on merit, rather than party, that the emperor pub-

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licly favored. Regarding merit, no one would ever doubt that of Paranhos. After all, he had risen quickly during the Liberal Quinquennium, and had now taken a position in the editorial office of the premier periodical of the Empire. For the last few months, he had been demonstrating his literary skills as the “anonymous” author of the fashionable series of personal observations, or crônicas, “Ao Amigo Ausente,” (“To an Absent Friend”), in the Jornal. He had, more to the point, written very capable articles in the Jornal supporting Paulino’s foreign policy in the Plate region. As a Naval School professor and a man whose mother’s family had a strong military tradition, this championship of the cabinet’s foreign policy looks like sincerity, not opportunism. It proved an opportunity, however. Honório arrived, an unexpected stranger, in the Jornal office, introduced himself, and made his proposal in his peculiar, abrupt fashion. Paranhos, understandably flattered, and probably carried forward by the combination of ambition and dedication to Crown service that would characterize his career, accepted. His rise had been made possible by Holanda’s and then Aureliano’s patronage, but Aureliano had now vanished from the scene and the Liberals were in clear disarray. Honório was opening an unexpected path upward again.97 While Paranhos’s motivations are nearly transparent, Honório’s are not. Merit? Rio abounded in ambitious talent; why pick a man associated with his foe, Aureliano, the arch-enemy of the party and the scourge of the saquarema heartland? The choice suggests, instead, a calculated demonstration of Honório’s own independence. What better way to serve the saquaremas without subservience, to impress the emperor with his own non-partisanship, and to deliver a clear message to Eusébio, emergent political chief of the saquaremas, who had treated him with so little respect in Pernambuco? In Paranhos, Honório had a man with marked literary skill, with a military background and unusually fine technical knowledge, with political instincts and proven political courage, and with a clear need for a new patron, with Aureliano’s recent eclipse. Paranhos could have no divided loyalty now; by accepting Honório’s offer, he left the Liberals forever; his dependence upon Honório would be complete. As Paranhos’s son recalled the moment the two men met, the issue of personal patronage and ambitions only dusts the episode; it colors it, nonetheless. The two men did not know one another, even by sight. Honório called at the Ouvidor building; Paranhos hurriedly threw on his coat (it was the hot and humid season of waters, and probably in the early afternoon) and arranged to receive the councillor in a private side office. They spoke for ten minutes; after the invitation was made and accepted, Paranhos asked a question logical in the personalized and partisan context in which both men had made their way. He asked Honório to whom he owed his recommendation. Honório replied, “To no one.

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I consulted no one about appointing you. What influenced my mind was your merit, which I prize: I hope, sir, that you will prove I got it right.”98 Whatever the bitterness or resentment Honório held towards Eusébio, his relationship with Paulino, who had initially been his protégé in the early 1830s, and his chief and then colleague in the cabinets of 1842 and 1843–1844, remained apparently strong. This may also reflect as much Paulino’s lack of political ambition to be paramount as Honório’s consuming thirst for primacy. As Eusébio said of Honório, “like all men of strong temperament, he tends more to exaggerating his generosity towards his conquered enemies than in accommodations to conquering friends.”99 Paulino was no conquering friend. Indeed, throughout his career, Paulino seems never to have suggested the conqueror— he focused his superb mind on Crown service, generally not as a leader, but as an apprentice or a partner. First, he had devoted himself to the consolidation and defense of the state, as Rodrigues Torres’s and Vasconcelos’s understudy in fluminense and imperial legislation and direction. Now, he was working successfully to move beyond his former, necessarily partisan, role. Now, he served the defense of state interests abroad, first against the English, now, against the porteños. He had never been a prime minister, and, as we shall see, never demonstrated the ambition to be one. He had been satisfied to work with the others as a fluminense president, and, repeatedly, as a deputy and a minister. Something of this attitude may be projected in his personal correspondence with his eldest son, at the time in law school in São Paulo: “I appreciate your brilliant performance in the criminal law course. Do not dare, however, to become vain and to think that you know a great deal but, instead, dare to study ever more and to be ever more modest because this is the way to attenuate envy.” 100 or, again: “I was always much loved by my fellow students and contemporaries, because I made a study of being modest.”101This lack of aggressive political aspiration, and a temperament that, yoked to great intellectual talent, apparently armed him with a useful combination of caution, tact, and capacity, made him a superb diplomat and doubtless eased matters with Honório, notoriously quick to take offense and to give it. It is useful to take such time with these individuals at this juncture because of their importance for both the diplomatic and the political history that follows here and in the next chapters. With respect to the saquaremas’ Platine policy, the personalities of Paulino, Honório, Paranhos dovetailed spectacularly well. Honório’s strength and leadership allowed Paulino to consummate the second and third phases of his policy. In Montevideo, Honório completed the diplomatic treaties and political organization that brought together the allies and carried the supportive neutrality of Paraguay. Then, a coordinated effort of land and sea forces was put into movement against Rosas. Paranhos, as Honó-

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rio’s second in command, quickly adapted his own skills to the necessities of the mission. He demonstrated not only the intelligence and verbal ability expected, but a surprisingly rapid grasp of the issues and the actors, handling the complications with élan, showing a flair for decision, a capacity for work, an eye for detail, and an instinct for imposing himself that won Honório’s decided approval and, after some hesitation (allegedly because Paranhos was a novice, to Paulino’s way of thinking), the support of Paulino. He appointed Paranhos to Honório’s position when the elder statesman returned to Rio.102 The denouement of Paulino’s Platine policy itself is simply sketched. The alliance cultivated by 1851 rapidly bore fruit in early 1852. Brazilian naval and land forces (the latter again under the indispensable Caxias, now a conde), made common cause with armies sent into the field by Rosas’s rival Argentine caudillos. They met the porteños at Caseros on 3 February 1852. Rosas’s defeat led to exile, thirty years more of Argentine intestine struggle, the re-creation of Uruguay as a weak buffer state between the Argentines and the Empire, and the celebration of treaties with Uruguay and Paraguay securing favorable terms for Brazilian access to the eastern tributaries of the Rio de la Plata. These triumphs were the ones in which Paulino and Honório may have taken greatest pride in their public careers. Certainly, upon his return to Rio, when Honório was honored by cabinet and Crown with the title of visconde (1852), he chose the name visconde de Paraná, for the river he had helped make accessible to the imperial standard.103 The year 1852 found the cabinet triumphant but exhausted. For nearly four years, they had labored. They had turned the revolt in Pernambuco into a costly consolidation; they had faced the English and carried out the repression of the slave trade; they had made Brazil the arbiter of the Platine region. They had also laid the basis for the social and economic consolidation of the Empire and its future—at least according to their lights. At least two of the decrees by which they did this culminated years of parliamentary revision: the 1850 Commercial Code (initially proposed by José Clemente Pereira and others in 1834) and the 1850 Land Law (initially proposed by Rodrigues Torres in 1843). In essence, both actions regularized and established commerce and landholding in favor of the merchant-planter interests these men represented. Rodrigues Torres also reformed public finance (1850) and organized the second Banco do Brasil (1851, 1853). Paulino re-organized the diplomatic corps (1851) and Monte Alegre regulated the Board of Public Health. It was a great deal, and they were tired. Just at the beginning of the 1852 session, Eusébio, Monte Alegre, and Manuel Vieira Tosta were granted their resignations. However, there was still much to do, and, with great reluctance, Rodrigues Torres agreed to stay; on 11 May, he became prime minister and recruited

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Gonçalves Martins, Zacarias [de Góis e Vasconcelos] (1815–1877), and [José Ildefonso de] Sousa Ramos (1812–1883) to take up the portfolios of empire, navy, and justice. However, the sine qua non of Rodrigues Torres’s decision was the continued ministry of Paulino. Over the next fifteen months, Paulino oversaw the post-war triumphs of Paranhos in the Rio de la Plata while the others continued with the saquaremas’ innovations. Rodrigues Torres lowered export taxes (1853), probably as a sop to the slaveholders and an encouragement to export. Gonçalves Martins decreed the first concessions for railroads (1852) and the first steamship line on the Amazon (1852). These concessions, and others, were granted to Ireneu Evangelista de Sousa (1813–1889), Brazil’s premier merchant financier. Ireneu had been a crucial instrument of Honório’s and Paranhos’ Platine policies, bankrolling their Uruguayan clients; he now began his career as the Empire’s greatest infrastructural entrepreneur104 In all of this, the saquaremas used state decrees to perfect public service, to regulate commerce and landholding in the interests of the great agro-export elites, and to create the financial and infrastructural means to reach and exploit the Empire’s natural resources with greater efficiency. For a party associated with reaction, order, and conservatism, all of this will suggest a contradiction. However, if one reflects upon the interests best served by all of the saquarema policies, there is no contradiction at all. The reforms were intended to facilitate the great merchant and planting interests in doing what they had always done with greater advantages of access, security, and capital. The saquaremas had defended and defined the role of the state regarding domestic security and integrity; they had used that consolidation as the basis for defending the national interests abroad; now they used the state to promote the further exploitation of national resources to benefit the socio-economic interests with which they identified the nation. It was statist developmentalism beneficial to the hierarchical elites and to the nation with which they identified them. Yet, despite these many triumphs, the saquarema ministers were dogged by increasing political constraints that were both unanticipated and discouraging. It was these which exhausted and frustrated them to the point where they asked to be allowed to resign as early as November 1851. We have noted one aspect of these constraints, one obviously unmentionable in their plea to the emperor for relief. This was Dom Pedro II’s regular oversight and intervention in their domestic policies, where he consistently sought to limit partisan reprisal and appointments. This was a portion of their dilemma, but one which they could not address directly. They could not challenge the emperor, given their assumptions and beliefs about the centrality of the monarch to the constitutional system to which their party and ideology were bound. The constraints that they did mention were quite related, however; they had to do with partisanship and patron-

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age. They had to do with the cabinet’s ability to promote its policies in a Chamber that had emerged from past partisan struggle and that was increasingly concerned with making patronage demands. The second prime minister of the administration, Monte Alegre, had advised the emperor that “All the past made the cabinet’s position most difficult. If we did not satisfy these demands, we would disappoint those from whom alone we could expect support and we would thus give great strength to our adversaries.”105 To appreciate the cabinet’s dilemma, we must recall the history to which Monte Alegre referred. Earlier in this analysis, the role of patronage appointments in terms of electoral fraud and the impact of the 3 December 1841 law were introduced. The reader may recall that partisan control of the cabinet meant partisan control of the provinces and counties, with consequent defense and extension of partisan interest there at the clear expense of the contrary party. When the saquaremas came to power in 1848 and the emperor agreed to the chamber’s dissolution, the stage was set, so the saquaremas’ provincial allies thought, for a dramatic purge of Liberals and reprisals against their local protégés. However, the emperor’s oversight and non-partisan policy, combined with the cabinet’s vision of the state as a civilizing, ordering institution, above petty provincial partisanship, led them to a more judicious policy. We have seen some of this in the correspondence of provincial presidents back to Eusébio. As even Eusébio put it on one occasion, “One opinion is that a President ought not to accept the position of a [provincial] party Chief, enslaved by his passions.”106 And Paulino noted, in recommending a Liberal for a provincial bureaucratic position with the paulista census: “Machado de Oliva. is Luzia, but he has talent. It was for this that I dispatched him to Bolivia as chargé d’affaires in 1843. The census work has nothing to do with the political ideas of the individual.”107 All politically sensitive positions went to saquaremas, who were to limit partisanship to the extent possible; with regard to non-political appointments, merit was often taken into consideration.108 For many saquarema allies in the provinces, however, this limited policy of purge and spoils created enormous frustration and resentment. They had sharpened their knives over five years of Liberal persecution, and they expected to cut a bloody swath back into local power. As Monte Alegre had explained to the emperor: When Your Imperial Majesty decided it was good to call to his Councils the present Ministers, it had been five years that the party called Santa Luzia occupied all the official positions from which it had expelled its adversaries. Those called Saquaremas, [who] were those upon whom alone the cabinet could support itself, saluted the day 29 September 1848 [i.e., the date of the cabinet’s ascent] with great hope, some for the natural desire for revenge, others for that of seeing the rule of their ideas consolidated, others for

Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage / 163 wanting to recover the positions that they had occupied. There was no lack of those who expected and demanded a reversal of official appointments equal to that which had been done by the Ministry of 2 February [1844].109

This desire for political spoils was particularly significant in the Northeast, as was noted earlier. There, the number of well-born, well educated scions of planting and merchant families in decline was increasing; the number of bachareis increased while sugar mills began to stop grinding and their fires went dead, offering fewer and fewer opportunities. New skills and fewer options combined, and the status of such men and their ambitions required new titles and scope. For the saquaremas among them in 1848, then, the saquarema cabinet’s ascent promised not simply the protection of their established interests in the provinces, but the timely opportunity of prestigious Crown service for themselves and their own protégés among their electoral clienteles.110 Thus, when the new deputies (and senators, to a lesser extent) came to Rio in December 1849, the first Party of Order majority since 1844, they were less automatically supportive of the cabinet than the saquarema chiefs doubtless expected. The party had always been proud of its disciplined ranks. This traditional solidarity may well have been owing to the passionate struggles of the Regency and the very early 1840s, when the nature and survival of the state and the nation were in dispute. Then, too, the period before 1843 had less clearly fraudulent elections and, thus, smaller majorities, so that a substantial opposition to the reactionaries was always present in the Chamber. This more significant opposition had doubtless forced the party to define itself and underscored the need for parliamentary discipline. Finally, the generation which was now taking its place on the Chamber benches had not experienced that partisan struggle for the state and nation, and was correspondingly less moved by past ideological battle cries. To organize, discipline, and negotiate with them became an increasingly difficult task for a cabinet whose views were derived from the past struggles. And they had less and less help in these tasks in the Chamber, for they and the other great leaders of the party were more often seated in the Senate. It was Eusébio who had had to try to manage the party cohorts in the Chamber, and, too often, he had done so alone.111 All of these factors, the need for patronage, the fading away of ideological fervor and the lack of a significant Chamber opposition, and the shift in generations meant that the saquarema ministers found themselves in the unexpected position of having to cull support in the Chamber, although it was almost wholly made up of members of the party which they had helped found and consolidate. Indeed, they were faced by opposition there. No where was this clearer than in the delegation from Pernambuco. Frustrated by the policies of limited reprisals and patronage instituted after the Praieira Revolt, they now

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formed the hard edge of the Conservative opposition to the cabinet. [José Tomás] Nabuco de Araújo (1813–1878), until then a protégé of Eusébio and a saquarema stalwart, now made his reputation as the great orator of this faction. Their constant criticism of cabinet policies must have increased the cabinet’s dependence upon other provincial delegations or influential deputies; these could then negotiate their support in exchange for cabinet patronage.112 It was an increasing pressure the ministers found both opportunistic and terribly frustrating, and it was central to their desire to resign. Paulino, the day after the 1852 resignation of Eusébio and the others and the reshuffle of the cabinet under Rodrigues Torres, explained matters to Paranhos: . . . the cabinet reorganized itself in the way that Your Lordship saw in the Jornal do Commercio. I ought to say that there was not the least dissension among us, that we parted very much friends, and with much esteem among us. The exhaustion, the tedium, the disgust, the decision taken by Mr. Eusébio to leave no matter what, the difficulty of his carrying alone the burden of debate in the Chamber and of accommodating the passions, the discontent that were there, all this brought the cabinet’s withdrawal.113

They had essentially helped to create a political world which they could not dominate and whose ambitions they found despicable. They had urged the emperor to dismiss them in 1851 because a new cabinet always could use the expectations for a new dispensation to negotiate with members of Parliament from a position of relative strength (as Eusébio and Paulino may have been able to do in the African-trade crisis of 1850).114 The emperor, however, apparently in view of the Platine crisis, had been unwilling to allow any change in the administration and compelled the ministers to wait. Paulino, for one, had been miserable at having to stay on. He and the others had soldiered forward until May 1852, when, as noted above, several ministers were allowed to step down. The reshuffled cabinet under Rodrigues Torres, ascending 11 May 1852, found it just as hard to fly as the Cabinet of Eagles, its first incarnation. Paulino’s correspondence indicated his desperation and his anger with the milieu from as early as 1851. Then, in December, a month after the cabinet’s first attempt at resigning, he had vented his feelings to his old protector, Honório. He had written in anger, surprised at Honório’s criticism of his patronage appointments and cynical about a party majority which wanted the saquaremas to remain in power so that they could blackmail them for patronage: Yes, sir, I did make . . . some [patronage] appointments in organizing the Diplomatic Corps. I shall have to take responsibility for them in public, and defend them as best I can, but I never thought I would have to defend myself to Your Lordship, who is not one of those who licks the shop windows from outside, who knows how affairs are, who was a Minister and will be one again—Your Lordship tells me that I shall regret this all of my life. . . . If I had not made certain appointments I would have afflictions still greater. I

Provincial Politics, Foreign Affairs, and Patronage / 165 guarantee Your Lordship that if you had been in my place you would have done the same. One could avoid making them, but in that case, one would have to leave the cabinet, and I do not want to leave because of such personal issues. Finally, there are affairs that I will only be able to explain to you here, remaining silent with all the blame. It is this which aggravates me. And when Your Lordship, who knows how things are, says what one reads in your letter . . . what can I expect of others? Is there anyone who can bear this with resignation? It is for these and other reasons that I want to leave this hell. We have certain allies who do what children are accustomed to do when they own some little bird. They torment it, torture it, but they do not want it to die. . . .115

Clearly, Paulino’s torment and his mood did not ease during the discomforts of the season of waters, when his duties apparently demanded his presence in the humid, hot port city, despite health ruined by his previous bout with yellow fever. In the worst part of the season, in January 1852, he wrote again. In agreeing with Honório on the necessity to exert influence on the pending Uruguayan election, Paulino, exhausted, frustrated, and doubtless dripping sweat as he scribbled on, simply exploded, and seems to have conflated domestic and foreign enemies: Oh! If we might do to these ideologues, clowns, and recalcitrants against their own good the same that Louis Bonaparte just did with the clowns of France! Everything would be simplified and would be arranged admirably for the good of those countries. My dear Mr. Honório, I believe increasingly less in elections, Parliaments, majorities, minorities, parliamentary systems, and all that baggage, that only serve to obstruct there the most simple and most just affairs, and to make up a game, all favoring those who shout most, confuse most, and disrupt most, and to encircle with obstacles those who wish to put matters on the true path.116

Paulino’s disgust with parliamentary politics did not improve over the legislative session of 1852. Even months afterward, on 27 December, confronting again the heat and rain of the season of waters, the exhausted minister confided his growing disgust with Brazil’s parliamentary government to another party veteran. Writing to Firmino Rodrigues da Silva (Rocha’s close friend and collaborator), he discussed the election of 1852: The opposition disputed the election here with great fury and with great resources. We beat it completely because we are in power. If the opposition had been in power it would have conquered completely. Thus is the country, and thus is the system. I am nauseated by such a system nowadays, in view of what happens among us, and of what has happened and happens in Europe. Do not conclude from that that I am an absolutist, no Sir, what frustrates me is a sewer I shall call parliamentarism, excellent thing for the ambitious, the turbulent, the talkers, the bold, the shameless, the clowns, etc., etc. I hope to God that what has happened in the world is to put an end to such a system [putting it] in its true channel, from which it has overflowed so much.117

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Worse was to come after those elections, when the deputies took their seats in the new Legislature of 1853–1856. The Pernambuco delegation became the basis for a “parliamentary opposition” which went on the attack against the cabinet, and the Senate opposition increased as well. In May 1853, in the debates over the response to the emperor’s speech from the throne, the Chamber opposition and its allies in the Senate used the occasion, traditionally perceived as a measure of confidence in the cabinet, to attack Paulino. Worn out by work and with his health still impaired, now exasperated by yet another transparent attempt at extortion, Paulino found himself forced to respond on 20 June and 1 July in the Senate and 18 July in the Chamber. By the beginning of September 1853, with the Chamber still in session, Paulino refused to go on. His brotherin-law, Rodrigues Torres, would not continue without his trusted partner and, thus, the saquarema chieftains sought, once again, to resign. The critical stage of the ministers’ exhaustion and of parliamentary opposition were clearly evident; the emperor accepted the need for change. The saquaremas were finally allowed to resign. An era had ended.118 The ambiguities of the relationship between the society over which the saquaremas had presided and the state that they had reconstructed had proved too much for them. They had ended the African trade, they had maintained and strengthened the monarchy, they had defended the nation against foreign threats, but the odor of defeat and frustration rises from their correspondence. They had been unable to resolve the conflicts between the orderly and ordering state they envisioned, the intervention of the emperor, and the state’s abuse in the hands of violent, competitive provincial oligarchies, their representatives, and an associated system of patronage and spoils. They were baffled in their desire to use the state to change the society; instead, a process had begun in which their monarch and their society would change the state. And the impact of that had only begun to run its course.

chapter five

The Transformation of Politics and the State: 1853-1867 Gentlemen, despotism never introduces itself without promising great benefits: if it introduced a whip immediately, it would not achieve its ends . . . —J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 19 May, 46.

No one believes, no one is committed, and each does what the moment inspires. . . . In the critical hour the bulwarks will tremble and the new society will arise over the ruins of the old. The epochs of political enthusiasm will pass; egoism will pitch its tents in the places in which the old phalanxes camped. Everywhere the same lack of beliefs, the same indifference, which only awakes with some marvelous elixir, that bears the label of an effective remedy for curing or activating banking fever. . . . —João de Almeida Pereira Filho to Illmo. Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro Euzebio, in the imperial entourage at Salvador, 27 October 1859, AN,AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1682.

I would like to be able to ask those who have served as ministers, from both parties, if I seek to impose my opinion or only [have] expressed it with the conviction of a conscientious man. I see that many have yielded [to me] out of weakness; but what blame do I have in this; indeed, to avoid this, don’t I force myself increasingly to leave them at complete liberty (albeit without abandoning my supreme oversight as chief of the executive power, and subjecting myself to the role of a mere placeholder, as a constitutional monarch cannot be, as Guizot said well in his memoirs)? Perhaps I mislead myself; but I am constitutional in head and heart; I am not proud, and I intend to improve myself. The injustice of which I judge myself the victim pains me, and I hope that time will make the truth appear. —Dom Pedro II, diary entry for 11 Feb. 1862 [Pedro II, “Diário do Imperador Pedro II,” vol.9, 1862, AHI typescript.]

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By September 1853, the political atmosphere at the Court was charged with the anxiety associated with the change in cabinets. A change in leaders was expected, but not a change in the established order. After the failure and demoralization of Liberal radicalism, direct challenges to the state reconstructed by the saquaremas were over. The regime’s consolidation coincided with the natural maturity and evident hegemony of Dom Pedro himself, now nearly twenty-eight, married, and a father. The success of the saquaremas’ long administration in foreign affairs matched the domestic victories of the state and the full flowering of coffee-plantation production, now dominant in world production and seeking new frontiers. With the luzias’ retreat, the success and then the resignation of the saquarema political chieftains, and the emperor’s well known discomfort with partisanship, the end of ideological struggle and partisan exclusion seemed at hand. Indeed, an emphasis on non-ideological patronage and on moderate reformism seemed to seep into political speeches. A word that had arisen among the last Liberal cabinets of the 1840s, as they struggled to assemble a Chamber majority among Liberal moderates and the saquarema minority, began to reverberate. The word was conciliação (conciliation), and was understood to mean moving beyond the violent partisan purging and reprisal of bygone years. The most notable saquarema publicist, Justiniano José da Rocha, proclaimed that the need for partisan conflict was over and a time for peace and progress was at hand.1 Eusébio was more cautious, at least privately. To a friend abroad, he noted “The railroad, and the foundation of the Bank, behold the current objectives in the Order of the Day. Politics are dead, or asleep; I fear their awakening.”2 The new emphasis on melhoramentos (here, material development) was clear, as Eusébio wrote. It had specific bases. The end of the contraband slave trade had released a great deal of merchant capital for investment in banking, in infrastructure, in urban real estate, and in urban services and manufacturing. The growth of the Court as a port capital with an increasingly large wageand salary-earning population created new opportunities, as did the continued rise of coffee and cane-sugar exports and imported manufactured goods. In time, the obvious dwindling of cheap slave labor would mean a greater emphasis on wage labor to take the captives’ place in cities ( as they were shifted to the agricultural frontier or to the older rural areas to take the place of the dead). More immediately, however, the threat to plantation labor compelled planters, urban entrepreneurs, and statesmen to think of ways to strengthen other productive factors in compensation. Hence, the new emphasis on railways, to lessen freight costs and time and allow for bringing new lands further away from the coast into production, to take advantage of their fertile, productive

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soil. Hence, the new emphases on financial institutions to support not only the urban improvements and railroading but planters’ continued production and debt.3 As we shall see, very significant divisions would shortly open up in Rio’s merchant-finance sector over the direction and the nature of credit. Economic policy, however, was but part of the milieu in 1853; it was not yet the foreground. In September that year, the news that gripped the imagination of men of affairs as they pored over the four or five pages of the Jornal do Commercio had to do with politics.

I. Statesmen, Non-Partisanship, and the Cabinet of Conciliation Departing Montevideo in July 1852, Honório had returned to the Court from the temperate south after the victory in Argentina in time for the end of the cooler season. He doubtless enjoyed the prospect before him. After the arduous, frustrating months in Pernambuco and then the Rio de la Plata, he returned to his wife, cousin Maria Henriqueta, the honor of a noble title, and the pleasures of the new palatial home he could now afford as a successful serra planter. The palacete was on the road between the beaches of Flamengo and Botafogo, and was erected in a lot big enough to be cultivated like a small park.4 There, the new visconde de Paraná could contemplate his central role in the Senate and the Council of State and the fruition of his private affairs, as he and the viscondessa arranged the matrimonial alliances of their family. The eldest daughter, Maria Emilia, had already married (1845) Constantino Pereira de Barros, presumably a man of wealth and standing, but someone of no political significance. Only two of their four other children survived. Honório (filho), would marry Maria Cândida Rodrigues Torres, daughter of Cândido José Rodrigues Torres, a noted Rio merchant, factor of the Araruama clan of the baixada, and brother of Honório’s old saquarema ally, Rodrigues Torres. Maria Henriqueta (filha), was soon (December 1853) to marry her mother’s nephew (and, thus, her father’s second cousin), Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior (1830–1892), the promising son of a Rio merchant, and a graduate of both the Colégio Dom Pedro II and the law academy at São Paulo (1853).5 Then, in September, the Empire was surprised by the decision of Paulino and Rodrigues Torres to step down. Paraná was probably not caught off guard; he knew Paulino well and Rodrigues Torres better. Nor could he have been surprised by the summons to the São Cristóvão villa. He had been in good odor with Dom Pedro since his Pernambuco pacification and any doubts about his standing had doubtless been swept away by his ennoblement after the Argentine victory.6

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The difficulty, then, was the mission. As he wrote to his protégé, Paranhos, it would be very difficult to assemble a ministry after the triumph and retreat of the cabinets of Monte Alegre and Rodrigues Torres. Indeed, Honório was writing Paranhos about this in order to offer him the navy portfolio and ask him to wind up his diplomatic mission in time to stand for a Conservative deputyship representing Rio de Janeiro. He was thinking ahead; he wanted Paranhos in the Chamber and the cabinet to support him. He had already offered a portfolio to Eusébio and been refused.7 Eusébio would never serve under Dom Pedro’s scrutiny again. He had repaired to his residence on the Rua do Sacramento, near the Praça da Constituição, midway between the two chambers of Parliament. It would be in them that he would defend his ideas and the party with which he identified them. He would thenceforth decline cabinet service, noting his exhaustion and, then, his growing blindness. He also had complicated domestic affairs to contemplate. His father-in-law, José Clemente Pereira, a senator, councillor of state, and established planter, the venerated benefactor and procurador (here, steward) of the Santa Casa, would shortly die, in 1854. Eusébio’s wife, Maria Custodia, already ailing, would leave him, too, in 1856. In this same era, however, Eusébio would preside over marital alliances between his family and those of the visconde de Araruama, the barão de Tieté, the barão de Santa Rita, and the visconde de Souto. These marriages tied him to the established cane planters and merchants of the baixada fluminense and eastern São Paulo, just as his birth linked him to Rio’s upper magistracy and the planters of the serra acima. His private correspondence with Inácio Francisco Silveira da Mota, (the saquarema he had twice appointed a provincial president), a son-in-law of the visconde de Araruama, makes clear Eusébio’s position in the Province of Rio de Janeiro. A family visit to the great houses in the old sugar lands of the Campos region in 1857 reads a bit like a royal progress. They made their way by sea and by land out of the humid port in December to the cooler rural baixada plantations, to be fêted for weeks. No, Eusébio had had enough of being minister to Dom Pedro. Now, from the Chamber and then, 1854, from the Senate, he would lead the forces of reaction, coordinating the efforts of his widespread network. Finally appointed councillor of state in 1855, his was hardly a position of listless retreat, surely; it was more a well-armed entrenchment.8 Paraná made no mention of Paulino as he wrote about cabinet nominations. The explanation was clear to everyone who knew Paulino; he had been miserable in his position and was uninterested in a return. For nearly four years, Paulino had run the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a period of two overlapping crises. He had had to do this work alone, for the most part, because of the private negotiations with English diplomats in 1850, and the necessary secrecy of

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his Platine diplomacy, for which he had written and copied all of the voluminous correspondence himself for more than three years, forced to meet deadlines imposed by the packet-boat schedule between Rio and the south. In 1850, the yellow fever epidemic which had taken his mestre, Vasconcelos, had nearly killed him. Thereafter, his health had been uncertain, and he had sought to escape the terrible heat and humidity of the season of waters as other wealthy Rio residents often began to do then, leaving the Court for the provincial seat of his wife’s family on the Macacu River or for the new serra resort of Petrópolis. There, the emperor had had a neo-classical palace and park laid out; others followed suit, to the extent that their purses allowed.9 Although Paulino assured Paranhos of his continued interest in the Rio de la Plata and Paranhos’s future, he clearly had no interest in a return to portfolios or partisanship. He had begun a retreat into the role of a political observer. Although a senator since 1849, and a councillor of state in 1853, he only wanted a life of political reflection and juridical counsel. Shortly (1854), he would accept a noble title, visconde do Uruguai, and a mission to France (1855–1856), but both suggested the non-partisan diplomacy he valued most. His views on parliamentary politics would never recover from his last experience as minister. He focused, instead, on state policy and theory and the quiet settlement of his children, whose marriages and careers lay at a remove from politics or great wealth. There was, however, one exception. His eldest son and namesake, Paulino (1834–1901), had left the Colégio Dom Pedro II and was completing a São Paulo degree in 1853. Paulino’s correspondence with this son is strained by intense paternal concern and scrutiny. It would take on the tone of manly advice and confidence, though, soon enough. This son had been the first fruit of his father’s passion for his child bride. Thirteen when she married, Ana de Macedo Álvares bore the younger Paulino at fourteen. He first saw light at the ancestral cane plantation of her family, Tapacorá, near Itaboraí. He grew to be the ailing visconde’s hope, and pride, and joy.10 One can tell little of Rodrigues Torres, for his correspondence is not archived. However, like Paulino, he also withdrew, at least to some extent. Nor was this the first time. In the Liberal Quinquennium (1844–1848), Honório had had to prod him to come to the Court. A planter and the son and brother of important merchants, with seven children to settle and a widespread network of kith and kin in the province, Rodrigues Torres was torn between the political affairs of the Court and the need to look after his plantations, Monte Alegre and Palmital. The repeated calls to service interfered with planting, harvesting, and commerce. Between the late 1820s and 1853, he had been a professor, a journalist, seven times a minister, once a prime minister, and a provincial president. He had been a deputy ten years and a senator nine. Although he accepted ap-

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pointment to the Council of State in 1853 and ennoblement as the visconde de Itaboraí in 1854, his days as a minister seemed over. He turned to his private affairs, learned to negotiate with fluminense Liberals, spoke mostly about financial policy (his forte), and merely provided Eusébio stalwart support in the Senate alongside Uruguai and others. It was enough. In these years, the 1850s and ’60s, the Senate was the party’s redoubt and the Liberals attacked the aging Conservative leaders, the saquarema pope and his cardinals, as the “Oligarchy.” Only in 1864, with Eusébio’s increased illness, and general party malaise, did being a cardinal no longer suffice; only then did Rodrigues Torres take command again.11 One senses ambivalence in that decision. His earlier return to family affairs in the 1850s suggests something of a preference for provincial life. Three of his daughters married fluminense merchants or planters’ sons. Only one son, born late, followed his father’s career, taking degrees and marrying into a serra planter family, but he only became a fluminense provincial deputy. Another son may well have been a scandalous disappointment to the old visconde. All the record shows is that he married his mother’s French maid, Babette. The most prominent alliance was that of the visconde’s last child, a daughter who wed the son of Joaquim Francisco Viana, a senator and finance minister of 1843. Thus, the political legacy of a man who had been the most prominent fluminense reactionary of the Regency and a leading saquarema of the following decade apparently dribbled away into the rich obscurity of the fluminense lowlands from which it had first sprung. Still, as we shall see, in the darkening twilight of his many years, Itaboraí himself lived to step upon the stage and off of it one more time in the service of the monarchy he had helped to save and redefine.12 Yet that was far in the future in September 1853. Then, Paraná noted to Paranhos the difficulty of putting together a cabinet that would inspire confidence in Parliament. The new prime minister, however, was silent about a still greater difficulty—the nature of the cabinet’s mission. For Paraná, having held the traditional interviews with the emperor and being the political animal that he was, doubtless already knew what Paranhos and the other new ministers would soon find out. For the first time, the emperor was explicitly imposing a program, an agenda of political non-partisanship, non-partisan reform, and continued promotion of material progress. The emperor did not want a Conservative administration. He wanted to use a pre-eminent Conservative to lead a non-partisan reform administration to realize material improvements. Later, it was called the Cabinet of the Conciliation. At the time, however, prime minister and prince both avoided a declaration of its political complexion, probably to cultivate the broadest support possible.13 Paraná finally assembled a cabinet which did not have the traditional

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saquarema credentials the Chamber and the party might have expected; rather, it had the obvious virtue of capacity and of relatively non-partisan independence. Indeed, given the recent past, the emperor’s agenda, and Honório’s personality, the cabinet makes eminent good sense. One wonders, in fact, if the initial overture to Eusébio had been a ploy to suggest respect and to test personal support. The reader should remember here that Paraná’s relations with the saquaremas in 1850 had been, at best, ambiguous and that a potential basis for resentment on Paraná’s part was clear. Even his partnership with Paulino in the Platine diplomacy had not been without personalized differences. The reader may also recall the message implicit in Paraná’s appointment of Paranhos—a choice demonstrating personal independence, a willingness to reach beyond the party (even to its former enemies), a desire to cultivate the emperor’s personal approval of non-partisanship for his own benefit, and the marked capacity to create new and capable dependents in defiance of past loyalties.14 The new cabinet demonstrates a rather similar pattern. The minister of empire was the non-partisan, personal friend of Dom Pedro, [Luís] Pedreira [do Couto Ferrez] (1818–1886); he reinforced the cabinet’s appearance of Crown support. Justice was [José Tomás] Nabuco de Araújo (1813–1878), now a spokesman for the saquaremas’ opposition within the Conservative party and for conciliation between parties. His role as a northern critic of the saquaremas likely made him specially attractive to Paraná. He effectively allied the cabinet to the northern Conservative opposition. Limpo de Abreu, shortly to be ennobled as the visconde de Abaeté (1854), took foreign affairs. He had once been Feijó’s perennial minister and most feared defender in the Chamber. However, he had abandoned the Liberal reformism of that era and 1842 to become first, a moderate Liberal, and, then, increasingly, non-partisan from within the Senate (1847) and the Council of State (1848). Most recently, he had served Paulino in Platine diplomacy as Paraná’s partner in a phase of negotiations in 1852. Such a choice suggested Paraná’s willingness to embrace the more pragmatic Liberals, who had abandoned the historical reformism and rebellion of the 1830s and 1840s. Finance would be passed from Paraná to Abaeté in 1855 and, then, to Wanderley, in late 1856. Before that, Wanderley had been minister of the navy. Wanderley, the bahiano deputy and Conservative recruit from only the late 1840s, had already proven himself a formidable orator and provincial president for the saquaremas. He was the great rival of Gonçalves Martins for pre-eminence among Bahian Conservatives; this cabinet position helped strengthen his position after Gonçalves Martins’ recent presidency of Bahia, presence on the previous cabinet, and new ascent into the Senate (1851). Paraná may have been willing to cut Gonçalves Martins off—the latter had been a target of the Con-

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servative opposition and Paraná himself had a recent score to settle. In 1850, as president of Bahia, Gonçalves Martins had interfered in Paraná’s strategy in repressing the praieiros. Wanderley’s appointment, like Nabuco de Araújo’s, thus suggested the prime minister’s interest in maintaining links to the Northeast’s traditional Conservative elite, but not saquarema loyalists. [Pedro de Alcântara] Bellegarde, a career military man without partisan linkages, was a temporary minister of navy and minister of war until mid–1855. His appointments clearly emphasized loyalty to the monarch alone, as Bellegarde, the emperor’s namesake, was the son of a devoted courtier.15 Indeed, the mid–1855 shuffle, indicated several times above, involved a clear strategy for political survival emphasizing personal, rather than partisan, loyalty and virtues. As will be demonstrated, the moment was one in which the Paraná administration’s fate was obscured and its saquarema support almost entirely dissipated. It is understood that Paraná sought to shore up his administration that year by the adept appointment of a minister of war whose loyalty to himself and the emperor was impeccable—the marquês de Caxias, military hero of the saquaremas and the Empire time and time again, and most recently the blunt instrument used in the Platine region by Paraná and Paranhos.16 This service in a context of great risk and national importance had created a bond of deep personal feeling between all three men and would be of increasing significance between Paranhos and Caxias over the next two decades. Caxias’s relations with Paraná, of course, dated back far longer, to 1842, when they had fought against the luzias together. Caxias, like Bellegarde, was first and foremost a military man. Personal fealty to the Empire came before any other. As so many did, he identified this loyalty with fealty to the Crown in abstraction and to Dom Pedro personally. Serving together with Paraná against rebels in 1842 and with Paranhos and Paraná against Rosas in 1852, it is likely Caxias recognized and respected the capacity and service of both and doubtless identified them with his own. Although a saquarema through his family (his father, the regent, and his uncles and brothers were all soldiers loyal to the Regresso) as well as through family marriages (which made him kin to both the Carneiro Leão-Nogueira da Gama clans of the baixada and the serra, and the Araruama clan of the baixada), he was not so much a political man as a man profoundly loyal to the Monarchy with which he and his relations had come to identify the Conservative Party. Thus, Paraná may have appointed Caxias to reassure traditional Conservatives without endangering the more independent political position Paraná was taking.17 In these ways, the Conciliation Cabinet was more of a cabinet loyal to the monarch and to Paraná than a Conservative cabinet in either the ideological sense or personal sense. One can thus make a distinction now which would

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have been nonsensical earlier: it was a Conservative cabinet, but not a saquarema one. While it is true that most ministers were formally members of the Conservative Party, none save Paraná himself were identified with the saquarema kernel, the reactionary ideology and leaders with whom Paraná was shortly to break. Of the three ministers with historical linkages to the 1830s Regresso (Paraná, Nabuco de Araújo, and Caxias), two had recent or enduring reasons for stepping away from the saquaremas now. Ambition, disappointment, pique, new non-partisanship, ideological disillusion, all of these marked Paraná and Nabuco de Araújo. Caxias’s special position has already been indicated; he does not figure in such calculations, as he was not a political figure and served here out of loyalty to his monarch and to two friends to whom he was bound by shared imperial service and glory. Wanderley, Paranhos, and Abaeté had little (or no) historical commitment to the Party of Order at all; Paranhos and Abaeté were former Liberals who abandoned their party during the radicalization and demoralization of the late 1840s and sought to serve their nation and their monarch and advance their careers without much concern for ideology. Wanderley had only been recruited by the saquaremas in the late 1840s and must have seen an opportunity here in terms of his provincial rivalry with Gonçalves Martins (whose links to the saquaremas went back as far as anyone’s) and his ambitions in Rio. The willingness to serve the Crown and one’s own career, and a certain independence, would now prove crucial, as the cabinet’s agenda soon pitted it against the saquaremas in a struggle over the very role of the monarch, the parties, and cabinet government.

II. The Emperor and Parliamentary Government The agenda is important not only in terms of its substance, but in terms of its origin and partisan impact. For, though the cabinet’s measures were often stymied or distorted, their origin was clear and that and the measures’ impact comprised an unprecedented attack on the principles of parliamentary government. Here, some discussion of the monarch, the cabinet, and their role with respect to the parties and Parliament may be useful.18 As the Constitution had it, the emperor was to oversee the national interest in the political activities of the state. To that end, the monarch exercised discretionary support and intervention as the moderating power. As the chief of the executive power, as well, the monarch appointed a prime minister to organize a cabinet that could best initiate and effect policies in accord with national needs and the deliberation and consequent legislative support of the nation’s elected representatives in the Chamber and the Senate. By 1837, the parliamentary usages worked out by Vasconcelos and the other reactionaries, Honório among

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them, was that the cabinet could not fulfill its role unless it had the confidence not only of the Crown (which appointed it and could dismiss it), but the Chamber (whose majority must support it, in order to pass budgetary and enabling legislation). The principle was basic. The cabinet, although serving at the emperor’s pleasure, must enjoy the confidence of those elected by the nation, else it had no representative legitimacy.19 Under the Constitution of 1824, national elections were carried out in two steps. Voters (qualified by gender, age, and financial independence) chose the province’s electors, organized into parish assemblies, colégios. In a second election, the electors in these colégios voted for candidates disputing seats in the number allotted the province’s deputation to the Chamber. The same candidates were voted upon by all of the electors in a province in that second vote. The winners proceeded to the Chamber in Rio, where their credentials were reviewed for approval by the appropriate Chamber committee. By the 1833 election, it was already common for the contending parties to establish slates, chapas, of candidates. Party leaders in Rio would decide upon the most useful men to have in the Chamber and submit the chapa, through letters and the political press, to their loyalists in the provinces, and expect electors in their party to vote accordingly. A similar voting procedure was followed for elections to the Senate. Only here, the three candidates with the greatest number of electoral votes were put before the emperor, who, as the moderating power, chose the candidate he judged best (regardless of relative number of votes).20 The problem was that, early on, the cabinet could exercise great control over the elections through the abuse of the 3 December 1841 reform. The latter allowed them to appoint the county judges and police; they also exercised close control over such local coercion through the appointment of the provincial presidents whose main function had come to be the fixing of the elections. We have seen the results. If the emperor lost confidence in a cabinet, the ministers resigned. The new ministers, when chosen from the other party, would ask the emperor to dissolve the Chamber if its majority clearly favored the rival party. They could then use their appointments at the provincial and county level to fix the subsequent elections, thus returning a majority to the Chamber, a majority with which they could work.21 As we have seen, this fraud had become an acknowledged aspect of the Monarchy by 1850, and it thus undercut the basic notion that the Chamber was representative of the nation. The reader may recall Paulino’s private comment to another saquarema in 1852: “The opposition disputed the election here with great fury and with great resources. We beat it completely because we are in power. If the opposition had been in power, it would have conquered completely. Thus is the country, and thus is the system.”22 The same understanding

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is nearly explicit in the letter sent to the emperor by the Cabinet of the Eagles in 1851. Recounting the election of 1844, one of the great precedents for the electoral corruption subsequently common, the saquarema ministers noted, “The [Luzia] Cabinet of 2 February 1844 found the Provinces fortified with men of the saquarema party. Unable to gain that party’s support, and [thus] having to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, in which that party had a considerable majority, it was necessary to dismantle that party in the Provinces, and to prepare the latter for elections.”23 Given the fraudulent character of the elections, then, the emperor and the Monarchy’s statesmen tried to gauge public opinion, instead, through the national and political press and the reports that filtered up through Crown relatórios (provincial presidents’ reports), private correspondence, and conversation with trusted advisers.24 In constitutional terms, then, the effective erosion of representative legitimacy undercut the authority and independence of Parliament and the cabinet. Instead, over the course of the 1840s, as we have seen, the emperor’s support and direction had become increasingly central to political strength. Although the Party of Order could claim itself a legitimate expression of the dominant social and economic sectors of imperial society by the late Regency elections, the electoral practices become common by 1850 made such claims doubtful. Thus, since the Majority of 1840, because both parties had accepted the monarch’s legitimate constitutional roles, and because of their own increasing lack of legitimacy and independence, the parties and the cabinets could not effectively point to their representative character as a true counterweight to the monarch. Instead, as the denouement of the Majority movement had foreshadowed, both parties and cabinets had become increasingly dependent upon the emperor’s good will. They had power not because they represented public opinion, but because the emperor gave power to them.25 The reader will recall, for example, the fall of Honório’s first cabinet, in February 1844. Despite an elected reactionary majority supporting him in the Chamber, despite the taint attached to the Liberals because of the 1842 revolt, despite the legitimacy of the question Honório posed to the emperor, the emperor could and did force Honório’s and his cabinet’s resignation, summon a non-reactionary cabinet, and accept that cabinet’s inevitable request for the consequent dissolution of the reactionary Chamber. Effectively, the emperor had reversed the previous electoral result by fiat; he then fitted out the first of several dependent cabinets with a Chamber elected under their auspices. Moreover, the emperor’s ministerial appointments from 1844 through 1848 consistently brought the moderate pragmatists he favored into the cabinet, without regard for the radical Liberals elected to the Chamber who expected the cabinet to reflect their perspective.26 Anyone doubting the emperor’s increasing control

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had only to review the saquarema administration of 1848–1853. First, the origins of the administration lay entirely in the emperor’s hand. He had withdrawn support from the Liberal cabinet of 1848, compelling its resignation, and then adjourned and later dismissed the Liberal Chamber, allowing for saquaremacontrolled elections. Then, even with political chieftains of great personal prestige and capacity and the clear (if increasingly disputed) confidence of the new Chamber, the emperor’s interference was seen in his oversight of the ministries of empire and justice. Moreover, if it could be claimed that he did not interfere with either finance nor foreign affairs, it could also be pointed out that both ministers there, Rodrigues Torres and Paulino, followed policies of which the emperor had already approved and which were not closely involved with domestic partisan appointments or policies (in sharp contrast to the concerns of empire and justice).27 From the point of view of the emperor, these developments made perfect sense and served the national interest. His own boyhood and adolescent experience had made him distrustful of the motivations and impact of partisan control of the state. To call together a cabinet without regard to their willingness to serve national (rather than partisan) interests, knowing that their manufactured Chamber majority would provide support if suitably patronized, would have been an abandonment of his constitutional obligations. The emperor, instead, attempted to work within the constitutional proprieties to promote the national interests, as he understood them, using the ambitions and loyalties and weaknesses of the Monarchy’s statesmen to do so.28 The emperor was superb at this. After the traumatization and dependency of his early years, he was a sharp observer of those around him. Since, constitutionally, he was forced to act through and with others, as well, he had learned to take their measure, cultivate them, and use them. He regularly reviewed the lessons and examinations of the elite schools in the Court, in order to gain an early first-hand knowledge of the instructors and boys who might emerge as Crown servants. That was where he first met Paranhos, and where he must have first seen both Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior or Paulino’s first-born son. Numerous careers also testified to his ability to transcend a first, negative impression if a man later made clear his mettle and his loyalty. Men who had proved themselves found their nominations approved as they moved up the ranks of a public career. Men who were too independent, or too radical, or whose lives were stained by some indiscretion unworthy of the Crown found their paths discreetly blocked by the emperor. Although his private affairs were not without blemish, he kept them discreet, and expected the same of others. Hard, capable work and a public reputation for probity and respectability were expected of those desirous of his favor.29

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Nor did appointment to high office mean a free hand and full confidence. Far from it. The emperor consumed his very full days with the careful review of provincial papers and public reports and private communications, hawk-eyed for the tiniest tidbit of complaint about a man serving in his name. Then he acted to see that the case was explored, by moving through the appropriate minister for clarification and justice.30 The close control of every aspect of the state was brought into excruciating focus with the cabinet. Its formal name was the Council of Ministers; the prime minister’s actual title was president of that council. Although they conferred twice weekly, they took action only in the despacho (the formal meeting for deliberation and decision) with the monarch. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, in the evening, the ministers, dressed in the court uniform of dark green and goldfrogged jackets, white britches and stockings, black court shoes and dress swords, made their way to the São Cristóvão palace. For ministers dwelling in the old city or in the new city area between the old city and the villa, that is, men with old money or modest means, the trip was relatively short. For men with newer or greater fortunes, the trip was delayed and inconvenient. They left from the beaches to the south of the old city and took the roads on the west of town, to avoid traffic and skirt the mangrove swamp. The meeting endured four hours or so. The emperor, dressed in his ordinary frockcoat, allowed each of them to present the affairs of his secretariat in turn. He questioned them, asked for details and an accounting, and then went on. No decisions were made, no decree issued, without his active review and his approval. In times of crisis and complexity, the emperor might ask for the written opinion or the presence and deliberation of the Council of State or one of its sections (there was one for each portfolio), with the Council of Ministers in attendance. Although many statesmen, particularly Conservatives, served as ministers often, and often with the same portfolio, none had greater continuity in office than the emperor and few could match his knowledge of the particular affairs of their ministries or the multitude of men in state service. This intimidating reality must have given added strength to the powers that were the emperor’s by law and, as we have seen, by the increased taint and consequent weakness associated with Parliament because of electoral fraud. Nor did it matter that, in 1853, the emperor was only twenty-eight, or that his voice was high-pitched and feminine. He was not a man like other men. He was the charismatic, constitutional, and political center of the state, the legitimate scion of ancient, European dynasties; he could make or break the career of the most talented of men, damn or promote a policy, and allow the purge and appointment of Crown servants across the face of half a continent, and he did all of these things without any hindrance save his own understanding of the Constitution. A report to him by

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a minister addressed him as Sire, and took up a whole, covering page to state that simple word. Every verb expressing the monarch’s actions was capitalized. No person of political standing or ambition, no Crown servant, no one who yearned for a position or place came to or went from Rio without seeking the presence and kissing the hand of Dom Pedro II.

III. The Conciliation and the saquaremas Yet, with all of this established preponderance, the Cabinet of Conciliation added immeasurably to the Crown’s power and did so by the nature of its very origin. Although the emperor had indirectly shaped cabinet policies by appointments and despachos in the past, this time he actually wrote out the cabinet’s agenda. The intervention was direct; he was not implying what he wanted through a cabinet appointment or a despacho deliberation; this time, he provided Paraná and the others their mission and rules for their relationship with him. Moreover, it was an agenda that called for non-partisan appointments and substantive judicial and electoral reforms undercutting the legislation of 1841–1842, fruit of the Regresso and triumph of the Party of Order. Such reforms, it was seen, would also dramatically affect the role of the party in elections and in Parliament, weakening its political linkages to the local and provincial strata of imperial politics. Yet, the emperor expected these reforms to be pursued by a nominally Conservative cabinet, and one which would have to pass the requisite legislation through a Chamber elected under saquarema auspices. While the emperor doubtless viewed these reforms as an attempt to correct the practices established during the partisan conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s, the saquaremas were bound to see matters differently.31 The cabinet had ascended at the end of the parliamentary session, in September 1853. After adjournment, during the season of waters of 1853–1854, Paraná began preparations for its first test of strength the following May, when the deputies returned to Rio. This first test was a dramatic one: a reform of the 3 December 1841 legislation, key to the Regresso and to the Party of Order’s project for a centralized state commanding pre-eminent authority. The justice minister, Nabuco de Araújo, was an unlikely reformer and advocate of non-partisan conciliation. The son of a First-Reign senator (his namesake), he had taken an Olinda degree in 1835, just three years after Eusébio had; indeed, he was an early protégé of Eusébio. He had taken an early interest in moderado liberalism, but shifted towards the Regresso after the Sabinada revolt (1837–1838) had threatened his native Salvador. A magistrate and political journalist in his first posting, Recife, he was quickly recruited by the adherents of the Regresso there and sent as their deputy to the 1843–1844 Chamber, and to the first reac-

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tionary Chamber after the Quinquennium, in 1850. He served as the prosecutor of the praieiros under Honório’s provincial presidency.32 By then, Nabuco de Araújo’s position in the province had been secured through a brilliant marriage. His wife, Ana Benigna de Sá Barreto, was the niece of the ninth and last morgado do Cabo, Francisco Paes Barreto, a stalwart monarchist who had led pernambucano reaction against the rebel Confederation of the Equator and who had marched in triumph through Recife at the side of the Confederation’s conqueror, Francisco de Lima e Silva (the later regent and father of Caxias). For his services, Paes Barreto had been made marquês do Recife.33 Nabuco de Araújo’s early success, his background, and his oratory had marked him as a saquarema of capacity and ambition. He had cultivated relations with the two most noted of the saquarema magistrates, Eusébio and Paulino, early on. Now, in 1853, he asked Paulino’s opinion of his proposed reform. One wonders if this was an error or a calculated sounding. Paulino, after all, had been, after Vasconcelos, the legislator most responsible for the 3 December legislation. Was the minister testing the passage ahead? If so, there was froth on the shoals. Paulino, the Party of Order’s greatest living jurist, responded as he might have done a decade ago, when he had been minister of justice himself. He presumed that the state had a civilizing mission, given the peculiar barbarity of the country. In effect, just as Vasconcelos had done in the 1830s, Paulino pointed to Brazilian exceptionalism. A reform that did not recognize the unique circumstances of Brazil, with its irregular qualities of civilization, violence, and backwardness, was inappropriate. Whatever its abuses, 3 December provided Brazil with the domestic order it still required. Nabuco de Araújo’s reform, in contrast, presumed a uniform level of social and political preparation that simply did not exist. Paulino concluded that “I do not judge the law of 3 December perfect, [for] it is not in perfect harmony with the abstract principles of science. It is, however, in more harmony with our peculiar circumstances. A building raised on uneven land . . . cannot present the regularity and symmetry and have the beauty of another raised on even, flat land.”34 These remarks exemplified the saquaremas’ response to this first major project of reform by the Conciliation Cabinet. They did not react to the details, nor oppose specific changes to the reactionary institutions they had built by 1841. They responded, rather, to the cabinet attempting a general reform of a keystone of the Regresso. They perceived an attack on the strengthened state triumphant in 1841, a state which they still thought necessary because of Brazil’s particular backwardness. That this was a principled (rather than entirely partisan) response, is suggested by earlier, private correspondence. In a letter from Vasconcelos to Eusébio, when Eusébio, as minister of justice himself, sought

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Vasconcelos’s advice about reforming the 3 December legislation. Vasconcelos pointed out then the political difficulties of trying to pass such a reform en bloc. He suggested, instead, that Eusébio attempt specific adaptations (which is what Eusébio had then done). Vasconcelos then, like Paulino later, had defended such piecemeal reform by making a particularist argument: “Unhappily, we have the need to attempt these and other measures, because constitutions copied from Europe will establish inflexible rules that may be applied there with useful results and that among us might compromise the very existence of society itself.”35 Fluminense reactionaries were also already apprehensive on more purely partisan grounds. In early 1854, before the cabinet’s first legislative session, trusted stalwarts were reporting to Eusébio their concern and distrust, irritated by cabinet intervention in provincial politics and the resulting disarray in the Conservative ranks, increasingly divided between cabinet pressure and loyalty to the party. Probably in an attempt to calm Conservative apprehension, when Nabuco de Araújo introduced the reform in the Chamber, on 20 May, early on in the session, it was much revised. Nonetheless, by this time, the cabinet’s association with non-partisan appointments and anti-Regresso reform had already excited significant opposition in the party. The Chamber witnessed a rapid frontal attack on the reform and, by extension, Paraná and his cabinet, by Sayão Lobato, a close ally of Eusébio. Yet, though Sayão’s thrust was the swordplay of a saquarema chieftain representing the wealthiest coffee planters of the serra acima, it was actually not the session’s most significant. What proved the more important attack came much later, and from one of the most respected younger saquaremas, [Ángelo Moniz da Silva] Ferraz (1812–1867).36 Like Eusébio and Nabuco de Araújo, Ferraz had an early Olinda degree (1834) and extensive judicial experience, particularly in his native Bahia, where he had quickly become the favorite protégé of Gonçalves Martins. A provincial deputy from 1842 to 1843, he was among the very few saquaremas to win election to the Chamber from 1842 to 1848, where he won fame as an orator of the saquarema minority of those lean years. Under the saquarema cabinet of 1848, Ferraz had been rewarded with the plum position of customs inspector in Rio. Now, in 1854, he was the procurador fiscal (fiscal supervisor) of the minister of finance—Paraná’s own portfolio. The commonalities between all of these men point to the emotional and political pain of the struggle Ferraz initiated. It was fratricidal.37 Indeed, it was clear to the political world that something awful and spectacular was at hand the day (27 June 1854) Ferraz stood up at his bench. His first words indicate the personal difficulty of his position. The reporter caught the unusual character of the moment:

The Transformation of Politics and the State / 183 Mr. Ferraz arose, nodded to milord the prime minister, who returned the compliment, and expressed himself in the following way, in the midst of profound silence: The Chamber must recognize how difficult and painful my present situation is. Difficult, because I see myself forced to enter into combat with a man . . . [sic] a man distinguished and strong, not only for his intellectual resources, but principally for the authority that he enjoys in my country; painful, because the tie which binds almost all of the Chamber to the Cabinet, affection, also binds me to some of the noble ministers. That affection, which has calmed the majority, has also dominated and bound me until now.38

Ferraz then quickly leapt over the foreground of the finance budget (the ostensible subject for the day’s debate) to grapple with the larger issues of the Conciliation and, more impressive still, the personal role of Paraná. He charged the visconde with establishing a kind of personal dictatorship within the executive power. He explicitly attacked Paraná for using the cabinet’s considerable patronage to seduce Liberals into cooperation, undermining the healthy and necessary ideological divisions between the parties which were central to representative parliamentary government.39 The attack was so devastating that it compelled both Paraná and Nabuco de Araújo to respond. Paraná rose the next day. As Nabuco de Araújo would, Paraná adroitly focused his comments not on the personal attack or the idea of executive aggrandizement or the subversion of parliamentary parties, but on the Conciliation. They wrapped the administration in the ideal of non-partisan collaboration in an era of domestic peace and progress.40 Nonetheless, the blow to the prestige and potential of the cabinet looked crippling to some. During the remaining session, attacks on the cabinet’s program continued and strengthened; the party stalwarts were mobilizing, particularly over the judicial reform. In the Chamber’s waning days, a weak vote on the reform proposal indicated the threat to the cabinet itself; it risked a clear political defeat. In the Court and its fluminense hinterland, the saquaremas’ anger was mixing with alarm because the cabinet, probably because it was so weakened, was apparently seeking Liberal support and lending luzias a hand in the provincial elections of 1854. The anxiety of the cabinet and its consequent threats and search for alternative allies were obvious. Clearly, the session of 1855 would be crucial—if the cabinet survived until then.41 Indeed, during the months of the season of waters, saquaremas anticipated the possible collapse of Paraná’s administration. The visconde do Uruguai wrote from Paris to Eusébio that “The news of a change of Cabinets is making the rounds here, which seemed probable to me. Who will be the unhappy successors? There is nothing enviable in their fortune—I see no one but Your Excellency and [Rodrigues] Torres who might organize a cabinet that has strength.”42 However, such a rapid reversal was not to be.

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By the beginning of the second session, in May 1855, Paraná decided to meet the saquarema challenge. He had been forced from power twice, 1833 and 1844; once under the pressure of the Chamber, once under the pressure of the Crown. Now he would seek to use Chamber and Crown to survive; he did not intend to fall again. Indeed, rather than compromise, he decided to bring the war to his opponents. No one knew them better than he. He knew that his old allies’ strength lay not in their oratory alone nor in the qualities of their minds nor simply in their personal prestige. Their greatest strength lay in their political credibility and their consequent influence in partisan elections and the Chamber. This was strength reflected in the electors’ acceptance of their provincial slates of capable men, quite often trained magistrates, whom the saquarema chiefs hand-picked for merit and loyalty.43 To launch his attack, Paraná decided to use an old project for electoral reforms. This project had first emerged in the 1840s as a direct response to the increasing illegitimacy of the elections. Vasconcelos, whose belief in the central role of representative government was basic to the ideology of the Party of Order, had been one of its champions. Paula Sousa, one of the Liberals’ great ideologues, had been another. Unsurprisingly, the project had been damned by such mixed parentage. While the principal leaders of both parties agreed on the need to restore legitimacy to the elections, the means became the battleground of debate. The arguments turned on the issues of political and minority representation and restrictions on magistrates’ office-holding. The bill which finally emerged, known as that of 19 August 1846, was deemed unsatisfactory to the Liberals, who refashioned a new project which was strenuously debated and finally buried in the collapse of Paula Sousa’s own cabinet (September 1848). Oddly enough, Honório, who had generally supported Vasconcelos’s points of view in the earlier debates on the bill, sided with the Liberals in 1848. Now, in 1855, he breathed new life into the project.44 Senate discussion of the bill began almost immediately, on 9 May. Thus, it was part of the context of the session from its beginning, and fired all the debates that followed. The project threatened the saquaremas in two ways. First (in its “incompatibilities” component), by denying local magistrates (appointed by the minister of justice) the right to stand as local candidates, it eliminated a great, established source for saquarema recruitment. Such men, by their training, provincial experience, and their relationship to the cabinet, had traditionally proved an elite source of party talent. Second (in its “electoral circles” component), by discarding the parish votes for party candidates to represent a whole province in the Chamber, the reform undercut party leaders’ influence, which had determined the presence of well known party statesmen or protégés on the province-wide slates. Instead, the project restricted the parish electors to

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a vote only on the candidates to represent the local “circle” of counties in the Chamber. In this way, the reform would compel parish elections to focus only upon local candidates (whom Vasconcelos had ridiculed as “village celebrities”). Such figures would often be a far cry from traditional provincial chapas. The candidates were more likely unknown men, local landholders’ representatives without independent wealth themselves and lacking the national-party relations typical in the old provincial-slate system. Such persons were, necessarily, more vulnerable to the pressures and patronage of the cabinet. To be elected and re-elected, they needed to focus on service to the local electors, to please them, rather than seeking to impress the party’s established, enduring elite leadership in Rio. Moreover, to serve local electors, the new deputies would need to acquire favors and disposable patronage from the cabinet. If they possessed a clear link to a minister or two, they would be attractive to electors; if they were popular with electors, they would be worth favoring by the cabinet. The need to impress the political elite heading either party (an elite traditionally emphasizing ideological purity and partisan loyalty) would weaken, through the same process. The reform thus strengthened dramatically the emphasis on patronage, increasingly evident over the 1840s and early 1850s, and undercut the national parties and their chieftains in favor of the prime ministers and their cabinets and local provincial factions as the foci for deputies’ loyalty.45 The blow to the ebbing independence of the Chamber was obvious, particularly for Northeastern deputies, whose need for patronage was increasing. Without favors from the cabinet, sinecures, access, and public careers for their electoral clientele would be impossible and election or re-election improbable. The implications for cabinet power were mixed—greater independence from party and Parliament and greater control over the Chamber, but greater dependence upon the Crown. Paraná’s own experience had already shown him that a cabinet no longer had to enjoy the confidence of the Chamber nor represent the majority party there. This representative quality had done nothing to prevent his being cast down in 1844, nor had it raised him up again in 1853. It was the monarch who had done both. If he or his successors had the monarch’s confidence, power was theirs. With this reform, that power was qualitatively amplified, too, for one could use patronage and its anticipation in a sitting Chamber more effectively to get things done, for the deputies would be more pliable, and dissolutions and new elections less necessary. The problem now was that the deputies seated in 1855 had been elected under the old rules and saquarema auspices. For Paraná, the challege was to pass such a reform through a Chamber in which loyalty to saquarema representative principles and political leaders, however weakened, was still obviously very strong.

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Indeed, while Paraná began this new campaign in the Senate, the saquaremas, already mobilized, prepared a devastating offensive. As noted, between early 1854 and May of 1855, the concern of saquarema stalwarts had been building. Ferraz had done the damage he did because many others, less daring, shared his fear of Paraná’s actions. Saquaremas, after all, had seen him, one of their own great chieftains, pick a cabinet of relatively weak men, men he could dominate. They saw an explicit attack on party government and party ideals, using patronage alone to secure support. They saw that the loyalty of the ministers was principally towards Paraná, the emperor, and a non-partisan approach to patronage (which, ipso facto, undercut their party and strengthened the cabinet). They had seen Paraná’s ministers, particularly Paranhos (only recently a Liberal, now elected as a Conservative through Paraná’s patronage), reaching out to include and appoint luzias and intervening in the provincial elections and general elections to come, discarding staunch saquaremas in favor of more amenable supporters.46 Accordingly, the party’s traditional elite now loosed a frontal and a flanking attack. The first was trumpeted in the Chamber’s most formal manner, and we shall turn to it shortly. However, it might be more useful to glance at the second, the one from the flank, before. It was the more innovative and dramatic saquarema attack, after all; it thundered down from the serra acima, an unexpected bolt. The Teixeira Leite brothers headed up a group of saquaremas from among the most powerful planters of the heartland of the serra acima. They took a public position against the cabinet. These planters, key supporters of the Party of Order in the days of the Liberal Quinquennium, were trusted electoral influences in Eusébio’s fluminense political organization. They had been disaffected by Paraná’s decision to shift the route of a railway which they had promoted (and which had been financed in London through the offices of Eusébio’s cousin, Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, Brazilian ambassador there). Though the debates in the Chamber made it clear that this frustrated expectation of theirs was very much in the air, it was not, of course, the ground on which these planters challenged Paraná. Instead, the Vassouras planters challenged the cabinet for its judicial reform. It undercut their local influence through its attacks on the established local jury system, which they dominated and which they saw as a bulwark of constitutional order. After coordinating their effort with Eusébio, the planters published an open letter in the Jornal do Commercio, attacking the judicial reform as a threat to the monarchy, part and parcel of an ongoing decline of constitutional rights, including respectable, representative elections, a threat which might inspire a republican movement among those prizing human dignity. Such a public denunciation of high political policy by

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provincial planters was unheard of. Usually, their interests were taken into account by Conservative ministers—undoubtedly their lack of leverage with this cabinet (and what they had apparently come to understand of the crisis afoot from political men they trusted), had led them to act.47 This unexpected public pressure was fatal to the judicial reform. As one of the planters, Joaquim José Teixeira Leite, noted to another, the barão de Capivari, after returning from Rio, Eusébio applauded and praised the letter written to Paraná very much; and the latter was seen to be so pressured that on the following day he went to the Senate and there demanded that the judiciary reform be submitted to the Committee for Legislation and Constitution, which means, in the thinking of those who know, either burial or profound modification.48

This visit to the Court took place at the same time that the frontal attack of the saquaremas occurred. One doubts that this was a coincidence. The attack, after all, was made by Sayão Lobato, himself elected by the influence of the Teixeira Leites, and it was made in the most traditional manner, in the Chamber’s response to the fala do trono, that is, in the majority’s formal review of the cabinet’s program for the session. The resposta was always a cabinet’s first test. Moreover, it would not have been lost on Paraná that the choice for Sayão Lobato in and of itself also constituted a statement of the traditional saquarema leadership’s hostility and strength in the Chamber. A law school bacharel (1834), Sayão Lobato was born in Rio, the son of a senator. He had been a magistrate in both the baixada (Campos) and the serra (Vassouras), a deputy in the provincial assembly, a deputy in the Chamber since 1849, and a close friend and compadre with Eusébio, whom he may have known since they were classmates at Olinda. His relations with the Vassouras planters dated from his days as a provincial magistrate, not least during the bitter struggles of the Liberal Quinquennium, when he had first entered politics in their struggle against the luzias. It was he, finally, who had first championed the Vassouras railway project in the Chamber, criticizing the Conciliation Cabinet for their decision to favor another route. Now, Sayão, spokesman for the majority, effectively gave the saquarema verdict on the cabinet.49 The orator, noted for his aggressive rectitude, began by a fairly dispassionate survey of the administration’s imprudent expenditures and railroad concessions. Moral condemnation, however, was suggested by edged comments charging that the cabinet was bribing the press to buy its support. The most significant phrases, however, marked his conclusion. There, Sayão Lobato argued that the cabinet, though it embodied the personal corruption, party betrayal, and government incompetence of an era of personal aggrandizement and political expedience, hypocritically demanded the party’s support. He made the point

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sharper calling upon the example of Vasconcelos, the party’s deceased ideologue: Mr. President, I increasingly deplore the absence . . . of a capable man who . . . would have put out his strong hand and perhaps delayed the movement that seems to rush forward: I speak of Senator and Councillor of State Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos. . . . whose authority I only invoke so as to reinforce my own weak voice. . . . Gentlemen, . . . individual interests . . . must not prevail over the public weal . . . the present cabinet surely cannot call upon . . . the members of a militant party and speak of the need to maintain party unity . . . ; nowadays political colors have disappeared, that fire in which burned the soul of many selfless and patriotic people of one or the other party has now been extinguished: it has left no ashes except disillusion, lack of enthusiasm, and disappointment; today in this country we no longer have political parties; the present cabinet is a living proof of this. . . . And, Mr. President, if the present cabinet . . . does not demonstrate itself an extreme champion of the most severe economy in material affairs; if in moral affairs the present cabinet has no other plans except the justice reform project . . . I . . . will say that the present cabinet does not meet public needs, [and] that, to secure the legacy of the glorious generation of 1820, [and] for the great Empire of America to prosper, other leadership is necessary (Ayes and nays).50

The unprecedented planters’ letter and the oratory of Eusébio’s friend, however, were put in the shade by something the saquaremas had not planned: the unexpected eloquence of Justiniano José da Rocha, who rose from his bench the next day, 19 May. Rocha had been approached by the Vassouras planters to run a political opposition paper to the cabinet earlier, but he had declined. He noted publicly that he had done so in order to leave Uruguai and Eusébio uncompromised, since it was well known how close they were to him. Now, he could no longer hold back, and needed to speak out for himself. The foremost political journalist of his day, Rocha, a mulatto, had been beautifully educated in a Parisian lycée before taking a law degree from São Paulo (1833) and returning to Rio, where he dedicated himself simultaneously to reactionary polemical journalism, literature, and elite education. No one knew the saquarema chieftains better than he. They had sustained one another politically from the very beginning. Rocha, however, was poor. He had eked out a living from the public-education positions Vasconcelos and others arranged. Mostly, he lived from and for the party and its causes, as its foremost ideologue. He had been rewarded, finally, by election to the Chamber in 1843, 1850, and 1853. Now, he had come upon difficult times. After all, he was an ideologue, and ideological struggle was now condemned by the emperor; Rocha’s métier had become inconvenient. He had tried to adapt. By 1852, Rocha had stopped publishing O Brasil; by 1853, he had accepted the basic idea of the political conciliation. However, as Paraná’s judicial reform and policy of coopting Liberals fell into place in 1854, Rocha, like other saquaremas, was alarmed. Unlike the

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saquarema chieftains, however, Rocha expressed this alarm publicly. He wrote against the cabinet with increased vigor, in ephemeral opposition periodicals he started up. His friends among the saquarema leaders urged discretion, caution; an old friend in the cabinet offered him money and other inducements. Poor, without private support from the saquarema opposition, and tempted by bribes for silence from the cabinet, Rocha succumbed. The Paraná cabinet effectively bought him off by the end of 1854, with a regular column in the prestigious Jornal do Commercio, support for a new school, and the possibility of a prestigious decoration. If the cabinet made a practice of corruption, however, they had not made it perfect. Rocha found the journalistic sinecure cramping, the support for his school grudging, and the decoration withheld. He slid back to honesty and opposition. Now, he stood up. 51 On that day, and on others that followed, Rocha took through to their logical conclusions the concerns Ferraz raised in the previous session. He began where the other had ended, striking at the heart of the danger in their midst: he accused Paraná of returning to absolutism. He did so in an historical analysis; after noting the necessity of the centralized authoritarianism and aggrandizement of cabinet power associated with the 3 December 1841 legislation, Rocha listed its costs to the liberal ideas and institutions of the 1820s and 1830s. On the one hand, the legislation had achieved the order and integrity of the Empire; on the other, by 1853 it had undercut the liberties and constitutional balance of powers. Then he recalled the aftermath of his decision to accept the Paraná cabinet’s initial program, to reform the authoritarian legislation of 3 December: we waited to see how the practice of the [Cabinet’s] program developed; we did so in vain; days passed, and nothing; Parliament met: what questions . . . were brought to us? What of the reforms that ought to have ended the reasons for the old partisan struggles, so that saquaremas and luzias become men of the past . . . ? One project of political legislation [the judicial reform] was presented. And that was nothing but a strengthened authoritarianism, an absolute concentration of judicial power in the hand of [Executive] authority. [An . . .] Mr. Ferraz:—Even worse. Mr. J. J.da Rocha—Exaggeration of reactionary principles and nothing more. . . . Where are we going, where have we arrived? Here we all are, yesterday’s allies, looking at one another, and we do not know with whom we are, and less against whom we are; we don’t like the present [cabinet], but unable to understand what lies ahead, nor what we ought to desire, we still adhere to it. Some give it support, however cold and without commitment; others deny it support . . . I myself . . . it hurts me to see that, faithful to the program [of the cabinet], I find myself in opposition to the man whose prestige forced me to see its political necessity. I find myself in opposition to men at whose side I was, although without other merit than that of having helped a little to clear the road by which passed the triumphal car in which they went scattering benefits to the country. We went forward, gentlemen, driven by the great necessity to save order, to save a so-

190 / The Transformation of Politics and the State ciety besieged by revolution, and we arrive near, close to absolutism. (Complaints, laughter) Yes, I have reflected a bit. Answer me, tell me, even those of you laughing, are we not near absolutism! . . . A Voice:—That only exists in your imagination. The Prime Minister—They are dreams! Since when . . . (We [the reporter] did not hear the rest of the question) Mr. J. J. da Rocha—Since Your Excellency spoke in the Senate. Does Your Excellency think that one who hears you does not think twice about your words? Then you’re illuding yourself. I think a lot, a lot about what Your Excellency said, especially because of the profound respect I give you. We arrive, I said, near absolutism. . . . . . . some of you repudiate the word, perhaps one which is in the heart of many. It is the concentration of all social power in the hands of one man or one institution; so I say to you that this absolutism almost exists. It exists in the state, in the state in whose hands all is concentrated.52

On this first day, Rocha had joined Sayão Lobato. The two were followed by Ferraz on 22 May. These three struck again and again on the days that followed, singly or in combination on 23 May, on 25 May, on 26 May. The planters’ letter from Vassouras was published in the Jornal do Commercio on 26 May. The attacks, turning as they did on the prime minister’s ambition and political betrayal, on constitutional subversion, on cabinet corruption of political parties and deputies, and on the consequent dictatorial potential of the executive, were extremely heated, the more so because these were men who had fought shoulder to shoulder for two decades. A particularly awful moment of pathos sounded on one occasion, after Paraná first responded to the attacks, on 21 May. Paraná attempted to destroy Rocha’s charges by dismissing Rocha’s speech with a passing, barely oblique allusion to Rocha’s political turnabout and his venality. The journalist, his political integrity publicly dismissed after years of sacrifice, could not bear it. On the 26th, he delivered an extraordinary apologia in which, weeping at times, he described his long life of sacrifice for the ideas of his party to an enthralled and understandably sympathetic Chamber.53 In all of this personal bitterness the apartes were at times so offensive (not least from Paraná), that they were muttered, so that the recorder failed to catch them. The prime minister, when he spoke from the floor, was careful to ignore the evils with which he was charged and to claim either the high ground of non-partisan progress or to suggest that his opponents misunderstood or were simply ambitious to replace him. It is noteworthy that in this first debate over executive aggrandizement at the expense of Parliament, parties, and Constitution, the emperor’s role is entirely unremarked. While allusions to his favoritism and personal power were plain during the Liberal Quinquennium, here, in a Conservative Chamber—perhaps because of ideological and constitutional constraint, or perhaps because of a calculated desire to avoid offending

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the acknowledged source of all power—Paraná sufficed as the target, along with his ministers. The fact that the emperor had directed the cabinet agenda and sustained the prime minister did not arise in debate. It is clear that all of this preliminary debate, like the planters’ attack in the Jornal do Commercio, was designed by the saquaremas to weaken Paraná’s support in the Chamber and to force him away from his reforms. Clearly, however, although he had retreated on the judicial reform, he had not given up. Eusébio had watched his Chamber stalwarts cut at the advancing prime minister with flashing, edged display in May, but their blows had not crippled him, and the thrust to the judicial reform dealt by the planters had seemingly only goaded Paraná. The prime minister was unyielding; he had not backed down, he would not resign. He had parried or sidestepped in the Chamber, he had reshuffled his cabinet, he had prepared for his moment. Now he unleashed the issue of electoral reforms, which overshadowed all of the preliminary struggle. On 18 June, the project, introduced in early May and then formally prepared by committee for debate in Senate and Chamber, was put into play. In the Senate, Eusébio himself finally resolved to speak in mid July—one senses a reluctance finally overcome. The threat against the party and its principles had reached its standardbearer. The electoral reforms compelled every resistance, and Eusébio had no one else to send into the breach—particularly in the Senate, where he was the chief and where Paraná had successfully intimidated the others so that no one else was willing to speak.54 On 16 July, then, Eusébio, decided, arose. The speech he made, and a second, on 4 August, were classic efforts of his. He gave them in a Senate chamber characterized by “profound attention,” and he spoke with an impersonal serenity stripped of the ad-hominem remarks so common among others. Instead, he focused upon the deft evisceration of Paraná’s arguments. There was no attack on the political subtext of the reforms. Instead, Eusébio fastened his pitiless logic on demonstrating the checkered history, unconstitutional quality, and logical and legislative fallacies of the electoral reforms. He may have hoped, by sparing Paraná personal attack, to leave open the possibility for his old ally’s retreat back into the party.55 However, as Eusébio’s speeches thus generally avoided the political, the focus of this analysis, less of them can be usefully quoted here. Still, Eusébio was too skilled a party chieftain not to twitch aside the legislative drapery from time to time. Although the basis of his argument in the first speech was that the reform was unconstitutional, he also wanted to make it clear that its revival was foreign to the representative quality of Brazil’s constitutional monarchy. As part of this, he showed that the reform did not spring from public reformism or elected representatives, and he did so by careful citation of the reformist partisans of both the 1830s and 1840s (exaltados, modera-

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dos, luzias), and direct quotations sampling the opinion of their celebrated spokesmen. By this oblique approach, he demonstrated that the original and the present project were alike imposed by prime ministers, rather than arising from the public or its representatives. He was also careful to list the names of the parliamentary figures who had opposed the bill in 1848, possibly to underscore its established lack of representatives’ support and to shame its past opponents into opposition again.56 In both speeches, Eusébio referred to Paraná’s role as the defender of the Constitution in 1832, and Paraná’s emphasis on the charter’s integrity and the dire necessity for its respect. One also senses that his criticisms of Paula Sousa, the late liberal prime minister who had originally crafted and attempted to impose the bill Paraná now promoted, were really indirect attacks on the latter. In August, in attacking the arbitrary quality of the reform’s particulars, Eusébio contrasted them with the reason and principles of the Constitution, and warned of the destructive potential and precedent of such poor legislation: “They think to mark limits and to tell their ideas ‘Go only so far.’ But the boulder pushed down a mountain cannot be held back (applause), and the consequences will come, because logic will achieve what is inherent in it. (Applause.)”57 Eusébio then touched upon the issue of executive aggrandizement at the expense of the parties’ role in elections and of parliamentary government: You conserve for the state all means of action, it is left completely armed, with all its artillery ready for attack, and you divide the forces capable of resistance! (Applause) You divide the provinces [into electoral circles], you make the great influences disappear, influences linked by the communion of interests, you break them up and substitute petty localities, with their second-rate bosses, without connection, without means of action, for the great provincial slates, and have you favored electoral liberty? (Applause). . . . Division weakens . . . [political] principles: Unity means strength.58

Eusébio went on to argue that after such reforms the provincial allies of the parties would not operate in a unified manner; provincial chieftains would concern themselves with their own elections, rather than working together to elect a select, common provincial chapa. He emphasized that the state would inevitably possess greater relative power in opposing its enemies at the local circle level and would overwhelm such small, weak elements. The reform would thus promote public corruption (both in the sense of violence and subornation) which would sap hope of institutional reform. Indeed, he went on to point out the administration’s use of coercion in Parliament to press for the bill’s passage. In his concluding remarks, Eusébio argued that deputies elected by circles would be concerned with local interests alone, while the present system allowed deputies to consider the larger interests of the province and the Empire. Circle deputies would be compelled to negotiate with the cabinet to se-

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cure the local interests of their constituencies, without whose support re-election would be doubtful. Under the present system, deputies were more free to consider matters of principle.59 Eusébio did not speak alone. He was followed by the marquês de Abrantes, the consummate orator of the age, who assailed the reform eloquently for hours. When Paraná responded to Eusébio, his speeches were cut up by saquaremas’ apartes. Although devastating as arguments, however, Eusébio’s efforts and those of his Senate allies failed. In the end, the Senate passed the reforms; the vote, however, is telling. Senate Liberals welcomed them; they doubtless saw them as a blow to the dominant party, a chance for opportune alliance with the cabinet, and a concession to their 1840s reformism. They were joined by senators more monarchist than partisan, including Caxias and Abaeté. Indeed, the Conservatives divided, though most opposed. Those who supported the bill, one would speculate, were unwilling to break with Paraná, the most prestigious chieftain of the party (or to move against a cabinet enjoying the monarch’s clear support). Still, most of the party’s senators voted in opposition. On the two principal provisions, the Senate votes were 24 to 18 (for the “incompatibilities” provision) and 26 to 16 (for the electoral circle).60 In the Chamber, where the debate had been more ferocious and the analysis more bitter, Paraná was finally forced to threaten. He made the vote a question of confidence on 27 August. This ploy was transparent. With all the prestige of his years as a founder and chieftain of the Party of Order, Paraná had enormous charisma and a broad personal clientele in the Chamber. The personal anguish of both Ferraz and Justiniano in opposing him publicly fairly rises from the pages of the debates; it is easy to imagine how others might lack the nerve to do so and surrender to his leadership, once again. Added to this, of course, as the leader of a cabinet, Paraná could (and did) dispense power, prestige, and patronage. He could also ensure that those who supported him enjoyed cabinet support in the 1856 election, while those who did not would face the cabinet’s hostility (as would their supporters).61 Beyond these obvious inducements, it was well known that none of the other great political chiefs of the Conservative Party would willingly follow him to form a cabinet should he resign. The question of confidence, then, was threatening, indeed. On the one hand, if Paraná did not get the majority’s support, he could ask the emperor for a dissolution and a new election, in which deputies opposing him would have little chance of success. On the other hand, if he asked and was refused and then resigned, the emperor would probably have to turn to the Liberals. A Liberal prime minister would have to ask for a dissolution of the Chamber because of its hostile majority and would follow that with the usual purges and reprisals across the Empire, in order to eliminate

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saquarema obstacles to the election of an amenable, Liberal Chamber. The debates that followed Paraná’s announcement made it entirely clear that everyone knew the stakes. The days of debate involved were spectacular, with saquaremas trying to spring free of the gravity of political expedience, lifted up on wings of principled rhetoric. In vain. In the end, most dropped to the vulgar, partisan earth. Even such notable opponents as Ferraz and Rocha finally broke their opposition to the cabinet: the bill passed, by 51 to 36. The parliamentary ideal had been dealt a great blow.62 This is not the first time that these sessions and this cabinet have been recognized as a turning point; that was the impression then and later. It is the assessment of that turning point which differs. Our fundamental text on the Monarchy remains the biography of Nabuco de Araújo by his son, Joaquim Nabuco. Largely because of its treatment, we have tended to understand the Conciliation Cabinet as a signal of political consolidation and inclusion, an administration of liberal, non-partisan improvement and reform at the conclusion of the nation’s initial internecine partisan strife. In effect, we have seen it as the Nabucos preferred it be seen: a great stride forward in the Monarchy’s progress.63 The present analysis of the political history, based on the correspondence and the actual debates, makes another interpretation necessary. Although the emperor may have seen the Conciliation along the same lines as the Nabucos,64 one doubts if even Paraná did. Certainly, this is not how many of his former allies, the saquaremas, viewed the matter. Rather, Paraná might well have seen the cabinet and its victory as his personal vindication before his party rivals and his monarch, his political triumph after the dismissal of 1844 and the second-rank status and saquarema disrespect of 1850. In September 1855, his personal domination of cabinet and Parliament alike were manifest. Only the emperor overshadowed him; indeed, he was widely known as El Rei Honório (Honório the King). For many of the saquaremas, the issues were far more profound and cruel. It was basic to the ideology championed by the founders of the reactionary party of the 1830s, the saquaremas of 1848, that theirs was a party identified not simply with a strong state and monarch, but a strong state made legitimate by its constitutional, representative nature. The Chamber, the bulwark and arena of the reforms of the liberal opposition of the 1820s and the moderados of the 1830s, from which Vasconcelos, Honório, and the Regresso had sprung, was central to their ideology. As noted earlier, Vasconcelos had pursued the idea of electoral reform himself in the 1840s, to maintain the representative legitimacy of the Chamber. Others among the Party of Order had criticized the emperor’s apparent disregard of the relationship of the Chamber and its majority to the cabinet in the fall of the reactionary cabinet of 1843–1844—Honório chief

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among them. The reader may remember that the continued abuse of the monarch (and his favorite, Aureliano) in the Liberal Quinquennium in this regard had been of enough concern that one of Rocha’s closest friends, the reactionary publicist, Firmino Rodrigues da Silva, had written a sensational pamphlet about it whose principles were widely respected. Indeed, its authorship was ascribed to Honório, among other party chiefs. In fact, Teófilo Otoni, the most eminent of the old exaltados, recalled this and the struggle of Conservatives and Liberals alike against the monarch’s usurpations in the 1840s. It was a return to the common liberal barricade of parliamentary government, which Vasconcelos, Honório, Rodrigues Torres, and Otoni had once thrown up together against the first emperor’s power.65 For the saquaremas, then, the electoral reform of 1855 and the consequent potential for still greater executive aggrandizement (and the associated, fatal corruption of the Chamber) characterized the Conciliation Cabinet in a fundamental way. It represented a metamorphosis from a state representing the natural elite and interests of established society to a state unmoored to that elite and those interests, indeed, a state strengthened and lent autonomy by the growing need for patronage, a state increasingly independent, non-partisan, and overwhelming. For them, the Conciliation embodied and promoted an era of political malaise and disaffection by sapping the ideological appeal of the representative, constitutional monarchy of which they had dreamt in the 1830s. As Rocha had put it, they were approaching absolutism. The saquarema chieftains of 1848 had been unable or unwilling to dominate in the political world they had helped to make possible. Paraná had proven himself less fastidious and more flexible about his principles and had chosen to shape the potential for non-partisan state and personal power emergent since 1841. In the aftermath of September 1855, everyone recognized it was the rules Paraná was putting together that everyone would have to learn. The title marquês de Paraná, given in 1854, simply festooned this unique political triumph. Honório’s new hegemony was dramatically apparent in the first elections after the 1855 reform. His influence was feared even where the saquaremas themselves held not only established partisan power, but rooted local support: the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, even before the electoral reform, the rising number of those competing, between established saquaremas, Paraná’s Conservative clientele, and fluminense Liberals, was exhausting, exacerbated by declining discipline, particularly because of the policy of cooptation that Paraná’s cabinet promoted.66 Brás Carneiro Nogueira da Costa e Gama, then visconde de Baependí (1812–1887), a saquarema stalwart related to many of the most powerful planter clans of the baixada and serra acima, wrote in despair of his electoral difficulties in early 1854:

196 / The Transformation of Politics and the State The [electoral] College of Valença is not today the same as in earlier eras: each Parish has its political leadership and some more than one. . . . I still retain some faithful friends, who . . . still maintain some pledged voting; however, they are tired and want me to abandon these affairs, so that they can follow my example. . . . I very much approve of Your Excellency writing to all of the Electors. . . . I am very tired from [writing] my circulars to Electors, being ignorant of the names of nearly 400. . . .67

If ensuring partisan elections had become so difficult by early 1854, it was much worse in the general campaign of 1855, with the Conservatives split over the cabinet, and the electoral reform in place, undercutting the already weakening partisan network and strengthening the cabinet’s influence. A kinsman wrote to Eusébio, from the Aruruamas’ traditional baixada seat, the old cane plantation, Mata de Pipa, The purpose of this is to communicate to Your Excellency the result of the Colleges of Campos and Macaé voting with respect to the recommendations [i.e., chapa] of Your Excellency. It could have been better . . . [but you must bear] in mind the multiplicity of candidates and recommendations of the Cabinet—do not wonder that the voting went wrong, weakening some of Your Excellency’s recommendations, [indeed,] three even failed. . . .68

The visconde do Uruguai reported on this transformation to his son, for whom he had great political ambitions. Uruguai, on diplomatic mission to France, had decided to initiate his son’s candidacy as a deputy, relying upon party control of the elections and trusting that, even in the new age, his own long established connections in the province would be enough. He found things were quite different: They tell me that Paraná already had designated the candidates for all of the circles, [even] promoting Otaviano [a Liberal chieftain] for Cabo Frio. Speaking to Pereira da Silva about you, he said that he would promote you [against Otaviano] as a Substitute [suplente]. This will complicate your business, which my absence prejudiced a great deal. I believe that you ought not to accept such a contest, if there is no certainty of beating that black thug.69

Among fluminense electors, fear of contradicting the cabinet’s designated choices in the election ran deep. As Uruguai reported later, after the election, “There were Planter Electors, rich and independent, who voted for you on ballots written by others, for fear that their own handwriting would betray them [to the Cabinet’s agents]. The ballots are unsigned.”70 Uruguai, increasingly well informed, was shocked by Paraná’s newfound strength, and the consequent threat to the established order. Even the oldest ties were fraying: Paraná wanted you to ask him [for support], and to have you appear among the multitude of his creatures. Do as your Father [did], who was no creature of anyone. [Ro-

The Transformation of Politics and the State / 197 drigues] Torres is going to help take apart his Brother-in-Law, [and Torres is] one of the best friends that I know, a firm and reliable man, [and he is betraying me] in exchange for the flattery and favors that he owes Otaviano! What weakness! Beside the business of promoting your election, I would have a certain pleasure in battling with Paraná and Torres, but this could have a bad influence on our future positions and ally us with people with whom we ought never to be.71

In the midst of this electoral crisis, on 16 August 1856, Honório was enraged by a speech in the Senate. It was an attack by the marquês de Olinda; he rose, heated, to respond. He never completed the speech, however; suddenly, he collapsed in pain. He was rushed from the Senate to his palacete. Paraná had suffered from intestinal problems for years, a condition exacerbated by his infamous temper. Now, Rio’s finest physicians had their way with him for more than two weeks, applying purges and leeches, disputing appropriate remedies with one another. Pereira da Silva remembered the horror and took the measure of its fatal result: Brought back to his residence . . . attacked by fever, he was laid out in bed. The remedies were unable to alleviate the illness that weakened him. At times, his reason abandoned him, and in these critical moments he was still occupied in responding to Araújo Lima. . . . Attacks of fever returned, and after painful sufferings, he passed away, at dawn on 3 September. Death surprised him in the midst of a last oratorical triumph, to exchange his laurels for funereal cypress. The imperial capital’s population was profoundly moved. The statesman who had exercised the greatest influence on the political scene since the year 1831 had disappeared from the world when he still exercised supreme authority. Commercial houses closed their doors; citizens clothed themselves in crêpe; all public offices suspended work; the two houses of Parliament interrupted their sessions. The atmosphere itself seemed to share in the public grief, covering the sky with dense clouds, unleashing abundant rains, deafened with bolts of lightening. Despite the weather’s inclemency, an extraordinary cortège accompanied the coach bearing his mortal remains to the cemetery of S. João Batista; some in carriages, others afoot, all desirous of rendering full honors to the famous champion of the tribune.72

The cabinet was reshuffled, with Caxias reluctantly accepting the prime ministry, providing a colorless, decorous bust over Paraná’s acephalous cabinet. The scheduled election soon went forward. Even without Paraná’s direct control, cabinet influence and the sudden destruction of the party’s old provincial slate system meant that the new Chamber would be disputed between saquaremas, a large number of Liberals, and many Conservative cabinet protégés, men without the distinction of yore. The younger Paulino wrote of the fray, They tell me that the death of Paraná left everything in confusion, which perhaps even he could not have straightened out, if he had not died when the complications most developed.

198 / The Transformation of Politics and the State The elections are what everyone is dealing with and the candidates do everything in the dark. . . . New ambitions have arisen, local bosses dispute primacy with those of the Province, and all foretells a close fight that God willing will not have evil results—very disagreeable scenes have already taken place.73

In 1857, the new Chamber took its seat, exemplary of the age. It was more dependent upon patronage, confused in its partisan antecedents, armed with fewer men capable of withstanding the newly enhanced power of the executive.74 Opportunism, emergent even under the old electoral regime in 1850, was clearly much more significant. Before, surely, the cabinet had exercised downward influence on provincial slates, but that influence was party influence exercised by ministers who were party chieftains with historical, ideological prestige. During the 1830s and 1840s, the cabinets, at least the cabinets with chieftains of the old Party of Order, had been able to marshal the party’s rank and file, and bring in a majority that was relatively disciplined and ideologically coherent. Even with the increased regional divisions and importance of patronage by the late 1840s, local interests could not simply impose a representative; he had to be a candidate whose capacity and partisan identity were approved by the party network articulated through to the leaders in the Court. Now, even with a prime minister who had explicitly broken with that party, defying his saquarema friends, even with the cabinet that he had left without direction upon his sudden death, the personal and opportune alliance between the cabinet and purely local provincial interests had quite often triumphed. It is indicative that the saquarema leadership itself had been unable to prevail even in the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Only in circles where saquarema chieftains and local interests were intimately related was success possible, and, even then, not without a struggle. Indeed, one notes that five of the twelve fluminense deputies were new men without obvious saquarema links—one had been a noted Liberal. The five were obviously cabinet protégés: two were cabinet ministers, two were close kin to ministers (including Paraná’s son-in-law, Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior), and one was a Treasury official—the former luzia. Indeed, in terms of the traditional party, the reverse is stunning. Only five fluminenses of the remaining seven deputies were clearly saquarema stalwarts.75 If this happened in the saquarema heartland, it is reasonable to assume matters were even more striking elsewhere. Among the successful saquaremas was Uruguai’s son, Paulino José Soares de Sousa (filho). Uruguai confessed to his son that the struggle had been close fought and doubtful to the end. Uruguai had returned from his mission abroad and confronted an electoral scene so corroded by the cabinet’s new and hostile influence that despite all of his personal influence, he had still had to rely upon

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his brother-in-law, João Alvarez de Azevedo Macedo, the political chieftain of his wife’s far-flung provincial planter family. Even Rodrigues Torres, of whom Uruguai had despaired, had lent a hand. Nonetheless, Uruguai made it clear to Paulino that this was his last political campaign; what with the election and his experience as a minister, he had had enough of partisan politics altogether: I never saw such vulgarity as now. The circles made candidates arise whom no one had thought of—The lack of moral authority is frightening. Some friends from Itaboraí and Maracá offered to work for you.—I accepted. It was necessary to win in those two counties, not being able to count on Niterói, which was always bad and where many people were pledged to Cândido Borges. . . . I had to struggle with that Cabinet Candidate, [and those] who did not want, or even could not abandon the emperor’s protégé. . . . If I had arrived here earlier and if there were not so many people pledged to vote for Candidates that had been recommended, I would not have encountered the difficulties that I found.—Happily, I had good friends to help me. Your Uncle, Joãosinho, worked a great deal, Torres and his Brothers have taken an interest in you. [Nonetheless,] The election in Itaboraí was almost lost. . . . Your Uncle Francisco was completely beaten . . . and the candidacy of Luís seems entirely lost to me. The Luzias and the patrons of Otaviano have won in many Parishes of the Cabo Frio circle. . . .76

In the last years of Paulino’s schooling, and in the months in which Paulino had joined his father for a brief European tour as an attaché, Uruguai had also made it clear that his departure from politics was also the moment of his son’s inheritance. In explaining his plans to Paulino, Uruguai confided, “I desire, and I expect, that you honor and vindicate your family, and that you be my continuator. . . .”77 In effect, Uruguai placed upon the young bacharel the terrible burden of rising in a world in which Uruguai himself was no longer willing to struggle. That he expected the younger Paulino to remain faithful to his political ideals and conduct is also clear. He had raised Paulino with a tenacious hand and a critical eye, training him like a prized falcon, noting every detail. Now, he lifted his arm and expected his heir to soar alone, however troubled the skies above. In 1856, there were already rumors of Uruguai’s being appointed a minister. Perhaps for this reason, Paraná seems to have been interested in keeping him an ambassador. Uruguai discreetly refused both. However, Uruguai’s political withdrawal was made manifest in 1857. The emperor asked him to succeed Paraná, and Uruguai declined. He would not serve among the emperor’s ministers again. The independence and influence of the Council of State and the Senate sufficed him. He had privately concluded that political solutions to the questions facing any cabinet might well be impossible to find—at least, for him. Now he wished, politically exhausted and disillusioned, to contemplate the po-

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litical future of the Monarchy, in dilating upon what he had learned in twenty years of politics and his brief exposure to European statecraft.78 Paulino, then, began his practical apprenticeship mindful of his father’s legacy and critical presence, but without the visconde’s direct involvement in the provincial politicking and imperial statecraft that evolved over the 1850s and 1860s. For the most part, he would have to find his away alone, relying upon his father’s private counsel and Senate pronouncements and his later writing for occasional light from on high. It would be an era in which any light was welcome. Two factors darkened the first part of Paulino’s public life, 1857–1862: weak cabinets and financial crisis, both leading to renewed partisan mobilization. The second part of his political experience, 1862–1867, can be understood as the era of the emperor’s reaction to that mobilization. It is characterized by the manifest presence of Dom Pedro II as the dominant political actor, pressing down hard against the increasingly desperate vigor of the traditional parties. He came to do this through the transparent raiment of a political party of his own confection: the Progressive League.

IV. Opportunism and Partisan Mobilization For this era (c.1857–1867), the weakness of the historiography rivals that for the 1830s. Indeed, it may be worse. Here, one can only attempt capable narrative by piecing it together indirectly, through biography and memoirs. Nabuco’s biography of his father, given the centrality of the Nabuco de Araújo’s political metamorphosis, is both indispensable and undependable. Indeed, Nabuco’s masterpiece speaks directly to the era’s nature. It is the very complexity and fluidity of the politics of these years that did so much to lend the Monarchy as a whole the reputation of a partisan and ideological Babel, and Nabuco, his father’s apologist, had every reason to emphasize such incoherence. Yet, immersion in these published sources, coupled with the careful use of archival and contemporary materials, allows us to discern meaning. The meaning is the increasingly defined impact of the monarch. The role of the emperor in the 1860s differs from that before to a distinctive degree. In his early reign, Dom Pedro II gradually emerged from observation and response at a vague remove to, first, oversight and correction and, then, discrete but certain policy domination. In the 1860s, however, his command was so impinging that it was exposed in unprecedented fashion. We begin by sketching out the basic political lines of the new era.79 After the saquarema cabinets of 1848–1853 and Paraná’s Conciliation Cabinet of 1853–1857, Dom Pedro II faced a political world in which he did not apparently think the Liberals had the strength to maintain the Empire and in which

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the politics of patronage, the monarch’s policy of conciliation, and Paraná had alienated the Conservatives’ traditional leadership. The saquarema triumvirate, Eusébio, Itaboraí, and Uruguai, were willing to serve the monarchy, but not the monarch, at least not as his ministers. With Paraná gone and the Liberals useless, Dom Pedro II had thus to find prime ministers with some claim to Conservative leadership who would use the cabinet’s new power to pursue his policies. Thus, with perhaps two exceptions (one headed by Ángelo Ferraz and one headed by Zacarias de Góis e Vasconcelos), they were men who appealed to the emperor’s clear preference for moderate, non-partisan, amenable stewardship: the marquês de Olinda (1857–1858, 1862–1864), the visconde de Abaeté (1858–1859), and the marquês de Caxias (1861–1862). The elections of 1856 and 1860 returned Conservative majorities, but ones divided between the pliable dependents of such ministers (soon called Conservative moderates) and saquaremas (soon called puritanos or vermelhos—puritans or reds—for their radical adherence to the old party and its principles). They also returned a numerous minority of Liberals, also increasingly divided (especially after 1860), between pliable moderates and reformist younger men and históricos, (traditionalists, adherents to their old party’s reformist legacy). It is important to note that the younger Liberals did not represent a new Liberalism so much as new political drive and context. They were the Liberals of a new generation, whose political and economic reformism, entirely congenial with that of Otoni, had more to do with the new opportunities and personal frustrations of the time than a dramatic ideological shift. They had as their exemplars and leaders men such as [Francisco] Otáviano [de Almeida Rosa] (1825–1889), José Bonifácio [de Andrada e Silva], o moço (here, the younger) (1827–1886), and [Aureliano Cândido] Tavares Bastos (1839–1875), youths who had to make their way against the established ways and interests closely associated with the saquaremas. As we shall see later, their Liberalism would gain strength and a following because of socio-economic contextual changes that made their reformism more compelling.80 The era may well remind the reader of aspects of the Liberal Quinquennium, only, this time, with moderate Conservatives in power. The cabinets, dominated by such Conservatives and their non-partisan (or post-partisan) colleagues, naturally had no ideological or historical bonds to many in the Chamber. Consequently, they secured Chamber majorities through ephemeral alliances between the two moderate fractions of the two old parties. The majorities thus gained were fragile because they were ideologically incoherent and without a partisan base. Both parties’ radicals charged such majorities with opportunism—the willingness to trade votes for state patronage. As occurred in the Liberal Quinquennium, over the course of the years 1857–1862, the admin-

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istrations’ fragility lent itself to brevity; there were six cabinets. Indeed, the fragility was such that even the dwindling partisan strength of the saquaremas was sometimes enough to force concessions. Those cabinets which favored policies more congenial to the saquaremas tended to prevail, if only slightly. This tendency increased until the political crises of 1862, to which we shall come soon. Such cabinets, inherently weak and consequently ephemeral, were poor instruments for crisis leadership; crises tended to exacerbate the lack of political coherence apparent between cabinets and the Chamber. In the 1850s, the crisis was financial. It began under the marquês de Olinda, who had cobbled together a cabinet redolent of his established preferences. That is, it was one dominated by northern ministers dependent upon him, as in his late Regency choices. Indeed, the most obvious thing in common was dependency, not party: two of the ministers were Liberal, one was a saquarema; Vasconcelos’s younger brother, Francisco Diogo Pereira de Vasconcelos (1812–1863), minister of justice. The cabinet’s key portfolio, however, may well have been that of finance. This went to one of the Liberals, the outstanding orator, [Bernardo de] Sousa Franco (1805–1875). Sousa Franco, a magistrate, was the son of a Belém merchant and had commercial experience himself, as well as an Olinda degree (1835) and ministerial experience on the last Liberal cabinet of 1848.81 His economic ideas were known and disliked by the emperor. Nonetheless, anxious to be amenable to his new prime minister, Dom Pedro II agreed to the nomination, for Sousa Franco’s ideas were congenial with those of Olinda, heavily influenced by the barão de Mauá. Mauá has appeared in these pages before. He was the financial agent of Uruguai’s Platine policy, subsidizing the Montevideo government and working closely with Paraná and Paranhos. His relations with these Conservatives were only later counterbalanced by the antipathy of Itaboraí in the later 1850s. In the saquarema administrations of 1848–1853, Mauá was the willing helpmeet not only of saquarema foreign policy but their domestic developmentalist policies. It was then that he secured the first concessions for railroads, Amazonian steamship service, and the gas illumination of Rio. Even then, though, he met in Rodrigues Torres a fundamentally different view of the nature of capital and credit.82 Itaboraí was the son of a merchant in the fluminense colonial trade, and a student of mathematics at Coimbra in the 1820s; he was a fundamentally conservative financial thinker. He accepted the ideas dear to the bankers and investors of London, in which credit was tied to capital reserves and reserves were tied to gold. He was also a planter who profited from such theories, as did export producers throughout the Empire. Credit rates held relatively steady by conservative fiscal policy and an income in which his coffee or sugar was paid

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for in English pounds (which could be used to pay for domestic goods and services in variable, weaker contos)—all of this made good sense to him.83 Mauá, who had apprenticed with a Portuguese merchant in Rio as a child and then with a Scots merchant banker in Rio and England, knew the neo-colonial economy from hard and successful practice. Extensive experience in both South America and Europe over thirty years had convinced him of the potential of credit, entrepreneurial daring, and technical innovation. Like Sousa Franco, he had come to believe that Brazilian resources could be better tapped and the economy placed on a more developed and independent course with a more innovative use of credit. He was confident because of his varied successes and accumulated fortune. His daring had won a particularly useful conquest in Olinda. Like other Northeasterners concerned with regional decline, Olinda wanted railways for Pernambuco, to open up the economy. He had invested in a new railway himself, and stood to profit by securing easy credit for such endeavors. Mauá, favoring Sousa Franco’s ideas on credit, sought to influence Olinda (and the latter’s support for Sousa Franco) by investing heavily in the same railway himself and taking its promotion and direction in hand. This was the context of support in which Sousa Franco called for easy credit for urban investment and infrastructural development, based upon a reformed system of banking. Such policies directly challenged Itaboraí’s financial assumptions. Moreover, they did so in an arena that Itaboraí had constructed himself, as the finance minister who had created and regulated the second Banco do Brasil in 1851.84 These conflicts were further politicized because of the class-sector interests touched upon. The end of the Atlantic slave trade freed up a great deal of capital for investments in the early 1850s. The old merchant-planter interests formerly behind the trade and heavily invested in slaves and urban real estate, now successfully sought to channel most of this capital towards rural finance and infrastructure, particularly railroads to extend the worth of old plantations and create access to new. Newer entrepreneurs, blooded in the recent era of urban expansion, may well have been more concerned with urban infrastructure, pioneering industry, and expanding urban commerce and urban amenities for a growing city and an expanding wage economy. Mauá figured centrally in this, too. This emerging urban sector naturally found his and Sousa Franco’s ideas more congenial than Itaboraí’s. Apparently, such investors (and other city dwellers, to whom the advantages of such investment and a more European way of life had obvious appeal) would form an expanding political base not only for the Liberals (both históricos and the new generation) but for the moderate Conservatives. Both supported reforms and material development and were less wed to the more conservative economic bases of the traditional agro-

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export complex. Sousa Franco, an histórico, appealed to his party for both partisan reasons and for the hopes his financial policies held out for the liberalprofessional investors, the urban-service sector, or the marginal landholders outside of the charmed circle of established export planting, all of whom were either traditional or new supporters of the Liberal Party. As Olinda’s personal case demonstrated, there would even be grounds for support among the traditional ranks of the Conservatives, at least among the export planters in the Northeast, threatened with steady decline.85 Thus, the stage was set for crisis in 1857. While the financial reforms set in motion by the saquaremas in 1851 had facilitated credit for the traditional sectors they favored, fiscal and financial reforms set in motion by Paraná’s last finance minister (Wanderley) and then dramatically broadened by the banking reforms of Sousa Franco, led to a boom in credit with a consequent inflationary boom and bust within the year. This was exacerbated by the international depression of the time. By the parliamentary session of mid 1858, the saquaremas had mobilized fierce opposition to Olinda’s cabinet, with Itaboraí leading in the Senate.86 In the Chamber, however, opposition had particularly interesting consequences. Among these was the saquaremas’ acquisition of two important deputies. Torres Homem, the great exaltado publicist of the 1840s, had become one of the foremost proponents of Conciliation in 1853. Appointed to a Treasury position, in 1856, Paraná’s cabinet next saw to his election as a deputy for Rio de Janeiro, as well. However, in 1857, his financial ideas forced him to oppose the Olinda cabinet, despite Olinda’s opportune embrace of Conciliation. Torres Homem had departed from his 1840s radicalism in the Conciliation, and figured among Liberal moderates; now, by breaking with Olinda’s cabinet, supported by many Liberal moderates, he effectively broke with his old party entirely. He took this step in a noted speech opposing the cabinet’s financial policies, in 1857. This would be the bridge over which the former exaltado would cross to embrace Itaboraí and to enjoy the favor of Dom Pedro II (whose dislike of Sousa Franco’s policies has been noted).87 Torres Homem was not alone in his new stand. Perhaps just as surprising was the adhesion of Teixeira Júnior. The latter, son-in-law to Paraná, admitted to being a former supporter of Olinda’s cabinet (as the continuation of Paraná’s political policies); now, however, he also reached out to the saquaremas across the rubble of the Sousa Franco bust. Scion of an established Rio merchant family himself, Teixeira Júnior’s speech established him as another new ally of Itaboraí, and an ally blessed with technical and rhetorical talent. Among statesmen and men of affairs in the Court, this marked the beginning of the respected financial reputation he would later enjoy.88 The most significant 1858 speeches, however, were those of Paulino, the first

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of which took up Teixeira Júnior’s points on 29 May. Like his colleague’s, it was probably Paulino’s first speech. It was a crafted, mature piece of financial criticism; it was probably his second speech, on 29 June, however, which marked him as a political figure of the first quality. Five decades later, a contemporary remembered the impression these speeches made; they set Paulino apart and prepared the way for his role as the Chamber’s saquarema standard bearer by the next year—when Paulino was but twenty-five. In the second speech, in response to the fala, Paulino spoke in formal opposition to the cabinet, which was present. Paulino charged the ministry with using the Conciliation as a cover for buying Liberal support with patronage, particularly among the personal clienteles of the ministers in the provinces of Pará, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Sul. He concluded by charging that the financial policies promoted by the ministry were arbitrary, fiscally irresponsible, and designed as a source of patronage. He articulated the most pervasive saquarema critique of the Conciliation— that it represented the abandonment of any political principles, the domination of the Legislature by the executive, and the facilitation of political corruption through state patronage. Paulino concluded, Gentlemen, the disrespect for the law, elevated to the category of a government principle; the contempt for the Constitution; the lack of action and satisfaction with respect to public necessities (ayes and nays) . . . , an entire year’s wasted time without one step taken toward national progress. . . . (ayes and nays) the immense cloud of bank notes that condenses on the financial horizon, threatening the fortunes acquired by labor and the public fortune (ayes and nays), a cabinet that wants to concentrate everything in itself, that wants everything without the capacity to do anything (ayes and nays), are reasons enough for the man who loves the liberty and the order of his country to fight, as I have to fight, the present cabinet (applause; cries of well done, well done. The orator receives the congratulations of a great number of the deputies).89

Parliamentary opposition to the cabinet was so strong that year that its Chamber majority dissolved and the emperor became dissatisfied. In October 1858, the cabinet resigned and the emperor attempted to woo Eusébio, as he had Uruguai. The offer was clear: take power in exchange for heading up a “conciliation” cabinet. Eusébio (alleging his poor health) refused, as Uruguai had done. It is possible that Uruguai was asked and refused again, as well. It seems that these men, unlike Paraná and Olinda, were unwilling to lend Conservative political cover to the emperor. The emperor, perplexed, stated that they accepted his ideas about relations between Crown and cabinet. What he may not have understood (or may have been unwilling to understand) is that they refused to serve as ministers for the very reason that they did accept his rights to intervene. They likely knew from experience that such intervention would force them to either undertake policies they did not support or to resign. Surely, in their view, either action would be personally repugnant and harmful to the

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monarchy. They would not serve him, because they could not serve him as he wished. Nor, apparently, would they contradict or challenge him personally because, for them, he was not a person. He was an institution without accountability, and the great source of legitimate power; it was illogical, disloyal, and imprudent to contradict or challenge him.90 Thus, the emperor turned again to the more pragmatic moderates. This time, he picked Abaeté, the one-time Liberal, who cobbled together Chamber support by another cabinet of mixed partisan antecedents. Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, Eusébio’s cousin and the former ambassador to England, was made minister of empire. This was balanced by appointing Nabuco de Araújo, a statesman defined now by the Conciliation, minister of justice. Abaeté gave further weight to this end of the cabinet by making Paranhos, another Conciliation veteran, minister of foreign affairs. The most interesting acquisition, however, was Torres Homem, now made minister of finance. As we have seen, he had left the exaltados for Paraná’s Conciliation by 1853 and, then, in 1857, abandoned the Conciliation camp over finance, allying with Itaboraí and the saquaremas. More important, the saquaremas were not the only ones who appreciated his financial views. In money matters, the monarch saw eye to eye with Itaboraí. Thus, Torres Homem’s public opposition to Sousa Franco had impressed Dom Pedro II; indeed, he had let go of whatever old personal resentment he might have felt for the exaltado of 1848. By 1858, amidst the increasingly desperate financial malaise, the emperor accepted the prescription of Torres Homem as the antidote to Sousa Franco’s failed tonic. The cure was more important than the doctor.91 The incongruous histories of the cabinet members gave it traction in the Chamber initially. However, its shift to a conservative fiscal policy, combined with Nabuco de Araújo’s increasing incompatibility and consequent resignation, led to political trouble with moderates. Abaeté apparently decided to seek support where he still could, and replaced Nabuco de Araújo with the saquarema stalwart, Tosta (now barão de Muritiba). Muritiba as minister of justice meant that the portfolio with greatest impact on politics and patronage was now in saquarema hands. This further galvanized Liberal and moderate Conservative opposition. By August 1859, the latter part of the legislative session, with a bare majority, Abaeté requested adjournment from the emperor, to signal to the Chamber that he had the emperor’s continued support. The emperor, however, refused, apparently balking at the partisan cast the cabinet had taken. The cabinet, humiliated, was compelled to resign. The emperor, whatever his hostility to Abaeté’s political drift toward the saquaremas, still supported conservative financial policies. It was a quandary; he wanted saquarema financial policies but not a saquarema cabinet and if he

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appointed Liberals, they would not pursue the financial policies he wanted. Yet, without ministers identified with one party or the other, no cabinet could garner sufficient Chamber support to rule. The emperor decided, instead, to strengthen the Chamber minority opposition of moderate Conservatives and Liberals by appointing a moderate Conservative administration, almost entirely pragmatic and northern in its members, and nearly free of saquarema taint. It was headed by Paraná’s one-time bête noir, Ferraz, and emphasized moderate Conservatives opposed to Torres Homem’s policies. In this way, it could be hoped that the cabinet would at least enjoy moderate and Liberal support. Yet, to win over enough saquaremas for a majority, Ferraz turned to the deputy [João de] Almeida Pereira [Filho] (1826–1888), making him minister of empire. Almeida Pereira’s saquarema appeal was superb. He had a law degree from São Paulo, was a protégé of Eusébio, and was a man committed to the party. Uncle to Eusébio’s son’s wife, son-in-law to the visconde de Araruama, Almeida Pereira’s relations with the old party and its milieu were strengthened in the most organic fashion.92 Ferraz’s career suggests a combination of brilliance, integrity, and political courage. While he had come up among the reactionaries and the Party of Order in the 1840s, and led the saquarema minority at one point in the Liberal Quinquennium, he had also supported policies of the Liberal, Paula Sousa, in the latter’s ephemeral 1848 administration. Between 1848 and 1855 he had been given plumb appointments by saquaremas and Paraná to win his support. Yet, he had turned on Paraná over corruption and cabinet aggrandizement in 1855, as we saw. Now, as a moderate Conservative, he would once again surprise the Chamber and the parties. He turned against the Chamber opposition from which he had come. He did so by shifting over to the saquarema position on finances after studying the question during the season of waters between sessions of 1859 and 1860. In May 1860, at session’s beginning, the opposition heard the prime minister’s pronouncements on finance and quickly formed up to confront this rightward shift. The saquaremas rallied in the cabinet’s defense in both houses of Parliament. Moderates in the middle began to drift toward either extreme in the resulting struggle, making clear the re-emergence of intense partisan politicization. Ferraz’s reputation and position apparently carried most of the Conservative moderates back towards the saquaremas, so that a new party unity was apparent for the first time since 1850. The Liberals, a minority that thought Ferraz’s turnabout a betrayal, responded with a new ferocity in the debates.93 They were not alone. Not all of the Conservative moderates returned to the traditions and leadership of the saquaremas. Nabuco de Araújo was one of many who sought a new independence. The political world of 1860, rapidly

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radicalizing, was divided still further by another of these independent Conservative moderates, who published a critique of the monarch himself. The author was Zacarias [de Góis e Vasconcelos] (1815–1877). We met him before, as a minister under Rodrigues Torres in 1852. Bahian, a former protégé of Gonçalves Martins, and a kinsman of Ferraz, Zacarias, too, had broken with Paraná over the electoral reforms as a deputy; consequently, he lost his seat in 1856. However, Zacarias had remained in the Court, pursuing the legal and political questions which had attracted him as a young professor at Olinda, years before. This was how he now came to publish Of the Nature and Limits of the Moderating Power (1860), a celebrated attack on the emperor’s constitutional role. Along with some Liberal radicals’ speeches at the time, this was part of a significant public critique of the monarch’s function as an independent political actor, something untouched since 1849. He demanded a more limited constitutional role for the emperor, in which the cabinet became responsible for the monarch’s actions, rather than remaining merely the instruments of his policies. In the context of the contemporary debate, Zacarias was responding to the emperor’s obvious influence on cabinet formation and financial policy. His response, however, went much further than the immediate issue of finance; he addressed the central issue—the monarch’s domination of state policy, as opposed to that of a representative Chamber and a cabinet legitimated by Chamber support.94 Such attacks, pressed not by Zacarias alone, but very significantly by Liberals in the Chamber, drew swift saquarema response. Whatever their concerns about one or another of the emperor’s interventions in policy, the saquaremas’ historical and ideological attachment to the Constitution did not allow any challenge to it, and, thus, to the emperor’s moderating power. One cannot assume that this was simply opportunist support for the emperor derived from the current saquarema alliance with the ministers regarding fiscal policy. Theirs was the consecrated stance of the old Party of Order. No matter what their differences with the monarch’s decisions, saquaremas had traditionally held with his constitutional right to make them and to do so without constitutional responsibility. Responsibility for actions taken by the executive lay with the cabinet, which must resign if it could not accept the policies promoted by the monarch. Saquaremas might complain of the decisions the emperor took, as they did in the 1840s, but they did not challenge his constitutional role and they did not publicly attack him personally when they judged that he had erred. As for the new demand for a reform that would make the cabinet responsible for decisions taken by the monarch as moderating power, that crossed another line. As Paulino pointed out, to force the monarch to accept the necessity of cabinet responsibility for his acts as the moderating power was to conflate two distinct constitutional powers, for the cabinet represented and embodied part of the ex-

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ecutive.95 To do so would be to increase the unconstitutional aggrandizement of the executive power: I consider greatly noxious and dangerous the confusion and absorption of the attributes of the independent powers by any other power, and principally by the executive. (Applause). I consider the exercise by the ministers of the grave responsibilities of the moderating power highly inappropriate for our liberty and for our institutions. (Applause). Sustaining the independence of the political powers, separating them from all manner of Executive influence and action, I defend the cause of true liberal principles. (Applause). And it seems to me, gentlemen, that on this point we who sit on these [Conservative] benches are the more sincere friends of liberty (Applause.)96

These constitutional issues and the great political conflict over financial policy have to be understood together and apart. The era’s history and its meaning clarify the situation. The emperor had sought since Paraná to direct state policy towards material development, moderate reforms, and non-partisan administrations. To accomplish this, he had been forced by a lack of saquarema support to appoint mixed, weak cabinets to attempt coalitions in a divided Chamber. Faced with the financial crisis of 1857, however, the emperor had briefly turned, once again, to more conservative leadership and saquarema support in the Abaeté cabinet, apparently convinced that Itaboraí, Torres Homem, and their traditional fraction of the Conservative Party were the better choice to resolve the financial crisis. The opposition of moderates and Liberal reformists, galvanized by Abaeté’s embrace of the saquaremas, and the emperor’s growing concern about the saquaremas’ strengthening, led to the fall of Abaeté and the choice of Ferraz. In the Ferraz cabinet, appointed to mollify the opposition and brake the saquaremas, Ferraz himself then came around to the same financial conclusion as the emperor previously had, and reversed his former opposition to Torres Homem’s policies. This led to saquarema support for his cabinet and the desertion of the opposition. The Liberals charged him with bending to the emperor’s will, rather than remaining true to them, and attacked the constitutional basis for the emperor’s alleged intervention. In this increasingly partisan mobilization, the moderates of either party shifted back and forth and the parties conflated financial policy and the emperor’s constitutional role. Each issue heated political passions and both added new life to the old political divisions. The question of political legitimacy had now become so salient that Ferraz apparently made the decision to make a public stand against cabinet interference in the election scheduled for 1860. He probably hoped to undercut opposition charges that the emperor was inappropriately driving policy (since the emperor had appointed the cabinet, if the latter influenced the election, it would suggest the emperor’s indirect collusion in electoral fraud to secure his

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own policy) and to seek the vindication of the cabinet’s controversial policies by a less fraudulent appeal to the electorate. Of course, at this point in the development of Brazilian political culture, this did not mean that the elections would be free of coercion or corruption. It meant, rather, that the cabinet itself would not directly engage in either to influence the results. The parties, of course, would be compelled to do so. It was to be a trial of strength, with the cabinet on the sidelines.97 Joaquim Nabuco’s account celebrates the election of 1860 as a watershed, particularly in urban centers. He presents it as a moment demonstrating the emergence of a new force born of the marriage of many one-time Conservative moderates and the re-emergent Liberals (históricos and the new generation of reformist youths), distinct elements which would later fuse in a new Liberal Party.98 What really happened is a good deal more complicated. The cabinet’s announcement of an unprecedented withdrawal from electoral influence drove the saquaremas and their opposition to mobilize their support throughout the Empire at the provincial and local levels. Consequently, the elections were more truly indicative of each party’s relative strength. Moreover, the stakes were obvious and quite high—such an election would determine whether the saquaremas or their opposition had the representative authority to compel the emperor’s support in the composition of the next cabinet.99 The saquaremas charged from their political redoubt in the Senate to sweep aside the cynicism and discouragement of the era. Almeida Pereira worked closely with Eusébio to reconquer the Province of Rio de Janeiro, doubtless formidably strengthened by the presence of their kinsman, Silveira da Mota, in the fluminense presidency. Paulino, now the saquarema chief in the chamber, had already begun to construct and command his own political clientele at the provincial level, apparently independently of Eusébio’s old baixada and midserra base. All of this saquarema work was necessary. Even in the Paraíba Valley, in the planters’ old bailiwicks, the elections were highly contested; the purchase of votes was public knowledge. If this was so there, one can imagine the struggle in the coastal towns and in other provinces. Since Paraná’s day, a mere four years ago, certain parishes, most particularly in towns, had been weaned away from saquarema control and had even become Liberal redoubts. There, over the course of the 1850s, the new socio-economic interests of liberal professionals, the urban middle class, and urban entrepreneurs had emerged and become politically articulated. Such emergent urban elements had financial and economic interests increasingly distinct from those of the old planter-merchant elites. Their milieu and their representatives provided the context and the pressure for the 1857 banking reforms of Sousa Franco. It was these elements who responded to the saquaremas’ financial policies with frustration and fury, particularly as

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the impact of the bust and saquarema solutions took their toll in urban centers such as Rio and Salvador. Such interests had provided clear and clamorous support for the financial reforms and for the resurgent Liberals and the Conservative moderates who supported them. They now invested cash and influence, particularly in the cities, to contest the elections.100 The new congeries of urban elements is suggested by a flowering in both literary and polemical work in the periodical press. It was an inchoate mingling of the second wave of Brazilian Romanticism, the Progress so closely raveled with economic Liberalism, and the frustrations and ambitions of a younger generation of urban intellectuals who identified their careers with political and economic change. Nothing speaks to this so obviously as the Corréio Mercantil, already identified as a Liberal paper in the late 1840s, which flourished in the 1850s as the great champion of this emerging combination of forces. The paper owed its importance to Otaviano, the Corréio’s chief political editor after 1854, and one of the most influential Liberals of the era. Uruguai once described him as a “black thug,” a racialized reference to his formidable partisanship. Fluminense, the mulatto son of a surgeon, Otaviano had taken a São Paulo degree in 1845, achieving early fame as a noted poet and littérateur. This literary facility lent itself to political journalism, a common path at the time, and he had been quickly recruited into Aureliano’s political machine as his secretary during the favorite’s presidency of the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Otaviano’s talents, connections, and ambitions allowed him to bridge the first and second generations of the Liberals—beginning as Aureliano’s protégé in the 1840s, by the 1850s his celebrated reformism (and a smart marriage) allowed him to set down deep roots among the emerging urban elements at issue here, and he himself became the protector for the younger Liberals looking for a voice and a medium in the Court. His strength was such that he was elected a deputy out of Rio by 1853, even under the saquarema administration of the time. By 1858 his “attic” style had reached its full flower; he was the standardbearer for a generation and a bloc of interests who were pressing for change. 101 As did the Jornal do Commercio, the most established daily of the Empire, the Corréio Mercantil also published literature, following the French fashion of the feuilleton roman. Indeed, Justiniano José da Rocha began this in 1839 as the translator and first Brazilian author of such serial novels in the Jornal. The third most important daily of the era, the re-born Diário do Rio de Janeiro, began its Liberal phase in 1860, as the great pulpit of [Joaquim de] Saldanha Marinho (1816–1895). Like Otaviano, Saldanha Marinho bridged the Liberal generations, a veteran of the first and a protector and leader of the second. An Olinda graduate (1836) and provincial magistrate from Ceará, he came to the Court a Liberal militant and deputy for that province in 1848, and endured the Conserva-

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tive years afterward as a noted Rio lawyer and polemicist. Indeed, the role of his journal in the Liberal shift in the Rio electorate is denoted by his election in 1860. Many of the journalists who came to work with Saldanho Marinho were graduates of the celebrated literary salon associated with the Liberal [Francisco de] Paula Brito (1809–1861), whose seminal literary periodical, Marmota (1849–1861), and bookshop press on the Praça da Constituição (now Praça Tiradentes), together made up a noted intellectual center for young and ambitious literary men, most of them Liberal. One of them, now a new reporter for the Diário, was an obscure mulatto journalist, translator, and poet, [Joaquim Maria] Machado de Assis (1839–1908)—later Brazil’s foremost novelist. Indeed, as has been suggested earlier, literature and political journalism were crucial avenues of social mobility for talented mulattos of the era, among them Justiniano José da Rocha, Torres Homem, Otaviano, and Paula Brito himself.102 It was this electric new urban Liberalism with which the saquaremas had to contend in Rio and the larger towns. Elsewhere, the terrain had not changed so dramatically; the challenge was not new urban interests so much as frayed partisan loyalty in the wake of the Conciliation. To capture or recapture parishes, north and south, the saquarema senatorial leadership exhorted the disillusioned and divided ranks of the old party. Even Uruguai emerged from his study. In a very significant gesture, he reached out to Pedro Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, visconde de Camaragibe (1806–1875), an heir and chieftain of the old Pernambuco Conservatives with whom he had feuded when a minister. The message to Camaragibe, apparently designed for circulation, was clearly intended as the saquarema call to arms: It seems to us that there is an almost complete discouragement and lack of belief in the country; that there is a great lack of connection between the men who could exercise some beneficent influence, above all between men of the South and of the North; that all is becoming individualized, such that, with faith in men and affairs being lost, egoism and personal calculations and interests have almost finished erasing the few civic virtues that remain to us. All of this is suddenly upon us in the next elections. Each person cares only for himself, and, at most, his personal interests. In the state in which our affairs are, we believe that if the next Legislature were poorly put together, and, above all, put together with inexperienced and unknown people who only have in view putting themselves forward and opening a path for themselves, public affairs, already in such a poor state, must worsen a great deal. Thus, it seems to us appropriate that honest men who exercise some influence in their Provinces should apply it to support the re-election of those deputies who have already proven themselves followers of good principles. . . . For all of these reasons there must be solidarity and reciprocal help between men who see the state of the country, its needs and solutions, in the same way. They must join hands and it is an obligation of faith for those who are stronger to help those who are

The Transformation of Politics and the State / 213 weaker. Such behavior may promote the re-establishment of faith and confidence, and drive away or slow down a great deal of the egoism of this epoch which is fatal to everything. We write to Your Excellency, not as though to assume a command with which no one charged us, but as a Citizen who has been concerned and is still concerned with public affairs, who desires the good of his country, [and who] addresses himself to another in the same circumstances who has the same noble desire.103

The 1860 elections, then, provide a telling summation of the Empire’s political reality twenty years after the Majority. In 1840, liberals were a fraction of an opposition minority party most strongly representing the interests of lesser landholding groups in the major provinces and elements from the emergent urban middle sectors, as well as some of the free poor of the port cities. That same year, the party of the Regresso was a majority party dominant in the Court and other port cities and the established export plantations of their nearer hinterlands. In 1860, a glance at the twelve fluminense victors suggests an interesting shift across the Empire. The Court was entirely dominated by a Liberal slate: Otaviano, Saldanha Marinho, and Martinho Álvares da Silva Campos (1816–1888). However, with the exception of [Luís] Pedreira [do Couto Ferraz], the emperor’s confidant and a non-partisan veteran of the Conciliation Cabinet, every other fluminense deputy was either a saquarema or a Conservative allied with them at this juncture. Elsewhere, the pattern was similar. The saquarema memoirist, Pereira da Silva, recalled that the loss of Rio was mirrored by that of the towns of São Paulo, Ouro Preto, and São Luís do Maranhão and by the return of great históricos of the 1840s and new firebrands: José Bonifácio’s nephew and namesake, José Bonifácio, o moço, and Tavares Bastos, who rapidly emerged as the most noted Liberal publicist of the 1860s. He also notes, however, the striking victory of the Conservatives over all.104 These results suggest two factors of enduring importance. First, the greater towns had become Liberal bailiwicks. Second, despite this, the Liberals remained a minority party in the nation, as demonstrated now in election results relatively untarnished by cabinet electoral intervention and shaped by the postParaná reforms emphasizing local electoral influence. This is worth reflecting upon. As we have seen, Conservatives, after about 1850, suffered from divisions within their party because of regional and provincial resentments, the Conciliation struggle, the consequent impact of local electoral influences, and an associated loss of national and provincial discipline. The moderate and Northern factions had proven very important in their political impact and would prove increasingly significant. Nonetheless, Conservatives, whatever their differences, regrouped in 1860 under the saquarema battle standard and dramatically dominated the returns. Indeed, Pereira da Silva states that the Liberal Party only won around twenty-five seats in a Chamber of 122.105 Thus, the election of 1860

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hardly represents the Liberal hurricane Nabuco alleges. At most, it was an indication of the Liberals’ new alliances and their consequential urban political base. Indeed, whatever the damage done over the years, 1860 was, much more, a demonstration of the saquaremas’ continued national strength and leadership. Let us see how the emperor confronted this.

V. The Emperor’s Party The cabinet, given its mixed party affiliations and the partisan mobilization of the electorate, resigned before the new deputies’ first session of 1861. Almeida Pereira, strengthened in his saquarema sentiments but alarmed by the return of such Liberal rebels as Otoni, was supposed to have precipitated the decision. He may have done so in the hope that the emperor would react as he himself had, and, concerned with the resurgence of Liberal reformism, championed by a minority of formidable political talent, turn to the saquaremas.106 Electoral results would have supported such a solution; such a cabinet would have had the firm support of the Chamber’s preponderant majority. Such a choice, however, would also strengthen the process of partisan radicalization long underway, a process the emperor doubtless found divisive and distasteful. Dom Pedro II apparently sought, rather, to contain this process, and to deflect the Conservative Party back in the direction of non-partisanship. He asked Caxias to lead, a choice for a non-ideological Conservative, but seemingly acknowledged the saquarema electoral results by allowing Sayão Lobato, Eusébio’s old friend, the crucial political portfolios of justice and empire, balancing him out with Paranhos in foreign affairs and finance. The point was made with greater force in less than two months into the new session of 1861; by then, another moderate northerner, Antônio Coelho de Sá e Albuquerque, had been made minister of foreign affairs and Sayão Lobato was removed from empire. The portfolio was given to still another moderate northerner, [José Antônio] Saraiva (1823–1895).107 The emperor’s appointments clearly indicate a rejection of the partisan significance of the Conservative victory. Indeed, they demonstrated the monarch’s decision to deny the Chamber majority and its traditional ideological leadership the control of the state, while ostensibly ceding to the election by appointing a Conservative cabinet. Such finesse had its costs. Caxias and Paranhos paid the price personally in their relations with the saquarema leadership, who, denied direct domination, sought indirect influence over the cabinet through parliamentary manoeuvres. The two ministers drew still closer together, angered by the presumptuous pressure from saquarema chieftains with whom both had served in years gone by. On one occasion, apparently referring to the saquaremas’ refusal of portfolios in the 1850s, Caxias wrote to Paranhos that “I see what

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you meant, with respect to the bizarre behavior of these gentlemen, who do not wish to govern the country, when they are invited to do so, because they prefer to govern the Government. They are completely mistaken about me, since I am not disposed to serve them as a hobbyhorse.”108 On another occasion, Caxias dismissed the saquarema lack of support in the Senate in this fashion: the business of the Senate, to me, is more serious. They took advantage . . . of the absence of Manuel Felizardo and two or 3 of our friends, who did not go there today, to give us a check. It was a defiance. So 2 or 3 senators could not leave home, so as not to vote? I do not know what it is that these Gentlemen want. I am not disposed to tolerate them any more. Only a few of our so-called friends voted [to support us]. . . .109

The two, however, sustained one another, as they had in the aftermath of Paraná’s death in 1857. Then, as now, they confronted a milieu of saquarema hostility. Indeed, Caxias had had to urge Paranhos not to resign in those days, so as to continue to serve the emperor and preserve his chances for a brilliant political career. Paranhos had stayed on, then, and prospered. Now they stood fast together again, serving their monarch, but not their party.110 However, despite their initial ambivalence toward their old allies, Caxias and Paranhos found themselves forced toward the saquaremas to obtain votes. Other moderates, in the cabinet and the Chamber, moved in the other direction. Over the months, under the unremitting radical attacks of Otoni and other históricos, the fissures within the Conservative Party, temporarily overcome in 1860, opened and were replicated within the cabinet. Sá e Albuquerque and Saraiva resigned in August 1861. Saraiva later proclaimed that he had done so after differences with Sayão Lobato. The cuts within the cabinet bled votes in the Chamber. The attrition among moderates and approximation between some of them and the Liberals became manifest. The potential for an antisaquarema opposition majority took shape. Accordingly, the cabinet, during the season of waters, prepared for war, strengthening the traditional saquarema faction of the party across the Empire. It did so knowing it faced a potentially hostile Chamber when the Legislature met again in May 1862, and might need to ask for a dissolution. With saquaremas dominating the electoral machinery, they could “fix” the elections in the traditional manner, ensuring a more loyal majority in a new Legislature. Indeed, once the 1862 session began, the alliance between moderates and Liberals solidified and the cabinet’s remaining supporters constituted a bare majority. The opposition, taking advantage of a few absences among the cabinet’s loyalists one day, called for a vote of confidence, and the cabinet lost it by a single vote. Caxias, as anticipated, went to São Cristóvão with his ministers and asked the emperor for a dissolution; unexpectedly, the emperor refused. Caxias was profoundly shocked and humiliated, for he thought they had had an understanding. Although, in fact, the emperor

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had discussed a possible dissolution with Caxias, he had subsequently decided privately not to grant one to the cabinet, knowing it would use it to fix the election of a saquarema Chamber. The emperor seems to have arrived at a crossroads. He could not resolve the ongoing political contradictions as he had attempted over the 1850s. Time after time, he had appointed non-saquarema cabinets which he apparently had hoped could sustain themselves and dominate the Chamber as Paraná had done, and carry out the policies associated with the Conciliation. Instead, his ministers had faced an increasingly radicalized, partisan Parliament, culminating in the electoral victory of the old saquarema leadership in 1860 and the polarized, partisan Chamber seated in 1861. A dissolution now and a fixed election under saquarema auspices in 1862 would merely give him a saquarema Chamber and outrage the moderate-Liberal opposition alliance which had developed, and the Liberals would obviously attack the interventionism of the emperor again and continue the process of radicalization in and outside of the Chamber. Despite Caxias’s pained response to the decision, the emperor had decided that a more novel solution was required.111 It may have been Nabuco de Araújo, one of the most prominent of the moderate Conservatives, who best anticipated the emperor’s new strategy, just before the opposition’s fatal vote of confidence. He suggested a political alliance, a league, an ideological oxymoron of a non-partisan party, led by moderate Conservatives in the cabinet and supported by the históricos, younger Liberals, and the moderates of both traditional parties in the Chamber. The speech had been made 20 May 1862. The vote of confidence took place 21 May, suggesting that the emerging alliance had a majority (if only by one). The Caxias cabinet, denied the Chamber’s dissolution by the emperor, had no recourse, and resigned. On 24 May, Zacarias (Nabuco de Araújo’s political ally and the parliamentary leader of the new league) accepted the emperor’s nod and formed a League cabinet of mixed moderates and Liberals.112 This was, in effect, a bald attempt to ram the monarch’s domination and his dissatisfaction with the threat of saquarema hegemony down the throat of the Chamber. It was a clear miscalculation, based on the assumption that Caxias’s loss by one vote on one day was indicative of the anti-saquarema opposition’s consolidation of a vigorous majority. Dom Pedro had overplayed his hand; the new cabinet, even with the clear support of the monarch and with its obvious potential for massive patronage, still could not cull a firm majority. Perhaps the ideological and partisan mobilization of the election of 1860 and the last two years had made such open political manipulation of the system simply too unpalatable, particularly for a Conservative majority, no matter how reduced. Saraíva crowed the opposition alliance’s new name—the Progressive League— and was laughed at by the Conservatives. The League cabinet lost a vote of con-

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fidence by six votes within an unprecedented few days. It was consequently called the Cabinet of the Anjinhos, a reference to infants dead shortly after birth. Like his predecessor, Zacarias then sought the desperate recourse of the Chamber’s dissolution by the emperor. To grant it would obviously expose the emperor far too much and also have led to an election far more contentious and destabilizing than any previous. The cabinet, again like its predecessor, was thus compelled to resign. The emperor, in the aftermath of this disaster, seems to have retreated a step. Again, he attempted to have his way by choosing between various amenable moderates. In the end, he settled upon one of them, a seasoned statesman, to manage the divided Chamber with greater skill.113 On 30 May 1862, the marquês de Olinda announced his formation of a cabinet at the emperor’s behest. It was quickly ridiculed by contemporaries as the Ministry of the Aged. It was dominated by Olinda (Empire), his old cohort, Caetano Maria de Lopes Gama (since 1854, visconde de Maranguape, now minister of justice), and Miguel Calmon (visconde de Abrantes in 1841, marquês de Abrantes in 1854), appointed minister of foreign affairs. Essentially, it was not only another northern cabinet of moderate Conservatives, but a cabinet of elderly statesmen long detached from the saquaremas and their party’s concerns, grown old in Crown service. The essentially non-partisan quality of this “Conservative” cabinet was made clearer still by the presence of that old Liberal, Holanda (since 1854, visconde de Albuquerque) as minister of finance. Indeed, there was even a nod towards the new Progressive League; the minister for agriculture, [João Lins Vieira Cansansão de] Sinimbu, was a League adherent. The single most important political signal, however, was Olinda’s appointment. Olinda, born in 1794, was now an old man with a long memory and immense pride, pride injured by numerous past affronts at the hands of the saquaremas. It was Olinda, after all, the last regent, who in 1839 had broken with Vasconcelos and the reactionary party, only to be forced to call upon them for desperate support in 1840, without being able to avoid the humiliation of resignation despite it. He was also the prime minister who had been dismissed from the saquarema cabinet in 1849, superseded by a much younger man (Uruguai) who had triumphed in his place. Finally, he had been the prime minister whose financial policies had been savaged by the saquaremas in 1857, leading to his fall in 1858. His ambition for vindication and primacy was hardly obscure; he had struck out against Paraná in 1857, only to take up the man’s policies when he succeeded him. Now, he had encouraged the League against Caxias and the saquaremas. The session of 1862, after his ascent as prime minister again, made clear that his capacity, even as a senior statesman of the party, to renew respect and compel obedience among Conservatives was nil. More important, over the session’s course, it became clear that he had little interest in doing either.114 If unresolved, such a stalemate threatened increasing Chamber hostility and

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the sort of Conservative opposition which had toppled him in 1858 (and Zacarias in 1862). Olinda seems to have anticipated this and began to prepare new political support elsewhere. The key ministry for patronage and elections was, as always, justice. That portfolio, first held by Maranguape, was passed to Sinimbú, the League man. In 1862, during the legislative recess of the season of waters, the saquaremas were outraged by Sinimbú’s sudden purge of Conservatives from key positions affecting elections and patronage throughout the Empire. In their place, Sinimbú inserted moderates and even Liberals. In effect, the League was in control. The portent for the Chamber was obvious.115 Perhaps partly for this reason, in the session of 1863 the Conservative majority of the Chamber did not threaten Olinda. Instead, it sought to maintain the most congenial support, probably fearing dissolution and an election under League auspices. Certainly, they might also have done so to sustain Olinda in a foreign-affairs crisis with the English (the so-called “Christie Affair”).116 To no avail. In mid–1863, Olinda made his move. He asked the emperor for a dissolution and new elections, arguing that his allegedly non-partisan cabinet could do little with the partisan Chamber it faced. This, despite a lack of any significant Chamber challenge to his policies. Yet, this time, Dom Pedro II granted Olinda what he had refused Caxias and Zacarias. Despite the verdict of the 1860 election, the emperor, unwilling to put up further with saquarema domination of the Chamber, pressure on cabinets, or domination of the elections, now gave Olinda a free hand to rearrange the political landscape, effectively reversing the 1860 Conservative triumph. He dissolved the Chamber and allowed Olinda to carry out voting under the auspices of the anti-saquarema opposition alliance, the emergent Progressive League.117 The campaign indicated the nature of the League. Born in Rio, as all parties had been, it now had the opportunity and the need to create partisans across the Empire. The alliance’s leadership promised whatever was required to that end; without local support, it would not get the deputies it needed to form up an amenable majority. In Liberal redoubts, the cabinet’s agents promised the opportunity of revenge and resurgence; in Conservative redoubts, they promised new opportunity for defeated rivals and moderates to recover; in places where neither party had dominated, they offered ambitious new men places in a new party with obvious Crown support. Perhaps needless to say, where patronage alone did not suffice, violence was not shirked. The newly elected Chamber was thus one in which various minority fractions across the Empire, often with old enmities and ideological divergencies between them, made an opportune alliance and came together to serve the cabinet and the emperor in exchange for position, patronage, and, in the case of the resurgent históricos, the longed-for chance to recover the ground lost since 1848.118

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The saquaremas did not even attempt to contest the election in the Court. Indeed, the deputies elected from the Province of Rio de Janeiro suggest how devastating their rout was. In a defeat unrivaled since 1844, no saquarema was elected in the province that they had dominated since 1837. The Chamber was almost exclusively ligueiro, former Conservative moderates and Liberals of one stripe or another (moderates, históricos, younger reformists). Only a halfdozen Conservatives were admitted at all—others had their elections overturned. From 1863 to 1867, Conservatives were heard almost exclusively in the Senate, where their aging chieftains had fortified themselves. There, they welcomed Paranhos (rewarded by the emperor with a senatorial chair in 1862). Like his friend, Caxias (but unlike another friend, Nabuco de Araújo), Paranhos remained a Conservative, however moderate. He had left the Liberals after 1848, had triumphed among the Conservatives in elections and cabinets of the 1850s, and had lost an election to the Liberals in 1860; apparently, his partisan bonds, such as they were, remained with his second party. Now he had a chance to regain a position among its chieftains after the estrangement of the recent past, and he welcomed it. From the Senate, then, the party held out, obstructing and criticizing the cabinet and its Chamber majority. Called the “oligarchy” or the “fortress” by the Liberal press, the saquaremas in particular used the Senate to attack the triumphant Progressive League’s chieftains and the ligueiro deputies for the opportunist abandonment of ideological and partisan loyalty.119 Olinda thus had his revenge and seated a Chamber dominated by the weak, unstable components of a party born under the monarch’s hand, in antagonism to the saquaremas. Now, he decided that his work was done and that the task of attempting fusion of these components was best left to the progressista chieftains. He and his cabinet resigned when the new Legislature met in a special session, called in January 1864. It was then, in the midst of the season of waters, that the emperor called Zacarias to São Cristóvão again to manage the emergent alliance that he and Nabuco de Araújo had cultivated since 1862. No one in his new cabinet was an experienced statesman, although two were Liberal survivors of Zacarias’s ephemeral cabinet of 1862; it would be Zacarias who dominated. Zacarias, like Nabuco de Araújo, was essentially a solitary political figure, rather than a party man. Also, like Nabuco de Araújo, he had risen quickly within the ranks of the northern Conservatives on the strength of his intellectual capacity and oratorical distinction. A protégé of Gonçalves Martins and a rival of Wanderley, Zacarais had once been critical of the Conciliation. Nonetheless, he had not committed to the ideology of the saquaremas or the larger Conservative Party’s discipline. During the post-Conciliation years of intense local political rivalry in the north, he had apparently left the shadow of

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Gonçalves Martins’ Bahian faction and, like Nabuco de Araújo, sought his own path. Both men agreed on the need for shedding party discipline and exclusivism. Both agreed on the need for moderate reforms away from the authoritarian state designed by the reactionaries of 1837–1841. Both were critical of the emperor’s role and tended to believe in an increased restriction of that role and enhancement of cabinet power. Yet, as we have seen and will see again, they were quite willing to accept Dom Pedro’s intervention when it served their political interests.120 Thus Zacarias accepted power again in 1864. He did so, however, only to find that he could not forge a new party in the Chamber. The Liberals, in particular, made it clear that they were unwilling merely to accept the League and its progressista chieftains in exchange for patronage. Between the League leadership and the progressistas and the Liberals in the Chamber, the latter were obviously the most ideologically coherent and partisan element. Moreover, galvanized by the electoral successes of 1860 and 1863 under the charismatic leadership of Otoni, they sensed that, finally, their day was coming. Indeed, by 1865, Chamber divisions between a progressista minority and growing Liberal majority, as well as the emperor’s disappointment and consequent, flagging support, combined to force Zacarias’s resignation and the ascent of the first Liberal cabinet since 1848. The emperor, plainly trying to contain the Liberals, had decided to abandon Zacarias and throw the Liberal majority a ghostly victory—a Liberal cabinet too weak to threaten him but partisan enough to take the wind out of the Liberals’ reproaches and ambitions. Such a solution was a return to the same failed strategy he had attempted time and again with either party—the Liberals in the 1840s, the Conservatives in the 1850s. By appointing a prime minister and cabinet whose political and personal strength were too weak to threaten him, he created a dependent political instrument and stymied the more radical elements in the Chamber pressing for clear and forceful direction along their ideological lines.121 This cabinet, headed by Francisco José Furtado (d. 1870), was weaker and more inexperienced than Zacarias’s administration. Although it enjoyed support from the Liberals in the Chamber (and guarded silence from the disappointed progressista minority), it nonetheless rose and fell between the very end of one legislative session and the bare beginning of another, from 31 August 1864 to 12 May 1865. No doubt it would have proved vulnerable under any circumstances, but it was felled by a particularly ferocious brace of crises: a new banking crisis in 1864 and the onset of war in the Platine region. Once again, as had happened in 1848 when conflicts with England and Argentina had threatened, or in 1857, with the first financial crisis, the emperor was understandably uncomfortable with a weak administration at his right hand. The cabinet re-

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signed, mindful of its own incapacity under the circumstances, and embarrassed by the first Chamber vote in May.122 The emperor, anxious, fumbled around for an experienced or respected statesman, someone who might command some authority in the thoroughly divided chamber. Abaeté refused him, and Saraíva could not recruit a cabinet, failing him. Nabuco de Araújo refused to try, again failing him. Olinda, finally, did not refuse or fail, accepting not only the prime ministry but the portfolio for empire. Olinda and the emperor then desperately pieced together what was effectively a national-unity cabinet to carry on the war. Nabuco de Araújo was made minister of justice; the Liberals were to have been appeased with appointments to foreign affairs and finance. The candidates, however, refused or resigned, and were replaced by weaker men. Ferraz, now independent but personally respected, took war. Understandably, the cabinet came to be characterized by internal bickering and policy incoherence. Still, it endured fifteen months until, in their second legislative session, Olinda, aged and worn by the divisions in the cabinet and Chamber, beaten down by the increasing pressure of the Liberals, and harried by the saquaremas in the Senate, finally requested his dismissal. The collapse was hastened by the unmanaged financial crisis that made the cabinet’s political frailty and divisions ruinous, especially in a milieu clamorous with the demands of war.123 Yet the emperor was still unwilling to turn to the históricos or newer militants among Liberals, despite their strength in the Chamber. Their established position against his constitutional role probably made this impossible. He was thus forced, once again, back to the progressista camp. This time, the widening chasm between Liberals and progressistas was not bridged, however, it was widened. For the third time, Zacarias accepted power under Dom Pedro II, but this time, he recruited a cabinet entirely made up of progressistas. He was determined to demonstrate his capacity and that of his fraction of the League, and he was determined to do so by discarding the Liberals and winning the war.124 In 1866, after two years of continued criticism, dissent, and demands from the Liberals, Zacarias presided over elections designed to weaken their pressure. The break between progressistas and Liberals was a ferocious one, made especially bitter by Zacarias’s successful attempt to use the old measures of coercion, corruption, and violence to deny many of the Liberals seats in the new Legislature.125 In the end, when Zacarias faced the Chamber in May 1867, it was divided between his own progressistas and radicals from the two traditional parties: those históricos and younger Liberal firebrands who had survived the cabinet’s electoral tactics and a small group of saquaremas whose local electoral strength triumphed over the divided efforts of their progressista and Liberal enemies. Thus

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profiting from the League’s fatal break up, these few saquaremas entered the Chamber after more than four years of political exile, embittered by Olinda’s 1863 betrayal and cynical at the emergence of the progressistas (in their perception, an opportunist party of moderate renegades without principles).126 Their disillusion and anger with the current political realities darkened their view of politics as they took their seats. However, bitter disillusionment was only a portion of the cup passed to them in 1867. They would also taste the challenge of the ongoing war and financial crisis and, most unexpectedly, a new threat to a fundamental institution of their party and their society—a threat to slaveholding. In the closing dusk, their succor was in the capacity of their chieftains. For they would find their way lighted by the prestige of the remaining saquarema chieftains in the Senate—and in the Chamber, they would be led into the night by Paulino.

chapter six

Abolition, War, and the Vindication of Constitutional Government: 1867-1871 It is appropriate to keep very much in view . . . that the Moderating Power, by the nature and scope of its attributes, separate from those of the Executive, cannot intervene, cannot usurp. It can restrict movement; it cannot, alone, undertake it and bring it into effect: the most that it can effect is the conservation of that which exists, for a time. It is power not of movement, but essentially of conservation. .... As important as the role that may be appropriate to the Emperor, as Chief of the Executive Power in that Body, he is not the Body itself. The Ministers, because of the very fact that they are responsible, cannot be passive agents. They can say to their Chief—I am the responsible one, and I do not take upon myself that responsibility. —Visconde do Uruguay, Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo (1862), 2:48, 55.

Paulino’s rise among saquaremas had been extremely rapid after the drama of his 1858 debut. He had taken paternal admonition to heart as a young man; his very signature then is modeled on his father’s, as was his detail and preparation. Rarely making an aparte from his Chamber bench, he only spoke after timely meditation. His first speech had been met with profound attention and culminated in heartfelt congratulations, possibly born of relief, for the saquaremas were in need of a leader in the Chamber. Their great captains had all retreated into their Senate fortress, and some of the most capable had drifted towards moderate opportunism. The era was widely perceived to be one of decline, corruption, and estrangement among the party’s leaders; Paulino’s position was all the more sharply drawn by contrast.1

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I. Conservative Party Leadership by the 1860s Despite Paulino’s youth, this role might well have seemed fitting. Who else had such a clear claim upon the saquarema mantle? When Paulino stood in mid 1858, he raised his voice in a Chamber where the echo of his kin was still faint. He was not only the son of Uruguai, but the nephew of Itaboraí. His antecedents and obvious talents brought him the offer of a portfolio from Caxias in 1861, but he refused it. Uruguai advised against accepting so early. He himself may also have recognized the offer for what it seems, an attempt to woo him with position in the hope that he could help garner saquarema support for a moderate Conservative cabinet, a cabinet in clear contradiction to the saquarema electoral victory of 1860. It was not the last time Paulino showed himself uninterested in position for its own sake. He did not want to use his place among saquaremas to vault forward alone; he was willing to hold back and wait, to redeem his heritage among them.2 In 1859, his father corresponded about his son’s marriage, noting the bride’s distinction as the daughter of a planter of wealth. It was not simply wealth Paulino found in wedding, it was a new status as a planter, for the bride’s inheritance included a coffee plantation in the Cantagalo region of the Paraíba Valley—Val de Palmas. The wedding took place at the foot of the Morro da Glória, in the town residence of Itaboraí’s brother, Cândido José Rodrigues Torres. So many party ties knotted together at once. Son of Uruguai, the principle living ideologue of the saquaremas, the man who had apprenticed with the party’s founding ideologue, Vasconcelos, the younger Paulino was now marrying in the home of a noted a fluminense merchant, the brother of his uncle. His uncle, in turn, was a fluminense planter of the baixada and a past saquarema prime minister. His mother’s people were all baixada planters, and his maternal uncle, João Álvares de Macedo, was a principle saquarema provincial political chieftain. His maternal grandfather held an Itaboraí plantation, Itaporacá, which had been in the family for generations, the same plantation on which he himself first saw the light of day. Now, he, too, was a planter, but in the serra, the frontier of the provincial coffee boom. In a phrase, Paulino’s birth and marriage raveled his personal affairs tightly into the great strands of fluminense power and status—old baixada sugar, port commerce, new serra coffee, and the reactionary party founded in the Court—Paulino’s new position and established origins embodied them all.3 Thus, in the 1860s, when the emperor’s party, the Progressive League, triumphed in cabinet and Chamber and the saquaremas were thrown back into the Senate and their provincial holdings to lick their wounds and contemplate the political devastation of the Conservative Party, Paulino apparently did two

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things. He cultivated his own fazenda, and, as his father advised in those days, he undertook to reorganize the party in the province where it had first gained strength. Eclipsed in the Court, he understood the party needed to renew its strength by touching the earth of the province.4 Uruguai had admonished his son once about the danger of staying too long in Europe.5 Indeed, upon his return from the Continent, Paulino’s distaste for politics and fluminense rural life and his longing for the pleasures of Civilization were sharp. In a letter of 1857, his first year in the Chamber, Paulino described the political confusion and ideological incoherence. He noted the rise of the Conservative opposition, in which he would come to play a central role, with complete detachment. He noted his longing for his brief days as an attaché with regret: In the midst of all this, here I am, recalling a Europe which I do not see the probability of revisiting as early as I desired. Every day I convince myself more of the goodness of your counsel to continue in diplomacy: I would have availed myself of it if circumstances, whose weight I alone can measure, had not forbidden it. Matters here move only impelled by nature, and our men think that we live in the richest, in the most powerful country on earth.6

Later on that year, after quoting from the Marriage of Figaro (in French, of course) to deride the provincial complacency of the political world in Rio, Paulino noted a visit to Cantagalo, “the richest and best cultivated county of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, and therefore, of the Empire.”7 Perhaps he was courting his future wife; yet, however moved by wealth and beauty, it is clear he still found Brazil distasteful. It was unpleasant wherever one lived: “I write to you from Cantagalo, where I have been vacationing for a month and a half. The stuffy heat of Rio obliges me to come in search of some air in these mountains: Shortly, I shall return, because our countryside is only tolerable for days.”8 And, again, in 1858, Paulino noted his desire to return to Paris or to Italy at the first opportunity.9 After mocking the “marvels and grandeurs of the new continent” he added “The man who has lived in those old countries where (as the patriots here say) all is refinement and artifice, cannot but admire the simplicity and natural quality of those here, beginning with the poets who are inspired by the Tupinambás and the banana trees.”10 By November 1858, however, such arch phrasing has evaporated from his letters.11 After the conclusion of that year’s legislative session Paulino had apparently overcome his regret for “refinement and artifice” and come to understand and embrace the calling his father had heard a quarter-century before. It was in 1858 that Paulino had made his political debut as an orator in the Conservative opposition, and, if his correspondence is any indication, he never looked back. His letters scatter the perfunctory phrases about the pleasures of his past diplo-

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matic days in Europe, but contempt for Brazilian affairs has passed, and he shares knowledgable details about the politics of the day. Paulino had already become what his father had demanded: his continuation, his heir, the keeper of the faith to his families, to his party, to what he had become himself. Indeed, unlike his father, Paulino not only spoke for planter kith and kin, he was a planter himself, and he lived among other planters every year, returning to his own land during the season of waters. He no longer looked to Europe, nor saw the Court as though from London or Paris. Indeed, it could be said that when he looked to the port capital, he did so from the mountainous, forested interior of the province—from the inside, out.12 Other protégés of the old chieftains had other paths to the Court. They speak to the divisions within the Conservative Party after the Conciliation Cabinet of 1853–1857. Paraná’s and Uruguai’s protégé, Paranhos, provides us with a precise opposite of Paulino in his origins and, not coincidentally, in his political choices in the 1850s and 1860s. Paranhos was as much an orphan as an heir of Paraná, who had sized him up and grasped him as a tempered instrument for his own use. Paraná had dismissed Paranhos’s Liberal antecedents, and thrust him into the ranks of fluminense Conservative deputies in the 1850s. From the very beginning, however, they held Paranhos at arm’s length; they remembered him too well as Aureliano’s aide in the provincial purges of the 1840s.13 Nor did Paranhos’s origins recommend him to the prejudices of the fluminense elite: he was the illegitimate son of a Portuguese merchant and a Bahian lady from a military family. His father had died early; his mother, caught up in legal disputes over his father’s estate, had no fortune to sustain him. Paranhos had thus pursued the career of his maternal relations, leaving Salvador for the Court and the Military Academy at sixteen. He flourished there as a cadet, staving off penury by teaching others on the side. The next step, to an academic career, was obvious. In these humble beginnings, he married a classmate’s sister—Teresa de Figueiredo Faria—for love. He had little else to offer, and probably no introductions to the dowered daughters of merchants or planters.14 Few would have anticipated Paranhos’s startling career from such beginnings. But those few were significant. It was an ascent through unusual talent and select personal patronage, with his eyes fixed early but firmly on advancement and honor in Crown service. The emperor first noted him distinguishing himself as a brilliant professor in the Military School. It was then, too, that he met and impressed Holanda, who took him up among the Liberals, where Aureliano found him useful. Thence, his rapid climb from professor to Liberal deputy and provincial vice president to political journalist, and then to Paraná’s side, to Conservative deputy, and to minister. By the mid–1850s, as minister of

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foreign affairs in the Conciliation Cabinet, Paranhos distributed patronage himself; it was he who granted Uruguai the favor of his son’s diplomatic European post. Paranhos would take up portfolios in the moderate Conservative cabinets of Abaeté and Caxias, as well. Known for his early success in the Platine diplomacy of 1851–1852, he was requested for missions there in 1857 and 1865. Although he shared his party’s reverses in the 1860 campaign, failing to win a seat as deputy from the Court, he was appointed a minister again in 1861, slipped into the Chamber as a deputy from Sergipe that same year, and then achieved the great eminence of the Senate in 1862. All of these last victories were manifest rewards for his service to his newest patron and friend, Caxias, as well as to the emperor, whose policies he had pursued skillfully at home and abroad.15 In the 1860s Senate, Paranhos approximated the old saquaremas again, despite his past association with the moderate Conservative ministries of 1853–1862. The humiliating 1862 resignation of the Caxias cabinet, of which he was a member, seems to have driven him and others back under the saquaremas’ battlestandard. Now, in the 1863 Conservative opposition that followed the rise of the Progressive League, he joined Itaboraí, Uruguai, Eusébio and the others in attacking Olinda and then the successive League or Liberal cabinets of the 1860s. Paranhos remained a Conservative, after all; he had turned his back on the the Liberals in the 1840s, he could hardly expect to be welcomed among their allies now. And, despite this background, the saquaremas found his celebrated rhetorical strength useful in this desperate struggle. In turn, his new rapprochement with the saquaremas was subsequently shored up by their support during a shocking personal embarrassment in 1865.16 This 1865 reversal was entirely unexpected. Paranhos, appointed plenipotentiary minister in the thickening Uruguayan struggle by the Liberal administration of Furtado, had just achieved the Convention of 20 February, consolidating Brazilian successes. Then, suddenly, he was recalled in disgrace. In sorting out the claims of an admiral who had attacked Paranhos’s conduct of affairs, the cabinet, under great partisan pressure, had decided against Paranhos. He was sent word of his recall without warning, news he received presiding at a public banquet in Montevideo. Such a decision necessarily implied the concurrence of the emperor. The cabinet’s ingratitude, poor judgment, and precipitous decision were acts which scandalized the Conservative Party chieftains. For Paranhos, excepting the defeat (again, at Liberal hands) in the 1860 election, it was the first set-back of his career, and one which was both public and palpably unjust.17 Paranhos had always made his way by great personal merit and the support of powerful older men who appreciated what he could do (and do for them).

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Since 1856, the most important support had come, both indirectly and directly, from Dom Pedro II. Now, the emperor’s support had been denied him when he might have most assumed it. It seems clear that his great personal pride, something possibly linked to deep personal insecurities about his origins and early struggles, had been suddenly gored, and precisely at a moment of great international triumph. Upon his return to the Court, his pique with the emperor led to the unprecedented decision to avoid the customary beijamão at the palace after arrival. Despite their support for Paranhos, this was too much for the saquaremas; rumors of his disrespectful slight spread quickly. Eusébio, advised of the affair while seeking a European cure in the last months of his fatal illness, was moved to scribble a judicious reprimand. Aged, ill, and increasingly blind, Eusébio’s tact and words frayed a bit, but remained clear enough: They sent me news from there that Your Excellency, on the occasion of your arrival, did not go to pay your respect to the emperor. Perhaps because I cannot judge well from here, it seems to me that you did not do well. The Emperor Ought always to be outside our questions, even when it might seem to us, when someone is a person of confidence, that one ought not to agree to sacrifice the person who was sacrificed. But I have such confidence in the mettle of Your Excellency that I suspend my judgment.18

Paranhos’s mettle was, indeed, sorely tested. He was a man clearly willing to serve Crown and cabinet, even a Liberal one, but he could not bear the accusation of dishonorable or incompetent behavior. He waited until the legislative session was underway and then appeared in the Senate, to clear his name, a public response Caxias had advised. The weak Liberal cabinet which had betrayed him had since resigned, but they, clearly, were not the audience Paranhos intended. He sought the approbation of the political elite and the ear of his monarch. He gained both. Although Paranhos had published an open letter upon hearing of his dismissal, it was this Senate speech which contemporaries recalled as vindicating his political stature. Machado de Assis, present as a political journalist, later recalled that I turned out to see that day, and it seems I still see it now. Galleries and tribunes were full of people; many political men or simply the curious were admitted to the Senate chamber. It was one in the afternoon when the [Senate] president gave the floor to the senator. . . . Paranhos was accustomed to speak with moderation and calm, he extended his fingers, raising them to make a slow and sober gesture or now to pull at his shirt cuffs, and he projected his voice in meditated and expressive fashion. On that day, however, the anxiety to produce his defense was such that the first words were more shouted than said: “It is not vanity, Mr. President. . .” After an instant, his voice returned to its habitual level, and the speech continued as on other days. It was nine at night when he finished: it was then as it had been at the beginning, no sign of fatigue about him nor the audience, which applauded him. It was one of the deepest impressions parliamentary eloquence has left me. The furor abated with the events, his defense was complete.19

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The emperor was clearly unwilling to lose such a man, and his favorites, the progressistas, made clear their support, publicly and privately. As he had done with the very capable Paraná, the monarch soon found a way to demonstrate his continued support for a statesman after humiliating him publicly. In 1866, with the support of Zacarias’s progressista cabinet, the emperor appointed Paranhos, a Conservative, to the highest political rank in the monarchy: councillor of state. For a time, while they still lived, Paranhos sat among the surviving founders of the Party of Order as their equal.20 One of them, Uruguai, Paranhos’s one-time protector, had just gone. In the early morning of 15 July 1866, the visconde, for a long time depressed and ailing from a stroke, died suddenly of another. He met death in a rented home near Paraná’s palacête, on the road to Botafogo; he had never been rich. Indeed, Paulino was compelled by family circumstances to ask the prime minister for a pension to sustain the viscondessa and her younger children in suitable fashion. The household goods of his father, this prematurely aged senator, councillor, and party chieftain, were put up for auction. Those who appreciated the finer things were invited to view Uruguai’s European prints and landscapes, French beds and desks, traditional Brazilian furniture of mahogany and jacaranda, French silver and crystal, and fine porcelain from Sèvres and Saxony. There were also books, more than a hundred single and multi-volume sets. Among these were many copies of the two careful studies to which he had consecrated the years of his retirement from militant politics: the Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo (1862) and the Estudos práticos sobre a administração das províncias do Brasil (1865). The most recent was a detailed study of the reforms he had thought crucial to revise provincial administration and foster more liberal municipal political practice. A project for future reforms never carried into practice, it is of little moment for our concerns. The earlier of the two studies, however, is a two-volume essay on administrative law which does require some notice, even if it be brief. This work was considered his intellectual legacy to the Conservative Party.21 Derived from his disillusion with partisan and parliamentary strife, the arena, after all, of his public life from 1836 to 1853, the study was also inspired by his observations during the diplomatic mission to Europe he undertook in 1854–1855. He had used his spare time then and upon his return to meditate upon the constitutional history of France, England, and the United States, and its relevance for Brazil.22 In his conclusions, several points of abiding importance are clear. First, his continued insistence that Brazilian society required the adaptation of others’ experience (rather than its imitation) and that it could not be administered without close attention to its particular realities. Among the latter, as he emphasized (and as he had argued in the 1830s and 1840s), the lack

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of a tradition of local participatory government and the presence of a tradition of local tyranny (by which Uruguai, as other saquaremas did, meant the violent disputes and domination of the great families of the provinces).23 Second, Uruguai continued to insist that such realities demanded a highly centralized state to counter-balance such local power and problems, to promote their eradication over time, and to cultivate an ordered, civilized society in their place.24 Third, while he pointed to the need for the reform of the Council of State as the key locus for administrative direction and oversight, Uruguai continued to insist upon the supreme, independent, and beneficent role of the moderating power exercised by the monarch with that council’s experienced advice.25 Fourth, Uruguai consequently rejected Zacarias’s and the Liberals’ contemporary constitutional arguments for the monarch’s limitation. Indeed, Uruguai championed the monarch’s enlightened intervention. Fifth, if Uruguai’s view of the monarch was idealistic, his views on cabinet government were unflinching and cynical. Most strikingly, he made clear his own assumption (and experience) that cabinets in Brazil necessarily depended upon a systematic use of patronage which undercut both the electoral process and the legitimate authority of the Chamber, which, constitutionally, derived from that process.26 In most of these conclusions, Uruguai’s continued faith in the unique division of powers in the Constitution of 1824 and in the Regresso legislation of 1837–1841 is clear. What is also clear, however, is his loss of faith in one of the central aspects of the Regresso constitutionalism of those years as stated and acted upon by the reactionary party leaders, most particularly, Uruguai’s mentor, Vasconcelos. That is, Uruguai no longer had faith in representative government as it had developed in the Empire or in the positive role of the Chamber and its relationship with the cabinet.27 He did, however, retain his faith in the monarch and the Constitution to protect society’s interests and the nation’s future. Uruguai’s analyses were clearly influenced by his experience, and thus reflected his profound pessimism, and that of many saquaremas, regarding the political milieu of the 1850s and 1860s, with its post-ideological corruption and its weak, opportunistic administrations. Yet it is central to recognize that Uruguai clings to the essential hopes that undergirded his life’s work: constitutional clarity, the potential for cultivating liberal civilization, and the positive role of a benevolent state, conflated with its monarch. This last is of signal importance. In contrast with the opinions and efforts of Vasconcelos (who had headed the liberal opposition to the first emperor in the 1820s), in Uruguai’s works concern with the monarch’s abuse, or efforts to enhance and emphasize representative participation in the Chamber and in the cabinet, are both absent. Instead, Uruguai’s hopes for representative government are vested in the future. For the visconde, the possibility of liberal governance in Brazil lay in the

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slow development of a participatory, liberal political tradition, particularly under county government auspices, as a bulwark against extremes and arbitrary statism and as the germ of a more liberal future of representative government. It is the representative government of his time that he has abandoned, not the possibility of the realization of liberal government in the future. Most importantly, there is no fear of the monarch’s intervention at all. In 1862, the threat of the monarch’s unconstitutional intervention against the established social order was something Uruguai did not anticipate. It would be his son, Paulino, who would have to confront that. These issues explain the organization of the Ensaio. The emphasis on constitutional clarity is the most apparent recommendation of the book. The study seeks, first, to distinguish the appropriate roles of the Council of State, the cabinet, and the monarch, to avoid any confusion between constitutional powers (executive and moderating) and vitiation of their proper balance, and to suggest useful reforms to that end. It seeks, second, to emphasize reforms at the base of society and governance, at the level of the county. Here, it speaks to Uruguai’s exceptionalism and liberalism. That is, since Brazil did not have a historically developed political culture of participatory governance, it must create one, in order to brake extreme centralization, to attend to local minutiae, and to create a school for public service and private initiative. The book’s concluding appeal is seemingly to the monarch and to his trained elite. In this, Uruguai recommends the reform of the state to strengthen its beneficent role (maintaining the Empire, oversight of justice and law at all levels of society, and promotion of material and cultural progress), while condemning the over-centralization and executive-power aggrandizement and corruption so apparent in his time. The appeal for a review and a reform of local, county government seems to be the obvious prelude to the two-volume study of provincial administration which Uruguai published in 1865.28 As we shall see, with regard to contemporary representative government, Uruguai’s son and heir would differ with him. Although Paulino, too, considered the 1860s an era of decline and opportunism, he had not given up and retired to his study. It is true that, with his father’s death in 1866 and the triumph of the League, Paulino touched the very bottom of a period of deep personal despair and depression. Yet, he recovered, as did his faith in the institutions for which his father and the other departed party founders had once fought. Perhaps this was because his personal experience of the monarchy was different. More than his father ever had, Paulino figured in the actual contacts and organization of politics in both the Chamber and the province itself. As we shall see, he would live out a deep faith and commitment to the Constitution’s form of representative government as a key balancing component in the direction and

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administration of the state—which was what Vasconcelos had taught. In this way, the younger Paulino remained faithful to a tradition his father had very painfully come to abandon.29 In his deep involvement and leadership in the actual process of representative politics in Rio and the provinces, Paulino was heir to another saquarema chieftain who also passed from the scene in this decade. Eusébio died 11 March 1868, within two years of Uruguai. Despite increasingly wretched health in the later 1860s, his correspondence indicates that he had continued to oversee fluminense politics throughout the elections of 1856–1862. Indeed, his role as leader of saquarema criticism and obstruction in the Senate into the early 1860s was a commonplace in the political journalism of the day. Machado de Assis, new to the Senate then, recalls I heard Eusébio de Queirós speak only one time, and the impression that it left me was lively; he was fluent, abundant, clear without loss of vigor and energy. It was not a speech of attack, but of defense, he spoke in the role of chief of the Conservative Party, or pope; Itaboraí, Uruguai, Saião Lobato and others were the cardinals, and all formed the consistory, according to the celebrated definition of Otaviano in the Corréio Mercantil.30

Apparently like Paulino, Eusébio did not lose his faith in the ideological traditions of their party. Characteristically, he expressed that faith with care and discretion. It was Eusébio who organized the funding and 1862 completion of the celebrated equestrian statue of Dom Pedro I, old enemy of the Regency liberal opposition. It was intended as an allegorical project, but, or so it seems, in more ways than one. The obvious allegories were the figures clustered about the statue’s base, representing features of the Empire. Its indirect allegory was clear in its sponsorship, in the representation of the monarch, and in the speech Eusébio intended to make at its inauguration. All of these composed a message to the progressistas and the monarch that should have been clear; they pointed to the old reactionary assumptions fundamental to the regime, assumptions now besieged. For the statue was explicitly cast in terms of a constitutional, representative monarchy, a regime which had brought lasting order dominating half a continent—and it was a statue paid for by a select group of fluminense planters and merchants, men identified with the saquaremas. This enduring statement of the ideology, achievement, and socio-economic basis for the old Party of Order remains standing in Praça Tiradentes.31 It may have been Eusébio’s last triumph. Two years after his retirement from active politics, Eusébio steamed to Europe for medical consultation. After his return, 1866, still weakening, he had to face the progressistas’ ascendance and the heart-felt absence of Uruguai. Yet, worse was to come. In the quiet of the emperor’s villa at São Cristóvão, in meet-

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ings of the Council of State, he suddenly confronted an unexpected threat. It was one posed by the monarch himself, a threat that neither Eusébio, nor Uruguai, nor Vasconcelos could have anticipated when they helped reconstruct the monarchy. As it was, Eusébio only glimpsed this crisis before descending to the grave; he left the theater before the last act ended. This act, begun in 1867, had as its overture the formal request by Dom Pedro II that Eusébio and the other councillors of state deliberate upon the issue of slavery’s abolition.

II. Abolition, the Constitution, and the Party It was the political commitment of the emperor that was most unanticipated. By 1867, the emperor’s interest in abolition itself could have been no surprise; Eusébio would have heard of it years before. Dom Pedro II had, like his father and a few other statesmen, taken an early view that slavery was a backward, barbaric, and burdensome legacy, unworthy and dangerous to sustain. He participated in one of the earliest organized abolitionist efforts in the Court, in 1856. However, Dom Pedro II had long distinguished between his private opinions and his public role. His decision to join the two in this instance may have derived from foreign events. The emperor may have been concerned about the larger significance of the United States’ intestine struggle in the 1860s. Not because that civil war suggested slavery’s potential for national division. Given the general Brazilian acceptance of slave labor, north and south, whatever the variation in vested interest, a violent regional struggle would have seemed a distant possibility. The emperor may well have been much more preoccupied, instead, with the Empire’s reputation among “civilized” states after the “Emancipation Proclamation” of 1863. Now, Brazil alone among independent nations maintained slavery. The company of the last Spanish colonies only accentuated this embarrassing isolation.32 The English, particularly in the early 1860s, presented an even more direct threat to Brazilian slaveholding. English diplomats to the Court had increasingly pressed their nation’s longstanding policy against slaveholding since 1850. In 1862–1863, this underlay the arrogance of the Christie Affair, and served notice of English willingness to intervene in the Empire on this particular matter. While nothing uncovered to date can determine whether the American or the English factors weighed more upon the emperor, the best evidence suggests that the manifest threat of the English was the heavier.33 After all, after England’s 1850 naval intervention in the African trade, the emperor would have had little doubt of what might happen. Both threats may also have been convenient, facilitating an attack upon an institution the emperor found repugnant and embarrassing. What we do know,

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however, is that they did inform his arguments to others as he pursued a moderate reform that would manifest the Empire’s commitment to abolition, worthy of a state to be counted among respectable nations. It is suggestive that this pursuit may have begun in 1863, precisely the year of American emancipation and Christie’s gunboat diplomacy. However, consistent with the emperor’s discretion and indirect style of action, especially important in regard to this particular issue, someone else took the first public step. Ironically, it was someone intimate with Eusébio [Agostinho Marquês] Perdigão Malheiro [Filho] (1824–1881), a very prominent jurist, a member of the court, and the son (like Eusébio) of a former Supreme Tribunal president, was Eusébio’s brother-in-law and, like him, kinsman to a number of prominent slaveholding planter families. Altogether, he seems a very improbable abolitionist. Yet he gave a speech as president of the prestigious Institute of the Order of Advocates which made his personal and professional concerns about slavery plain. In this speech, Perdigão Malheiro argued for the political necessity of abolition and advocated the practical means of the “free womb.” The latter was a phrase referring to freeing the children born of slave women after a certain date. It was a policy that had the virtue of doing something to destroy future slavery gradually while doing nothing to touch existing property. Perdigão Malheiro’s speech may have been spontaneous; he was an abolitionist personally and would take the unusual and expensive step of freeing his own captives. He was also a man of unsuspected personal integrity. However, Dom Pedro II may have encouraged airing the issue by such a prominent person as a way to introduce the topic into public discussion. In any case, if the monarch’s first public move was indirect, a more important, hidden one was not. Perdigão Malheiro’s 7 September 1863 speech was followed by the emperor’s private 14 January 1864 instructions to Zacarias. In these, Dom Pedro’s new prime minister was directed to consider precisely this means of abolition because, as the emperor advised, “Events in the American Union require us to think about the future of slavery in Brazil, so that what occurred in respect to the slave trade does not happen to us again.”34 Over the course of the next two years or so, as the sudden unraveling of Brazil’s Platine policies demanded increasing attention and the avoidance of unsettling domestic disputes, the emperor and his ministers kept the issue quiet. The emperor, however, did not allow the issue to rest. He apparently asked José Antônio Pimenta Bueno (1803–1878), one of the more noted jurists on the Council of State, to study “free womb” precedents and prepare legislative options. These were brought to the attention of the Olinda cabinet in early January 1866. Olinda, alone among his moderate Conservative and Liberal colleagues, opposed taking it up. The emperor waited. Then, during Zacarias’s

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third administration, later that same year, the emperor forced the issue upon the public. Having received an appeal from an abolitionist committee of distinguished French statesmen, the emperor had his foreign affairs minister reply, in August 1866, that the Empire would address abolition. The political world, irrespective of parties, was shocked.35 In all of this, it was the monarch who initiated.36 This was not within the constitutional limits of his role as the moderating power, nor was it within the constitutional limits of his role as chief of the executive power. Indeed, it contradicts the balance of powers central to the Constitution of 1824. At best, the Constitution allowed the executive power to propose legislation, but even that was not delegated to the chief of that power. Moreover, the provision seems to be intended to address enabling legislation or efficacious reforms with respect to executive-power functions, rather than initiating reforms of broad significance. Thus, such proposals were to be made by the minister to whose portfolio the legislation pertained: “The Executive Power exercises by any of the Ministers of State the proposal [of legislation], which is appropriate to it in the formation of laws.”37 This article was also placed immediately after another specifically emphasizing the parliamentary origin of all legislation: “The proposal, opposition to, and approval of the Projects of Law pertains to each one of the chambers.”38 A proposal for legislation by a minister could become a legislative proposal only after examination by a Chamber committee and redrafting into a legislative project by that committee; only then was it to come before the Chamber for the process of debate, amendment, and passage.39 Yet, having pressed the cabinet to undertake a public commitment to a foreign organization without even broaching the subject in Parliament, the emperor now pressed Zacarias to bring the issue before the Council of State, for the first time, and as though the matter was the cabinet’s concern, rather than his initiative.40 On the evening of 2 April 1867, in the São Cristóvão palace, the Council of Ministers sat down to a meeting with the Council of State, presided over by Dom Pedro II, to discuss a confidential proposal prepared in advance and circulated to them by Zacarias on 1 February.41 After noting the need for considering the extinction of slavery, given the present “state of opinion in the civilized world,” and “to avoid that the incidents rapidly ending the practice not catch the government, to which the initiative properly belonged, unprepared in a matter of such gravity, in order to obviate great misfortune and disturbance” the councillors were asked their opinion on three queries (presumably drafted with the guidance or approval of the emperor). It is important to emphasize that the councillors were asked to respond to queries which clearly accepted abolition as inevitable. The issue was not whether abolition would occur, but whether the state should intervene to facilitate it:

236 / Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government First. Is it convenient to abolish slavery directly? If so, Second. When should abolition take place? Third. How, and with what precautions and planning should this measure be realized?42

These queries had attached to them a printed version of Pimenta Bueno’s research regarding free-womb legislation, making it clear what the emperor’s preferred course of action was. Put baldly, the emperor was forcing the councillors to discuss abolition in general as an inescapable and necessary course of action and pressing them to provide support for state action to carry out his gradualist approach specifically. Despite the way in which the issue was framed, and despite the fact that the emperor’s hand was clear to everyone at the table, the councillors responded apprehensively, however restrained by the respect owed their monarch. Of the twelve councillors, only ten were at the palace; Olinda and the visconde de Sapucai were absent. Although Olinda, a visceral monarchist, did not care to defy Dom Pedro II in his presence (as he had had to do on this issue when prime minister), he did not shirk, and submitted a written opinion. The reading of his opinion, as well as that of those present, provides interesting results. Two councillors refused to be boxed in by the way in which the emperor and Zacarias had tried to circumscribe the deliberations, and they voted against any abolition at all: these were Olinda and the barão de Muritiba, the Bahian saquarema stalwart who had suppressed the praieiros in the 1840s. The other councillors were more adroit. They accepted the free-womb solution, but only with the greatest and most detailed hesitations and stipulations. They all wanted the issue postponed until the ongoing war in Paraguay was ended; they argued that slave insurrection, armed resistance to the measure, and race war demanded widespread military support. They generally argued strenuously for long-term delays and careful demographic studies. They called attention to the fundamental threat to established society and powerful, respectable private interests. In sum, being told by their monarch that they must face up to abolition, two would not, and the others, pressed to support the emperor’s preferred solution, deferred to their monarch, but most only after undercutting their acquiescence by innumerable considerations, grave concerns, and the explicit call for delay and onerous preparation. Only Torres Homem, Sousa Franco, Nabuco de Araújo, and the visconde de Jequitinhonha discussed abolition itself with anything approaching enthusiasm. Pimenta Bueno, now the visconde de São Vicente, did not speak at all.43 No one spoke at greater length about the measure’s perils or with more specific concerns about the wisdom of the proposal than Paranhos. And only Paranhos had the temerity to suggest, barely obliquely, the monarch’s responsibility for raising such a dangerous idea:

Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government / 237 in these moments, even the most daring minds would not agitate for such a reform, if the Imperial Government (your Imperial Majesty will permit me this candor) were not the first to judge that the opportunity had arrived or was very close for such a profound change in the ways of our agricultural establishments.44

It would be difficult, in the face of this record, to suggest that the Council supported the emperor’s project. Certainly, the emperor understood this, for he decided to press still harder.45 On 9 April, the emperor called his councils together again, in order to force commitment by different tactics. As Paranhos recorded it, the emperor had called the meeting because the Government intended to charge a Council of State committee with the organization of a [legislative] proposal, drawn up according to the opinions that prevailed, and for that end that same August Lord wanted all of his Councillors to manifest themselves as candidly and as explicitly as possible.46

In other words, the emperor wanted the council’s support, he wanted it made clear, and he wanted it on record. On this occasion, Olinda and Sapucai were again absent, and, of the ten who attended, Jequitinhonha, Itaboraí, Eusébio, and Torres Homem did not sign the proposal of São Vicente. However clear the emperor’s commitment to the proposal, the meeting demonstrated the same divisions as before. Itaboraí was even briefer and more vague than the week before, accepting the free womb concept but alluding to the necessity of great delay, preparation, and security. Eusébio simply stated his entire congruence with his previous opinion. Neither was willing to deny their monarch directly; both clearly wanted to evade any precise legislative recommendation or personal responsibility; both alluded to the fundamental issues of economic and social security.47 Again, Paranhos made the most extensive remarks, albeit accepting the free womb as the lesser evil: In obedience to the new decisions of His Imperial Majesty, he [Paranhos] will force himself to make his thinking clearer, and to add some ideas, if possible, concerning the convenience, method, and opportunity of the projected social reform. In the present state of affairs, he accepts at this point the measure of emancipation of the slave womb . . . it is the most one can do in the thinking of those who judge, as he does, that it is not possible to decree immediate and total abolition, without causing the gravest and irreparable damage to our society.48

If the emperor expected warm support for his project, it would be hard to find it in these two meetings. At best, a majority of the Council of State had agreed to the option it was pressed to support, and only after carefully pondered concerns and restrictions. As the last meeting’s purpose made clear, however, resistance was useless. The cabinet was to nominate a Council of State committee to draw up a project for the cabinet to propose to the Chamber. The emperor, as the moderating power, was constitutionally bound to seek the ad-

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vice of the council, and, at least formally, he had now done so. However, he clearly had no interest in their alarm or concerns, which he largely ignored. Instead, he had successfully used the exercise to provide legitimacy for his project and to prepare it for formal introduction to Parliament. The committee was appointed 11 April. Zacarias chose Nabuco de Araújo, now committed to abolition, known for his judicial acumen, and very close to Zacarias politically as a founding progressista. He also chose Sousa Franco (later replaced by the emperor’s favorite, Sapucaí) and Torres Homem, now a protégé of both the emperor and Itaboraí. It was a committee combining judicial brilliance and useful political linkages; above all, it was a committee of which both Zacarias and the emperor could be sure in terms of both capacity and loyalty. The two councillors most clearly abolitionist by conviction, São Vicente and Jequitinhonha, were not even considered, probably because neither had political influence in the Chamber and because Jequitinhonha’s ideas about abolition, already public, differed from the project upon which the emperor had clearly decided. The legislative ideas that would figure in the committee’s judicial delibeations varied. The Portuguese laws analyzed in São Vicente’s initial work and the newly published study of Perdigão Malheiro were very important; the ideas of various other European statesmen and publicists, less so.49 On 22 May 1867, despite the warning of the councillors about raising the issue during the war, the annual fala do trono of the emperor to the Parliament contained the following phrase: “The servile element in the Empire cannot but merit your opportune consideration, being regulated in such a manner that, while respecting present prosperity, and without profound damage to our primary industry—agriculture—, the important interests linked to emancipation are attended to.”50 The shock in Parliament was palpable. From that moment on, the issue, already seeping into the political air since the response to the French abolitionists (and doubtless in the private conversations of the political chieftains in and out of the Council of State and the cabinet), must have filled every mouth. It was no longer simply the policy by which the emperor hoped to finesse a glacial transition out of the international shame and vulnerability of slavery. It was now a political challenge to the most traditional and established interests in the Empire. Shortly, it would be seen to be a threat to the basic political assumptions of the monarchy itself. Most immediately, it served to deepen the growing abyss between the parties and the cabinet. Although opposition to the idea was marked as early as May and June 1867 in Senate and Chamber speeches, the cabinet already faced an arduous struggle in the Chamber, which, as the reader may recall, was divided between progressistas, Liberals, and saquaremas. This Chamber, just elected, in which the Liberals and saquaremas were patently cyn-

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ical about the origins and ideas of the League and increasingly concerned about the Empire’s financial difficulties and the conduct of the war, now had one more issue to lay at the feet of Zacarias.51 Zacarias’s task was especially delicate, as he was caught between the two horns of a dilemma: one was his need to be seen as presiding over a stable, enduring administration, the other, the need to be perceived as a secure source of patronage. Both depended upon the emperor’s public favor. He was entirely dependent upon the emperor’s support because he had no established, partisan, ideological constituency to maintain his majority. Without the emperor’s public support, former Conservative moderates and the Liberal moderates, who made up the bare progressista majority in the Chamber, would desert him, knowing that they could not depend upon him for patronage, as without that support, he could not last long. The emperor’s favor allowed Zacarias to maintain this fragile majority and to defy the increasing pressure from the radicals, Liberal and saquarema, on either of his flanks.52 Let us remember why this radical hostility was increasing. Zacarias contended with Liberal ferocity because they were angry over his betrayal in the 1866 election and ideologically hostile to his obvious subservience to the emperor. They dreamt of obtaining a cabinet replacing his. Strengthened by their urban-elected tribunes in 1860, strengthened again by the significant minority elected through Olinda’s machinations in the election of 1862, given hope (and then frustrated) by the ephemeral Liberal cabinet of Furtado, they thought themselves close to power. They wanted to obstruct Zacarias into resignation and, as happened with Furtado’s ascent, to press the emperor to allow them to take Zacarias’s place. Zacarias’s problems with the saquaremas were no less painful. Since 1863, their chieftains had been attacking the League as an opportunistic alliance based on political corruption. After 1867, Zacarias had, once again, to face a re-organized, resurgent saquarema minority in the Chamber, and they pursued their attacks on his legitimacy and failures with unrelenting bitterness. Thus, on either side, the radicals of the traditional parties attacked Zacarias and the League with fury and frustration. Only with the emperor’s support could he scrape together a bare majority, based largely on progressistas, to carry on. The emperor had supported the idea and rise of the League because it corresponded to his interest in a non-partisan, pliant, reformist government and to his loathing of partisan exclusivism, political independence, and ideological radicalism. In the mid 1860s, Zacarias had strengthened that support by his demonstrated willingness to secure what had become the monarch’s two great desires: he had embraced the explosive issue of abolition and, in late 1866, he had committed himself to winning the war in Paraguay, at whatever the cost.

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Both patently demonstrated Zacarais’s acceptance of the monarch’s direction, in exchange for Crown support—in stark contrast with his 1860 position advocating limitations on the monarch’s political role. Indeed, Zacarias’s actions with respect to the war would demonstrate just how far he was willing to humble himself to retain power.53

III. War and the Coup of 1868 The history of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), has been told elsewhere. Nonetheless, it demands some attention here because of the war’s direct impact on our political concerns. The region is hardly foreign to this study, of course. The reader may recall the centrality of Platine diplomacy and war in imperial affairs since the late 1840s. The careers of Uruguai, Paraná, and Paranhos have brought these matters back into our narrative repeatedly. If the region was especially significant for Paranhos, it was at least as much so for Caxias and, indeed, for their relationship.54 Paranhos had last voyaged to the Rio de la Plata in the controversial mission of 1864–1865 to finesse frontier grievances with Uruguay. The Uruguayan president had been unwilling to resolve these, particularly because the Brazilians whose grievances were at issue were allies of Venancio Flores, a client of the Argentines, and a man who was seeking his overthrow. Paranhos had successfully compelled the hostile administration’s surrender and Flores’s installation through a coordinated effort of force and diplomacy. The price of Brazilian intervention in Uruguayan affairs, however, was the Paraguayan decision to go to war. Francisco Solano López, Paraguayan president, had issued diplomatic warnings (1863–1864) stating that intervention in Uruguay would be deemed casus belli. He viewed Uruguay’s plight as a potential forecast of Paraguay’s and had hoped to shore up the weaker nation’s autonomy and compel the respect of his more powerful neighbors. Solano’s military actions were most provocative. In 1864, upon hearing of Brazil’s intervention, he took a Brazilian provincial president and his entourage prisoner as they steamed up river to their province. Solano then conquered a disputed portion of the Empire on his frontier. He crossed Argentine territory on his way to this triumph, despite Buenos Aires’s refusal to grant permission (1865). In short order, the Empire made a triple alliance with both its client state (Uruguay) and its traditional rival (Argentina). Joint military planning and manoeuvers took place. By 1866, the Paraguayans were defeated on Brazilian soil and thrown back to defend their own. However, Dom Pedro II had been deeply outraged by the Paraguayan invasion, and would not agree to treat with the enemy. He made Solano’s elimination and Paraguay’s unconditional surrender the only price of peace.55

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Paraguayan efforts were sustained by a formidable army and frontier. The initial allied efforts, under overall command of the Argentine president, Bartolomé Mitre, stalled by 1866, crippled by a crisis combining defeat and intestine Argentine and Uruguayan conflicts. Much of the war afterward was to be fought by Brazilians at a great distance from their sources of men and materiel. It was a war fought against a determined foe who made excellent use of the region’s swampy conditions and riverine access routes. The latter were fortified by long-prepared fortresses seconded by naval forces. Brazilian victories required a great deal of infrastructural organization, coordination between naval and army forces, and leadership that could prepare and inspire the poorly trained volunteers, conscripts, and freed slaves who made up the imperial ranks. The choice for that leadership is best understood with particulars. The 1866 crisis noted was associated with the defeat of the allies at Curupaiti (22 September). It was soon after this that Flores left to attend political affairs in Montevideo. Mitre was unwilling to push forward afterward. Internal disputes among officers regarding the defeat and Mitre’s decisions left the remaining allied forces encamped, bickering, and immobile. They were soon ridden with cholera.56 It was in these awful circumstances that the emperor, desperate, advised Zacarias to consider offering Caxias the baton. However, Caxias was not only a Conservative, but a man with political enemies among Zacarias’s cabinet and his Chamber majority. Nonetheless, the war and its associated financial crisis demanded victories, and Caxias was famous for winning them. Zacarias appreciated the emperor’s respect for the general and, of course, Zacarias required the emperor’s unwavering support. He broached the idea to his cabinet. Zacarias was forced to accept the resignation promptly offered by Ángelo Ferraz, minister of war, a man who was both Zacarias’s kinsman and his friend. Ferraz was personally incompatible with Caxias, and could not comfortably remain in office as the general’s superior. He saw his duty, and he did it. Zacarias then offered the command to Caxias, appealing to his patriotism.57 It was a sure appeal. In October 1866, Caxias put aside his political differences with Zacarias to their mutual satisfaction and departed for the front. Over the course of late 1866 and 1867, Caxias reorganized Brazilian forces and their infrastructure. Then, invested temporarily with the allied command, and coordinating closely with Inhauma, the Brazilian admiral, Caxias began encircling the fortress of Humaitá (22 July 1867). The Paraguayans launched a desperate attack to forestall a siege, leading to the second battle of Tuiuti (3 November 1867), a victory for the allies. On 13 January 1868, Mitre left to confront Argentina’s internal difficulties, and passed formal command of the allied forces to Caxias. The marshall seemed poised to complete the encirclement of Humaitá and to attack it. It was at this moment, 4 February, that Caxias ten-

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dered his resignation in a short memorandum alleging ill health. He also wrote privately, stating that he could not continue in his command while being publicly criticized by the cabinet. He had read of partisan-press attacks and assumed these had the cabinet’s support.58 The messages came by the regular steam packet from the south on 19 February. Zacarias assured the emperor that the cabinet was guiltless, but that they would resign rather than risk victory. Effectively, he was asking the monarch to choose between the cabinet, which should enjoy his confidence, and a general, who obviously did. The emperor was too deft a statesman, too sensitive to the constitutional issues, and too concerned with victory to choose immediately. He called upon the Council of State for advice on 20 February. Seven of the ten councillors present urged reconciliation; of the three remaining, one called for the resignation of both cabinet and commander and the other two split over which should leave. The emperor, however, was unsatisfied. He wanted to know their judgment if reconciliation proved impossible. His intimate, Bom Retiro, may have spoken his master’s mind when he pointed out that Caxias’s intent was to compel a show of confidence. It must have been plain that the emperor, completely determined to humble Paraguay, favored the general; now, he apparently wanted the council’s approbation. Five of the councilors had supported Caxias in the discussion so far. Yet now, forced to choose, six thought it best to preserve the cabinet rather than the commander. While almost all feared that Caxias’s resignation put victory at risk, these six made it clear that the League cabinet’s resignation would be destabilizing. Inevitably, it would mean appointment of a Conservative cabinet, to support Caxias. This, in turn, would mean a purge of all League appointees and the Chamber’s dissolution, in order to elect a Conservative majority supporting the cabinet. Indeed, councilors on either side of the question (Nabuco, a progressista, and Torres Homem, a Conservative) made it clear that they thought that Zacarias’s cabinet was already in danger of falling, unable to overcome its perennial fragility. Finally, Bom Retiro pointed out that the Conservatives would be weakened, in turn, if they came to power under such circumstances, because it would taint the legitimacy of their ascent. Clearly, if the cabinet had to resign, or would inevitably do so, there were very good reasons that it should not be now. Thus, the Council’s deliberations provided the emperor and the Conservatives with any number of insights: first, that reconciliation was the obvious best immediate solution to the problem of Caxias’s retention. The general wanted a demonstration of confidence from cabinet and Crown, and this was the least disruptive form. Second, that while the consequences of the cabinet’s immediate resignation were explosive, the narrow victory of the council’s vote made it clear that Zacarias’s position was extremely delicate. If Zacarias had taken his

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position to test the emperor’s support, everyone could see that the augury was a poor one. Third, that while the Conservatives could see that their ascent was guaranteed by the humiliation and weakness of Zacarias’s cabinet, they could also see that they must wait—the political costs were too high at a time when stability was crucial.59 The advice for reconciliation was thus immediately followed. The Conservative members of the Council of State wrote to Caxias; the minister of war did, as well. These efforts bore fruit. Reassured by the minister of war and by his Conservative friends on the Council of State of the support of both the cabinet and the Crown, Caxias withdrew his resignation. In short order, news of his indispensability was indicated yet again. The navy braved Humaitá’s artillery on 18 February, clearing the way to Asunción on 22 February. During the same era, the president of Uruguay was assassinated, underscoring the fragility of the allies’ support and increasing the Brazilian burden. Victory seemed possible, but remained daunting; Caxias’s indispensability seemingly grew with every packet’s dispatches.60 By mid 1868, however, the forward movement slowed. Stalemate at the front worsened the conflict in Rio, where the Legislature had reconvened, for it suggested that Caxias was unwilling to risk a defeat because of continued concerns about cabinet support. It was clear that the February crisis had only been delayed. All parties had representatives on the Council of State. Everyone thus knew that Caxias had had concerns about the cabinet and that its sacrifice had been debated. The Conservatives, if they had been willing to topple the cabinet before 20 February, had decided since not to do so. They were apparently persuaded either by the Council discussion or the perception of the emperor’s wishes or, most probably, both. Both had made it clear that a change in cabinet to suit the soldier was unacceptable politically and reconciliation, at least initially, was the best face to put on matters. They were also persuaded, though, that Zacarias’s fall was simply a matter of time and opportunity; the emperor’s support for Zacarias had been fatally undermined by his obsession with victory. It was a vicious circle, but it went round and rolled forward—if a cabinet was perceived to lack the monarch’s support, it lost the majority’s confidence. And a lack of confidence meant such a cabinet could not perform its function, it could not lead, it could not oversee the passage of legislation, and, thus, it could not serve the monarch. Thus, the perception of a cabinet’s fall from favor could lead to the reality of a cabinet’s fall, for the monarch could not support a cabinet which could not perform. In this particular case, how could Dom Pedro trust in Zacarias’s ability to win Chamber votes or reassure Caxias, given this milieu? How could the war be won given the weakness of the administration and bad blood between it and Caxias?61 For Zacarias, the situation was a bitter one. He was a political leader without

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a real party, a prime minister who led because he had been empowered by the emperor and the patronage accruing to his power. With the ebb of the emperor’s favor, he faced not only the Liberals’ hungry hostility, but the desertion of the progressistas. Indeed, some among the Liberals hoped to ally with the progressistas to take Zacarias’s place. Zacarias had to forestall this; he had to find a way to paste together progressistas and Liberals, under progressista leadership, again, as had been done in 1863.62 In the end, both Zacarias and the Liberal leaders in the Senate arrived at the same strategy to resolve this crisis, although each imagined a different result. Their common solution seems shocking at first glance. It was to compel the emperor to call the Conservatives back into power. By doing so, the emperor would have to expose himself through flagrant intervention (since the Chamber had only a minority of Conservatives, his hand would be obvious—the cabinet’s fall could not be ascribed to a hostile majority). It would be another instance of the personal intervention he displayed in 1844, 1848, and 1862. This, and the inevitable dissolution of a Chamber whose majority was comprised of progressistas and Liberals, would fuse the two factions together in opposition to the new Conservative cabinet. Such an alliance, radicalized in the direction of the reformist Liberal tradition, could unite around a commitment to reform the emperor’s “personal power” and other problems of the state and society identified with the reconstructed monarchy of 1841. However, Zacarias hoped for more: that the new Liberal party would fuse around and behind him. These plans are suggested in Senate speeches, in which Otaviano, the great Liberal chieftain, goaded the Conservatives to call for the cabinet’s fall and their own rise. It is also indicated by the way in which Zacarias decided to set the emperor up in his manner of resigning. Here is how matters went. The emperor appointed a favorite, Torres Homem, a senator, despite the cabinet’s support for another candidate. The emperor’s decision was neither unexpected nor an issue touching integral interests of the cabinet. Indeed, the cabinet had recently proposed Torres Homem to the higher position of councillor of state; he was clearly not persona non grata to them. Zacarias, however, pounced upon the appointment, arguing that it illustrated a lack of Crown confidence in the cabinet. He did this knowing that such an appointment was entirely and traditionally the privilege of the moderating power. For his part, the emperor himself may have been gratified by the opening Zacarias so provided. Both Zacarias and the emperor, in a phrase, found this appointment suitable grounds for public disagreement—their fatal opportunity. They parted company in July 1868. Matters were clarified still further in the dénoument. It was the custom, upon a prime minister’s resignation, to advise the emperor on a possible successor during the final interview at São Cristóvao. However, rather than indi-

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cate another progressista or Liberal, who might govern with the support of the current Chamber, Zacarias declined to name anyone. Zacarias did not want another progressista advanced to leadership of the League, nor did he want to advance the Liberals to a position of greater strength. Zacarias wanted the emperor to choose a Conservative, as discussed above. And, by suggesting, through silence, that there was no one among the progressistas or Liberals who could lead the Empire at such a moment, he sought to help force the emperor in the Conservative direction. Zacarias knew such an appointment would make him and his cabinet martyrs in the progressista and Liberal outcry inevitable after a Conservative triumph. He also might expect that this would ensure him a glorious position among the emergent opposition party sure to follow. The League and its leadership, favored and brought to power by the emperor, would now fuse with the Liberals under that same leadership, but now in opposition to the emperor.63 If it is important to detail this metamorphosis of the League and its relationship to the emperor, the Conservative response to the political crisis also demands careful study. Since at least the Conciliation Cabinet, 1853–1857, unity had frayed in the old Party of Order. Their years of iron discipline and national unity were gone. 64 Both in Rio, between Conservative moderates and saquaremas, and in the provinces, where rival factions allied to the national party had been loosed to squabble by the electoral reforms, the party had evolved into something a good deal less unified and ideologically coherent than it had been. This process had inevitably been exacerbated dramatically by the Conservatives’ exclusion from power after 1862. As one might expect, no where was this more obvious than in the Northeast, where issues of clientelism and patronage had long divided Conservatives. A Bahian stalwart wrote to Wanderley at precisely this time, observing that If the históricos ally with the cabinet [of Zacarias], it could be that the Conservative Party has the luck of the people of Israel; dispersed and wandering, it will be completely annihilated. In this country, six or eight years without the contact and the strength of power, [and] a party cannot live. Since 1854, the epoch of the party’s dispersion, fusions have taken place and they still have not achieved solid organization. The union or reconciliation of the two groups [progressistas and Liberals] will consolidate a Liberal-progressista establishment which will survive the rest of the present Legislature [i.e., that elected for 1867–1870] and will create the future one. In that case, our weakness will pass beyond the limits. The shell of the Conservative Party will remain and the desertions will be great. 65

The greatest division in the party, part of the dispersion of 1854 mentioned, was the divide between saquaremas and Conservative moderates. We have seen, too, that it was a division often sharpened by regional distinctions, principally between the southeastern provinces (more saquarema) and the northeastern

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(more moderate). Some of the Conservative moderates, particularly from the northeastern provinces, had become progressistas and left the party, following Olinda, Zacarias, Nabuco de Araújo, and Ferraz. However, a very distinguished group remained Conservative; Paranhos, for example, and Wanderley and Caxias. However much many saquarema stalwarts resented their role in the Conciliation and its aftermath, Paranhos, in particular, had a following in the party, and not only among one or another of the provincial rival factions. As we shall see, many Conservative moderates, like their progressista counterparts, were willing to follow a capable leader who clearly enjoyed the emperor’s favor and could promise political success, or moderate reform, or dependable patronage, or all three. The Conservative response to Zacarias’s 1868 decline suggests these enduring party divisions. The chieftains most keen to destroy the cabinet and succeed it were northeastern, doubtless because they were most affected by the progressista defection and rival claims in the region. Zacarias’s most personal enemies, for example, seem to have been Gonçalves Martins and Wanderley (since 1861 and 1860, barão de São Lourenço and barão de Cotegipe, respectively). Indeed, in the razor play of the mid–1868 Senate debates, where Liberals and Conservatives alike attacked Zacarias, Cotegipe made clear his intentions: “in my understanding, one only makes opposition in order to take over the State. . . . [Mine] is not opposition with big kisses.”66 Other rivals were more subtle. Paranhos, for all of his ambition and criticism of the League, refused to rise to the Liberals’ bait. Itaboraí, now the sole surviving member of the saquarema triumvirate, however critical, did not show his hand too much. His statements only clarified his criticism of Zacarias’s handling of affairs; only by implication did this suggest Itaboraí’s desire to succeed him.67 Both men may have been cautious because neither wished responsibility for a political crisis. It is also possible that one or the other was genuinely hesitant about the desirability of office. These are points worth exploring. Paranhos, for example, may well have been unsure of carrying the burden the emperor’s prime minister would have to face. He might have recalled his betrayal in 1865; he certainly could see Zacarias’s betrayal being played out now. He might also have had doubts about his support in the Conservative Party. Senator Silveira da Mota, an old saquarema, took time in one of these 1868 debates to imply that Paranhos was without partisan ideology or identity. He dismissed him as a willing servant of the emperor, rather than a Conservative standard-bearer in the struggle against Zacarias.68 Itaboraí’s position, of course, was quite different. No one could challenge his primacy among Conservatives. Sole survivor of the party’s founders, he had

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helped them create and lead the party in the Chamber and in cabinet after cabinet over thirty years. No one had better relations in the party’s fluminense heartland, and, although he had never organized the party in the Chamber or the countryside, he had been a national leader in the party in power and in adversity for a generation. Eusébio had been the party’s great chieftain in the 1850s and 1860s; Itaboraí, however, had stepped forward as Eusébio’s physical decline over the mid–1860s forced his retirement. Although the visconde’s health, too, was not the best, he had just had the benefits of a European cure. His hesitation now was probably not born of a lack of confidence, then, or of vigor, or of partisan rank. It probably came of calculation. The old mathematician knew that the monarch was beset by a visceral distrust of partisanship. Itaboraí had known this first-hand in the cabinets of 1843–1844 and 1848–1853, and it was clear to all that the monarch’s prejudice and interventionism had only increased since then. Itaboraí may thus have concluded that if he were to have any guarantee of substantive political power, his ascent would have to appear before the political world and the emperor as a response to the monarch—a personal commitment and favor. Thus, he obscured any personal, partisan desire to ascend—indeed, as the chief of the party, he explicitly refused to call upon the emperor to dismiss Zacarias. Such a call, he noted, was logically the role of the majority in the Chamber.69 While this statement reflected established Conservative ideology, it may also have been an oblique warning of the hard choice the monarch faced. After all, if the Chamber did call upon Zacarias to resign, through a failed vote of confidence, it would be the work of a party traditionally hostile to the emperor. With his cabinet’s ebbing support and the ongoing mobilization of the Liberals, there was a threat of Zacarias losing to a hostile alliance dominated by the forces led by Otoni and Otaviano. Such leadership would not be placated by another moderate or progressista cabinet; they would expect an administration dominated by históricos and younger reformists. Thus, Itaboraí’s comment about the majority veiled a threat. A cabinet with majority support would likely be anathema to the emperor personally, would surely polarize the Chamber still further, and alienate Caxias, whom the Liberals criticized—a prospect the emperor could hardly anticipate with pleasure. The emperor, as the visconde doubtless anticipated, would have to act first: either to forestall such a possibility, or simply to end Zacarias’s increasingly ineffective administration, the cabinet’s fall would have to be compelled by the emperor. And he could only favor the Conservatives. One cannot know whether Itaboraí actually feared this prospect of a Liberal triumph, or simply hinted at it to force the emperor’s hand. He may well have reasoned that if it were thought by Parliament and the emperor that he had

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won power merely from successful partisan opposition to a fragile administration, his relations with Dom Pedro II would be far weaker than if he came to power because the emperor needed him there. Better still if he came to power because the emperor himself had pressed for the fall of a moribund cabinet and had thus been forced to find an alternative of great political strength. In either case, the visconde would appear less like a partisan chieftain and more like an imperial statesman responding to his nation’s call—more specifically, to his monarch’s pleas. It would give him tremendous political and moral leverage with both Crown and Chamber, providing him with the clear support and credibility any prime minister would need in such a context. In the end, of course, if this were the saquarema chieftain’s view, he must have been quite satisfied. As has been described, it was not the Liberals in the Chamber who forced Zacarias’s fall nor the Conservative opposition in the Senate. No partisan blow dislodged the prime minister. Zacarias left as he had come, with an eye on power, and by the monarch’s decision. He loudly proclaimed the Crown’s responsibility for his fall, later styled a coup. From Itaboraí’s point of view, however, Zacarias’s resignation was as he might most have wanted it. The progressistas were felled by the hand of the monarch, and that hand now had to knock at the saquaremas’ door.

IV. The Conservative Cabinet and the War After Zacarias left São Cristóvao, on 14 July, he sent the customary message to his successor: Itaboraí was summoned to the emperor’s villa at seven in the evening. The appointment began a difficult process of negotiation. Here, it seems clear that Itaboraí’s hesitation, so manifest in the Senate, was not entirely a political ruse. He doubtless had wanted the League to fall; he may well have welcomed a return from political exile. However, he was no fool. The national and political challenges were overwhelming, not least the subtextual difficulties with the emperor. They were reflected in the difficulty Itaboraí had in organizing a ministry. It took the visconde two days to negotiate a cabinet acceptable to himself and to his monarch. Partly, this may have been so because of the reluctance of candidates to accept the burden of power under such circumstances. Partly, this may have been so because of the monarch’s ambivalence. The emperor is supposed to have made his choice for Itaboraí and his party because of the discipline and loyalty of the Conservatives, compared to the League’s embittered disarray. However, one could have made the same distinction in 1866. It seems much more likely that it was not relative partisan strength which had changed, but the emperor’s appraisal of the nation’s dire necessity. In 1866, the emperor had been confident that Zacarias could manage and he

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was confident in Zacarias himself, as dependent and amenable. But Zacarias had not managed. The crisis over Caxias and partisan attacks in Parliament had gored the minister; his political alliances had bled away. The war, the financial crisis, and the increasing political conflict demanded rapid resolution; the progressista cabinet would plainly no longer do.70 Nonetheless, this must have been hard for the emperor, who had prevented a truly saquarema cabinet from taking power since 1853. Thus, the monarch’s negotiations with Itaboraí may have dragged on a bit partially because he probably resisted the visconde’s partisanship and attempted to attenuate it. However, the fundamental choice was inevitable. He had to accept the partisan character of the new cabinet if he wished to gain a cabinet capable of success. Indeed, one might also view this choice as an old one: the emperor had always chosen saquaremas when national necessity required organic political strength—one need but recall 1848, 1851, and 1852. In this sense, the choice demonstrated the implicit recognition of the achievement and role of the saquaremas within Brazilian society and the visconde’s position among saquaremas. The saquaremas remained organic representatives of the more dominant fractions of the ruling class, and Itaboraí, a founder and exemplar of their party and its conservative, representative ideology. The contrast with the emperor’s creations is compelling. This was not a political pastiche pulled together with patronage alone—it was not the moderate-Conservative, non-partisan sort of cabinet the emperor called for in the late 1850s or the opportune alliance of the League he had promoted in the 1860s—in most significant ways, the return of Itaboraí and the cabinet he chose represent the vindication of the Party of Order. Many of the very factors which made the saquaremas distasteful to the emperor—their partisan and ideological distinction, their social and economic base—also provided the very strength circumstances now required. A bitter pill to swallow, but the only one for the malady. The emperor, however, was not alone in recognizing the necessity of the hour. The cabinet of 16 July 1868 also reflects Itaboraí’s political acuity regarding the changes in circumstances: over a saquarema core he shrewdly dropped the cloak of Conservative solidarity, to cover and smother the party’s disarray, inevitable after more than five years of opposition status and after thirteen years of the Conciliation and its fruits. Itaboraí took finance for himself. War went to the barão de Muritiba, a saquarema of the same generation, a councillor of state, a Conservative senator, a veteran of the saquarema cabinet of 1848. Itaboraí’s other choices suggest adroit accommodation to the era. Agriculture went to an histórico apostate, [Joaquim] Antão [Fernandes Lobo]. Here, Itaboraí showed a cunning use of the post-Conciliation emphasis on non-partisanship, for Antão had been an 1842 rebel, a Liberal mineiro chieftain who then left

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the party for the Conservatives’ moderate wing in the post-Conciliation era (one of the few to change parties in that direction).71 The choice for the other ministers indicate both cunning and a willingness to use talent and to do so in a way to gather the Conservative moderates and northerners back under saquarema leadership. Itaboraí asked Paranhos to take foreign affairs and Cotegipe (a chieftain of the northern Conservatives and a bulwark against the League inroads there), was persuaded to take navy. The true character of the administration, a vindicated, reinvigorated saquarema cabinet, was clear in the key political ministries: both went to new men wed to the old party ideals. One portfolio, justice, is particularly interesting in this regard. The minister in question was another northerner, José[Martiniano] de Alencar [filho] (1829–1877). Alencar’s father and namesake was a founder of the Majority movement of 1840; we met him there. A radical priest of Ceará, he had figured in all of the rebellions of the early nineteenth century. He made his home with a cousin, Ana Josefina de Alencar; she bore him José and several other children. The younger Alencar was brought up largely in Rio, in the home on the Rua do Conde where the Majority conspiracy was organized and on the chácara in São Cristóvão where his father spent his last years as a venerated Liberal senator. Alencar took his São Paulo law degree in 1849 and spent four years writing opinions on mortage law in the prestigious office of Caetano Alberto Soares, an abolitionist and one-time president of the Institute of the Order of Advocates. On both counts, Soares was thus a predecessor of Perdigão Malheiro, Alencar’s contemporary in São Paulo and now his colleague in the better law circles of the Court. It might have been through Soares or Perdigão Malheiro that Alencar made his first contacts with saquarema eminences in the Court. Soares, although an abolitionist, worked on projects associated with both Eusébio (e.g., the commercial code of 1850) and Rodrigues Torres (the land law of 1851).72 This points to the urbane conviviality common among the Court elite, however, rather than political conversion. Indeed, in the early 1850s, Alencar was a literary protégé of the Liberal chieftain and journalist, Otaviano, a class mate from São Paulo. It was for Otaviano’s Corréio Mercantil that Alencar wrote his famous “Ao correr da pena,” a crônica series, during 1854 and 1855. At that time, the Conciliation Cabinet was promoting the newer urban entrepreneurial and financial interests, interests that apparently allied them to Otaviano. Alencar, however, was disgusted with the speculative improprieties associated with these policies, and tried to say as much in his column. He broke with Otaviano when he was censored (July 1855). He went on to edit the Diário do Rio de Janeiro (October 1855) and pursue a serious interest in literature. Early on, he dabbled with drama; however, his reputation rests on the novels he began to write then, pub-

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lished as serials (folhetim romances) in the dailies. O Guarani, his most famous, was published in this way before its 1857 appearance as a book. These novels quickly made him Brazil’s most prominent Romantic novelist.73 Alencar’s financial moralism in 1855 had separated him from Rio’s emergent Liberal circles, as well as the Conciliation cabinet reaching out to them. Moreover, though a supporter of the Conciliation’s emphasis on political inclusion, Alencar was also disillusioned with the executive aggrandizement associated with Paraná’s cabinet. This may explain his admiration for Eusébio, who, as we saw, was quietly organizing opposition to Paraná in 1855 and would oppose him openly later that year. Certainly, Alencar’s personal support for the saquarema chieftain is manifest by a March 1855 column, and there is evidence of a personal relationship by year’s end.74 Literary success did not suffice for a respectable income then; worse, Alencar had grown up in the milieu of the powerful. His decision to enter politics was unsurprising. He ran in the 1856 election to represent his native Ceará. Despite his father’s legacy and the widespread importance of his clan among Liberals in the province, he failed—perhaps due to his break with Otaviano. In 1859, Alencar asked Eusébio’s support for a judicial advisor position (consultor) at the Ministry of Justice. He was successful. In 1860, Alencar’s father died, perhaps breaking his son’s most important link to the Liberal Party. Now, when Alencar returned to electoral politcs, he sought Eusébio’s backing in Ceará, this time as a Conservative. He was elected.75 Alencar’s entry into the Conservative Party under Eusébio’s protection would be definitive. The success in 1860 was followed by the five-year political exile he and most other Conservatives underwent from 1863 to 1868, an experience that probably deepened his partisan loyalty, particularly given the manifest opportunism of the League. He used the time to write celebrated pamphlets, which confirmed his position among the Conservatives as one of their most brilliant, austere ideologues. Although his antecedents could not have been further from them, his ideas and his championship of constitutional and public moralism brought him the admiration of the saquaremas.76 He strengthened his position by marriage. Georgiana Augusta Cochrane, his bride, was grandniece to the marquês de Baependí, the daughter of an urban entrepreneur, Thomas Cochcrane, and third cousin of the marquês do Maranhão. This marquis had helped crush the liberal Confederation of the Equator (1824) in which nine of Alencar’s rebel kin had perished.77 By 1868, then, Alencar represented a notable Conservative acquisition. The most eminent of the younger generation of literati, a protégé of Eusébio, the bearer of a name that indicated the repudiation of the Liberals, a celebrated Conservative polemicist, it is no surprise that his candidacy came up among

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Itaboraí and his friends. There was, however, the issue of Alencar’s fearless independence; he required wooing. By Alencar’s own account, he had already resolved to abstain from office, to serve his ideals uncompromised. However, on the morning of 15 July, in his Rua do Carmo office in the city’s heart, word was sent to him from Itaboraí’s conclave, taking place at Paranhos’s home near the Campo d’Acclamação (now, Praça da República). Alencar resolved to refuse the offer. An hour later, however, another prospective minister came to his private office, and persuaded Alencar to discuss the matter with Itaboraí himself. They met that afternoon, at Paranhos’s residence. There, he finally accepted—he later noted that he felt too embarrassed to refuse.78 Itaboraí’s successful envoy to Alencar that day was an intimate of the visconde, a man tapped to become Itaboraí’s minister of empire. It was Paulino; if the visconde could not have Uruguai by his side in 1868, he could have Uruguai’s son, his own nephew. However, as we have seen, this was far from a simple reflex of sentiment; Paulino had earned the portfolio, and Itaboraí could not have chosen better. After securing Paranhos for the crucial challenges of foreign affairs, he had in Paulino a guarantor of domestic order. Paulino combined the legal acuity of his father with Eusébio’s political organizational skills and Itaboraí’s status among planters. The visconde had merely recognized an heir already annointed in the Chamber and in the saquarema circles of the party’s fluminense heartland. As the cabinet’s fate unrolled over the next few years, Paulino emerged clearly as the strategist and spokesman for his uncle and the saquaremas, a position his by acclamation as much as by legacy. A keeper of the Monarchy’s traditions once noted that Cotegipe (“who was not mistaken about men”) once declared that “Uruguai could have waltzed on a table covered with crystal, without touching a piece. Well, the son, Paulino, has the skill to do the same . . . in the dark and blindfolded.”79 The table was certainly covered with crystal in 1868. Indeed, the cabinet faced radicalization at home and war abroad. The emperor’s appointment of Itaboraí, as expected, caused an immediate uproar; progressistas and Liberals described it as a coup d’etat, because Itaboraí did not represent the Chamber’s majority. They promptly voted their lack of confidence. Within two weeks, Itaboraí had been granted a dissolution and new elections for 1869. These, held under Paulino and Alencar’s auspices, would be as clearly a work of partisan reprisal as that of 1862, and only an inconsequential number of opposition deputies were seated. Long before that, in August 1868, the month after the cabinet’s ascent, the progessistas and the Liberals had begun fusion, led by Zacarias, Nabuco de Araújo, and Teófilo Otoni. They wrote up the first party program of the Monarchy, founded a paper, and reorganized the old Liberal Party. As this party now stood, it possessed an unprecedented political coher-

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ence; they embraced a series of radical reforms (restructuring the emperor’s constitutional role, abolishing slavery, and so on) and claimed that only their realization could avoid a revolution. A small fraction went further and, in 1870, founded the Republican Party. In either case, such men had placed themselves in radical opposition not only to the Conservatives and to the emperor, but to the monarchy the Party of Order had restructured by 1841. The conflict could not have been clearer.80 Even old friendships staggered under this new antipathy. This was so particularly between Conservative chieftains and the progressista leaders, their former allies and protégés. Paranhos, who had served with Nabuco de Araújo in Paraná’s Conciliation Cabinet (along with Cotegipe and Caxias) attempted humor in a note to his old friend, but the tone seems a bit strained: I have not gone to see Your Excellency for fear of being obliged to arrest you red-handed, seeing that, according to what is said around here, Your Excellency is in permanent conspiracy. Tell me if your fears of absolutism have got to the point of not wanting that I visit you. If there is no interdiction, when can I see you, without perturbing your liberal sessions.81

This political radicalization of domestic affairs and a milieu of crisis were exacerbated by the bloody delay of victory in Paraguay. Shortly after Itaboraí took power in 1868, Humaitá was evacuated by the Paraguayans (22 July) and then occupied by the allies (5 August). In December 1868, Caxias led the allies to a series of victories, destroying the Paraguayan regular army at Lomas Valentinas (27 December), compelling Solano’s flight into the mountain ranges east of Asunción and the 30 December surrender of Angostura, last river fortress of Paraguay. The occupation of Asunción in early January 1869, however, did not lead to the total surrender Dom Pedro II demanded. Solano organized an irregular army by August 1869, and began a desperate resistance.82 Caxias decided he had had enough. He was old, tired, and very sick. Despite his monarch’s pleas, he resigned his command (19 January 1869). With great reluctance, the monarch finally allowed his son-in-law, the Prince Imperial, Louis Gaston d’Orleans, comte d’Eu, to take the discarded baton (15 April 1869). The cabinet had already been forced to send Paranhos (February 1869) to attempt interweaving diplomatic and military conclusions to the conflict; Cotegipe took over Paranhos’s portfolio for foreign affairs (10 February 1869). Paranhos now achieved a singular position in both the party and Crown service. The cabinet began to look to him to resolve the complicated issues of the war so that they, in turn, could address the domestic crises tied up with it. Itaboraí, who had inherited the financial crisis of the 1860s, now feared financial collapse, for example, and Muritiba was concerned about a Liberal coup, possibly one linked to

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elements in the army around the comte d’Eu. They were desperate for Paranhos to arrange a peace and provisional Paraguayan government.83 However, there was only so much one man could do, no matter how experienced and talented. Battles only ended on 16 August 1869, with the Paraguayans’ defeat at Campo Grande. However, given the emperor’s obsession with Solano, guerrilla war continued; there would be no end until Solano’s end. Thus, it was also to Paranhos that the ministers commended the pursuit and killing of Solano, from September 1869 to 1 March 1870. Even then, Paranhos’s task was not done. He remained in the region for the tortuous diplomacy settling the claims of the victors, avoiding new war among them, and structuring the defeat of the vanquished. This work limped from the provisional treaty of 20 July 1870 to the failure of the conferences that followed and then through the difficult, separate national negotiations that dragged on from 1870 through 1871.84

V. The Conservative Cabinet and the Crisis of Abolitionism While Paranhos wove, unraveled, and wove again, he maintained correspondence with his colleagues in the Court. He was thus kept abreast of the last acts of a stifling, overheated private drama that played out behind the public one of parties and war. This had been taking place in the despachos and correspondence between the monarch and his ministers from the beginning of their tenure in 1868. The emperor had been pressing forward on his abolition project in the Council of State since 1867. Although he gained ground while Zacarias was still in power, after Itaboraí ascended in July 1868, all forward movement stopped. The emperor was carefully blocked by his ministers, albeit with the greatest care and vague reassurances about the future. He did not balk. Instead, probably in late 1868, the emperor willfully misread Itaboraí’s opinion as councillor of state in April 1867 and applied it as pressure again: I do not desist from the project on the servile element, which can be presented an an opportune moment. According to the opinion given by the Viscount de Itaboraí in the Council of State, it is no longer possible to backtrack. I maintain that discussion of the project in the Council of State should be concluded. It requires such a final discussion.85

Paranhos responded for the cabinet: I also believe that it is convenient to complete the study of the project for the gradual abolition of slavery, and to have in mind its execution at the opportune moment. It is the opinion that I had the honor to enunciate as Councillor of State, and I believe that it is in accord with that of milord the Viscount de Itaboraí, manifested on the same occasion. There is only the fear that if the necessary secrecy about the object of the Council of State meeting is not maintained, it might agitate the minds of those who would tend to

Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government / 255 precipitate the event, some because of conviction, others out of political calculation. But perhaps some words from Your Imperial Majesty might avoid the publicity which is feared. There was not, however, I ought to declare to Your Majesty, an agreement between us in a sense contrary to the desires that Your Majesty Has Deigned to express in the letter to which I respond.86

In 1869 and in 1870, Dom Pedro II pressed the cabinet at least to mention publicly the need to pursue gradual abolition as an intended, if deferred, goal. The cabinet, on each occasion, respectfully refused, referring to the imprudence of even raising such a matter at such a time. In 1869, nothing had come of this judicious defiance; in 1870, however, a political crisis ensued.87 The reason for such different outcomes was simple. In 1869, the cabinet was doggedly pursuing final victory in Paraguay. In 1870, that victory had been achieved, and the raison d’être of the cabinet had disappeared. The emperor could press for abolition without fear of undermining the war effort. Our best source for the consequent crisis is records kept by Cotegipe of the despachos and a letter or two between Paulino and Itaboraí. They all demonstrate how, in preparation for the legislative session of 1870 in May, two months after the final defeat of Solano, the emperor began again to press Itaboraí to promote the freewomb legislation. They also show how Itaboraí decided to resign rather than to do so or to continue without Crown support. The correspondence makes clear Paulino’s adherence to the doctrine, explicit in his father’s writings and Paulino’s speeches, that a minister who could not accept the monarch’s direction was obliged to resign.88 The account of Cotegipe shows the way in which Itaboraí effected precisely such a policy while attempting to avoid damage to the monarchy itself.89 The chronology is instructive. As alluded to above, between 1 and 5 May 1870, the emperor repeated his wish to have the free-womb project promoted by the cabinet in the fala do trono at the session’s opening, and, again, he was refused. Aside from the questions of the project’s origin and inopportunity, the issue of his intervention was explicitly raised by his cabinet. On 4 May, Cotegipe recorded his protest in despacho that We had accepted the ministry under the condition that we would not raise this question and although the war’s end appeared to put it on a different footing, the [war’s] consequences would still endure a long time and confidence was still being established . . . I was persuaded that the question had the gravity that I thought it had because the [previous] government had raised the issue [itself] and because everyone believed that the impetus came from His Majesty, who had and must have great influence on opinion . . .90

He cautioned that The Cabinet will lose strength and dignity because it will be said, correctly, as it is already said here and there, that His Majesty imposes upon us and we accept the imposi-

256 / Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government tion for the love of power. Such an idea was prejudicial to the Crown and to us, his Ministers.91

Between 18 and 20 May, disagreement over a senator’s appointment compelled the cabinet to threaten resignation. They saw the disagreement as a test of the Crown’s confidence in the context of their refusal to promote abolition; Paulino went to São Cristóvão with their position. On 22 May, the emperor responded to the threat of resignation by offering to cede on the senatorial issue in exchange for cabinet support on the “servile element.” On 23 May, the cabinet refused this attempt at public purchase and asked to resign once more. The saquarema view of the abolitionist project and their constitutional role allowed no other option. On 24 May, Itaboraí defined the crisis more acutely. He contacted São Vicente to discuss São Vicente’s succeeding him as prime minister; Itaboraí then conveyed this action to the emperor. By doing so, the Itaboraí demonstrated how serious the cabinet’s threat to resign was. Politically and ideologically, they could not go on without the monarch’s confidence, and that had been clearly threatened. This was a counter-move. The reasons Itaboraí thought of São Vicente seem obvious; he had served as the emperor’s legal advisor and draftsman in the preliminary abolitionist studies. If the emperor wanted a prime minister for abolition, who had greater title? Itaboraí may also have thought that no saquarema would shoulder such a project, that such a project would never survive the antagonism of the party and its constituency, and that São Vicente, given his personal and political distance from both the party and its constituency, was both more able to champion the project and less likely to damage the party, to divide it, or to win it over in the Chamber. In a phrase, Itaboraí might have been threatening to set up São Vicente and the emperor to fail, gambling that they could not pass such a law with such a Chamber, thus preserving slavery, the Constitution, and the party. On 25 May, the crisis was extended indefinitely. São Vicente had made his own political calculation and declared to the emperor that he was unprepared for such a burden.92 The emperor was forced to yield to the cabinet, and he did so on 26 May. Perhaps Itaboraí had gambled on this, too. After all, he had made it clear to the emperor that he was willing to step down, but had then allowed the emperor’s own abolitionist, São Vicente, to demonstrate that no viable successor among the Conservatives was to hand. The Liberals, of course, were personae non gratae. The emperor had to rule through a parliamentary system, but no viable cabinet would serve his abolitionist purpose. Ibaboraí had thus bought the regime time, time in which the emperor might reconsider the contradiction between his personal wishes and their consititutional monarchy. Perhaps he even hoped the emperor would find himself compelled to support the cabinet once again.

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It was not to be. Between May and September, the cabinet slowly weakened, haunted by the emperor’s obvious frustration and discredited by the public perception of the ebb of imperial confidence (fed by the emperor’s indiscretion). It was increasingly beset, as well, by internal upset and slow bleeding from a deft, sharp, unexpected blow from the Chamber. Let us turn to the intestine malaise, first. Although partially obscure to us, it is useful for our broader analysis. It returns us to the party’s established divisions and the cancerous issue of patronage.93 Alencar held justice, the most critical political portfolio. On the one hand, given his reputation for independence and rigorous political moralism, Itaboraí may have nominated him as a way to placate the emperor’s well-known penchant for non-partisan impartiality in justice appointments.94 On the other hand, given Alencar’s inexperience and ideological purism, Itaboraí and the others may also have hoped to use him as a blind for saquarema retrenchment. In any case, it became an unhappy experience for everyone involved. Alencar grew frustrated by the emperor’s customary interventions in the minutiae of his office; he also became estranged from Cotegipe and, perhaps, there were differences with Paulino, too. After all, he was an ideological polemicist whose political career had been arranged by others, while Paulino and Cotegipe were practiced at the grittier, established ways of provincial politics and may have asked more of their colleague than he cared for.95 In the end, Alencar apparently decided to escape from such politicagem through ascent to the upper chamber, where he could be removed from such concerns while enjoying lifelong prestige and status. The monarch had suggested to Alencar that he did not favor acting ministers standing as candidates for the Senate. Thus, when a seat for Ceará was vacated, Alencar left the cabinet in January 1870.96 Alencar’s portfolio was picked up temporarily on 10 January 1870 by [Joaquim Otávio] Nebias (1811–1872), a paulista saquarema and contemporary of Itaboraí. On 9 June 1870, Nebias resigned, and Muritiba took his place. This was a divisive decision because, through it, Muritiba’s political network, which had already cumulated direct patronage for three provinces as well as that associated with war, now had the most important patronage portfolio. Justice placed their hand on judicial appointments generally, with crucial influence on elections. Thus Muritiba’s additional portfolio effectively gave his faction within the party an unusual preponderance that Cotegipe and Paulino understandably perceived as threatening and divisive. Cotegipe, however, increasingly found himself isolated in his concerns. Paulino, tightly associated with Itaboraí, viewed Muritiba’s appointment as temporary. Like the visconde, Paulino assumed the cabinet’s time was running out, and was apparently focused on the larger constitutional and party questions associated with the cabinet’s fate.97 The acid seeping through the party as a result of Alencar’s resignation, pa-

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tronage rivalries, and the cabinet’s struggle with the monarch was especially painful to the more ideological saquaremas. The rivalries, especially, increased the cynicism and distance of many of the party’s best cadres. Cotegipe makes it clear that it was these petty divisions and their implications which were the immediate occasion for the cabinet’s resignation.98 These were secondary, however, to the conflict over abolition. Indeed, as indicated, Itaboraí’s decision to appoint Muritiba temporary minister of justice suggests his indifference to such matters. He was planning to leave and his reason remained the same in September as it was in May: he would not pay for the emperor’s confidence in the coin of abolition.99 The emperor’s pressure on the cabinet had been clear from early on in the legislative session, and, despite the cabinet’s deft use of threatened resignation, it had worsened. In previous years, the emperor had pressed on abolitionism but then put it aside; a war was on, and he had supported the administration. Now, after the hidden struggle in May, matters were different. Rebuffed in private, the monarch found ways to alert the political world of his dissatisfaction. Thus, the emperor sought to push at the actors on stage from behind the curtains. Here we come to the attack, adroit and sure, mentioned earlier, an attack begun with a blow from behind early on in the 1870 session, precisely at the time when the emperor’s frustration was most open. On 11 May 1870, six days after the emperor was first rebuffed by the cabinet, the prime minister was in the Chamber for the traditional opening discussions. Without warning, Teixeira Júnior rose and made an interpellation. He raised the question of slavery’s abolition and its absence from the cabinet’s program, demanding Itaboraí’s formal response.100The prospect of an embarrassing party fissure undercutting the cabinet had been abruptly opened up. Here, party and personal divisions since the Conciliação help us to an explanation. The reader may recall the deputy in question; Paraná’s son-in-law (and second cousin), Teixeira Júnior was a contemporary of Paulino in colégio and law academy. He had been elected to the Chamber under the protection of Paraná’s cabinet in 1856 and re-elected in 1860. He had survived Paraná’s passing because of his very capable support of the saquaremas’ critique of Sousa Franco’s financial policy under the Olinda cabinet in 1858. His speeches paired him with his schoolmate, Paulino, and the two supported one another then and for the next few years. His financial ideas, associated politically with Itaboraí, doubtless strengthened ties between them, for Teixeira Júnior’s cousin had married Itaboraí’s niece (see Genealogical Table I). Thus, at the level of the party’s national leadership, Teixeira Júnior was related by blood and politics to both the moderates associated with Paraná (e.g., Paranhos) and the saquaremas led by Itaboraí. Betwixt and between.

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At the provincial level, Teixeira Júnior’s position was even more ambiguous. Despite the fiscal conservativism he espoused in 1858, earlier, he and his father, Jerônimo José Teixeira, a Rio merchant and investor, were involved in the new speculation of the mid 1850s, alongside Mauá, Paraná, and others of his kin. This included participation in one of the factions that had vied for the Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II, the great railroad linking Rio to the fluminense coffee frontier. One faction, in which the Teixeiras figured, was dominated by investing interests centered in Rio, and it had the support of Paraná and Otaviano. The other faction was led by the Teixeira Leite brothers, one of the dominant families of the serra, with strong commercial and political links in the Court. The struggle was bitter. The reader will recall that the conflict had had a bearing on the mid–1850s divisions of the party. The Teixeira Leite brothers were linked to Eusébio politically from at least the late 1840s. These ties were strengthened by the common opposition to Paraná in 1854 (and probably strengthened again by Paraná’s dismissal of Eusébio’s cousin, Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, Brazilian ambassador to England, allegedly for his handling of the railway’s financing). Sayão Lobato, ally and compadre to Eusébio and representing the Teixeira Leite group in the Chamber, was the deputy who had led the charge against Paraná in 1854, and the deputy who made Paraná’s handling of the railway a constant reference in his attacks.101 Aside from his investment links to this railroad conflict, Teixeira Júnior was directly involved professionally. Paraná’s protection, which explains Teixeira Júnior’s 1853 appointment as promotor público (roughly, district attorney) in Niterói, the fluminense capital, and his elections to the provincial assembly (1854 and 1856), also explain how, in 1855, two years out of the law academy, he was made a member of the board of the controversial railway. Simply put, he was an agent of Paraná’s faction in its victory over the Teixeira Leite group. This was emphasized yet again with his being made fiscal (financial overseer) of the Teixeira Leite family’s Banco Commercial e Agrícola (1860). These appointments damned him among these serra planters and their matted network of allies. He was among the enemies upon whom they blamed their loss in the railway routing controversy, and they resented his presence and actions in the oversight of their bank. With polite respect, they carefully cut off any electoral support for the man on the two occasions (1860 and 1863) when Teixeira Júnior was forced to request it.102 Nonetheless, Teixeira Júnior’s strength among other Conservatives initially made up for this during the early post-Conciliation era. Even without Teixeira Leite support in 1860, he was elected to the Chamber. Itaboraí’s son-in-law, Joaquim Francisco Viana, was a key supporter of his for a district slate in 1860 which included saquarema stalwarts Pereira da Silva and Sayão Lobato. Eu-

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sébio’s old serra ally, the conde de Baependí, supported him, as well, as did the barão de Patí do Alferes, staunch old ally of Uruguai. The barão de Tieté, father to the key paulista saquarema, Rodrigo da Silva (Eusébio’s son-in-law and an old friend of Teixeira Júnior), supported him in Banco do Brasil elections in 1860, as well. Paranhos, his father-in-law’s protégé, saw to it that he was made procurador fiscal (financial steward) of the fluminense treasury in 1861. Nonetheless, by 1868, with the saquarema faction again in ascendence, Teixeira Júnior may have come to realize that his fluminense support, always mixed, had fatally weakened. Perhaps given the competitive hunger for office among saquaremas denied power for five years, Teixeira Júnior’s Conciliação antecedents proved a bit too unpalatable. Whatever the reasons, a biographer put his plight euphemistically: “Not having been invited by his friends to present himself as a candidate, he did not wish to do it on his own. He was only elected in 1870, to take the place left by the choice of the visconde de Niterói [Sayão Lobato] for the Senate.”103 This political charity may well have been an afterthought by Teixeira Júnior’s old colleague, Paulino, attempting to salve the hurt of 1868 and recruit back an able orator. If so, it proved to be an error. In 1866, Torres Homem was appointed Banco do Brasil president; he was also made a councillor of state. His success was doubtless due to the emperor’s support for his views in financial matters. The reader may recall that Torres Homem’s financial ideas had also brought him into alliance with Itaboraí. Perhaps because Teixeira Júnior was a well-placed, capable supporter of Itaboraí in financial policy as well, Torres Homem and the younger man became close, not least, one imagines, because Teixeira Júnior had been elected director of the bank in 1865. Teixeira Júnior doubtless felt the need for such friends. One would imagine that the lack of party support in 1868, and the way in which he entered the Chamber in 1869, may well have confirmed to Teixeira Júnior the limitations of his electoral base among saquaremas and the necessity of continued, significant patronage. Men like Itaboraí and Torres Homem could help him to appointments in which his talents were set off to great effect. Some time between the 1869 session and that of 1870, he asked Torres Homem to intercede with Itaboraí for the choice position of Customs Inspector. It would have been ideal. Considered a kind of seventh ministry, the position was likely to shore up his prospects by putting his financial skills on display at a level nearly that of finance minister.104 As in the 1868 election, Teixeira Júnior was rebuffed—Itaboraí refused the request. Worse, in explaining to Torres Homem, Itaboraí made three serious points—one humiliating, one dismissive, and one in the form of cutting humor. Perhaps recalling the younger man’s reputation for ill health in the 1860s, he noted that Teixeira Júnior was too well-bred and comfortable for the diffi-

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cult work involved. He also argued that his oratorical talents were better suited to party service in the Chamber. Then he joked about “the advanced ideas of Doctor Teixeira, his known tendency for reforms. . . .” Itaboraí had a long memory. Whatever his ties and respect for the banker, the old finance minister could not overlook the man’s origins. Born to a position of urbane wealth and comfort, coddled with handsomely paid positions and fixed elections early on, Teixeira Júnior had won what standing he had among saquaremas only through his Chamber oratory in defense of saquarema finance policy. The condescension about Teixeira Júnior’s reputation for reforms was probably the most damning reminder; a rebuke of Teixeira Júnior’s origins in the Conciliação, in Paraná’s reformism and the consequent division of the party, and in the Rio entrepreneurial group allied to Paraná and Otaviano. It was probably the most essential point, but it was also the most fateful, and it would come back to haunt the visconde. Teixeira Júnior later told his son that, after hearing Itaboraí’s comments through Torres Homem, he immediately asked Torres Homem which needed reform was the most important, the gravest problem the Empire had to resolve. Torres Homem (who, of course, had participated in the Council of State in 1867 and was a supporter of the emperor’s abolitionist project) did not hesitate. No doubt aware of the monarch’s current frustration with Itaboraí’s cabinet in this regard, he answered “the question of the servile element.” Teixeira Júnior then stated, “Well, I shall show my old friend and chief, milord Visconde de Itaboraí, how capable I feel about embracing the solution to that gravest political, social, and economic question.” 105 Hence the interpellation Teixeira Júnior threw at Itaboraí on 11 May. The recollection of his acquaintance, Pereira da Silva, or the correspondence of Cotegipe to Paranhos, suggest another aspect of Teixeira Júnior’s decision. In the upper echelons of the political world, it was well known what the emperor wanted and what he had been denied. The statesman wanting to please Dom Pedro II at any cost knew what issue to champion. Certainly, Torres Homem’s role in pointing Teixeira Júnior in the right direction was surmised by Cotegipe (and, doubtless, by Itaboraí and his nephew) immediately after Teixeira Júnior’s unanticipated Chamber challenge. For the cabinet, the political edge gleamed close to the throat. In a Conservative Chamber in which moderates and dissatisfied clients inevitably held seats, Teixeira Júnior would not be the only deputy to glimpse the opportunity the emperor’s cause presented; having defied the visconde, Teixeira Júnior knew others, less courageous, would be willing to follow behind him in attacking and, perhaps, supplanting the cabinet, weakened through the rumors of ebbing Crown favor. Whether the emperor was aware of Teixeira Júnior’s collaboration before it was manifest is impossible to say. However, in imperial politics, the ability to anticipate the direction in which the em-

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peror desired to move was a key quality of success. Those ambitious for opportunities to rise or to batten watched and listened; the emperor often made his intentions clear through carefully dropped comments to members of the court or councils. Being unhappy with Itaboraí, the emperor essentially suggested that others strike him; he did not have to attack himself—others would. In this case, Torres Homem had acted for him and, through Torres Homem, the emperor had found a deputy willing to raise the issue the cabinet had smothered for two sessions.106 Thus, as discussed above, even after Itaboraí successfully confronted the emperor again and again in late May, even when the emperor was forced by lack of an alternative to retain his obstinate saquarema cabinet, he had deftly put oblique pressure on the cabinet to accept abolitionism from the Chamber. Teixeira Júnior began organizing allies and drafting an abolitionist project; he then called for a special committee to propose such legislation (23 May). At that point, Paulino went into action. He ensured that the majority elected to the committee were dependable saquaremas. It is important to note that this was possible because the Chamber majority remained disciplined. The saquarema leadership could not stop Teixeira Júnior from interpellation, nor from calling for a committee. Nor could they stop São Vicente, the emperor’s jurist for the abolititionist project, from passing materials to Teixeira Júnior’s group in the Chamber. However, they could load the newly elected committee to obstruct and slow its work, and this they did.107 Nonetheless, the pressure was significant and it grew. By 16 August, despite the efforts of key saquaremas on it, the special committee reported an opinion proposing legislation remarkably like that which São Vicente had written up for Dom Pedro II. It was contradicted by only one dissenting member, Eusébio’s son-in-law (and Teixeira Júnior’s former friend), Rodrigo da Silva.108 This represented an important reversal against the cabinet. Indeed, when Teixeira Júnior had first raised the issue, in May, abolitionism had been combated vigorously by Alencar and various saquaremas, partly by exposing the monarch’s role in its origins, thus challenging its legitimacy and Teixeira Júnior’s integrity.109 This goring had clearly failed to stop the project. What had changed between May and August to explain this? Appreciation of the emperor’s lack of confidence and anticipation of a new cabinet and, consequently, new patronage had come into play. In the 23 May session, Teixeira Júnior had only been able to cull a minority of Conservatives willing to join him in opposition behind the issue of abolitionism. Initially, those who signed his petition for the special committee included sincere abolitionists (including established saquaremas, such as Perdigão Malheiro and Pereira da Silva). The vote establishing the committee indicates that this was an opposition of 26 out of the 82

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voting. By mid-August 1870, however, Teixeira Júnior’s following and its potential were clearer, particularly among dissident deputies from São Paulo and Bahia. No one would have had illusions about it. It was an opposition comprised of Conservative deputies excluded from adequate patronage, or provincial fractions hostile to others supported by the cabinet. Now, gambling on the emperor’s dissatisfaction, they hoped to be part of a triumphant coalition which would take the cabinet’s place, using the abolitionist project as a banner. Such opportunism did not escape unscathed. In his August dissenting opinion, Rodrigo da Silva, echoing points Alencar had made in May, carefully destroyed the idea that abolitionism sprang from public opinion. This is a point Paranhos had made in the Council of State in April 1867, as well. Abolition came not from rising public opinion, but down from on high, a point often missed in the historiography, but clear enough to contemporaries. If this argument were intended to embarrass the emperor or the Conservative opposition into stopping, it certainly failed. Correspondence between Itaboraí and the emperor, as well as Cotegipe’s private account, make it clear that it was this increasing, public loss of Crown confidence and consequent possible erosion in the Chamber that forced them to offer their resignation yet again, around 10 September. If this was also an attempt to force the emperor’s support, it could not have pleased anyone. Once again, the emperor apparently did not accept Itaboraí’s resignation only because he remained unsure of a successor.110 In this final phase, the political and ideological issues were capably appraised by the saquarema leadership, which prepared for what was to come. Paulino took charge. On 12 September, to demonstrate the majority’s support for the cabinet’s position on abolition, Paulino made it a question of confidence. It was a direct challenge to Teixeira Júnior’s committee report, to the Chamber opposition it suggested, and, indirectly, to the emperor’s interventionism. Anticipating the imminent fall of the cabinet, he must have wanted to make it clear that its fall was due to the emperor, and that it was the cabinet which represented legitimate public opinion.111 This appeal to the representative legitimacy of the Chamber is an old motif of the party, as the reader will recall. Traditionally central to the party’s ideologues since the 1830s, it had increasingly influenced their attitude toward electoral reform. From early on in this Chamber’s sessions, Paulino had committed the party to the direct vote; he introduced this reform in 1869 and, with greater vigor, in 1870. The coincidence with the emperor’s interventionism on abolition is suggestive. Such a reform would strengthen the claims of the Chamber to its legitimate representative quality; that, in turn, would make it harder for the emperor or the cabinet to legitimize their interventionism or aggrandizement at Parliament’s expense. Thus, though the vote of confidence for which Paulino

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called now had an obvious political meaning, it also speaks to the traditional party ideology regarding representative government. Again, the issue was constitutional legitimacy: in both cases, the reform and this particular vote, the saquaremas strove to emphasize Parliament’s role as a representative body which must legitimate policy, the necessary complement to the cabinet and the monarch. The vote of confidence in question could not have been better designed to reaffirm a related, basic tenet of the party, one derived from Vasconcelos’s teachings in 1837—that the cabinet’s legitimacy must derive from the nation’s confidence in it (something demonstrated by majority support in the Chamber, and not just the Crown’s confidence, for both the Chamber and the Crown were constitutionally held to be nationally representive). Finally, in this particular case, a vote of confidence would demonstrate that the saquarema cabinet, if it did fall, did so not because it lacked the confidence of the nation regarding abolition, but because it lacked the confidence of the Crown on this particular issue. It made it clear that the project did not originate from, or represent the opinion of, the voters or their deputies, but from and of the Crown alone. Such a vote of confidence would also presumably have some impact on any subsequent cabinet presuming to represent the majority. 112 Paulino only addressed the cabinet’s position on the propriety of the project for the free womb (which the cabinet explicitly dismissed as inopportune). He did not defend slaveholding or attack abolitionism itself. On the contrary, he stated that slavery was condemned by Christian and enlightened thought alike. He merely confirmed that the gravity of the project required study, reflection, and data. He pointed to two particular questions requiring careful consideration: the right to private property and the status of those freed by such emancipation. He then justified the vote as necessary to reassure rural slaveholders who might be apprehensive about the issue having been raised at all; they needed to know if their lives and property were threatened by the state. Paulino had obviously made sure that he had a majority beforehand, otherwise he would have been foolish to call for a vote at all. Having a majority, he could also force the preliminary vote to be nominal, that is, to have deputies identify themselves as they voted. Clearly, a nominal vote would make deputies’ identities (and, thus, loyalty) clear to the party faithful who voted for them and to the party chiefs in the cabinet who might seek to measure their influence and mark their opposition for future reprisal. The result, in the end, was a clear vindication of the cabinet and its position; the numbers were 54 to 21. Apparently both the emperor’s recent failure to find an alternative to the cabinet and the prestige and leadership of the saquaremas continued to stymie their opposition.113 In the Senate, Paulino and Paranhos (before he returned to the Rio de la Plata), defended the same position. Paranhos, however, went a bit further. He

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did state, as Paulino had, that the cabinet was in complete solidarity on the issue and that it would not address the problem without due reflection and calm, considering the issues of state finances, public opinion, and consulting with the affected interests of agriculture and commerce. However, he also stated that the cabinet would take these actions in 1871 . . . if it still existed.114 Under the circumstances, though the Liberals strove to suggest that this was a flagrant division between the ministers, it amounted to much of the same thing Paulino had said. Such a deferral was typical of the resistance the emperor had faced since 1867. Delay was an obvious ploy to maintain constructive relations with their monarch while denying him his will. However, the actual, obvious loss of the emperor’s confidence was fatal for Itaboraí. He had stayed long enough to vindicate his mandate; he would not go on. Embarrassed by public knowledge of the emperor’s withdrawal of favor (and the emperor’s part it spreading that knowledge), weary of work and parliamentary opposition from party and Liberal opposition, and divided internally over issues of partisan patronage, his cabinet agreed. They requested the emperor’s acceptance of their resignation on 23 September; this time, he agreed. Despite the difficulty of an alternative, perhaps the implications of the vote of confidence were too obvious and dangerous for him to bear.115 Now, the emperor had to contend with the problem which had stayed his hand since May: finding a successor. It took Dom Pedro II until 25 September to convince São Vicente to accept the burden and five more days to organize a cabinet. The reasons are clearly linked to the saquaremas’ vindication in the Chamber. Itaboraí and Paulino had successfully demonstrated the identity between their position and that of their party. How could the emperor’s abolitionist now recruit competent colleagues from that same party, in defiance of its leadership and the Chamber’s public record of support for that leadership? The issues at play were painfully clear. When Itaboraí rose in Parliament to explain his resignation (as tradition required), the visconde referred to the difficulties of replacing Muritiba as the temporary minister of justice. It was a discrete fiction, fooling no one. The Conservative divisions associated with Muritiba had only provided the context and the final cover for the decision. The cabinet had resigned because they could not accept the emperor’s imposition of abolition. They had done so, however, only after having exposed that imposition and demonstrated the representative legitimacy of their administration and their stand on the issue. They had done what they could, within the limits of their party ideology and the Constitution, to vindicate both under the manifest pressure of their monarch. Pereira da Silva, a saquarema close to Itaboraí, recalled that, privately, after the visconde’s parliamentary explanations, the statesman did not contain his frustration:

266 / Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government To his intimate friends, . . . who thought it strange to hide the real cause of his retreat from power, he formally declared that he considered that acts of the monarch’s personal intervention [a acção do governno pessoal] weighed too much on public administration, and alienated people from the love owed to those institutions which alone, in his opinion, were adaptable to the customs, to the moral and material development, and to the integrity of Brazil; that there was already enough wood on the fire to threaten to burn and destroy the foundation of the representative, monarchical structure, and that his patriotism prohibited him from bringing to it new material that might hasten the combustion.116

The emperor’s imposition of his abolitionist project was perceived as a threat to the saquaremas’ concept of the state and its relationship to their society, as well as to the interests they represented within that society. They had resisted this threat, but did not rebel or threaten revolution. They were necessarily constrained to resist within the parameters of the constitutional, representative regime central to their ideology.

VI. The Meaning of São Vicente’s Administration The São Vicente administration, an ephemeral of the Monarchy’s history, is, for that very reason, instructive. Its transience demonstrates precisely the growing distance between state and society—that is, the gap between the emperor, his promotion and abuse of an aggrandized executive, and the political origins and organic base of the Monarchy. Under the Constitution, the emperor could reject Itaborai’s cabinet, which had a strong, vital relationship with the established social order, and he could attempt to rule and pursue abolitionism through São Vicente, his instrument. But to do so was to attempt government hostile to the dominant element of the Conservative Party, an organic leadership articulating the established social hierarchy and the state. Still, the state’s autonomy and strength had grown significant enough so that Sao Vicente’s cabinet could come into being, despite its threat to that hierarchy and the party which represented it best. However, birth is one thing, survival, another. The state’s increasing autonomy alone was not sufficient to give the new cabinet enough vitality to survive. It lacked the oxygen, the blood, the muscle that were best found in a political leadership which grew between the state and the larger, dominant interests of the Monarchy. The saquaremas were such a leadership; São Vicente and his ministers were not. As we shall see in the following chapter, however, there was an alternative, however limited. Paraná had demonstrated this possibility. If a cabinet, supported by the monarch, but alien and inimical to the established interests of imperial society, wished to attack those interests, it could do so by cultivating new roots, however fragile, in the niches and fissures that were breaking up the Monarchy’s original social and

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political terrain, roots sustained from Brazil’s emerging social and economic contradictions. However, São Vicente was no Paraná; he had no capacity to take strength from these new possibilities. Rootless, his cabinet perished early on. A memoirist, proud of his French literary schooling, compared it to the “roses of Malherbe,” which fade quickly.117 In fact, São Vicente’s cabinet endured but five months, and only that long because these months lay in the season of waters, between parliamentary sessions. Even then, in that sodden, steaming season, the cabinet was constantly rumored to be rotting away. The cabinet’s fatal weaknesses derived from the agony at its birth and the congenital defects associated with them. The emperor had compelled the resignation of the Itaboraí cabinet by his insistence over abolitionism and his withdrawal of confidence when they obstructed him. Now, the emperor was free to go forward, but was faced with a Chamber and a dominant party hostile to his project and his abuse of his position in promoting it. Yet, the emperor had no choice but to seek to use Conservatives to realize the reform. The Liberals were no alternative; they had emerged from a process of divisive and incompetent political rule in the 1860s which had radically altered their position. They were now explicitly hostile to the emperor, not least because of his interventionism. Moreover, the Conservatives obviously preferred to stay in power, not only for fear of the Liberals’ reforms but, of course, to avoid the usual purges and persecution of partisan reversal. The party and Dom Pedro II thus needed one another, but were estranged by the emperor’s project and his associated abuse of his constitutional role. The new cabinet’s composition speaks to this dilemma. Initially, São Vicente, possibly seeking saquarema support, had gone to the monastery dominating the Morro de Santo Antônio, to discuss a portfolio with São Lourenço, who resided in a cell there. Perhaps São Vicente thought that the Bahian saquarema would be tempted by the vista of patronage an appointment would bring—new strength in São Lourenço’s perennial struggle for domination of Bahia’s Conservatives. However, the emperor would not have the strong-willed Bahian, who was on record against abolitionism, and São Vicente had to cut off his wooing and look elsewhere among the party’s chieftains. He had little luck. Unsurprisingly, none wished to carry forward a project repudiated by the consecrated party leadership, inimical to their constituency’s interests, and imposed extra-constitutionally by the emperor. Perhaps those ambitious enough to think of it were put off by the implications of the emperor’s rejection of São Lourenço. São Vicente himself had no partisan attraction. A contemporary of Uruguai at São Paulo (1832), and a personal friend of the late saquarema, he himself was no party man. He had served as a paulista judge in the 1830s, a provincial president of Mato Grosso (1836–1838), and a paulista deputy during

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the Liberal Quinquennium in the 1840s. He had served under the Liberals in foreign affairs as a diplomat (1844–1846, in Paraguay) and foreign minister (1848). Made provincial president of Rio Grande under the saquaremas (1850), he was raised to the Senate (1853) and the Council of State (1859), where he was reputed the monarch’s friend. His non-partisan service and abolitionism certainly make this reputation understandable, but they were poor recommendations for dominating the Chamber, where he had no important connections at all.118 The only saquarema to accept a ministry was given justice, doubtless in an attempt to attend to such matters. However, his intentions seem to have been to safeguard the party’s interests, rather than to forward the cabinet’s. He was, in effect, a saboteur; he quickly made clear that he opposed the abolitionist project which was the cabinet’s raison d’être. [José Ildefonso de] Sousa Ramos, barão de Tres Barras, was a contemporary of São Vicente and of Uruguai at São Paulo (1834). A mineiro, he had become a fluminense coffee planter in Valença, going into law and politics there. The Party of Order lifted him out of obscurity to the presidencies of Piauí, Minas, and Pernambuco in the partisan 1840s and 1850s. He had survived the Liberal Quinquennium as a deputy for Piauí, shifting to Rio de Janeiro in 1850–1852 during the saquarema ascendency. A senator by 1853 (for Minas), he was then appointed to justice under Rodrigues Torres. Minister of empire in Caxias’s moderate cabinet (1861–1862), Tres Barras had just ascended to the Council of State (1870). In a phrase, Tres Barras had precisely what São Vicente did not—partisan credibility and experience. Although these qualities had probably suggested his utility to São Vicente and the emperor, as a way to win some semblance of saquarema representation and support, such influence could flow either way. Tres Barras had apparently joined São Vicente’s cabinet the better to oppose the emperor’s project.119 Two other appointments more clearly spoke to the mission and rewards for those loyal to it: Torres Homem took finance, and Teixeira Júnior, Agriculture. Torres Homem, however cautiously, had favored the project in the Council of State deliberations of 1867 and apparently served as the link between Teixeira Júnior and the emperor in 1870. Given his financial reputation, the appointment also made practical sense. Agriculture for Teixeira Júnior made a certain kind of sense, for it was a crucial portfolio, given the cabinet’s emphasis on abolitionism. Unhappily, however, Teixeira Júnior’s capacity had everything to do with finance and nothing to do with planting. Although he had kin among the planters, he himself was entirely urban in his background and his investments. Worse still, he took ill in November and was compelled to withdraw. The cabinet had looked to him, as a renowned orator and the project’s champion, to lead in the Chamber, where he had led the Chamber’s minority Conservative

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opposition against Itaboraí. Now, however, his burden fell to the minister of empire.120 The appointment to empire probably speaks to São Vicente’s desperation in trying to recruit. Being unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to secure another saquarema such as Tres Barras for this highly political post, he had settled on a pernambucano novice, perhaps thinking such a minister could be more easily managed and might also be useful in recruiting patronage clients among the Northeastern deputies. For these few months, however, João Alfredo [Corréia de Oliveira] (1835–1919), could have offered little to the cabinet. João Alfredo was chary of speaking, a terrible handicap in the Chamber, and had had little time to establish a reputation for leadership. What may have recommended him was his newly established role among northern Conservatives and a record of good service to the Crown. João Alfredo descended from a distinguished line of cane planters on his father’s side. He was also kin to the dominant Conservative clans of his province. His cousins were among the Rego Barros family, and one of them, the barão de Goiana, was a great local political chieftain in the province whose daughter he had married. These relations, and the crucial protection of the visconde de Camaragibe,121 the great chief of the province’s Conservatives by the 1860s, had brought João Alfredo quickly from his Recife122 degree (1856) to the provincial assembly (1856–1860), to the Chamber in Rio (1861–1863, 1869). The saquarema cabinet had appointed him to the provincial presidency of Pará (1869).123 While saquaremas would have been disappointed by João Alfredo’s acceptance of a São Vicente appointment, they were given no significant reason to regret his ascent then. João Alfredo had no opportunity to display talent during this tenure; his capacity would only be revealed later. If São Vicente was unfortunate in most of his cabinet, he knew and was determined to improve it. São Vicente fastened upon Paranhos as the solution his cabinet required as the months went by. Nor was he alone in his estimate. Cotegipe, fellow bahiano and a colleague of Paranhos in the Paraná cabinet, had thought of Paranhos as a potential prime minister for years. In late 1870, the man’s star had long since risen high enough for everyone to know its light. That year, his ongoing Platine achievements were graced with a noble title—visconde do Rio Branco. Whatever his capacity, though, the issue of compatibility remained. After all, Rio Branco’s role in the Senate, in the Council of State, and in the Itaboraí cabinet, point to his increased approximation to the saquarema leadership. Defeated by the Liberals in the election of 1860, an ardent critic of the post–1863 League administrations, betrayed by the Liberal cabinet and the emperor in 1865, the most specific opponent of abolition in the 1867 Council, and an 1868 minister who had accepted the leadership of Itaboraí, there was little to suggest Rio Branco had any sympathy for São Vicente or his mission. In-

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deed, the emperor had rejected Rio Branco as Itaboraí’s successor in his final interview with Itaboraí in 1870, precisely because of his solidarity with the saquarema cabinet. Moreover, Rio Branco was now, once again, deeply involved in the fragile Platine negotiations of 1870–1871. Thus, though it was obvious why São Vicente wanted him, it was just as obvious why Rio Branco did not requite such desire. He refused São Vicente’s pleas, pleas that began 9 December 1870.124 As the beginning of the parliamentary session drew closer, Teixeira Júnior, on temporary leave, finally resigned. Tres Barras immediately threatened to resign with him, deepening the crisis. With both established orators gone, how would São Vicente confront a Conservative majority? São Vicente’s nerve failed entirely. In private, he threatened that without the explicit support of the saquarema chieftains, he too would resign. São Vicente’s agony and threats come to us from Caxias’s correspondence with Rio Branco. The old soldier, now duque de Caxias, provided a perfect intermediary. Close to both the saquaremas and to Rio Branco, doggedly loyal to Dom Pedro, he heard from everyone and was used by them all, as well. São Vicente apparently had Caxias arrange a meeting with Itaboraí, Muritiba, and Sayão Lobato around 25 January 1871. There, the jurist made his demands for Conservative support. Caxias reported that the saquaremas offered guarantees. They did not suffice. São Vicente also demanded that Rio Branco, and the particular friend of the emperor, Luís Pedreira do Couto Ferraz (now barão do Bom Retiro), help shore the cabinet up by accepting appointments as ministers. The prime minister’s reasoning seems clear: one minister would secure the confidence of the Chamber, the other, the Crown. By 30 January 1871, however, both candidates had refused to serve.125 São Vicente could see no alternatives and refused to go further himself. The emperor and the Conservatives were back to the stalemate of May and September 1870; the saquaremas refused to support abolition themselves, the emperor would not confide a cabinet to them without such support, and both considered the Liberals too threatening an alternative. São Vicente, so Caxias reported to Rio Branco, glimpsed only one solution. He asked the emperor himself to press where the saquaremas had failed: S. Vicente asked the Emperor to put pressure on Bom Retiro, and, seeing that he did not yield even to this, made a decisive request to resign, and advised His Majesty to order that Your Excellency be called to organize a new cabinet. And he told me that the Emperor having agreed to this, said to him that if Your Excellency did not wish to accept, He would see himself in the position of handing over power, however much against his will, to the Liberals, seeing that the conservatives that He judged best positioned to serve well at present had refused to do so. Just today, I happened to be with S. Vicente and I heard from him that he was no longer a minister, and that he only held on to the portfolio until Your Excellency might arrive, since, having refused to serve with him, now you would

Abolition, War, and Constitutional Government / 271 have to organize a cabinet more to your taste. He also told me that the Emperor had been sorry about your first refusal, and that he said that he never expected this from Your Excellency to whom he had always given proofs of affection. I do not envy you the sinecure, my dear friend, but what can one do? If Your Excellency refuses, we will have Zacarias or Nabuco [de Araújo], and the Conservative Party is in the mud, never more to rise. Do not vacillate, and do not be impertinent. Your Excellency has much talent and judgment and will find decided support in all of our party. Carry out the proposed reforms, with care, do not go to extremes, but continue forward, for you will do a very good service to our Fatherland. Think well on the consequences of passing power to the hands of our opponents. . . . I believe that the Visconde de Itaboraí will also write to you in the same sense in which I do . . . . My friend, believe me, the situation is not as bad as it seems.126

There is no evidence that Itaboraí did, indeed, write to Rio Branco. However, such added suasion may have been superfluous. Caxias’s pleas to Rio Branco were something quite different from São Vicente’s. They were the desperate, acute arguments of a stalwart personal friend and trusted political companion, a colleague in bygone cabinets and the bloody history of the Rio de la Plata. And they conveyed both the desperation of the saquaremas and the personal wishes of the emperor. Rio Branco’s coastal steamer brought him back to the Court on 20 February, bearing him from the more temperate south to the stifling humidity and torrential rains of the old port city. During the last week of the month, while he caught up with his family and doubtless received the visits of friends and allies, São Vicente refused the last urgings of the emperor to consummate politically the abolitionist project which he had sketched out in law. São Vicente had recognized the limits of a state policy, however enlightened, when it lacked political support, and he, as a mere servant of the Crown, could not produce such support. That act was over. On 25 February, the emperor requested Rio Branco’s presence at São Cristóvão.127

chapter seven

The Defeat of the Party: The Political Crisis of 1871 The representative system in Brazil does not rest on the Doctrinaire principle, but on the democratic, modified by the Doctrinaire. The sovereignty of the national will is its foundation; and it is by means of legislative affairs that that will rules over all the powers of the state. . . . The throne, which is erected so high in the center of our institutions, can only support the weight of moderating power; initiative pertains to the Parliament and the country. A bolt of will unleashed from those heights will either set the country ablaze in struggles of resistance or light up the cemetery of public liberties. (Very good.) This is the constitutional doctrine. (Applause.) —Pinto Moreira, Jornal do Commercio, 18 August 1871, 2 [7 August 1871].

In this political history, the reader will have noticed the lack of attention to the point of view or the plight of the great mass of Brazilians. This is a history of a regime dominated by a series of related elites. It explores, and focuses upon, their perspective in the analysis of their actions because that is the nature of the era’s political direction and its history—it is the history of the actions and ideas of a ruling class. Nonetheless, the reader will also have noticed that our examination has also taken others into account when they forced themselves upon the elite’s attention. The reader will recall that attention to others, particularly urban middle-sector and mass participants, was brought to bear when, say, they intervened in the regime’s history in the Regency, or in the context of the debate over the ending of the African trade.1 Here, in the last chapter and in this one, although the analysis has focused on elite concerns regarding abolition, the actual plight and perspective of the captives is lacking. This apparent contradiction is interesting, because it points to a central aspect of abolitionism at the time; the captives’ actual plight and perspective is lacking precisely because nei-

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ther was central to the issues and development of the political debates at hand. With some problematic exceptions, even those whose scholarly preoccupations focus upon abolition in the debate of 1871 have made this clear. In effect, we have no evidence, to date, that the agency of the captives themselves figured in the political debate and crisis of 1871.2 If the captives themselves did not figure in the discussion as agents, however, their presence in it, however distorted, was nonetheless pervasive. They figured in it as constructed in the perspective of the elite, as objects of capital, objects of fear, objects of policy. They were reduced to an abstraction, a euphemism, the “elemento servil” in the language of the projected reform and of its proponents. Ironically enough, theirs is not the only story hidden from view. As will be seen, at least in the established history of this era, the elites themselves have had their actions and their ideas obscured, as well.

I. The Elemento Servil and History Some attention to the reality of the captives is obviously required, however brief, to appreciate the context of the 1871 debate. The most obvious matter to mention is that the nature of slavery and slaveholding had changed gradually since the end of the African slave trade in the 1850s, but with dramatic results. In 1850, slaveholding was common in most of the Portuguese-speaking areas of the Empire and was the common ambition of all ranks and colors. The end of the trade meant the end of cheap slave labor. Natural reproduction, limited by gender imbalance, disease environment, malnutrition, and harsh labor meant that the number of captives gradually diminished after the African source was cut off. The constriction in the supply, combined with the continued growth in demand (particularly in the expanding coffee frontier, strengthened by the railroads of the 1860s), led to a rise in prices which favored the wealthier and more creditworthy. The result was an internal trade in people and the growth of mixed free and captive labor arrangements, particularly in the Northeast. In general terms, people were sold out of urban captivity and into rural captivity, particularly the agro-export sector. Within the Empire as a whole, this meant not only the diminishing presence of urban slavery, but the final phase of the shift of slaveholding from the northern and northeastern littoral to the south-central coast and near hinterland of Minas and São Paulo. That is, the presence of a greater proportion of Brazilian captive in the south-central region, a tendency with roots in the eighteenth century, was now consolidated and strengthened by a small, regular interprovincial trade. The completion of railroads into both provinces, by facilitating rapid transportation and cheaper freight costs, encouraged this tendency dramatically, particularly in western São Paulo (which became the most dynamic export frontier in the Empire after the mid-1860s).3

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Demographic and Regional Change in the Southcentral and Northeastern Brazilian Population, 1823-1872 (from Stein, Vassouras, 296) 1823 Region

Southcentral Northeast Total National Population

1872

Free

Slave

Total

Free

Slave

Total

1,045,099

446,549

1,491,648

3,125,616

891,306

4,016,922

1,101,548

493,834

1,595,382

3,005,850

349,762

3,355,612

3,960,866

9,930,478

This does not mean that there were no people in captivity in the North, the Northeast, or in the towns. It means that there were significantly fewer captives in urban areas throughout the Empire and that they were concentrated more significantly in the hands of the wealthy; it also means that northern or northeastern captives were more likely to remain in, or fall into, the hands of the steadily decreasing number of rural landholders who remained competitive. The interprovincial trade, quite small compared to the old African trade, appears to have been underway even before the end of the Atlantic traffic in 1850. Increasingly, even competitive or, better, surviving planters in those regions found it economically advantageous to sell off some of their captives each year precisely in order to remain in business. Aside from coffee planters, Brazilian planters, in the northeastern provinces, particularly, were simply losing ground in the North Atlantic market as they competed with cane and tobacco planters in Cuba and cotton planters in the United States, and they had been doing so precisely in the era after the end of the African trade, except for a few years when the United States Civil War pulled the South’s cotton off the markets. This demographic shift in slavery does not mean that an era of foreign free labor or flourishing wage labor among free Brazilians ensued. Foreign free labor understandably preferred the free-labor regimes and greater opportunities long established elsewhere. As for Brazilians, the great number of laborers who took the place of the African or creole captives were the Afro-Brazilian rural people, largely descended from earlier generations of freedmen. They were desperately poor, landless, and unorganized. They became agregados, dependents who exchanged their labor for the favor of protection and farming small plots of landholders’ property. They remained largely outside of the cash economy and a crucial labor and domestic-food production resource. Thus, one of the objections to abolition raised by the councillors of state in 1867 was that there was a practical need to know the demographic proportion

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and location of the captives before discussing emancipation. This is also why there was a good deal of attention to the rate of decrease. The slaveholding elite knew that they confronted a dwindling resource with implications for the economy, differential regional impact, and the potential presence of a suddenly freed and potentially mobilized captive population. However, here, and in most other places where grave men of wealth and position raised practical issues of concern—whether the councillors, or the ministers of the Itaboraí cabinet, or deputies in the Chamber—they were ignored. This includes the very significant issue of socio-economic and political integration of the emancipated. To the extent that this, the fate and role of the emancipated, was addressed and debated at all, it was largely done by the proposal’s opposition or in response to that opposition.4 This is because of a reality touched upon earlier. The project of the free womb was essentially a political one. It was a response by the emperor to his perception of the Empire’s international position, rather than a practical plan addressing both freedom and security. An enlightened scholar, a connoisseur of European public affairs, a correspondent of European savants, and a man morally repelled by slavery, Dom Pedro II did not want Brazil to stand alone among civilized nations as a slaveholding nation. By constitutional definition the defender of the Empire, Dom Pedro did not want Brazil subject to English abolitionist intervention again, nor Brazil’s future blighted by the shadow of the divisive potential glimpsed in the United States. His private sentiments and his shame and concern drove him to find a solution while maintaining as much of the status quo as possible. Hence his decision to impose the free-womb project. It had, in theory, a great deal to offer him. It would declare before the world the Empire’s reasonable solution to a barbaric and necessary colonial legacy. It would free the Empire from English threats derived from the settled English perception of Brazilian intransigence. It would deprive slave holders of labor so gradually as to represent little immediate or mid-term threat to their production or to the larger society of which slavery was the traditional foundation. It must be observed that the fact that such a project did nothing for the captives existing was not addressed as significant by the monarch. It is also important to note that while the project and natural demographic decline among the captives were understood to end slavery, it was also understood that both would nonetheless leave a certain, dwindling number of captives for decades to come. That was implicitly acceptable to the emperor. Whatever his private sentiments, the emperor and those who championed this project with him were willing to accept immediate and enduring issues of inequity and subsequent decades of captivity in exchange for legislation immediately addressing the public challenge of their wretched international standing and the dubious future complications associated with unchallenged slaveholding.5

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The opposition to the project was not willing to ignore the immediate implications of such a project. For them, the stakes were very high indeed. They may be reduced to two issues: first, the maintenance of the socio-economic status quo over which they presided and for which their representatives had reconstructed the monarchy; second, the security and strength of their constitutional, representative form of government, now threatened by their monarch’s actions and those who supported them. History has generally recognized the drawbacks of the free-womb legislation of 1871, and it has also noted the socioeconomic interests of its opponents. It has generally ignored the constitutional element of the debate or dismissed it as inconsequential or secondary. In the main, one can thus say that history has hardly conveyed the significance of the 1871 crisis, even when (or because) it does convey a soft, distorted echo from this past. One could summarize that echo, the received wisdom, rather briefly: The emperor and his prime minister sought to address the international issue of abolition by the Rio Branco Law of 1871. Historians differ as to whether this was a Conservative ploy to preserve slaveholding for generations (this is the more recent view) or the idealistic attempt of enlightened public opinion, the monarch, and the minister to realize a glorious reform against the will of a powerful minority of “slavocrats” (this is the traditional view). Indeed, 1871 is generally granted little attention at all. Given the fact that the impact of the 1871 legislation on the captives themselves was negligible, most historians focus on the Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888, which actually led to the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, one is obliged by the evidence to contradict most historians with respect to both the nature and the consequent importance of 1871.6 First, this debate was not an inconsequential dispute over a farcical law of little actual importance. In fact, perhaps only the debates over the nature of the monarchy in the 1820s and 1830s were as fierce or significant, for this was a debate which cut to the central political conflict over that monarchy as it emerged by 1841. Indeed, this debate essentially settled that conflict. As the previous chapters have made clear, this was a conflict apparent since the 1840s, in many ways, a conflict that was enduring, however intermittently addressed. The debate, the conflict, concerned a specific issue: constitutional, representative government. The conflict was most evident in the relationship between the monarch, the parliamentary political parties, and the direction of state policy. In 1871, the conflict surfaced in a very open way, because it challenged one of the fundamental aspects of the traditional social order: slavery. That institution, so central to imperial Brazilian society, provided the heat and the anguish of the debate, and was, by its very fundamental nature, inextricably raveled into the larger conflict. That conflict, however, was fundamental and became explicit in public deliberations and with great drama, and it did so over five months. In

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the end, its resolution damaged both the Conservative Party and the monarchy in fundamental, fatal ways. Second, the constitutional issues were thus not incidental to the abolitionist debate of 1871—they were at the very heart of that debate. In many ways, the issue of abolition was either secondary to, or subsumed by, the larger constitutional issues, which spoke to the basic one of the relationship between state and society. Third, to the extent that slavery and emancipation were truly debated at all, they were debated by actors whose beliefs and interests have been distorted or neglected. This was not, as the classic historiography argues, a conflict between a moderate, enlightened, abolitionist majority and a negligible minority of marginalized, diehard slavocrats. Nor was it, as the modern historiography suggests, a conspiracy by the slaveholders to maintain slavery under the noise of a farce of abolition. This was a debate over the emperor’s abolitionist project, a debate pitting an authoritarian executive and a fragile majority of its dependents in the Legislature against an established, constitutionalist minority of nearly two fifths of the Chamber. It did not pit slave holders against others championing free labor. Indeed, it took place in a Chamber where most deputies, on either side of the debate, owned people and wished to maintain and secure slavery, at least for many years, as a necessary evil which both sides opposed and deplored in principle. Nor were those who spoke most fiercely against the abolitionist project merely doing so as pig-headed, stubborn men with a greater vested personal interest in slavery. In fact, three of the principle orators opposing the project and its origins took grave personal exception to the calculated use of the epithet, “slavocrat.” These three were men who had, at considerable personal expense, freed their own captives discreetly in years past, for reasons of private and political morality. Indeed, one of the principle orators against the project was the most prestigious abolitionist of his time, Perdigão Malheiro. As will be shown, he proposed an alternative abolitionist project, one arguably more practical, more effective, more equitable, and more humane. It was a project that was publicly supported by the opposition in the Chamber and in numerous petitions from the landholding and merchant elites. However, it was not the emperor’s project, and, therefore, it failed.7 In essence, it will be shown here that the debate of 1871 was not simply about abolishing the captivity of men, women, and children in Brazil. Nor was it about race. No one in the Chamber maintained that slavery was moral or preferable on grounds of racial differences. No one attacked the right of freed or free Afro-Brazilians to participate as citizens upon emancipation because of their racial origins. Instead, the debate of 1871 was most fundamentally about the resolution of a political contradiction clear since the Majority of 1840. It has

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to do with the nature of legitimate political authority and the catastrophic decline of the constitutional, representative regime reconstructed by the reactionary party between 1837 and 1842.

II. Rio Branco and His Ministers Rio Branco did not have far to go on 25 February 1871. He had first taken a new, larger house on the Rua do Aterrado, the road built over the land filling the swampy area between the old city and São Cristóvão, when he became a minister for the first time, in 1853’s Conciliation Cabinet. Since then, as his career had flourished, he had moved to the Rua do Conde, which had recently been renamed “do Visconde Rio Branco” in his honor, a singular distinction. It was one of the oldest east-west roads, leading to the Campo de Acclamação, with easy access either way to the old city and São Cristóvão, along a more pleasant route on higher ground. Yet the visconde probably did not need much time to think as his coach rattled along the way to the emperor’s villa. He had heard a great deal of the current political situation, no doubt, upon his return to the Court from Buenos Aires on 20 February, in conversations with his compadre, Caxias, and with others. We cannot know what he thought; we can only speculate, piecing together this complicated conjuncture from what evidence is to hand and some logic. We may wonder if he may have hoped that, after São Vicente’s humiliating failure to manage a viable Conservative cabinet, much less a Chamber majority, that the emperor, recalling Rio Branco’s concerns in 1867 and his solidarity with Itaboraí and Paulino as recently as September 1870, would be more flexible.8 If this is how the visconde thought, it might explain his mounting concern as he left the country palace after his interview with Dom Pedro II and his acceptance of the mission his monarch had imposed upon him. For the emperor was unrelenting. In their long conversation, he made it clear that he wanted the reform and he expected Rio Branco to obtain it. Rio Branco, who had been assured party support in his contacts with the party leaders before the interview, now found that that support varied dangerously as he related the emperor’s wishes. Itaboraí and Muritiba joined Caxias, Bom Retiro, and Tres Barros in offering their continued solidarity to his new administration, but the first two made it clear that they could not do so in regard to the key issue. They would not support the abolition project. Muritiba recalled the situation months later, in the Senate: When His Excellency, summoned from the Rio de la Plata by the noble ex-prime minister . . . directed himself to ask the orders of the elector of ministers [a circumlocution for the monarch] in order to know his thought, as was appropriate to the occasion, it seems that His Excellency found himself a little mistaken in the reception that he expected his

The Defeat of the Party / 279 proposals might have. Returning from the interview, the honored member sought to know what my opinion and that of other friends might be concerning his reception. Then I did what I could to encourage him in the achievement of the goal that he had proposed by virtue of the invitation received; and I declared to him that I would not fail to support the administration of His Excellency. But I never failed to reserve my entire liberty of action, principally in relation to the question under discussion now [i.e., the abolition project]. The honorable member knew my opinions in respect to this and, thus, could not expect in any way that I would abandon those that I had professed [before] in order to embrace those which suddenly arose after the honored member placed himself at the head of the Cabinet of 7 March.9

There is no way to know precisely how Rio Branco perceived his position after these conversations. He may well have felt betrayed; he had accepted the call of the emperor on the assurance that he had the support of the chieftains of the party, a party whose domination he was preserving by becoming prime minister. Perhaps this is what he meant when, the next day, 6 March, he wrote to thank Cotegipe for his support: “I am thankful for the expressions of friendship that you sent me and that fell upon me like a consoling balm in the pitiful position in which they placed me.”10 After all, he had been commanded by the emperor to go in one direction and been advised by two of the most eminent of his party chiefs that if he did so, he did so alone. He would have to fail either such men or his emperor. This may well have been his perception; certainly the decision he took is clear. It was to accept his monarch’s direction. In that same letter of 6 March, Rio Branco sought the support of Cotegipe, then home in Salvador, and attempted to make the strongest case for his acceptance of his prime ministry. He told his old friend of his interview with the monarch: The emperor understood that public opinion urgently demands the following reforms: that of the electoral law; that of the administration of justice; that of the National Guard; and that of the servile element. He would not dispense with these reforms in any program. I think, as I declared from Buenos Aires to Your Excellency, that the reforms indicated are indispensable. I did not hesitate, then, to accept the opinion of His Majesty.11

After briefly commenting upon the other reforms, he went on to argue The question of the servile element now cannot have any other solution but that of liberty of the womb, with all the necessary guarantees to present property. It is the most that prudence counsels, and I believe that this can be done without trauma, assuming that the proprietors do not put up resistance, which would be ineffective in containing the torrent of public opinion, but would aggravate the inconveniences from which the reform is not exempt. The status quo is impossible, it would also offer serious dangers.12

Rio Branco may have thought to cover the emperor a bit with his vague and groundless reference to “public opinion”—he and Cotegipe knew better and had stated as much to the emperor in 1867 and 1870.13 Perhaps it was due to his

280 / The Defeat of the Party

discretion and the constitutional prohibition regarding the Monarch’s responsibility; it must have been wishful thinking, however, when he wrote bravely about Paulino’s following in the party: “I ought not to fear [its] hostility but [it] . . . merits some special consideration, for reasons that are obvious to Your Excellency.”14 Here, it seems clear that Rio Branco had no sense of the potential of the saquaremas in the Chamber for determined opposition. Perhaps the thought here was that Paulino and his cohorts would be appeased if the party’s political interests were overseen by a minister of empire whom Paulino knew and who was of impeccable Conservative origins. The irony of this would be apparent soon enough. The point is, however, that Rio Branco completely underestimated saquarema resistance and its origins, and expected to overcome it as a matter of course. His overtures to Cotegipe make clear his strategy; he would have to dominate his party in two ways. First, he would have to win the adherence of other prominent Conservatives, such as Cotegipe, to lend his reformist policies party authority and strength; hence his lures of power and patronage: “If the portfolio of finance does not please you, one will have to arrange something else which satisfies Your Excellency.”15 Second, he would have to ensure the party’s grasp of political realism—it must either support him or choose what he thought a fatal political radicalization. Thus, in encouraging Cotegipe to join him in March, Rio Branco not only made him offers, he also improved upon the same threat about the Liberals taking over that Caxias had made to him in January. He did this by pointing out the danger of saquarema obstinacy as well as Liberal radicalism: “One is dealing, my friend, with saving the country from the calamities of a political reaction or of a government of a party that is divided into radicals, republicans, extreme liberals, and liberals.”16 While his letter to Cotegipe begins to convey Rio Branco’s show of confidence and determination, it also betrays thoughts more intimate and darker. His ambivalence about a party in which he had served for twenty years easily surfaces. Perhaps recalling the saquarema opposition to the Conciliation Cabinet and the pressure that he and Caxias had felt from the saquaremas in the moderate administration of 1861–1862, he felt safe in confiding a certain bitterness to Cotegipe. He had been placed in his present position by the saquarema chieftains, and, despite their support for him in the early and mid–1860s and his presence in the 1868–1871 cabinet, he seemed to think they were quits: “I am paying off my debt to the Conservatives. Successful or not, I will attempt to leave power with dignity, and retire afterwards to the realistic position in which I always wished to live.”17 His lack of identity with the party seems clear, here, as well as his personal pride and political independence. His independence or, perhaps, his isolation from his former cabinet colleagues, saquarema or not, was soon complete. Before his letter of 6 March

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could have arrived, even Cotegipe balked; Rio Branco read, instead, the barão’s hesitation about a portfolio. In a letter responding to an earlier one of Rio Branco (28 February), the barão nevertheless gave him assurances of later support as a senator and immediate advice on his cabinet nominations. The challenge, Cotegipe counseled, would be the mastery of the Chamber’s Conservative factions. Cotegipe warned the visconde that his absence abroad might make it difficult for him to judge the state of the deputies. He wanted Rio Branco to assemble a team of the younger, more brilliant Conservative deputies, but warned him off of the Conservative oppositionists Teixeira Júnior had once recruited. He thought such men would alienate other Conservatives who were much more valuable for holding together key provincial delegations. Cotegipe, while he admitted the inevitability of the abolitionist project, also emphasized the primacy of electoral reform. The reader may recall that this was the issue central to the Chamber majority in their concern for revitalizing the legitimacy of the Chamber’s representative quality and the role of the parliamentary parties. Cotegipe stated that direct elections would address the issues that could be changed. He also added his doubt that the emperor would agree with this approach but that, without it, they would be caught up in a “vicious circle.” He concluded with something derived from his own recent experience as a minister in the Itaboraí cabinet. He advised Rio Branco, in his dealings with the emperor, to impress upon the monarch that the ministers must be treated as constitutionally responsible and must be understood to be so. It must have been quite clear to Cotegipe that the emperor’s actions too often suggested that he thought of the cabinet as his instrument. The barão thus pointed to the essential constitutional dilemmas that would frame the struggle to come.18 As it happened, when the visconde had this letter of Cotegipe in hand, he had already organized most of the cabinet. The problem was completing it. By the end of March, Rio Branco was still unsure about this. In a letter of 11 March, Cotegipe firmly denied acceptance of any portfolio. Like São Vicente, Rio Branco was having great difficulty in recruiting ministers, even among his friends; he found the party’s divisions lamentable and what he took to be the deputies’ lack of a sense of public service distasteful. He may have mistaken Conservatives’ repugnance for the emperor’s intervention for such a lack. In any case, the cabinet that he did assemble suggested that he had adopted at least some of Cotegipe’s advice; he recruited younger, capable deputies to help him in the Chamber. Against the barão’s counsel, however, Rio Branco also did his best to reach out to the oppositionist deputies and to the saquaremas at the same time, apparently assuming patronage could mitigate their political differences. Taking the finance portfolio for himself, Rio Branco appointed Manuel

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Francisco Corrêia, a young Paraná native and Crown servant as minister for foreign affairs. He retained João Alfredo in empire, gave navy to the key paulista oppositionist, [Manuel Antônio] Duarte de Azevedo, and agriculture to the young pernambucano deputy, Teodoro Machado Freire Pereira da Silva.19 These links to the Northeastern deputations and the saquaremas’ opposition within the party were obvious attempts to influence the deputies most vulnerable to the appeal of patronage and reform. However, his appointment for justice was a master-stroke: he won over Sayão Lobato. A former personal enemy of Rio Branco and the compadre and once the close friend of the late Eusébio, Sayão Lobato had been an undeniable saquarema stalwart. Rio Branco could now write of him as a dependable ally: “Mr. Sayão [initially] preferred to stay out [of the cabinet], and thus give us active and very effective support [in the Senate]. He gave me the most decisive demonstrations of friendship . . . and political confidence.”20 Without correspondence or memoirs from Sayão, it is difficult to understand precisely what caused this volte face. However, the circumstances of his career offer a convincing explanation. One of two brothers, sons to an esteemed magistrate and First-Reign senator, Sayão Lobato had built the first phase of his career around a reputation for candor and principled courage. His saquarema credentials date back to the desperate fluminense struggle of the Liberal Quinquennium of the 1840s. However, after the logical culmination of this, in the struggle against Paraná and his reforms, Sayão ran for senator (1856) against the cabinet’s candidates. Despite his electoral victory, he was passed over by the emperor. He may well have realized that he had reached the limits to which partisan loyalty could take him. In any case, his subsequent positions suggest that while he continued to enjoy great esteem among fluminenses, he was willing to barter this political standing for influential appointments from the mixed, moderate-Conservative cabinets of the era 1856–1862. The service he demonstrated then, serving with Paranhos as a minister in the Caxias cabinet of 1861–1862 at one point, seems to have earned the emperor’s approval and forgiveness for his opposition to the Conciliation. Elected a deputy in 1867 and 1868, he finally ascended to the Senate in 1869; the 1858 humiliation was a thing of the past. Now, once again, he apparently brought his established personal prestige among saquaremas to a cabinet in exchange for the power of imperial favor and the key portfolio for partisan patronage.21 By April, then, Rio Branco’s concerns about recruiting ministers had dissipated entirely.22 The prime minister was calm and preparing strategy and tactics for the parliamentary struggle to come. Correspondence makes several matters clear about the working relationship between the emperor and his prime minister in this phase. First, the emperor and the cabinet labored closely

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together as they went over the project São Vicente had revised during his tenure as prime minister. This central burden of the cabinet was carefully reviewed in April. Nor was the emperor merely glancing over a proposal as it went through drafts. He went over everything, from the legislation itself to the fala do trono. He used the twice-weekly despachos to review the reform’s wording in private meetings with Rio Branco. As he had planned to do with São Vicente, he also made it clear that he himself would be abroad during this most crucial juncture. While he stated that the reason for the trip was to seek medical expertise for the Empress, Maria Teresa, this fooled no one then nor later. His most recent and most credible biographer has argued that when he traveled, he let it be known that if the project were not passed, he might not return.23 This tactic of being out of sight jibes with the emperor’s established policy of seeking to limit any perception that he was responsible for the direction of state policy (as opposed to its oversight and realization, the constitutional role of the Crown). Indeed, he advised Rio Branco that he wanted his part in the cabinet resignations and appointments associated with the abolitionist project explicitly denied. On 9 May, with the session underway, the emperor’s role in Itaboraí’s fall was raised, and the emperor wrote to Rio Branco that he was pleased with the cabinet’s response, but wanted better: it is necessary that, when it is opportune, . . . [it be stated] that the visconde de Itaboraí it is who in this matter asked to resign along with his cabinet, indicating S. Vicente to organize the new one, and, also, that S. Vicente [it was] who resigned, in spite of similar efforts on my part to the contrary . . . thinking of you, Sir, for the new prime minister. I had not the least part in such [cabinet] changes; to the contrary.24

The emperor left no direct evidence of his part in the promotion or the drafting of the abolitionist project, either, except for his private correspondence with Rio Branco, which is made up of brief, vague notes indicating only his interest and his presence. He had handled his tools with force or gently over the years. Now, after setting the machine up, pointing it, and pushing it forward, he wished to disappear. Soon he would vanish behind the velvety curtain of a voyage; the drapery motionless, he would wait, impatient but unseen. In fact, in all of the archival research done here, no evidence has been found of direct contact between the emperor and his minister after Dom Pedro II left the Court for Europe in May 1871. There would be no direct responsibility in the final act itself. Only in late September, and this through the correspondence of a confidante in his entourage, did the emperor comment on Rio Branco’s labors.25 The emperor clearly wanted his will to be done, and precisely as he wanted. Once that was clear, however, he wanted to be free of any evidence of responsibility for his intervention. One result of this is that if Rio Branco had wished to consider a significant amendment to the project during the debates (in order,

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say, to cope with conflict and attempt consensus), he could not have done so in consultation with Dom Pedro II, and, if he had done so without consultation, he would have failed to pass the project the emperor had overseen and favored. In other words, if the prime minister had wished to oversee the reform’s passage into law in collaboration with the Chamber, as the Constitution directed, he could only have done so by failing to pass the reform the emperor wanted. He would have effectively failed to carry out the mission with which Dom Pedro II had entrusted him. It was to be the emperor’s way, or no way at all, and all of the responsibility for this lay with the prime minister, who could only do what he had been told or fail. The focus and the anxiety of the monarch were clear. On 9 May, the emperor wrote to Rio Branco that “As for the program of the present cabinet, what is appropriate . . . is that the reforms be presented as quickly as possible, beginning with the legislation on the servile element.”26 Despite Rio Branco’s comment to Caxias about resigning with dignity if he could not succeed, he quickly demonstrated that he had no intention of resigning nor of failing. An untiring worker, a superb orator, a meticulous administrator, and an accomplished master of men and circumstances, Rio Branco was a statesman who had made his career through the dramatic development and display of such talents in Crown service, working successfully with one great statesman after another. Now he would do so with the master of all statesmen, although only in absentia. He had no family, no fortune, no fazenda to fall back upon. He could not fail.27

III. The Nature of the Debate Some aspects of Chamber debate need to be recalled here.28 Under the Monarchy, the two houses of Parliament joined in the Senate chamber for the opening of Parliament’s annual session, which began 3 May and generally closed in late September. The monarch began the session in that joint meeting by reading his fala do trono, speech from the throne, which was understood to be the policy, program, and perspective of the current cabinet. Thereafter, the Chambers separated for their sessions in each house. If a change in administration had occurred, the formal explanation of the cabinet change might immediately compel a vote of confidence. Alternatively, the normal course of events would occur, and the fala do trono would present the first opportunity for testing a cabinet’s strength, as the Chamber had to make an official response to the fala and the committee charged with drafting that was voted in by the majority. This was the pattern followed in 1871. Thus, the debates on the fala and the resposta (response), as well as the votes on committee membership and in support of the resposta, would establish the number of votes upon which the cab-

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inet could count, or, its majority. If the committee drafting the resposta were not made up of cabinet supporters, and if the resposta were critical of the fala and garnered a majority in support, the cabinet would know immediately that it lacked the necessary support for pursuing its policies. Generally this would lead a cabinet to ask to resign or to have the Chamber dissolved to allow for the election of a new Legislature more amenable to its policies. Neither of these options was appetizing for a cabinet or for the emperor, as we have seen. In 1871, with the emperor’s absence, neither was a likely possibility for Rio Branco. Generally, a cabinet knew whether (or assumed) it had a majority upon ascending; if it did not, it quickly asked for dissolution; if it did have a majority’s support, and cabinets generally did, what mattered was the margin of the majority. This was the case in 1871. The margin would determine the fragility or strength of Rio Branco’s support, and would determine, in turn, the tactics necessary to sustain or increase that support. A second battleground was the debate over the budget, orçamento, of each ministry. Often, a minister would be called upon to defend not only his past and future actions, but the cabinet’s policies in general. If the cabinet’s majority were weak or evanescent, the cabinet’s work could be held up in budget debates. A strong majority would vote the budget through quickly. The third testing ground, obviously the crucial one in 1871, was the program of the cabinet. This program was tested in the debate over legislative projects it had proposed and which its majority-elected committees vetted and then brought forward. These went through three readings and debates, each separated by regulated periods of time for reflection. The first reading introduced the legislative project in terms of its intent, constitutionality, probable impact, and so on. Amendments could be proposed, voted upon, and accepted only in the second of the debates. The third debate was on the completed legislative proposal. After passage in the Chamber, the proposal went to the Senate, which put it through the same process. Only, if the Senate amended the proposal, it had to send it back to the Chamber for approval. Once it had passed both houses, the proposal went to the Monarch for his signature or his refusal. The debate in the Chamber or the Senate could not take place without a quorum, and, once a project debate had been announced by the president of either house, it could be closed by a majority vote. Votes were anonymous unless a nominal vote was proposed and passed by the majority.29 These basic aspects of parliamentary practice are detailed because all came into especially dramatic play in 1871. For example, assumptions about majority support: the cabinet assumed it had enough support at the session’s very beginning so that its ministers could offer saquarema stalwarts choice committee positions. Although this was doubtless done with an eye to buying their sup-

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port, one doubts that it was done with much sense of risk. This sense of strength may well have derived from the prime minister’s assumptions about the degree of intimidation and of influence exercised by the clear favor in which the emperor held the prime minister and the cabinet, as well as by the weight of the manifest prestige of Rio Branco in the party and the political world in general. He was mistaken about both. Rio Branco and his colleagues completely misjudged the nature of saquarema opposition and Paulino’s capacity to organize it in a Conservative Chamber, however vulnerable to cabinet coercion and patronage. This opposition’s members, called Conservative dissidents as the debates wore on, were apparently recruited and regimented under Paulino’s personal direction before the debates began. At first, signs of opposition were sparse; it first showed quickly, thrusting brightly in speeches by one or another of the most noted saquarema orators in the Chamber and the Senate, starting 9 May. At the time, it cut at the origins of São Vicente’s fall, Rio Branco’s rise, the propriety of the emperor’s voyage, and the reform. On 12 May, however, the minister of agriculture introduced the abolitionist project; a Chamber committee to review and present it was appointed shortly afterward, and the emperor left for Europe (25 May). Paulino apparently judged then that the time had come for a more forceful test.30 It was then (29 May) that Paulino made his first speech of the session, in the ongoing debate over the fala. In this initial move, the political acuity and silken adroitness characteristic of the man are suggested by the words and the strategy. Tobias Monteiro’s observation about how the furor of the dissidents contrasted with the style of their leader are worth recording here. He described the dissidents as “A wind of passion, that came from the threatened coffee plantations,” and compared them to their calm commander, a statesman he himself once met: Paulino de Sousa was thirty-seven then and already felt that the baton of Itaboraí was being passed into his hands. We knew him already old, out of politics, but influential, revealing the same gentleness in voice and gestures, the same firmness in command. No one would say that there was a hard will, rock-like, under that velvet restraint. He was a chief who did not order, he asked; who did not threaten, but convinced. Everything about him . . . demonstrated such structured form and gravity that his followers accepted his direction as though it were a species of priestly guidance.31

In this first speech, Paulino deftly attempted to effect the separation of the cabinet, to which he offered his support, from the abolitionist project, which he was obliged to oppose. It was an attempt to maintain Chamber and party solidarity with the cabinet in exchange for the sacrifice of abolition, at least in its proposed form.32 Rio Branco did not accept this offer. He recognized it as a challenge to his administration’s raison d’être, a threat to the confidence of the

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Crown, and an attack on his own leadership.33 As his mestre, Paraná, had done with the electoral reform in 1855, he decided to respond by quashing his opposition through making the issue a question of confidence. Unlike Paraná, however, he did so immediately. This, again, demonstrates his assumptions about the strength of his support, or he would not have risked it. In fact, the vote which followed only rebuffed the dissidents; it certainly did not quash them. It was a trial of strength that told Rio Branco how difficult his mission was to be. The opposition, in this early test (1 June), mustered 35 votes out of 98 deputies present, a formidable dissident bloc. Rio Branco’s majority was both relative and absolute, but clearly fragile. For a favorable vote on anything significant to the cabinet, every one of the 63 who had stood by him on this occasion would have to attend a session merely to guarantee a quorum.34 At that point, it was clear to everyone that it was to be war. While the majority-elected committee charged with presenting the project as a legislative proposal carried out its labors, the initial debate on the project was joined, as each faction sought to achieve and to test support. By 13 June, that first phase had to come to an end. The conflict metamorphosed into the budget debates, which immediately became the battlefield for the cabinet’s survival. Rio Branco and his ministers were forced to defend and to try to build up their majority on these more peripheral and general issues of support for the cabinet. Such debates were likely to be ones where Rio Branco would naturally expect more support, as they had to do with sustaining the executive power’s function, and this support, in itself, would demonstrate his strength and thus garner more. With the reform technically off of the floor, the cabinet’s strength might thus solidify and possibly grow before the next test against the project itself. Rio Branco may well have been glad of the June delay, then; he knew that the debates on the reform would be divisive and difficult, and he doubtless wanted to avoid them until his majority was as strong as possible. He knew that if he held on to his majority or increased it, he would win. He probably reasoned that the more the project itself was debated, the greater the risk of Conservatives buckling under to ideological, personal, and partisan pressure from their established saquarema leadership, and returning to the traditional party’s ranks. For this very reason, the dissidents sought to maintain their pressure by forcing the cabinet’s dubious legitimacy and abolitionist project into the discussions of ministerial budgets.35 The saquaremas thus employed a two-fold strategy in June. First, they focused the debate on issues of past party policy and coherence and on the constitutional issues which they had raised in May. They attacked Rio Branco for betraying the party’s position on abolition, a position he had defended in the Itaboraí administration, trying thus to demonstrate his political incoherence and explaining it as due to his servility to ambition and to the Crown. They al-

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luded to the emperor’s intervention in the process. They spoke to the lack of public opinion favoring such legislation. They pointed to the danger of economic and social chaos. They demonstrated the cabinet’s betrayal of both the party’s constitutional tradition and its constituency.36 Paulino, in particular, fastened upon the key constitutional and political issues. In response to Rio Branco’s claim that the abolitionist project was a legitimate Conservative policy, despite Itaboraí’s 1870 stance, Paulino pointed to Rio Branco’s own public statements against the project in the Senate in 1867 and 1868. He then went on to refute the cabinet’s attempts to rewrite the history of the Itaboraí cabinet: The Cabinet of 16 July is at times described [by the present cabinet] as anti-emancipationist, at other times as radically emancipationist. I appeal to the memory of all here still present who can testify about the facts that they witnessed. We were not and we are not enemies of liberty: we are abolitionists up to the point permitted by the right of property, the state of the country, the most vital interests of social order: what we combat is improvisation in a matter so grave and difficult and the precipitation of those who, for a preconceived idea, do not hesitate to sacrifice the present and the future.

Paulino continued at length to discuss the party’s position on the abolition project in terms of established party ideology and history, concluding with one of the key constitutional issues; the origins of the project and constitutional responsibility for state policy. This, for many, was the heart of the constitutional issue. Paulino implicitly revisited here the doctrine of the nature and limits of constitutional powers in his father’s Ensaio, the 1860s debates on the emperor’s role and cabinet responsibility, and the private travails of the Itaboraí cabinet with their monarch: In the arts of administration, if the initiative of a measure derives from the sovereign, but the ministers accept it from conviction, making it theirs and defending it, it is they [in effect] who want it and it is them that the nation ought to hold to account, as I do with the present ministers, [who are, in effect] responsible for the servile proposal. I do not want to know now if they were convinced or who convinced them. If the ministers, for the love of power, subject themselves to impositions, still more do I charge them with responsibility, because they also have that of not comprehending the duties of their position and that of cheapening the dignity of their mission. Minister of the navy:—And Your Excellency thinks there are such ministers? [here, the minister tries to draw Paulino into either making an inappropriate ad hominem comment or retracting his implicit condemnation of the cabinet] Paulino de Sousa: In no way would I place in this last hypothesis the members of the present cabinet, many of whom are my friends and whose character I need not defend. (Applause.) It does not concern me to know how they designed the proposal: it suffices me that they are responsible for it. Andrade Figueira: One can assign the origin of the measure, leaving aside the responsibility to whom it belongs. [here, Andrade may have sought to point to the em-

The Defeat of the Party / 289 peror, to emphasize the constitutional betrayal of the cabinet, without formally placing responsibility on the monarch, which was constitutionally impossible] Paulino de Souza:—I do not contest the right to indicate the origin, I do not do so since I have someone to whom I may constitutionally direct myself. (Very good.)37

Paulino, like all of the political world, knew the emperor’s role. As the reader sees, however, he worked carefully to resist the monarch’s imposition and ministers who willingly became his instrument in that imposition, taking care to shield his constitutional monarchy by refusing to hold Dom Pedro II responsible in public. The dissidents also began to enter into the record something unprecedented in Chamber history; eighteen or so petitions from merchants and planters of Rio and its hinterland, petitions with long lists of signatures. These were clearly orchestrated by the dissidents to demonstrate the saquaremas’ congruence with the fluminense socio-economic elite—in contemporary terms, the most significant public opinion. These petitions initially presented intransigent positions against abolition; with the development of the debate on the issue itself, in July, the petitions began to embrace amendments or alternative proposals emphasizing the continued control of the emancipation process in slave holders’ hands, in order to mitigate state abolitionisms’s weakening of their moral domination of the labor force. This is an important point. Throughout the debate, the slave holders’ fear of the state undercutting their hegemonic position in the traditional rural moral economy was an important motif in their representatives’ oratory.38 As the force and edge of the saquaremas’ oratory and public opposition were displayed, Rio Branco found himself at an obvious disadvantage. He had no orators who could match the rhetorical skills or logical or historical arguments of his opponents, and no real supporting public opinion.39 He himself tried to ward off the immediate blows by speaking in response himself; he sought to counter the petitions through subsidized journalism. Although his ministers had to respond in the budget debates, he could and he did defend the cabinet and his own position indefatigably. He did this with consummate skill, sometimes at length, and, from time to time, racing between the Senate house at the western edge of the Campo d’Acclamação to the old city site of the Chamber to speak at both houses of Parliament the same day. He came to take his meals at home between the chambers, at times throwing himself down on a cot for a moment’s repose, fully dressed.40 From May on, Rio Branco also employed an old tactic in terms of the impact on national public opinion. The Jornal do Commercio, where Rio Branco had worked in 1850, had been the journal of record for the parliamentary debates since the Regency and, thus, enjoyed a state subsidy. Rio Branco apparently made sure that while his speeches and

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those of the reform’s few defenders were published relatively rapidly, the devastating attacks and careful criticisms of the opposition orators were published many days late, sometimes a week or two later. This doubtless muffled their impact on public opinion and, perhaps, the deputies themselves, since those who could not attend every day or were too fatigued to follow the discussions were necessarily dependent on the Jornal for the arguments.41 The opposition orators were relatively abundant. Reading the annals of parliamentary debate over the course of the Monarchy, one has the impression that key debates generally were carried by two or three orators on each side. In the debate of 1871, the saquaremas mustered a half dozen orators, men who stood up to risk their political careers over the course of the five months of the Chamber’s sessions, with another five or so making spectacular contributions more rarely. Like the debate over Paraná’s policies, the speeches and punctuating apartes are all the more striking for their personal, abusive tone. After all, many of those opposing Rio Branco had known him personally for a decade; Paulino had known him for two. The issues were fundamental; among them were the nature and authentic leadership of the party itself, for both sides claimed to represent the Conservatives.42 On 30 June, the initial testing was over. The debate over the project itself began again with the report of the reform’s committee on that date.43 Criticism in the ensuing debates and the discussion of the reform’s origins by Nabuco de Araújo’s son make it clear that the committee had done little to work out the project’s many weaknesses; it was essentially the draft that the cabinet had tinkered with in April under the emperor’s immediate supervision, and, thus, a project derived directly from the 1867 drafts provided to the Council of State and subsequently refined by the latter’s committee afterward.44 Given the emperor’s imprimatur and the consequent desire of the cabinet to pass it as he had directed, this is unsurprising; they could have little interest in regard to any necessary, substantive revision regarding its potential practical problems. In effect, these latter were beside the point. Now, however, that it was brought before the Chamber for the second reading and discussion, a real danger of delay, amendment, or defeat was clear, particularly given the display of oratory and the public pressure of the petitions already mustered by the opposition and its constituency. Rio Branco no doubt wished to avoid either delay or amendment— both threatened the mission given him by his monarch. Possibly gambling that his enduring majority might have sobered his opponents, he apparently sought, instead, to compel the dissidents to reconsider their opposition. Both sides agreed to a private meeting between Rio Branco’s representatives and the leading opposition deputies in the residence of the Chamber’s suave and widely respected president, Brás Carneiro Nogueira da Costa e Gama, conde de Bae-

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pendí. The conde lived on the Rua do Visconde de Maranguape, a new street on the edge of the old city, near the Passéio Público and in the shadow of the port’s old arched aqueduct. It was Baependí’s excruciating duty to maintain the decorum and preserve the equity of the Chamber’s practices and, a saquarema stalwart who nonetheless maintained the respect of all Conservative factions, he had been hard pressed (and would be still harder pressed soon enough). He probably hoped for the best in promoting and hosting the parlay. The meeting took place on 2 July, and another followed a little later. Both meetings made clear that Rio Branco was unwilling to entertain any real compromise, even on the project’s details, much less its substance. It was all or nothing. It became clear to the dissidents that the prime minister had agreed to the meetings only in the hope of getting the opposition to accept that it could not win against the cabinet’s majority and, thus, to agree to a face-saving farce—limited debate, to allow token dissent, as it were. The dissidents refused, apparently unwilling to accept defeat without attempting victory.45 In July and early August, then, the conflict became especially ugly. As it did, the nature of the conflict also became more manifest. The dissidents, apparently fearing defeat, made their priorities clear by shifting from frontal engagement over abolition to a flanking attack on the issue of the emperor’s imposition. In July, they first sought to amend the project; then, they argued for the adoption of Teixeira Júnior’s 1870 project. In either case, their concern was clear; if they could not win on abolition itself, they were desperate, at least, to re-establish the primacy of Parliament in legislation. In the end, the constitutional issue was clearly the more important to them and to others in the Chamber; their proposals began to erode the cabinet’s majority. Still, though the cabinet’s strength was seen to drop to a margin of six deputies or so, its majority remained.46 Yet, the dissidents apparently saw this as their best hope; as we shall see, they would return to an alternative abolitionist project in the most desperate phase of the debates, in late August. The dissident minority also sought to obstruct the cabinet, not only by turning all the remaining debates on ministerial budgets back onto the reform (eventually forcing the cabinet to abandon the budgets and arrange special budgetary enabling decrees, passed by majority votes), but by avoiding a quorum. Knowing that Rio Branco’s majority was fragile and that many of its members were only recent recruits, made up of Conservative deputies who had voted to support Itaboraí’s position less than a year before, dissidents stayed away from the Chamber themselves and were often able to persuade a few of their former allies to do the same, as well. The numbers were such that this was often enough to stall the Chamber’s business. The cabinet, however, trumped the minority with increasing skill. João Alfredo quickly learned of the minor-

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ity’s wiles and countered these efforts by cajoling the prime minister’s deputies, if need be by going from house to house and pushing deputies to their duty. Over time, he became practiced enough at pressure to maintain the cabinet’s majority in the Chamber, to keep the debates going. Just as important, through the shrewd and capable manipulation of procedural rules and the increasingly brutal use of the majority’s vote, João Alfredo became adept at orchestrating the closures of the debates and forcing votes, pushing the project through rapidly and depriving the opposition of time to wear away at the weak support for the cabinet, of time to criticize articles at length—or, in some cases, of time to criticize them at all.47 The dissident opposition did its best work in speeches in the second week of July and then in the month’s last ten days. At month’s end, João Alfredo’s culled majority was clearly near to managing to close the second reading’s debate on articles. This would force the project forward to the third reading, and, thus, the debate on the project as a whole, with no possibility of amendment. The danger of amendment over, the Chamber would have no option of compromise, no possibility for the dissidents or the prime minister’s vascilating supporters to choose but his way. The project as the emperor wanted it, the cabinet’s viability, these alone would remain for deputies to decide. Any sort of dissident victory would, thus, be much more difficult to achieve. The last debates of July were therefore of great emotion and frustration, as the cabinet’s parliamentary tactics and increasing success at them became clearer and clearer. On 27 July, Francisco Belisário [Soares de Sousa] (1839– 1889), Paulino’s cousin48 and close political aide, was so frustrated by the extraordinary success of the cabinet’s supporters in manipulation of parliamentary rules to compel closures that he pricked Baependí’s pride, chafing at the conde’s handling of the matter, despite the conde’s scrupulous attempts at impartiality. Baependí, whose portraits and correspondence suggest a cultivated sang froid and deep political loyalty, must have found this too much to bear, particularly from a friend. He threatened to resign; though he and the Chamber went on, a breaking point was obviously nearing. In the following days, it came, but in an unexpected turn.49 This occurred on 2 August. The dissidents may have been unusually frustrated on that day; they could easily have been particularly wrought up by a superb speech given by Almeida Pereira, the former minister, and a planter of classic saquarema connections. With aplomb and skill, this former protégé of Eusébio and Sayão Lobato alike, regretfully but painstakingly destroyed the Conservative credentials of the cabinet and its project. Speaking of the cabinet’s straying from the party and its established position on the abolitionist project, Almeida Pereira argued that

The Defeat of the Party / 293 On the day in which the state wanders from that path, it abandons being the guarantee of what is constitutional, it abandons speaking in the name of normal society, and it is made to assume a role which might be glorious, but is of great risk and immense responsibility, that of being the agent of attempted revolution. The institution of slavery among us, in the Constitution, in the country’s legislation, in the usages and customs of centuries, is an institution of law. As such, it has made juridical relations that cannot be forgotten nor suppressed at will, nor only at the sonorous canticles of philanthropy. In a lawful society, the state has the rigorous duty to protect these rights, to maintain the interests created in good faith and sheltered in the shade of the law.50

His provocative eloquence was persuasive, but not persuasive enough among the wavering. As it had again and again during the past month, the cabinet’s supporters successfully organized and rallied a majority. Again, this majority forced a closure of the discussion on yet another article—this time, the next-tothe-last. It then forced the Chamber to vote on passing on to the discussion of the last article of the project. This vote, called unexpectedly and unusually on a Saturday, was such an obviously concerted ploy that opposition rage was palpable. Again, to no avail. The dissidents remained in the minority and lost the vote. Nonetheless, even at this stage, the vote showed that the dissidents had successfully pried away a few deputies from the cabinet’s majority, for the vote was 59 to 39. Clearly, some cabinet supporters had been persuaded to stay away; others had actually crossed back to the dissidents. However, it was still a cabinet victory.51 In the ensuing speeches, the dissidents attacked the cabinet’s procedural ploys in harsh and increasingly unrestrained terms. As the furor became uncontainable, Baependí added to the uproar, for he finally declared his decision to resign his position at the end of the day’s session. The Jornal do Commercio is an acquired taste for the modern reader. In its increasingly rare, old, leather-bound volumes, it is about a meter high and a half-meter wide. The few scholars who do consult it are generally unable to use these ungainly, deteriorating volumes, but are forced to read it in microfilm. Each issue runs to about four or six pages in the 1870s, and each of these pages is divided into narrow columns of very tiny print. Yet, despite the difficulty of such study, the pain and anger that rise from the pages carrying this particular day’s debate pull the reader to the dead moment with a unique, vital force. It was after Baependí’s announced decision that an unprecedented drama took place, as the saquaremas’ wrath swept and swirled around the emperor’s prime minister. In the ensuing exchanges, one of the saquaremas’ most feared champions spoke. This was [Domingos de] Andrade Figueira (b.1834). A fluminense colleague of Paulino at São Paulo, Andrade Figueira went on to a doctorate there (1857) and began a distinguished career as a lawyer. He came into politics

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only as part of the saquarema restoration of 1868. Paulino had then appointed him president of Minas Gerais that year. He was elected a deputy in 1869 and a deputy to the fluminense provincial assembly for 1870–1872 immediately afterward. Known for his character and the ferocity of his dedication, he was the constant speaker and master of apartes in this debate, possessing an unmatched articulate spontaneity: “His speeches were published just as they were spoken; he never read them before.” If he had prepared them, perhaps they would have been more restrained. Unlike more cautious saquaremas, particularly Paulino, Andrade Figueira did not shirk from personal comments, even about the emperor.52 On 2 August, in the growing tumult following the majority’s successful call for closure, and after Baependí’s announcement of his resignation, Andrade Figueira pointedly called for the Conservatives’ electoral reform, in order to liberate free men from the tyranny of the emperor and the executive power. Addressing the Chamber, he argued that It does not suffice that you discuss the liberation of slave progeny; it is necessary that, to achieve this with wisdom, and attentive to the nation’s true aspirations, you begin by liberating the white race . . . (Applause, very good, from the opposition.). . . . which finds itself politically enslaved. . . . (Applause from the opposition). . . . This slavery is ancient, but it was never made manifest so clearly, and with more concern from the country, than [now,] on the question of the servile element (Applause of the opposition). It seems to have searched for the appropriate terrain to manifest itself.53

In the air electrified by this provocative statement, and amidst the fierce accusations and counteraccusations and parliamentary wrangle that followed, [João ] Pinto Moreira finally rose from his bench among the dissidents. Pinto Moreira had never given a major speech in the debate. Indeed, although Cotegipe had taken his measure and proposed him among others as a possible minister to Rio Branco, in many ways he only emerges from provincial obscurity at this moment. The classic bio-bibliographical reference for this period does not tell us where in Minas Pinto Moreira was born or when, nor does it give us the date of the degree he took from São Paulo. Literally, his only claim to fame was this speech. He died, perhaps an old man, in 1876, after this, his first service as a mineiro deputy.54 But in this dismal hour of his party and his Parliament, he rose. He faced the prime minister, a visconde seated at the ministerial table facing the Chamber, attired “all in black, wearing his formal cutaway coat, on which shone, half hidden, the great decoration of the Order of the Cruzeiro,”55 and he spoke. Pinto Moreira began with a bitter condemnation of the tactics of the cabinet and its majority. Then, early in the speech, he proclaimed his resignation from the position with which the cabinet had favored him, the vice-presidency of his

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province. He did so as an explicit repudiation of the widespread use of patronage to obtain political servility in the Chamber. Then, as custom demanded, facing Baependí, Rio Branco, and the other ministers where they sat behind the green-draped table, he spoke of the emperor’s role in the perversion of the cabinet’s relationship with the Parliament and the party and argued, speaking of the cabinet, that to carry out such a mission, certain elements were necessary. First, the cabinet had to break its relationship with its party, to put an end to its representative responsibility. That, in turn, made it necessary to create parliamentary support through other means—state patronage. Pinto Moreira concluded by stating that “Finally, it was necessary that a statesman be placed at the head of this cabinet who, just a short time ago, had complained in the Senate of having been dismissed like a lackey who had stolen the king’s watch from the mantelpiece.”56 Pinto Moreira’s “lackey” reference was to Rio Branco’s public disgrace in 1865, and it was done with extraordinary skill. He had used Rio Branco’s own words, words from the Senate speech attacking his treatment by the Crown’s government (and, implicitly, by the emperor himself), to demonstrate Rio Branco’s servility. For the quoted reference to the 1865 speech immediately made the implicit point: what kind of man complained of being treated like a servant and a thief one year and yet returned to the same master another? The most painful touch was the introduction of the word lackey, itself, particularly in an aristocratic society based on slavery. A man of honor and independence would not serve the emperor once humiliated by him, nor would such a man serve him against the legitimate, constitutional traditions of his own party. Altogether, Pinto Moreira’s phrasing was devastating: Only corruption, servility, and personal ambition made such a statesman and such a cabinet’s actions possible.57 Rio Branco was an orator noted for his public poise and his capacity to respond by wit, deflection, or frontal counter-attack. Here, none of these could be brought to bear—the prime minister was publicly unable to control himself. Given the quite personal attacks he had faced and parried over the past three months from old friends and foes alike, there was obviously something extraordinary about this relatively obscure deputy’s particular attack to compel this loss of composure. The clear connection made between his public humiliation in 1865 and his embrace of the emperor’s imposition now, the suggestion that only a statesman with the character of a lackey could accept such ignoble treatment and such a mission, these drew blood. Perhaps it was too close to the truth. It was a commonplace regularly repeated in dissidents’ speeches that Rio Branco had conquered position and power by personal ambition, talent, and service, in implicit comparison to most others, whose status often derived orig-

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inally from social position, partisan relations, and ideological coherence. Rio Branco’s political incoherence and his reversals on abolition since 1867 and 1870 had been explored with scathing detail for weeks, and he had borne it. Now, however, the allusion to his acting like a lackey, a class allusion thrown in the face of a self-made man, seems to have been too much. One recorded account of his reaction to Pinto Moreira is this: The Prime Minister:—Your Excellency is in no condition for debate. Minority Voices:—Order! Order! Your excellency cannot say such words! Almost all the deputies rise, exchanging the most lively and vehement comments; the Chamber President rings the bell, demanding the right to speak. Voices of the Minority:—The Chamber’s dignity was offended by the Prime Minister with respect to a member of the minority. Visconde do Rio Branco (Prime Minister):—I wish to speak. Mr. Pinto Moreira:—It is I who am speaking. President of the Chamber: —The Prime Minister may demand his rights; but the only person who may appropriately speak to the orators is the President of the Chamber (Much Applause). Visconde do Rio Branco (Prime Minister): —I requested that Your Excellency attend to the orator’s words. The comments between the majority and the minority continue, many deputies remaining standing.58

There, the record ends. It was after this, in obvious tumult, that Baependí, having already stated his intent to resign, closed the session. This is not the only record, though. In the one published most closely to the event, it seems clear that Baependí himself played a role in the dissidents’ increasingly desperate attempts to confront the emperor’s cabinet. In this account, Baependí, an opponent of the project, joined the opposition in trying to avoid a quorum that day, although he himself was President of the Chamber. He only entered after the official roll call made it clear that the majority had assembled its quorum. After the cabinet’s deputies used the rules to force debate closure, Francisco Belisário again spoke bitterly of the majority’s parliamentary abuse. It was then, in this first account, that Baependí declared that he would resign if calm and prudence could not be maintained. One wonders if this combination of dissident attacks and statements were not a signal that the normal restraints should be abandoned. At least, however, they must have been a contributing element to the conflict which ensued. It was only then, after all, that Pinto Moreira’s speech was made (it is noted in the record at that point, though then unprinted), as was Rio Branco’s emotional response. After Rio Branco, personally insulted and apparently unheard by Baependí in his calls for order, responded to Pinto Moreira by stating, “Vossa Excellencia não está em estado de deliberar.” (the standard reprimand, translated above, this is a circumlocution

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used to silence a speaker unable to maintain decorum), this record tells the reader that Baependí reprimanded Rio Branco for using such an expression, which was one only the President of the Chamber could use. Baependí then went on to argue that the prime minister should have appealed to him. At that point, Pinto Moreira demanded to know if Rio Branco had been called to order for insult. Baependí defended his own procedure with Rio Branco and then, apparently for the first time, recommended that Pinto Moreira refrain from potentially offensive personal expressions and maintain appropriate moderation. In this record, it was then that Baependí’s ambiguous command of the situation broke down completely and tumult ensued, compelling Baependí’s suspension of the day’s session.59 This incident, and not least the suspect, desperate actions of the usually circumspect Baependí, can be thought a metaphor for the nature of the 1871 debate as a whole. It suggests the conflation of the personal and the political essential to an understanding of the history of the party and the political history of the Monarchy. More important, it also reflects the breakdown of personal and institutional relationships that the crisis of 1871 represents and effected. The Party of Order’s heirs here became disorderly in the defense of the social order. After all, the 2 August procedures, vote, and tumult point to the loss of more than the traditional calm and prudence for which Baependí appealed. More fundamentally, they point to the decline in the very order to which the old Party of Order had corresponded: an order in which the state derived from and protected the established social order; an order in which the Monarchy was the reconstructed, constitutional, representative government which received its support and legitimacy from the established socio-economic order and the elite who presided over it. In 1834–1837, the founders of the party had successfully organized against the regent of the time, based upon an appeal to the dominant class and to the established values of society. By 1842, these men presided over the Party of Order and had successfully reconstructed the state to safeguard that society, those values, and that order, in alliance with the monarch, who guaranteed and represented all of them. In 1871, however, the state and the social order were opposed. The monarch and his ministers were using that state and the monarch’s power to intervene against the interests of that order’s ruling class; essentially, they attacked the basis of that order. The Conservative dissidents, most coherent with the party and the party traditions identified with the state and its reconstruction, the heirs of the Regresso of 1837, were desperately attempting to defend that order against the state that they and their predecessors had sustained. The tumult Baependí may have encouraged, and certainly could not contain, speaks precisely to the desperation and unique disorder of the crisis. It was a fundamental crisis. Andrade Figueira had made

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that clear in response to the emperor’s fala, back in May: The strongest tie that binds a people to its government is the tie of legitimate and great interest, of being well governed, of seeing individual security guaranteed, property respected, opinions accepted. When, by contrast, a people, still unprepared for advanced reforms, however philosophically sublime, is thus struck in the face by an idea that emerges armed from the head of Jupiter, that is going to offend simultaneously property, sentiments, social organization, rooted interests, will there not be danger in such a situation? The confidence which has surrounded the throne of the Empire until today could be succeeded, I will not say by a lack of confidence, because Brazilians will never be able to nourish such with respect to their monarch (applause); however, indifference could follow, which is politically worse in its results than any other sentiment, even a more active one. The honorable ministers ought to attend to the political consequences of this fact, to the consequences of the indifference of the wealthy classes of the Empire, of the propertied, of the planters, who form, so to speak, almost the national universe. . . . If [the Monarchy] lacks a foundation of the great interests, if it lacks that confidence on which it has lived until today, and with which it has attempted to solidify itself, what will be the structure of support for such a respectable institution?60

The doors to the Chamber closed 2 August. Afterward, in succeeding sessions, civility was patched together. The stakes were too high for all concerned; tumult could not continue. A fragile order was restored. Yet, for the rest of the month of August, the dissidents tried in vain to compel the majority to see the logical consequences of the project and its larger significance. They were also quite clearly making speeches for the Empire’s electors to read and for posterity—they were terribly aware of the fundamental character of the crisis. Pinto Moreira made a superb, carefully crafted speech, completing the one Rio Branco had interrupted. Pereira da Silva, Perdigão Malheiro, and Nebias, all saquarema stalwarts, all abolitionists themselves, made splendid orations.61 Perhaps most important, Perdigão Malheiro, with dissident support, submitted an alternative abolitionist project to the Chamber (18 August) and discussed it in public (23 August). How is it possible to understand why the dissidents, having fought against abolition for so long, now responded with an abolitionist project of their own? The answer seems clear: it was a last, desperate attempt to meet the moral arguments of the cabinet and avoid the potential for catastrophe many saw in the emperor’s project. Indeed, the reader may remember that earlier, in July, the dissidents had attempted to amend the emperor’s proposal and, even, to promote Teixeira Júnior’s 1870 project in its stead. This August proposal, however, was their own project, and is even more indicative of their concerns and priorities. It was embraced by the dissidents for three basic reasons: First, as their July

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maneuvers had done, it offered a return to constitutional government. If it attracted away deputies from the majority, it would break Rio Branco’s bloc and the emperor’s imposed project would fail. The legislative initiative would pass back to Parliament, where it belonged, in a renewed majority under saquarema leadership. Second, while the project’s success would constitute a surrender on the issue of abolition, it appealed to them as abolition that was relatively acceptable in a situation in which they had come to see they had little choice. In effect, the project recognized that the political pressure for abolition could not be turned back; the emperor had proved himself unrelenting. Abolition would thus have to be engaged if the monarchy was to be preserved. However, in this proposal, while the interests of the party’s constituency were undercut, this was done in the least threatening way possible, by putting the process of manumission on plantations under the hand of the planters themselves, rather than that of the state. This would effectively strengthen the planter’s authority in this threatening context, rather than undermine it. Captives would know that their fate lay with their captor. Moreover, by providing immediate release for some captives and the sure hope of release for all, the project addressed the concerns of many slaveholders that the public announcement of abolition might breed revolt. After all, the emperor’s project struck at the legitimacy of slavery and announced liberty, but did nothing for those still in chains, creating a terrible potential for frustration and rage. This alternative project might contain the situation by showing the captives that their own freedom could be realized, but only under the control of their captors. Third, the economic provisions of the alternative project satisfied the captors’ notion of property rights in a demonstrably practical way. The captor was immediately and equitably indemnified for his loss out of funds raised directly from levies on the agro-export sector itself.62 This alternative proposal, however, doubtless the best possibility for compromise within the constitutional system, was simply dismissed. Rio Branco would neither relinquish control of the majority nor the project with which the emperor had charged him. João Alfredo, his spokesman, discarded the alternative in a brief speech (24 August) dismissing it as impractical financially and declaring that it had not been debated by the majority because it had been inappropriately presented to the Chamber.63 Rio Branco had his majority, and he knew he need not compromise. On 23 August, Paulino also made his third and final speech, a devastating tour de force, no doubt intended to destroy that majority by an appeal to Conservatives’ ideology and logic. He demonstrated Rio Branco’s lack of Conservative credentials, the unconstitutional origins of the project, the dangerous political irresponsibility of the cabinet in making the emperor’s role so patent, the

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impractical qualities of the project itself, and the terrible damage done to the Constitution, the parties, the Parliament, and the Monarchy itself. On 28 August, the day of the final vote, one of the most acid of the saquaremas’ younger purists, the gaúcho Antônio Ferreira Viana (1834–1905), made a telling proposal. He advocated making deputies ineligible for appointments made by the cabinet, a transparent attack on the state patronage which had brought the party and the Chamber to its present vulnerability to corruption.64 Such speeches, addressing both the ideals of the party and the patronage which had corrupted it, were equally ineffective. On 28 August, a majority of the same Chamber which had voted 54 to 21 in favor of the Itaboraí cabinet’s position against the emperor’s project in 1870, now voted in favor of the Rio Branco cabinet’s position supporting that project, and it did so by 61 to 35. Twenty-six of Rio Branco’s majority in 1871 were men who had reversed themselves, most likely pressured to change sides through cabinet electoral and patronage influence. Though the names indicate that the saquaremas had gained new support, it was not enough to make up for such a betrayal. Again, too, the majority pushed through to the vote unexpectedly; nine of the dissident minority were absent from the Chamber. If one considers that four deputies of the majority were cabinet ministers and necessarily bound to the project, this means that the struggle of 1871 had resulted in a Chamber divided 57 to 44.65 And this, despite the intimidation and patronage the cabinet could and did bring to bear. As has often been suggested here, there was a regional aspect to the vote, pointing to the Northeast, in particular, as the area whose deputies were especially susceptible to cabinet pressure. Indeed, a saquarema contemporary noted the significance of Rio Branco’s obtaining the support of the visconde de Camaragibe, the barão de São Lourenço (Gonçalves Martins), and the barão de Cotegipe, the chiefs dominating the Conservatives of Pernambuco and Bahia. He also recalled the prime minister’s pressure on “the deputies of the small provinces, who could not avoid the influence of cabinets. . . .” With such support, the memoirist concluded, “Silva Paranhos convinced himself that he might dispose of a majority.”66 In fact, of the 26 who shifted position to support the 1871 cabinet, 15 were from the Northeast and 19 of the 26 were likely to want, or already enjoyed, state appointments: 10 were law graduates; five were already magistrates; two were religious; one had a doctorate in law; another was an engineer. One also notes that of the 11 deputies who were not from the Northeastern provinces, all were from the sort of small or sparsely populated provinces vulnerable to “the influence of cabinets.” The process of parliamentary corruption through patronage, particularly in the Northeast, is something we have seen in play since 1850; it came into its own, now, in this crucial cabinet victory

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of 1871 against the interests of both the majority party and its powerful social and economic constituency.67 As for the thirty-five of the dissident Conservative who were present on 28 August, they went on record in supporting Perdigão Malheiro’s alternative to the emperor’s project. They clearly wished to indicate that the crisis was not, in the end, simply about abolition, but about the party and its monarchy. Forced by the emperor’s cabinet to accept abolition, they had made it clear that they would do so, if they could do so in a way preserving their hierarchy and their state. The vote of 1871 made it clear that they had lost that state.68 The denouement in the Senate was really rather anticlimactic. Although some of the saquaremas’ comments suggested that they expected crucial support in the upper house, they had little. Itaboraí, aged and now increasingly ill, had already spoken out to repudiate Rio Branco’s claims and to defend the minority’s position in the Chamber; and Zacarias, Tres Barras, Silveira da Mota, and Muritiba now attacked the origins and nature of the legislation itself. Still, the passage through the Senate was scandalously rapid, something its opponents emphasized: it lasted only a bit more than three weeks. After all, not only was the emperor’s role well understood and senators’ personal relations with the monarch and with the cabinet at stake, it was also stated and understood that meaningful amendment was neither desired by the cabinet nor politically possible. The Chamber’s quorum evaporated after 29 August. This being so, any amendment, much less obstruction, by the Senate would have meant deferring the legislation another year and thus deepening and prolonging the political crisis, something the senators, particularly the Conservatives, were probably loathe to do. Thus, although even abolitionists in the upper chamber were deeply concerned with the project’s flaws, they supported it rather than increase destabilization, court the return of the Liberals to power, or face the emperor’s personal interdiction. Yet one notes that significant Conservative senators were careful to be absent the day of the vote. Cotegipe was away on Platine diplomacy, to be sure, but Itaboraí and Muritiba were absent, despite their presence earlier during the debates. São Lourenço and Silveira da Mota, while protesting, voted for the amendment, as did Nabuco de Araújo, despite his criticisms. Zacarias, however, voted against it. He was one of four; the others were Tres Barras (the saquarema stalwart on São Vicente’s cabinet), Antão (the agriculture minister under Itaboraí), and Carlos Carneiro de Campos (a law professor at the academy at São Paulo from 1829 to 1858, and a councillor of state), an old adherent of the reactionary party of 1837. Although he had come to serve either party in the 1850s and 1860s, he apparently had been swayed by the speeches of several of his former students, and remained undaunted by his monarch or the prime minister.69

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The vote took place at 1:55 on the afternoon of 27 September, merely two hours after the Senate had opened its session for the final discussion. At the moment the votes were counted, spectators who had filled the galleries and tribunes stood up and tossed “a great quantity of flowers, which covered the carpet of the hall, and broke into repeated cries of long live the Brazilian Senate.” The President of the Senate arose and called them to order, according to the Senate regulations. They immediately fell silent. Afterward, the cabinet had to deny reports that the spectators were police agents. The Senate session closed at 2:10. Fifteen minutes had passed.70 The legislation was signed by the imperial princess regent, Dona Isabel, the next day, on 28 September 1871, in the old city palace, and published in the Jornal do Commercio 29 September.71 On 30 September, Parliament was reported closed; the season of waters approached. However, the last word had not yet been stated. For, as it happened, the Jornal do Commercio published the last speech from the debate that same day.72 It was, of course, the muffled opinion of an opposition orator, one of the most frequent, [Luís Joaquim] DuqueEstrada Teixeira. In his person, Duque-Estrada Teixeira was a representative and an advocate of the saquarema social order. He was of an age with Paulino, a privileged, successful fluminense lawyer and magistrate in Rio with a (c.1858) São Paulo degree. The name indicates a distinguished old fluminense family, related to Paulino’s mother’s people. A son-in-law of Muritiba, Duque Estrada’s own father was an established Rio lawyer himself; father and son had a practice together. Duque Estrada had entered politics in 1863, as an embattled Conservative; then, in 1867, he had been elected to the provincial assembly; in 1869, he had taken his seat in the Chamber.73 The speech in question had actually been made 20 July; but if the speech was published more than two months late, Duque-Estrada Teixeira may have taken grim satisfaction from speaking into the historical record last. Here is some of what he said. He spoke in rebuttal of the majority’s charge that the dissidents were a threat to the Monarchy. He argued that, instead, it was the debate and abolitionist project which threatened public order, large landholding, and established society. Then, he concluded with prophecy: when at last these elements of preservation and order are gone, on what will the monarchy support itself? What we demand are the rights and respect of the legitimate interests of our society, which are the interests of order and the monarchy in the present and the future. . . . Nations may live and progress on this or that form of government, but not without a conservative party that protects the fundamental institutions from profound shocks. . . . It is . . . damnable tolerance and irregular practice that has led the constitutional powers to go too far from their appropriate spheres, encouraging the executive power to become so overpowering that the cabinet was unwilling to permit that this re-

The Defeat of the Party / 303 form be a parliamentary one, and made without the unnecessary and capricious ministerial stamp. . . . When this reform arrives on the solid ground of reality, when the practical measures involved in the project are studied, we will see the government obliged to ask the nation, and especially those respectable classes whose just grievances have been so disdained, the means to execute these measures (Applause of the Opposition). . . . Already it has been announced in this Chamber that we are the minority and you the majority. Gentlemen, the step has been taken; doubtless, this proposal cannot be resisted because, as the eloquent deputy from Bahia put it, it is a stone which rolls downhill, it is a running torrent, it is even an idea which flies (Laughter). It flies, it is true, it flies like heavenly things, which have no foundations, it flies like the black cloud that suddenly takes form on the horizon and dissolves in a tremendous tempest. Pity the blind, fearful ones who do not discern it or believe that they can avoid and overcome the fury of the elements, just because they have in their hands the fragile helm of the ship of state!74

Too late. On the very day of the speech’s publication, the fateful day of the law’s passage, many weeks after Duque-Estrada Teixeira spoke, the Imperial Astronomical Observatory issued an oddly fitting bulletin. It graced the lawyer’s metaphor. The bulletin stated that the heavens, horizon, and mountain ranges had been overcast with clouds all day, with a light, intermittent drizzle. The previous night, there had been thunder.75 A storm approached.

IV. The Legacy of 1871 In late September, Egypt enjoys a rather dry heat. The temperature in Alexandria may well have been more comfortable than that of Rio, where the humidity was thickening and heavy rains rolled in. Dom Pedro II, having toured Europe, happily contemplated the exploration of the fabled land of the pharaohs, with their imperishable monuments to royal accomplishment. How delightful. And what a propitious moment to receive notice of what his minister had just achieved. It is entirely typical of the emperor that he communicated his response, even his embrace, through another. The letter through which he spoke to Rio Branco was written by a favorite in the imperial entourage, the surgeon Dr. Cândido Borges Monteiro, barão de Itaúna.76 Nowadays, the scholar finds it, dated 28 September, bound in leather, along with Rio Branco’s other treasured correspondence. And no wonder, for Itaúna conveyed the glory of the moment: Immediately after disembarking, the emperor received two telegrams, one from Florence, and the other from Milan, announcing to him that the law concerning the servile element had passed the senate, and now was sanctioned. Just as soon as he had read the former telegram, H.M. ran to me, gave it to me to read, embraced me, and in a true explosion of pleasure said the following to me; “Write again, now, to Rio-Branco, sending him this embrace that I gave you, and tell him, in the most positive language, that I am indebted to him, and wish to embrace him personally now, and that I will do so as soon

304 / The Defeat of the Party as I see him near me. Also tell him that I consider him as my man, in whom I put all the confidence and hope that I could have, nourishing the belief that he will not abandon me in the many things we have to do; also tell him to count on me as I expect to count on him, and add that leaving him at the head of government in my absence, every day I have more reason to believe in the man who has provided me and the country so much and such great and useful services in Paraguay.” I don’t know, my friend, if something has escaped me, because I have never seen the emperor surrender to such a violent expansion, and, as he was referring to my friend Paranhos, I could not restrain the tear that escaped me, and I almost lost the faculty of hearing.77

This letter corrects in its many suggestive phrases the misunderstandings of 1871 established since the era itself. The reader will note that there is nothing here about the captives and their plight. It speaks, rather, to the relationship between the monarch and his “man” and what they had done and might do together for their nation. The “law concerning the servile element” was the occasion for rejoicing because of the glory it brought and the good national policy it imposed; the idea that the horror of slavery had been addressed or mitigated goes unmentioned. What mattered was political victory and future policy. The legacy of 1871 for contemporaries had to do with that, it had to do with a political vision and a political conflict and a political triumph. In stark contrast, the legacy in the historiography is entirely distinct; it has to do with the law’s failure regarding the actual abolition of slavery and with the fate and experience of the captives. Let us hazard some thoughts on why this distinction should exist. There are, perhaps, three related reasons. First, the few historians concerned with 1871 at all have approached it anachronistically—backwards in time. They have been concerned with it largely in terms of the actual abolition of slavery, which occurred later, so they note it in anticipation of what happened afterward: the heroic struggle of the Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888. In terms of that struggle, of course, 1871 is a preliminary and a failure, and it thus invites very little scrutiny and, again, mostly in terms of emancipation.78 Second, the taint of victors’ sources or the cause of abolition itself have both distorted subsequent perception. Commonly, historians who study the Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888 and its 1871 antecedents do so, at least initially, through the works left behind by the movement’s veterans or the law’s advocates, principally the accounts of Nabuco de Araújo’s celebrated son and biographer, Joaquim Nabuco. The focus in such works is on the struggle that actually led to emancipation, the glorious mission central to their careers. The debate over constitutional, representative government is understandably avoided or obscured; that, after all, had been central to the defense of their opponents, and their opponents had lost. To the extent that scholars in later days have studied primary sources after reading these published accounts, or after

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reading the more accessible, massive, two-volume Discussão da reforma do estado servil (which contains only the speeches of the project’s defenders), they do so inevitably predisposed by such an introduction to the subject.79 Third, from this point of view, those opposing Rio Branco were, by that fact itself, champions of slavery and opponents of this civilizing reform. Even in the era of the debate, someone could be tarred by such a position, which compelled moral and political repulsion; hence the dissidents’ attempted rejection of the term “slavocrat” (escravocrata), mentioned at this chapter’s beginning. In the aftermath of Abolition itself, of course, such opposition was much more thoroughly damned. This was not only because such opposition had been politically routed and morally tainted, but, particularly by century’s end, probably because it seemed pig-headed and backward. After all, immigration, adaptation, and wage slavery had resolved the perceived threat to dependable labor posed by abolition, a threat which had been the chief pragmatic defense for maintaining slavery. In the time since, that repulsion towards abolition’s opponents has only strengthened. If one combines this repulsion for the opposition to abolition with a general lack of interest in Brazil’s nineteenth-century political history, the result is a relative lack of research on the crisis of 1871 and, when research actually is done, analysis which fails to take the dissidents’ arguments seriously or cannot comprehend them in terms of a past, political world now almost entirely unexplored and unknown. In a phrase, for more than a century, most scholars and laymen have been offended by the opposition of 1871 on the rare occasions when they considered the debate interesting, and they have never considered it interesting in terms of its proper context: the political history of the Monarchy.80 One might wonder, however, why even a historian of abolition who actually reads the debate of 1871 (or, at least, samples it) might not be struck by the constitutional issues central to the conflict and interwoven in all of the dissidents’ speeches. In the notable case of Viotti da Costa’s pioneering classic, Da senzala à colônia, the answer seems to be her theoretical and political assumptions and her focus on the abolition of slavery in 1888. In her analysis, 1871 is a rehearsal for the debate of the 1880s; she views the opposition’s arguments as examples of doomed obstructionism and bad faith in defense of class interests. The same may be said of Toplin, Conrad, and Gerson. Only Murilo de Carvalho, perhaps because of his informed sense of the larger political context, recovers something of the past in its own terms, and duly notes the importance of the constitutional issue. However, as the focus of his analysis in the chapter where he addresses 1871 is the political struggle between the elite and the Crown over slavery, rather than party or parliamentary or constitutional history, his achievement, at least in this respect, is unavoidably foreshortened. After all, his

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is an elegant analysis pitched at a more general, abstract level of class interests and the state; he does not recover the ties of 1871 to a long-term political debate involving the Conservative Party’s history and its constitutional traditions because his interests lie elsewhere, on slavery and on the larger structure of political power and conflict. Even Barman’s monumental biography of the emperor, generally impeccable on the emperor’s role in promoting the abolitionist legislation, implicitly accepts the traditional view that 1871 was a triumph of enlightened reform against deplorable vested interests and prejudices, rather than a debate in which those interests were intertwined with constitutional issues of central importance to contemporaries.81 There are two basic reasons why one can argue that this present analysis has recovered the debate in terms of its contemporary meaning. First, it is part of a long-term analysis of elite political history organized in terms of chronological development. Thus, the debate occurs and is analyzed in the historical context to which it refers—i.e., as a historical culmination, rather than as a failed preliminary. Second, this study takes seriously the idea that ideology remains central to understanding political events, so that evidence has been sought where ideology is likely to be found: correspondence, published contemporary accounts, and the debate itself, which has actually been studied here in the journal of record. One cannot stress the importance of the latter too much. Although he did not choose to pursue them, Murilo de Carvalho successfully grasped the presence of the ideological and partisan issues through actually reading the Council of State atas and at least a few of the speeches in Parliament (he cites the Diário do Rio de Janeiro, a paper which reproduced them for several days in May 1871). This enabled him to see that the issue of abolition was raveled around both constitutional and partisan struggles. However, his appreciation of this aspect of the debate (and his broad use of published contemporary sources to understand it) is the exception that proves the rule. Indeed, even reading appropriate primary sources guarantees nothing if one cannot engage their meaning apart from one’s own assumptions or interests. Even Viotti da Costa’s, Toplin’s, and Conrad’s classic studies, not to mention more recent analyses, because of their focus on abolition, eschew the careful sifting of contemporary evidence or an understanding of the political history in which 1871 was embedded and must be understood. It is indicative that Conrad’s analysis of 1871, probably the study most esteemed among those reading English alone, cites the dissidents’ speeches a score of times, yet only for comments on slaves and abolition. Conrad apparently does not understand the central importance of the constitutional and political partisan issues, despite the space and fury they involve in the debate. Thus, unable or unwilling to comprehend their significance, he ignores them, save for his suggestion that such matters were di-

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versionary, peripheral arguing points, which only concerned the emperor’s actions.82 An analysis of 1871 fastening upon only the discussion of abolition and slaves cannot recapture the meaning of the debate. Indeed, the kind of sampling most scholars have used cannot even recapture the rich possibilities of the debate for the proper study of race and slavery. Anything but engagement with the whole debate, read in historical and political context, cannot provide us with the meaning of this crisis. That reading has been the burden of this chapter. Let us try to make a summing up of what that reading reveals. As this chapter’s analysis has made clear, power and ideology were at the heart of these speeches and the strategies of either side. The emperor wished to pass a particular abolitionist law which would signify Brazil’s participation in Civilization and Progress while posing the least threat to imperial society or the economy. He imposed this mission, for constitutional reasons, upon an able statesman, Rio Branco. Rio Branco used patronage and the threat of a Liberal Party victory to secure the necessary Chamber majority from the Conservative deputies and to sustain it, dividing the Conservative Party, despite the able efforts of most of the party’s leadership to use partisan ideology and loyalty to maintain the party’s discipline and thus defend the interests of their traditional constituency. The dissident orators’ efforts were hampered by the unprecedented abuse of parliamentary rules to limit debate and to thrust through the project, cutting off sustained discussion and avoiding substantive amendment. Rio Branco sought to confront the able analysis and rhetoric of the opposition as the project’s most able orator. His strategy was to take the moral high ground and to proclaim the reform’s congruence with enlightened progress. He wisely avoided direct confrontation with the constitutional issues. Instead, he responded to the opposition’s charges by speaking without reference to the issues they raised, by attacking the personal motivations of his foes (he claimed that they wished his fall in the hope of coming to power themselves), and by seeking to suggest that they themselves were hypocritical or politically incoherent. Through his inferiors, and particularly in the anonymous columns subsidized in the daily press, these arguments were repeated, as was the attack on the opposition orators as slavocrats: benighted, diehard supporters of a cruel and shameful institution. The larger political significance of the debate is thus purposefully avoided by the prime minister. To take the constitutional and party issues seriously would have necessarily placed Rio Branco on terrain on which he could not win. If Rio Branco could not engage these issues, however, we must. We have to read the speeches of the other side to understand what the conflict was about, and we have to take them seriously and understand them in their own terms. It is there,

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in the lengthy speeches of the opposition, that the crisis is made manifest, its history noted, and the complexities laid bare. There, for example, by slowly working through the daily issues of the paper, one can find Paulino, who had been the party’s chieftain in the Chamber since 1859 and personally represents the traditional leadership of the party and its socio-economic base. Paulino’s views on slavery and abolition are cited in the historiography, but that is all. It is hardly enough; by omitting so much else, it is a distortion. Let us turn, for example to his speech on 23 August 1871. As Paulino’s last effort before the final vote at August’s end, it gives us the political meaning of the debate for the party and the Monarchy in superb fashion. Published long after the crucial hour had passed, on 10 September, this was a finely crafted piece of about four hours, typical of Paulino’s speeches. The Chamber anticipated its quality; the recorder noted deputies’ “general movement of attention.” The introductory ad hominem references are done quickly. He clears the way for his larger points by ridiculing the feeble attempt of the preceding pro-Cabinet orator; then he proceeds to eviscerate Rio Branco. He dismisses the visconde’s claims to party leadership (and, thus, a claim of coherent representation of the party and its past). It is worth quoting, if only briefly, for it directly contradicts so much of the established historiography: I always recognized in the prime minister an able statesman and one of our most notable talents; I did not know, however, that His Excellency was today or had been at any time one of the chiefs of the Conservative Party (Applause). Whenever it might have been, however, I do not judge myself obliged to go wherever this or that chief goes, but to find myself where the ideas of the party are. (Much applause.) Mr. Andrade Figueira:—Where the battle standard is. Mr. Perdigão Malheiro:—It is ideas that constitute the party. [Paulino continues:] The noble deputy [whose speech preceded this one] preaches to the converted. No one here supports the perpetuity of slavery. (Applause.) I already stated on another occasion and I repeat: In this enlightened century, for men who profess the law of the Gospel, the cause of slavery is condemned and for all time. (Well done.)

Paulino then went on to make a series of crucial points. His followers abandoned the call-and-response accompaniment obvious above and remained unusually silent during the hours of this indictment; only now and again was it punctuated by dissidents’ apartes of support. After defending the straightforward attempts of the minority to defend itself from the unprecedented and brutal parliamentary tactics of the cabinet’s orchestrated majority, Paulino attacked the good faith of the cabinet with regard to the reform. He detailed how the cabinet, rather than seeking compromise and allowing amendment, sought merely to limit opposition speeches and made it clear that no change in the

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project’s principal components was acceptable. The Legislature had been reduced to an institution of endorsement. Paulino continued, attacking São Vicente for his part in the unconstitutional initiation of the legislation (the perquisite of Parliament) and Rio Branco and his cabinet for the unconstitutional effect of making transparent the role of the emperor. He argued that Rio Branco had done this by the abrupt championship of a mission so patently at odds with his own recent past statements and the very recent past position of the Conservative Party in the preceding year’s Chamber. Only Rio Branco’s own ambition and his consequent submission to the emperor’s pressure could explain such a rapid volte face. In the course of this, Paulino discussed how such an imposition of legislation (legislation incongruent with the ideas and interests of the party and its constituency) undermined the parties’ roles in a representative form of government. Real parties, he pointed out, represented the ideas and principles of one or another national constituency. The non-ideological opportunism characteristic of the “official party” (here he used a term saquaremas had always employed for the Progressive League and now used to attack the supporters of Rio Branco) represented the executive power alone. They constituted a party which had perverted the concept of national representation; they were united by patronage, not principles; they bought votes and voted as the cabinet desired, thus undermining ideology-based parties and the parliamentary system to which representatives’ election and votes are central. After making these foundational, contextual points, Paulino proceeded to dissect the legislation itself. He noted its potential for perturbing the established social and economic order, particularly by undercutting the crucial domination of the slaveholder over his captives through introducing the destabilizing idea of abolition and the forcible intervention of the state between master and slave. He also noted its unconstitutional impact on the idea of private property, of which the state was the supposed guarantor. Near the end of this speech, Paulino again offered the alternative abolitionist project of Perdigão Malheiro, which had been introduced five days earlier during the course of the debate. He pointed out, in doing so, how it avoided the potential for socio-economic peril and unconstitutional precedent. Rather than raising and then frustrating the hopes of the captives, it offered them immediate and effective emancipation for some and the hope of such liberation for others on a regular basis. Rather than threatening the rural order with state intervention, it emphasized the slave holders’ participation, thus maintaining their hierarchical superiority and acknowledged respectability [moral]. Rather than exacerbating the aggrandizement of the executive power (and exposing the monarch to the charge of unconstitutional intervention), it sprang from the

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Chamber and the support of the party and notable constituents in the nation, thus emphasizing the rightful role of Parliament in originating legislation on behalf of the nation it represented. At the end of his speech, Paulino concluded with this statement, which brought the speech round again to the central issues of the 1871 debate with an authority he alone possessed: The illustrious rapporteur of the [project’s] committee evokes the venerated shades of Vasconcelos, Monte Alegre, Paraná, Uruguai, and Eusébio to condemn our behavior. What I learned in my life and in the examples of these great men was that the nation’s representative fails his political faith when he accepts other inspirations and repels those of the public’s thought. (Very good.) If these August shades, if these elevated souls, in the unknown mansion in which they rest from their great labors, from their services undertaken for this fatherland that they loved so much, accompany with the same ardor and solicitude that they demonstrated in this life, the path and the destiny of the country; if from there they might inspire us, we who desire to imitate them, they would say to us today and always: “Defend that constitutional order that is our legacy to you; struggle to consolidate the representative system in Brazil; support the great interests of today, that enclose within themselves future prosperity. You have there in history our examples. Follow them and pass them on to your children.”83

This speech, the failed but skilled oratory of the saquarema leader, has gone uncited, not to mention unanalyzed, since 1871. Yet it encompasses the position of the Conservative dissidents and makes manifest its complications and the links between the abolitionist project and the political history in which it must be understood. Indeed, the ignorance of that history is such that much of the speech would be incomprehensible to all but a few readers today, since it is part of a lost political world of references, traditions, and past events. The fate of the speech is suggested by the response of João Alfredo, made the following day. The largely silent instrument of Rio Branco’s parliamentary tactics, “the taciturn leader of the closures,” João Alfredo had made himself indispensable not as an orator, but as the parliamentary prod who went around to majority deputies’ residences to ensure the numbers crucial for a quorum and as the minister who planned and organized the closing of the debates, choking off the opposition. Now, his comments were designed to have a similar effect. They were part of the effort to muffle the sound and fury of the opposition by suggesting that they signified nothing. Unlike Paulino’s, João Alfredo’s speech was published relatively soon, so that the reader is confronted with a rebuttal long before the speech rebutted can be judged. João Alfredo dismissed Paulino’s devastating speech as more about politics than the proposal, attacked the minority for avoiding a quorum, argued that the minority merely defended the

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status quo, and then concluded by discarding the Perdigão Malheiro alternative as impractical and out of order in the Chamber rules for debate.84 Here is the final irony of the debate, and, thus, a fitting conclusion. As Rio Branco customarily did, João Alfredo had successfully dodged the constitutional issues by avoiding the reform’s relationship to the political realities of the Monarchy. He also sought to bury Perdigão Malheiro’s alternative project. Both tactics mirror the success of the monarch and his minister in history. As João Alfredo and Rio Branco desired, politics have indeed been stripped from posterity’s understanding of the debate. Moreover, Perdigão Malheiro’s proposal has been entirely lost to view. Like the political history and politics which make Paulino and the dissidents’ opposition understandable (and, with them, the true significance of the debate), this abolitionist proposal, by the most distinguished abolitionist of his day, is not simply unanalyzed—it is ignored.85 Such an omission is striking. As argued above, it is emblematic of the historiography’s failure. It suggests either an unwillingness to analyze the dissidents’ speeches or a decision simply to discount them. Traditionally, abolitionist veterans and historians discussed the debate of 1871 as a failed but idealistic attempt to liberate the captives; more recently, historians have dismissed 1871 as the elite’s successful guarantee of its interests through the façade of gradualist abolition. Surely, if either were true, and if the traditional or modern historians had thoroughly sifted and engaged the debate, this alternative proposal should have caught their eye and demanded explanation, for it contradicts both positions. Most ironic of all, if one were researching the struggle for emancipation with due care, this proposal would be fascinating. For, as has been shown, Perdigão Malheiro’s project was accepted by the dissidents. Driven by the threat to their property, power, and Parliament, the planter-merchant elite and the Conservative Party endorsed it. If the cabinet had been free to amend or negotiate the emperor’s proposal, and if they were truly interested in emancipation, they, too, could have then accepted it. It could have been a compromise. Most interesting, upon passage, such a law might have actually done something for those ostensibly most concerned: the captives. Let us see how. The emperor’s project, which is generally deemed to have been a complete failure in its actual impact on slavery, only actually proposed to free the new-born after eight years, and the freedom in view was dubious: the captives were to be redeemed in exchange for thirty-year bonds or remained bound workers until aged twenty-one. Perdigão Malheiro’s proposal would have freed people among those already living, would have done so within a year, and then would have done so annually until there were none left in chains. Its tenets were simple. After a careful, brief period of registration, certain cate-

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gories of captives in prioritized rankings would be eligible for emancipation and their owners reimbursed for their value. The number of captives freed would depend upon public monies raised from a practical, dependable, specific list of sources (including taxes on slaves and exports). The categories privileged emphasized the married, the skilled and literate, and recommended nubile females and males over thirty-five, and children under fifteen. The slaveholder would be involved in designating the eligible captives in the second category; their indemnification would be settled by public judgment and/or arbitration.86 In a phrase, Perdigão Malheiro’s proposal, as its author and Paulino made clear, was politically expedient, constitutional, and freed some captives nearly immediately and all the rest in a regulated process over the years. It was not only publicly supported by Paulino and the opposition, it was championed by a prestigious association of merchants and planters in the Court. Its figures and demographic projections (both disputed by João Alfredo) were checked and compared favorably to those of the emperor’s project in the Jornal do Commercio by Cristiano Otoni, Teófilo’s brother, a well-known Rio entrepreneur of Liberal antecedents and planter association.87 In a phrase, if 1871 were wholly about abolition or the plight of the captives, this project could have been debated in August and adopted as a compromise between the noble aspirations of the monarch and the constitutional and pragmatic concerns of the saquarema dissidents. Captives could actually have been freed by 1873, with more to follow, every year. Instead, the emperor and his “man” passed legislation of little impact on slavery but catastrophic impact on the Monarchy. They were responsible for a decisive, culminating moment in the conflict between the Conservative Party and the political development of the Monarchy, a monarchy the party’s founders had done so much to define and defend. Thus, the emperor’s project was only a fundamental element in the final act of a larger struggle. The crisis of 1871 was about the relationship between state and society, it was about the representative, constitutional monarchy theorized by Vasconcelos and the reactionaries in 1837 and defended by the saquaremas leading the Party of Order. It might be argued that this view of 1871 as a unique, culminating moment in a constitutional struggle between state and society, between executive and Legislature, between prince and party neglects the precedent of 1850. After all, then, too, a cabinet appointed by the emperor had promoted a policy—the abolition of the African slave trade—fundamentally at odds with the interests represented in the Chamber and by the Party of Order. Then, too, the cabinet used its influence and the lure of power and appointments to get its way. It is true, too, that the elder Paulino had made the issue a question of confidence for

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the cabinet then, a barely indirect threat against the deputies’ remaining in power (since, if the cabinet lost the vote, new elections were unavoidable). Yet, such a comparison, done with more care, actually strengthens the case made here. The cabinet of 1850 had been appointed by the emperor because he needed its strength in the context of domestic and foreign threats that the Liberals were manifestly incapable of resolving. For the cabinet, essentially saquarema, was strong precisely because of its ideological and partisan coherence with the most powerful elements of the ruling class. In 1871, in contrast, the emperor, having rid himself of the saquarema ministers of 1868–1870, precisely because they remained coherent with those same ideas and constituents, appointed a cabinet willing to do his will and, for that very reason, opposed to the saquaremas and those they represented. The cabinet was, by consequence, weaker and less credible to its party and the Conservative constituency. Again, in 1850, the saquarema leadership, convinced that their society and their state were alike threatened by English naval intervention, took the decision to shape a response that limited the immediate damage as much as possible by distinguishing between the interests of the negreiros and those of slaveholders and by taking the initiative. They thus maintained state prestige and social order, both threatened by English violence. In 1871, by contrast, the cabinet, whose strength derived from the emperor alone, was willing to sacrifice the immediate interests of the ruling class and that class’s long-term relations with the monarchy by forcing through legislation which had no significant public support, which promised immediate, destabilizing consequences, and which alienated significant elements in the ruling class and the related, traditional leadership of their party. Finally, in 1850, because of their organic and ideological relationship with the party and the ruling class, the saquarema ministers had the credibility and the connections to mobilize support among deputies and their constituency so that they could achieve not only a majority, but, more significantly, so that they could obtain the loyal and successful enforcement of the legislation through the efforts of provincial appointees whose personal interests were directly (and negatively) affected.88 In 1871, by contrast, the credibility and connections of the ministers, particularly in terms of the saquaremas, were explicitly refuted. They faced months of ferocious resistance by the paladins of their party and the mobilization of key constituencies in the near hinterland of the capital. Their success came from the explicit use of patronage, brokered particularly to provincial deputies whose desperation for patronage had been a political commonplace since the early 1850s. Again, most significantly, the victory in 1871 was an ephemeral, political

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one—it had negligible effect on the captives. As the saquaremas had stated in debate, such legislation, imposed by a state without representative articulation to society, was a dead letter because it necessarily depended for enforcement upon those whose interests it attacked. In 1850, the saquaremas could and did make their case to those dominating local society. In consequence, the Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850 was effective. In 1871, the cabinet merely won the emperor passage of his project. In consequence, the Rio Branco Law of 1871 was quickly demonstrated a farce. In 1850, the state, the party, and the key constituencies could be made to move together through the skills of the Party of Order. In 1871, the state divided the party and alienated its key constituencies; it had effectively broken with the party. In sum, the contrast between 1850 and 1871 makes the points argued here more sharply. It points not to parallels in 1850 and 1871 between the actions of the party and the state with respect to society, but to the 1871 state’s break with the party at the expense of the state’s relationship to society. While 1850 was a triumph of the party, 1871 was the party’s most significant defeat. It was part of that defeat that Paulino’s appeal to the venerated shades of that party did not sway the cabinet’s purchased majority of 1871. Like the speech and the nature of the debate, the appeal was buried. Instead, an engorged executive and interventionist monarch brought centralized, authoritarian rule to an unprecedented triumph, grinding forward through the ruins of the party’s tradition of a constitutional, representative regime. In the end, after the debate of 1871, there is no doubt that the captives gained little. However, it may well be the case that the free, and all future Brazilians, descendants of the captives and their masters alike, lost a very great deal.

Conclusion: Legacy and Metamorphosis History, gentlemen, is not the simple catalog of facts collected for the exercise of the memory, it is not only the field upon which the philosopher, considering the grandeur and the decadence of empires, contemplates the transformation of civilization in its march towards the greater perfection of the human spirit. No, gentlemen, general history for humanity, and its particular history for each nation, is more useful and real; it is the lighted beacon at the edge of the abyss to signal to those coming the memory of disaster and to avoid in the future the unhappy events of the past (applause; very well said!) Let us recall, gentlemen, our own experience, what we have suffered, and let us reflect seriously upon what is being done in the country. —Paulino José Soares de Sousa [filho], Annaes, 1858, t.1, 29 May.

A superficial reading might suggest to some readers that what has been done here constitutes some sort of apologia for the Conservative Party and its position on state and society. The intent has been quite different. It has been to recover the history of the party and to explain its significance at the time and to suggest its significance afterwards. Part of this effort has been the exploration and recovery of what has been forgotten—part, building upon that exploration and recovery, has led to the revision of many past assumptions and arguments against established analyses. Nonetheless, some may suggest that the last chapter can be misconstrued to be a defense of the ruling class and its resistance to abolition, however gradual. What it has shown is rather different: that abolition was not a distinct issue in 1871 so much one inextricably bound to the relationship between state and society, and that the Conservatives’ division and defeat did not mean the triumph of progress on behalf of the captives’ liberation so much as the political victory of an authoritarian state. Indeed, the argument made was that 1871 represents the culmination of a process of authoritarian statism at the expense of constitutional, representative principles of government. In effect, only part of the reactionary legacy of 1837–1842 survived the historical

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process, a fundamental loss in the developing political culture of Brazil. To restate this point by way of conclusion, a rapid reconstruction of the historical process traced and analyzed here may be useful.

I. The Reconstruction of the State (1831–1840) The first chapter of this study demonstrated the relationship between the Monarchy’s political elite and the oligarchies dominating society, a society based fundamentally on slavery. The second chapter analyzed how the revolts and drive towards reform associated with the abdication if 1831 and the Regency which followed compelled a reaction. The reaction was most significant among leaders of the former liberal opposition, men like Vasconcelos and Honório, who were now key figures in the dominant moderado party. Attached to the ruling class themselves, and now concerned with the danger to the state and the society posed by these processes, these men and others like them reached out to elements in the dominant oligarchies of the Court and its hinterland, as well as to other statesmen representing the planters and merchants of the sugar provinces of the Northeast. In effect, the danger to the established social order, including the purchase and exploitation of captives, compelled a reassessment and a reconciliation among elite representatives of regional oligarchies leading to the formation of a new party in the Chamber. This party was able to command a majority and to begin a process of passing reactionary legislation. The latter was designed to recover the authority of the monarch and the state he represented and to strengthen both, in order both to defend the social order, threatened by violent social and servile conflicts, and to maintain the integrity of the nation, endangered by provincial revolts. In both the second and the third chapters, however, something besides the restoration and development of state authority under the Monarchy was demonstrated. As part and process of both the liberal opposition of the 1820s and the centrality of the Chamber to politics and partisan organization in the 1830s, the reactionaries also sustained the principle of representative, constitutional government. They articulated and sustained the significance of the Chamber in state policy and, as part of this, the idea that the cabinet must not only enjoy the confidence of the Crown, the chief of the executive power, but must necessarily enjoy that of the Chamber’s majority, which represented society. These ideas, influenced by the liberal constitutional monarchism of the July Monarchy, particularly the thought of Guizot, were crucial to the party’s ideology and parliamentary practice. They emphasized a balance between constitutional powers and the importance of elite representative deliberation, constitutional order, and ideological principles in good government.

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II. Impact of the Monarch and the Corruption of Representative Government (1840–1857) The careful analysis of the first reactionary administration’s fall (1839) and the Majority movement’s triumph and its aftermath demonstrated both the centrality of principle among the reactionaries and the impact of the monarch’s charisma in political affairs. Most particularly, while the reactionaries were willing to leave power if principle demanded it (e.g., 1839, 1844), they were also helpless to confront the monarch, even at the sacrifice of the Constitution or of the principle of representative government (1840, 1844). This set the stage for the disappointments of the Liberal Quinquennium, when the monarch and his favorite set aside the precedent established by the reactionaries with regard to the cabinet’s representative quality. Repeatedly, the monarch chose cabinets to suit his interest in amenable instruments, rather then statesmen commanding enduring majority support. At least as damaging, the reactionaries’ opposition used the new state authority of the reactionary legislation passed between 1840 and 1842 to establish a fatal policy of electoral coercion and fraud, making it possible for the cabinet, if it had the monarch’s support, to fix the election of a partisan Chamber majority. Partisan enmity sharpened in the ebb and flow of purges, violence, and impunity, and the monarch (or his favorite) was attacked by the Party of Order and its opposition for his corruption of the representative character of the regime and the upset to the balance of powers. By 1848, however, the monarch, beset with domestic conflict and foreign threats, called upon the saquaremas to take power. Their resumption of cabinet rank and their abuse of the now established state power regarding appointments and elections led to the consolidation of the monarchy. State power and their particular partisan strength joined; the last provincial revolt was quashed, the Party of Order was strengthened and extended throughout the Empire, and both the African trade and the threat from Buenos Aires were ended. A process of state intervention to achieve social and economic development was initiated. At the same time, though, the saquaremas found that their vision of the state’s civilizing mission was tempered by their need to respect and support their oligarchical allies in the provinces. Similarly, the need for state patronage increased the demands and dependence upon the state by the deputies representing those oligarchies. Instead of the triumph of enlightened authority in the provinces, often the saquaremas found themselves drawn into local power struggles there; instead of triumphant party discipline in the Chamber, the saquaremas found themselves forced to use patronage to garner votes. Exhausted by their triumphs, disgusted by their disappointments, the saquaremas resigned.

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With the state consolidated and the nation’s interests vindicated, the monarch no longer required the support of the Party of Order’s partisans. He sought, instead, to use their most capable leaders to carry out gradual material reforms without indulging in the partisan purges and spoils of the 1840s; indeed, he wanted a non-partisan approach to appointments. Service to the state, rather than party loyalty, was now established as the pre-eminent political virtue. While the saquaremas had conflated the two, the emperor saw them as contradictory. His non-partisanship was rather more like anti-partisanship. Only Paraná, among the most capable and prestigious Conservative leaders, was willing to serve under these circumstances. The Conciliation Cabinet he headed, particularly after initiating the electoral reforms of 1855, embodied these tendencies and gave them strength, initiating a pattern followed through in the 1850s and 1860s. The cabinets, made up of statesmen whose partisanship had waned and whose vision was pragmatic and opportune, were nearly entirely detached from the traditions of the Conservative Party, which was increasingly divided between purists and such moderates. The idea of a cabinet as partisan and representative, as established by the reactionaries in the late 1830s, was explicitly condemned by monarch and statesmen alike. As part and parcel of this, the Chamber’s representative quality was made an open fraud. Now, the ministers served at the emperor’s pleasure and to carry out the emperor’s policies. The cabinet could use its patronage to secure the necessary Chamber majority; if this did not suffice, the emperor could grant a dissolution, and elections under the cabinet’s coercive control. A new level of state autonomy had been achieved, at the expense of a tradition of representative government.

III. The Struggle Over State Autonomy (1857–1871) The Conciliation and post-Conciliation pattern, involving Conservative moderates and pragmatic leaders and a Chamber majority culled by patronage from Conservatives and Liberals, evolved easily into the Progressive League. The Conservative purists, the saquaremas, condemned such a party as an “official” party—the party of an executive power now aggrandized and corrupting the legislative power. The manifest interventions of the emperor in the direction of state policy through the rise and fall of cabinets compelled a backlash again, in 1860. More independent thinkers and Liberal statesmen challenged the emperor’s constitutional role; some argued for a new interpretation in which the cabinet achieved primacy, while the Liberals called for the outright reform of the Constitution to end the emperor’s interference. The saquaremas, whatever their bitter feelings about the abuse of the cabinet and the undermining of representative government, defended the emperor’s role as central to the bal-

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ance of powers. Indeed, they condemned the ongoing aggrandizement of the cabinet’s role at the expense of the Legislature as a clear violation of that balance, and argued that to enlarge the cabinet’s powers to include those of the emperor would simply compound that unconstitutional trend. Instead, they explicitly argued that the constitutional way to contain the Monarch was by assuming legal responsibility. The cabinet could resign rather than take the responsibility for policies it deemed inappropriate. This had been their practice and their principle since at least 1853, when their leaders had repeatedly refused to accept appointment to the cabinet, probably because of an unwillingness to serve as the Monarch’s instruments in policies with which they were in disagreement. This principle of cabinet responsibility was explicitly stated in the treatise of their leading jurist, the visconde do Uruguai, in 1862. In the 1860s, the League emerged under the hand of the monarch and came to rule despite the bitter attacks of the purists of either traditional party. In part, this development had been spurred by the financial crisis of the 1850s. The emperor had wanted a corrective financial policy associated with the saquaremas; this had allowed their resurgence, to a degree. That resurgence, in turn, had impelled the galvanization of their old and new Liberal opposition. The emperor had sought to damp down the renewed saquarema strength through maintaining control of the cabinet as a loyal, less partisan instrument through the late 1850s and early 1860s. When he thought it safe (1862–1868), he fostered the League and even a Liberal cabinet, to contain and reverse the saquarema resurgence and to carry out his anti-partisan and reformist policies. The League triumphed, using its patronage to manage both elections and Chamber support, creating and profiting by the divisions within the traditional two parties. By the mid 1860s, the emperor’s reformism included a policy of glacial abolition, something he imposed upon the League cabinet of 1867 to the shock of the established parties and the oligarchies they represented. The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) interfered with this development. The emperor, as he had in 1848, required capability and political strength to defend the nation. The League was increasingly demonstrated to be lacking both. The emperor’s preferred general, Caxias, was a Conservative, and the Conservative Party’s elder statesmen were clearly the men most able to both provide direction and the partisan discipline required by the war and a new, ongoing financial crisis. The emperor intervened yet again, but this time against the League, compelling its resignation. The League’s leadership, once fostered by the emperor’s favor and intervention, now condemned the emperor’s interference as a coup, and merged with the Liberals under a banner of reformism. The Conservatives, restored to power, oversaw the nation’s victory in Paraguay, but refused to take responsibility for abolition. The emperor, once victory was as-

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sured, compelled the Conservatives’ resignation, and sought in São Vicente’s cabinet, and, then, in Rio Branco’s, an administration willing and able to do his bidding. Rio Branco, a politician of consummate skills and a veteran of the Conciliation Cabinet, improved upon Paraná’s tactics to carry out the emperor’s imposition of abolition. He used the cabinet’s patronage to woo the majority required for passage of the Law of the Free Womb in 1871, despite the ideological coherence, personal prestige, and rhetorical skill of the Conservative old guard. Deputies from the region most sorely pressed for patronage, deputies whose careers were most subject to cabinet decisions, shifted over to provide a slim majority. Defeated in their attempts to cripple the cabinet, the Conservative dissidents faced state-imposed abolition, a contradiction to the principle of constitutional balance of powers and representative government, as well as an attack on their fundamental social and economic interests. The dissidents sought, in retreat, to salvage what they could. In Perdigão Malheiro’s alternative abolitionist legislation, they promoted a reform which, by its parliamentary origin, saved the constitutional principles of the party. It was also a reform which would have stabilized the rural order over which they presided. It provided near immediate, indemnified abolition to those captives designated by slaveholders. In effect, it avoided the blow to their moral authority that state intervention on the plantations threatened; indeed, it shored up that authority, by providing for slaveholders’ control of the abolitionist process, while also avoiding the frustration that they feared gradual abolition might cause among the captives. The 1871 struggle, in its origins and in its nature, is thus the culmination of a larger political history of which abolition itself is a crucial, but not the central, issue. The emperor imposed an abolition of little importance for the captives in Brazil in terms of its substance. For the oligarchies represented by the dissidents, however, the threat to their interests and to the constitutional practices which protected them was a fundamental threat. So much so that, in the Perdigão Malheiro alternative, they were willing to accept a much more meaningful abolition reform because it would safeguard those larger interests and practices. Moreover, as the reader will have seen, this struggle was long in coming, part of a process of erosion in which the emperor, beginning in 1840, had overseen and impelled the aggrandizement of the state at the expense of representative government. Although there is no question at all that the increasing significance of patronage and the partisan abuse of state power, independent of the emperor, corroded the representative quality of the Chamber and strengthened the cabinet’s power over the Legislature, it is also true that the emperor effectively supported this development because it strengthened his hand, a hand

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he hoped to use for society’s improvement. He had no faith in the parties nor trust in the vision of their statesmen; he was thus all the more willing to use the weaknesses in the system to foster a strong state under his control, rather than one representing a party organically linked to the dominant oligarchies in that society.

IV. Legacy Upon approaching these issues, one might initially think one approached only the contradiction between a strong state used for enlightened reform and a strong state under the control of reactionary slaveholders. The historical research displayed to the reader suggests, instead, a far more troubling dilemma, as well. It suggests the contradiction of a strong state under the control of an autocrat versus a strong state associated with a developing political culture of representative government. This is not meant to suggest that the one supplants the other; rather, what is argued is that both contradictions are present in the past under examination. Moreover, the legacy of 1871, as understood here, is most troubling of all. After 1871, it seems clear that the contradiction between the representative, constitutional form of monarchy established by the reactionaries in 1837–1842 and the reality of imperial intervention and statist authoritarianism manifest by 1871 became fatal. The “dream” of absolutism that Paraná had mocked in Justiniano José da Rocha’s speech had become the patent reality. In effect, the representative, constitutional government of the Party of Order had come to be seen as an institutional farce, the “theater of shadows” described by a contemporary Conservative critic. It was this statist, authoritarian legacy, hardly covered by a thin sheet of institutional legitimization, which survived the Monarchy, a somber presence in Brazil’s political culture ever since. In this, one sees not only the obvious tragedy of oppression, decade after decade, but the tragedy of the road not taken. It can be argued that the institutional practices and ideology of representative, constitutional government, the “ordered liberty” of the Party of Order, was an ideology suitable for the protection of the social and economic interests of the Brazilian oligarchies. Indeed, this has been argued here. However, such practices and ideology have great potential for democratic development. As the political history of other nations has demonstrated, if such practice and ideology are nurtured and strengthened over time, they can provide the potential for fostering the interests and political participation of other strata. In the nineteenth century, such practices and ideology protected the interests of the English, French, and American ruling classes, for example. Yet they also provided shelter and channels for those that

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these classes ruled, allowing (or helping to create the possibility of) transformation towards more democratic political institutions. This is not meant to suggest that such ideological and institutional forces alone suffice for such transformation; social and economic development must shape and be shaped in dialectic with them, and popular mobilization and agency must always come into play. However, one can argue that such forces have been and can be very significant in such a democratic achievement. In 1871, those forces suffered their most obvious reverse in Brazil, and one can argue that all Brazilians have suffered for it since.

V. Metamorphosis The legacy of 1871 has obvious repercussions leading to the fall of the Monarchy in 1889. Indeed, Andrade Figueira and others had warned of this during the debate. The divorce of the emperor and his cabinet from the ruling class led to an erosion of support and the increased growth of cynicism towards the regime. The Monarchy’s attractions weakened fatally—the society’s dominant elements, if they did not challenge the regime, ceased to support it with fervor or belief. Their frustration and their hostility only increased with the threat posed by the Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888, a movement that triumphed under the protection of the imperial princess regent. This result and its causes were clear to contemporaries, and this result, at least, has been a commonplace among historians since. This study was initially designed to conclude with a chapter in which this increased ruling-class indifference and cynicism was stated and demonstrated, before introducing the more active elements which combined in the regime’s decline and fall: the rise of politicized urban elements, the hostility of the army’s officer corps, and the rise and alienation of the newer paulista elites associated with the dynamic coffee frontier of São Paulo’s west. However, the nature of the political movements at play in the latter decades of the regime is too distinct from the political conflict of the era ending in 1871 to be encompassed so easily. The culmination of 1871 helps to explain the decline of the monarchy’s institutions and established support, but is not enough to explain the new political forces emerging afterward. This is particularly the case with the movement for abolition. It has been argued here that there was no significant public support for abolition before 1871; this is not the case after 1878. The movement in question was unprecedented and it was so for many reasons. We have seen that there was popular political mobilization in the pre–1871 era—there was such mobilization and cross-class political movements in the early 1820s, in the late 1820s, in the

Conclusion: Legacy and Metamorphosis / 323

early 1830s, in 1840, and in 1842 and in 1848. However, we have also shown that such mobilization and movements were ephemeral, often violently repressed, and always contained in a way to align with elite interests. The Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888 changes that political tradition and the political world of the Monarchy analyzed in this study. The movement, although it was initially led from within the earlier tradition, as a policy championed first in the Chamber by scions of the ruling class, quickly became something else, indeed, and something which transformed that earlier political world and its parties. That political world, that new reality, becomes a world in which members of the elites are only some of the actors, and not necessarily always the most significant ones. Viotti da Costa, Conrad, Toplin, and Dean, among others, have shown that Abolitionism, at times linked to the urban wing of the Republican movement, is not simply the story of elite reformists such as Joaquim Nabuco or even urban middle-class reformists such as André Rebouças or Quintino Bocaiuva or José do Patrocínio or Luís Gama. Rather, it involved as well a growing fraction of the nameless urban middle class and, most interesting of all, the urban working class and the urban and rural captives themselves. Here, there is work to be done on the agency of new groups and the traditionally oppressed alike. And, as Nabuco and Rebouças made clear at the time, some Abolitionists did not envision merely the end of slavery, but abolition as part of a linked body of reforms designed to transform the Empire’s institutions and society. To prevent those reforms, to contain the damage done or threatened by popular and captive mobilization, the established fractions of the Brazilian ruling class were quite prepared to sacrifice the political institutions which no longer guaranteed their interests, and to allow newer fractions of their class to construct others. All of this, however, is another political era, another political world. They will require another political history.

r e f e r e n c e m at t e r

Genealogical Tables

The four genealogical tables that follow use the following conventions: N P b c v m d ? f n i

= = = = = = = = = = =

negreiro (i.e., slave trader) planter barão; baronesa conde; condêssa visconde marquês duque name unknown son or daughter to grandson or granddaughter to brother or sister to

Siblings are not noted in birth order, nor are all siblings noted. The emphasis is on connections illustrative of the analysis; for the same reason, and for reasons of space, the names of children and spouses are generally reduced to the first given name. Persons significant in the study are put in bold font. All of the data in these tables have been drawn from the sources cited in the notes pertaining to these families in Chapter One, particularly Baependy, Macedo Soares, Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Klors Werneck, the AGB, notes from the IGB, Ribeiro Fragoso, and Garcia Florentino.

Abbreviations

Archives ACI AFPG

Arquivo da Casa Imperial in AHMI. Arquivo Fazenda Pau Grande, Avelar, Município Paty do Alferes, Estado de Rio de Janeiro. AHI Arquivo Histórico do Itamaratí, Rio de Janeiro. AHMI Arquivo Histórico do Museo Imperial, Petrópolis. AMHN Arquivo do Museo Histórico Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. AN Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. AP07 Arquivo Particular de Eusébio de Queirós in AN. AP23 Arquivo Particular de Jerónimo José Teixeira Júnior in AN. AP29 Arquivo Particular da Família Werneck in AN. AP32 Arquivo Particular de Caxias in AN. APERJ Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro. APVRB Arquivo Particular do Visconde do Rio Branco in AHI. AVU Arquivo do Visconde do Uruguai in IHGB. BN Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. CE Correspondência Encardenada in APVRB. CEQ Coleção Eusébio Queirós in AHMI. CFB Coleção Francisco Belisário in IHGB. CLT Coleção Leão Teixeira in IHGB. CN Coleção Nabuco in IHGB. CTM Coleção Tobias Monteiro in BN, SM. IGB Instituto Genealógico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro. IHGB Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro. PRO/FO Public Record Office/Foreign Office, London. SM Seção de Manuscritos in BN.

Periodicals AF AGB

Aurora Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro. Anuário Genealógico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro

334 / Abbreviations AL

Almanak administrativo, mercantile e industrial da corte e provincia do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro. [usually known as Almanaque Laemmert]. O Brasil O Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. Corréio Mercantil Corréio Mercantil, Rio de Janeiro. CSSH Comparative Studies in Society and History. HAHR Hispanic American Historical Review. JC Jornal do Commercio, Rio de Janeiro. JLAS Journal of Latin American Studies. LARR Latin American Research Review. LBR Luso-Brazilian Review. RIHGB Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro. RIHGSP Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo, São Paulo. SA Sete d’Abril, Rio de Janeiro.

Notes

Introduction 1. Needell, “A Liberal,” idem, “History, Race,” and idem, “Identity, Race.” 2. An initial assessment of the Monarchy, based on analysis of the canon, was published as Needell, “Brasilien, 1830–1889.” Briefer excursions were various entries on the Monarchy’s statesmen and political parties in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History, passim. 3. See Cardoso, “Associated Dependent,” and Weffort, “Why Democracy?”. 4. See Needell, “Oliveira Viana.” 5. This is not the place for a historiographical essay on the Monarchy’s literature. To some extent, notice and discussion of it is touched upon in the articles and encyclopedia articles of the 1990s cited above. The full citation of most of the works to which this paragraph alludes can be found in the course of the analysis introduced here. 6. The reader will find these historians cited as they come to hand in the narrative and analysis to follow; many are first cited in Chapter One, n.2.

Chapter 1 1. Amado, “As Instituições,” 1: 49. 2. Contested areas and trends in the history of the Monarchy are clear in the historiography; they will be addressed here in the text and notes as they become relevant. However, some of the differences between this study and others were introduced in Needell, “Provincial Origins,” especially 136–37, 142–43, 144, 149–51. Earlier studies of the Monarchy are reviewed in Stein, “The Historiography” and the bibliographic articles by Bethell, Graham, Murilo de Carvalho, and Viotti da Costa in Bethell, ed., Brazil. Textbooks include Buarque de Holanda, et al., O Brasil monárquico; Bethell, ed., Brazil; and Bastos Pereira das Neves and Fernandes Machado, O Império do Brasil. More recent monographs concerning the Monarchy and its politics include Beiguelman, Formação; Murilo de Carvalho, A construção; idem, Teatro de sombras; Flory, Judge and Jury; Rohloff de Matos, O tempo saquarema; Barman, Brazil; Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire; Pang, In Pursuit; Graham, Patronage and Politics; Bieber, Power, Patronage;

336 / Notes to Chapter 1 Moritz Schwarcz, As barbas; and Barman, Citizen Emperor. Monographs and articles with tighter foci will be cited below as they come to hand. 3. Fluminense is an adjective and noun referring to the captaincy, then province, now state, of Rio de Janeiro; it was used to refer to the city of Rio de Janeiro, as well, until the twentieth century, when Carioca came into use. 4. Alden, Royal Government, pt. 1; on Pombaline geopolitical policies, see Davidson, “Rivers and Empire”; and, on Pombaline policy in general, see Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies, chaps.1,2,3,8. 5. Here and hereafter, Rio de Janeiro (the city) will be distinguished from Rio de Janeiro (the captaincy, then province, now state), by calling the city “Rio.” 6. Paulista is an adjective and noun referring to the captaincy, then province, now state, of São Paulo; paulistano refers to the city of São Paulo. 7. Probably a reference to the converted slave warriors, mameluks, of late medieval Egypt. 8. Boxer, The Golden Age, 18–23, 30–35, 254–59, 265–70; Fausto, “Fragmentos” and Monteiro, “Os Guaraní” in Carneiro da Cunha, org., História dos índios; and Monteiro, Negros da Terra, chaps.1,2,5. 9. Boxer, Golden Age, chap.2, passim; Gerson, O ouro, 13–57, passim; Ribeiro Lamego, O homem e a serra, 71–84, 96–126, and maps 16,17; Stein,Vassouras, 7–10; Alden, Royal Government, 44. 10. Castro Peixoto, História fluminense, 56. 11. Ribeiro Lamego, Homem e a serra, 3–5 and 5–54, passim; idem, O homem e o brejo, 3–24, 52–85; Castro Peixoto, História, 39–49, 56, 70–74; Ferreira da Silva, Heréticos, chaps. 1,3, passim; Fausto de Souza, “A Bahia do Rio de Janeiro,” 5–340. 12. Fausto de Souza, “A Bahia do Rio de Janeiro,” 92. 13. Lamego, Homem e a serra, 3–4. 14. Gardner, Travels, 3–4. 15. Gardner, Travels, chaps.1,2; Saint-Hillaire, Viagem, passim; Walsh, Notices, 1:126–34, 147–48, 477; Burton, Explorations, 1: chaps.1–3, passim. 16. Gardner, Travels, ch.14. 17. Ibid., 12–13; P. J. Soares de Souza, Discurso . . . 1839, 52; cf. Dean, With Broadax, 221–22, 223. 18. P. J. Soares de Souza, Discurso . . . 1839, 51–65; Walsh, Notices, 1:400–401.; Dean, With Broadax, 7; Stein, Vassouras, 93–95. 19. Fausto, “Fragmentos,” 382–84; for the nomenclature of the traditional coastal peoples of the region, see Lamego, O homem e o brejo, 30–51 or Castro Peixoto, História, 15–16. 20. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, pt. 1 & chap. 15, passim; Castro Peixoto, História, 21–49, 70–73; Ferreira da Silva, Heréticos, chaps. 1,3; Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 10–13, & pt.4. 21. Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 12,13; Dean, With Broadax, 173–78; Florentino, Em costas negras, 28–34; Curto, “Luso-Brazilian Alcohol,” ms. to be published in H. Bonin and M. Cahan, eds., Le grande commerce, 3,4, 10–12, 12–21, 23–24, 24–31, 33–35, 37–38. 22. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chap.15, especially 422–28; Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” in Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil, 312–14; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens da grossa aventura, 76–82; JC, 7 Jan. 1832, 2; 3 Jan. 1834, 2; 7 Jan. 1835, 3; 11 Feb. 1836, 4; 13 Jan. 1837, 4; 3

Notes to Chapter 1 / 337 Jan. 1838, [7]; 4 Jan. 1839, 4; and 5 Jan. 1840, 4. In 1836, a drought affected fluminense exports and cane recovered slowly. Mascavado (alternatively, muscovado) derives from mascavar, to separate and add together inferior sugar, from menoscabar, to make inferior or incomplete, to depreciate. On Cuban post-Saint-Domingue expansion, see, e.g.,Paquette, Sugar, 29–30, 35–36, 51–52. 23. Alden, “Late Colonial,” 326–29; Bethell, “1822–1850,” in Bethell, ed., Brazil, 84–87; Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 18–20; Paquette, Sugar, 51. For comparative fluminense sugar and coffee exports, see the JC figures cited in n. 22 above. Brazil, using expanding slave labor and an open frontier, increased cheap coffee production dramatically, successfully competing against Cuban planters (in competition with sugar planters for slaves and facing a punitive United States tariff) and Venezuela. In Venezuela, the planters were often ruined by the 1840s, affected by the falling price of coffee, doubtless induced by increasing competition, and faced with rapid debt service, land shortage, and difficulty in tapping the free-labor sector. Slaves figured in the Venezuelan crisis only as collateral for debt, or, later, in the case of free-born children, as “apprentices.” Slavery itself was moribund (dying from the abolition of the slave trade, independence-era manumission, and the gradual abolition of slavery, ratified in 1830); see Lombardi, Venezuela, 32–33, 172, 175–79; and idem, “The Decline,” 108–27, 135–39. 24. Mineiro is an adjective and noun referring to the captaincy, then province, now state of Minas Gerais. 25. Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, 101–12; Lenharo, As tropas, chaps. 1–4, passim; Libby, Transformação; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 46–47; and Martins Filho and Martins, “Slavery,” 542–43, 548–49; Brown, “Internal Commerce,” chaps. 7–9, passim. The author is indebted to Judy Bieber for the Libby citation. 26. Brown, “Internal Commerce,” chaps. 4,6,8–9, passim; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, chaps. 7–11; Walsh, Notices, 1:508–17. 27. Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, chaps. 4, 15–17; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 28–34, chaps. 3,4; Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 12, 13; Riva Gorenstein, “Comércio e política,” in Menezes Martinho and Riva Gorenstein, Negociantes, chap. 3; Caldeira, Mauá, chaps. 5–7; Pijning, “Controlling Contraband,”chaps.2, 4,5. 28. Freire Allemão, “Memoria,” 561–71; Magalhaes, “Quem era Francisco de Melo Pahlheta,” in Brasil, O café, 1:19–23, 30–35; Oliveira Viana, “Distribuição,” in ibid., 1:80–82; Dantas, “O café na cidade,” in ibid., 1:106–9; Magalhaes, “Os caminhos,” in ibid., 2:816; Castro Peixoto, História, 74–76, 115–17, 120–21. Taunay, Pequena história, chap. 2; Stein, Vassouras, chaps. 1,2; Lamego, Homem e a serra, 64–132, passim. Note differences in detail with Dean, With Broadax, 179. The plantation shift from sugar to coffee in the Paraíba is exemplified in the fazendas Pao Grande and Ubá; see Fragoso Pires, Fazendas, 48–49, 128–29. 29. Conrad, World of Sorrow, chaps. 2–6, passim, and idem, Destruction, 24–27, 97–98; Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 4–5, pt.3, and chap. 18, passim; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, chaps. 3,4, particularly 45–76, 85–89; Eltis, Economic Growth, 150–57; Karasch, “The Brazilian Slavers,” chap.2; idem, Slave Life, chap.1, passim; Santos Gomes, História, 202–19; Slenes, “ ‘Malungu,” 48–67; Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 135–37; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 340–53, 426–29, 437; Reis, Slave Rebellion, 139–53; Maciel de Carvalho, Liberdade, chaps. 4,5; Stein, Vassouras, 70; Lacerda Werneck, Memória, 63. 30. Creole, (crioulo) in Brazil, refers to someone born in Brazil of entirely African

338 / Notes to Chapter 1 descent; cf. the Spanish-American criollo, a person born in Spanish America of entirely Spanish descent. The words likely derive from criar (to breed, to raise), suggesting the “unnatural” character of such births out of place. 31. For this paragraph and the preceding, see Debret, Viagem, 3:162–80; Walsh, Notices, 1:134–35, 146, 463–65, 467; Gardner, Travels, 4–5, 13–21; Mello Moraes Filho, Festas, 277–90, 343–84, 401–414; Lacerda Werneck, Memória, 62–65; Karasch, Slave Life, chaps. 1,5,7–9; Nogueira da Silva, Negro, 59–142, passim; Stein, Vassouras, chaps. 3,6–8, passim. See the superb portrayals of this society by Debret (in plates in his work cited above, or, better, the reproduction of the French original) or by Ender in Wagner & Bandeira, Viagem, vols.2,3, passim. 32. Vieira Fazenda, “A Hora,” in idem, Antiqualhas, 1: 25–32; Debret, Viagem, 2: 135, 136. 33. Walsh, Notices, 1:134–43; Debret, Viagem, 3:128,137; Karasch, Slave Life, 35–39. 34. It was in this field that a multitude was gathered in 1822 to acclaim the royal Portuguese heir, Dom Pedro (then prince regent of the Kingdom of Brazil), first emperor of Brazil. 35. Here and in the previous paragraphs, the author relies upon the classic surveys: Macedo, Um passeio) and Moreira de Azevedo, O Rio de Janeiro; particulars on the ministerial sites come from these and Vieira Fazenda, “Casa historica,” in idem, Antiqualhas, 5:31 and JC, 28 April 1832, 1, as well as AL, 1849, 62,74,100; 1860, 181; 1870, 158; 1889, 139. 36. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 23–25, 26, 141–43. 37. Here and below, the author has profited from integrating such analyses as Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, chaps. 15–17; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, chap.4; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” chaps. 3,4; and Lenharo, As tropas, chaps. 2,3. 38. Specifics are clear in the works cited in n. 37, above. The more general issue, the relationship between powerful local magnates and a relatively weak Crown, has attracted considerable notice. A select bibliography includes the classics, such as Oliveira Vianna, Populações meridionaes, chaps. 12–16; the allusions in Freyre, particularly Sobrados e mucambos, chaps. 1, 7, passim; and the analysis of Prado, Junior, The Colonial Background, 334–39, 349, 353–54, 360–74, 379–83, 404. More recent analyses include Alden, Royal Government, chap. 15; Boxer, Golden Age, 106–7, 148–50, 226–30, 306–8; and Schwartz, Sovereignty, chap.13. 39. Lavradio, “Relatorio,” pt.1, 436–37; idem, “Relação,” pt.2, (1915), 293, 301; Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia fluminense:, 1: 85–86; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Vila Franca, Araruama; Moya, AGB, 5 (1943) 3a., pt., 45–47. Araruama was the grandson of João Carneiro da Silva, morgado de Santo Antônio do Capivarí e Quissamã. For Quissamã, see Lamego, O homem e o brejo, 81, 129–30. The sugar plantation at Quissamã was one of the four principal latifundia of the Campos region in the late eighteenth century; the casa grande and mill raised there in 1786, Mato de Pipa (Barrel Forrest, possibly an allusion to the massive production of cachaça), still existed in its simple patriarchal lines when Lamego described it (ibid., 129–30). 40. Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93–99; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Arquivo, s.v., Itaborahy; Itamby, Uruguay; Lyra Filho, Visconde, 17,21; J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 44, 45. 41. Lavradio, “Relação,” pt. 1, 454; Baependy, “Biographia,” 365–67; Garcia Florentino, Em costas, 191–92, 194–200; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, 262,263,

Notes to Chapter 1 / 339 270–71, 288, 292–93; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” 198–99; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., São Salvador de Campos dos Goitacazes. 42. Baependy, “Apontamentos,” 367–83; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 194, 202–3, 220; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, 263, 264, 265, 270, 283–84, 288, 294; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” 199–204; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Vila Nova de São José, Maceió, São Salvador de Campos, Jacarepagua, Cachoeira, São Simão, Cunha, Caxias, Baependy; Lenharo, As tropas, 52–56. 43. Klörs Werneck, Historia, 4–5, 16–22; Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 201,209, 283; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, chap. 4, especially 271, 288, 292, 295; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Paty de Alferes, Guaribu, Parahyba, São Luiz, Capivary, Uba, Macaé, Muritiba; Silva, “O Barão,” introduction to Lacerda Werneck, Memória, passim. 44. Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 216,282; Miller, Way of Death, 521–22, 526n.79; S. A. Sisson, Galeria, 1: 281–94; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., São Diogo. 45. Sisson, Galeria, 1:18–22; ibid., 1:27–32; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:17–19; ibid., 2:308–10; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Valença; Barbosa de Oliveira, Memórias, 20, 174, 262; Ferreira de Rezende, Minas recordações, 38; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 140, 452n.44; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 252, 297–98; Holloway, Policing Rio, 103–5, 123–42; “Testamento de José Clemente Pereira: 1845,” in AN, AP07, PM 1907; “Inventario de Manuel José Ribeiro de Oliveira, 1834,” AN, AP07, PM 1968; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 107, 113, 131–32, 148–51, 220–21; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “O Processo,” in Mota, ed., 1822, 320–28, 331–34.

Chapter 2 1. Walsh, Notices, 2: 453–54. 2. Garcia Florentino, Em costas negras, 194, 201–3, 204, 221–22; Gorenstein, “Comércio,”, chap.4, especially 189–90; Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura, chap.4, especially 268–71, 283–89; Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 81–83; Almeida Prado, D. João, 136–37, 141–43, 152–61. 3. Macedo, Um passeio, 45–46; Moreira de Azevedo, O Rio de Janeiro, 1:11–19, 2:382; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 11–13, 19–20; Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 156–58. 4. Walsh, Notices, 2: 456. 5. For the paragraph, see ibid., 2:453–57. 6. Armitage, History of Brazil, 2: chaps.25, 26, passim; C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 28–36; Lyra, História, 1:44–50; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, chap.7, especially 248–53; Barman, Brazil, chap.5, especially 158–59; idem, Citizen Emperor, 27–32. 7. Barman, Citizen Emperor, chap.2, especially 30–56; Lyra, História, 1:87–109. 8. C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 35. 9. For the paragraph, see ibid., 34–36; cf. Armitage, History, 2:117–18, 125–26; Barman, Brazil, 161. 10. AF, 8 April 1831, 1980 and 11 April 1831, 1984–85; see, also, the citations to Lyra and Barman in n.6, above. For legitimizing use of monarchism in Regency rebellions, see, e.g., AF, 6 April 1832, 2625–27; Souza, A Sabinada, 35, 36–37, 158–91, passim, especially 161–62, 165–70; Kraay, “As Terrifying,” 507,526; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 43, 177, 180–82, 223, 231, 232, 234; Bieber, “Postmodern Ethnographer,” 57, 58–59; idem, Power, Patronage,

340 / Notes to Chapter 2 72–73, 203; Ferreira Reis, História do Amazonas, 163, 169, 174, 175; Cleary, “Lost Altogether,” 123, 124–25. Although Röhrig Assunção’s analysis of Maranhão makes no mention of the rebels’ attitude towards the Monarchy, per se, the general conflation of 1830s’ liberalism (which was consistently monarchist except in particularly explicit cases) with the rebels’ various agendas and the lack of any explicitly seccesionist or republican ideology suggests a parallel with the Cabanagem of Pará. See his “Elite Politics,” 17, 18–19, 27, 30, 31–32, 34, 36; but cf. 35. 11. Monarch and Constitution, and their use, were contested immediately. See the citations in the liberal opposition’s most influential paper, AF, in n.10, above. See, also, Annaes, 1831, t.1, 6–9 April, [facing 1]. On liberal reform, see Lino Coutinho, ibid., 14,19–20,and 26 May, passim; Ribeiro Andrade, ibid., 18 May, passim; Paula e Sousa, ibid., 18–21 and 24 May, passim; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid.,12 May, 13–14, 19–21 May, passim; Rebouças, ibid., 20 May, passim; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 21 May, passim. On defense of the established order, see Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 25 May, 92–93; Carneiro Leão, ibid., and ibid., 19 May, 22–26, ibid., t.2, 30 Aug., 81–82. On the monarch and the Constitution, see, also, the opposition to the newly empowered liberals: Rebouças, ibid., t.1, 20 May, 68; Luis Cavalcanti, ibid., 6 May, 13–14; Holanda, ibid., t.2, 9 July, 222 and ibid., 9 Sept. 240; and Montezuma, ibid., t.1, 29 May, 70. Orators are cited here and hereafter by the parliamentary usage most often employed to identify them in the Annaes; these varied, even in the same era, and, often, over time. Full names can be found in Javarí,Organizações. 12. Anais da Assembléa Constituinte, passim, provides the debates. See, also, Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 152–62; Barman, Brazil, 107–118. The constitutional issues were interwoven with personalistic ones, the growing conflict over Portuguese in the new regime, and the fear of Brazil’s being re-united to Portugal by Dom Pedro I (still heir to the Portuguese throne). The Northeastern provinces’ liberals attempted a secessionist republic in 1824, the Confederation of the Equator, which was brutally repressed. On the Confederation, see Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 165–67 and Barman, Brazil, 121–23. On the Constitution of 1824, see Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 161–64 and Barman, Brazil, 123–26, and the subsequent contemporary scholarship: Rodrigues de Sousa, Analyse; Uruguay, Ensaio, and idem, Estudos; and Pimenta Bueno, Direito público. Although the Council of State was appointed (11 November 1823) and given the task of drafting the constitution, of the ten councillors, one is thought the principal author: José Joaquim Carneiro de Campos (1768–1836), later (1824, 1826) visconde and marquês de Caravelas; see Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 160; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 303; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 4:472. Tavares de Lyra cites (255) good sources to suggest José Joaquim’s brother, Francisco Carneiro de Campos (d.1842), may have borne more of the responsibility, though he was not a councillor. 13. Ibid., Art.98. See Rodrigues de Sousa, Analyse, 2:77–85 and 91–145, passim and Uruguay, Ensaio, 2: 36–38, and chaps.27–29, passim. Uruguai, ibid., 2:38, notes that Constant took the idea from Stanislas Marie Adelaide Clermont Tonnerre, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre (1757–1792). On Constant, see Constant, “The Nature of Royal Power,” in idem, Political Writings. The original text, Uruguai notes, might be Constant, Collection complète, chap.1 [a work usually referred to as Cours de politique constitutionelle]; Uruguai probably meant to refer to ibid., chap.2, “De la nature du pouvoir royal,” where Constant argues that the distinction between the responsible authority of the king’s ministers and the monarch’s being free from accountability to the nation is “essentielle

Notes to Chapter 2 / 341 et fondamentale”—Constant concludes “C’est en effet, selon moi, le clef de toute organisation politique.”—See ibid., 1:18–19]. The phrase, as Uruguai notes (Ensaio, 2:36–37), was taken verbatim into the Brazilian charter: “Art. 98. O Poder Moderado he a chave de toda a organização Politica. . . .” (Constituição, 34). In both Constant and in the Brazilian constitution, the idea of the monarch’s disinterested, neutral oversight of the three other powers is explicit. The significance of this, particularly in Chapters Six and Seven of this study, cannot be overstated. 14. Constituição, Arts.98–101, passim. 15. Ibid., Arts. 102–104, passim. See Javarí, Organizações, 1–249, passim, for the cabinets and their dates. 16. Constituição, Art. 15, secs. 9,10, 11, 13; Art.36; Art.37, Art.38; Arts.52–56; Arts.58–60. 17. Ibid., Art.3; Art.11; Art.98; Art.100; Art.102, sec.15; Art.178. 18. Ibid., Arts. 15, sec.2; Arts.121,123,173–77. 19. Lino Coutinho, Annaes, 1831, t.1, 21 May, 75. 20. For the paragraph, see Constituição, Arts.17,18. For Salvador to Rio in 1833, see Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 37; for Belém to Rio, see Cleary, “Lost Altogether,” 120. 21. Walsh, Notices, 2:418–21; Tirone, “O Senado,” and “Juramento Constitucional”; Meirelles de Lima, “Juramento da Constituição,” [plates] in A. E. Taunay, O Senado, [49,51,165]. Moreira de Azevedo gives the building’s history in O Rio, 1:493–94 and its description in ibid., 1:499–501. The building, wretchedly remodeled, is now a unit of one of Rio’s universities. 22. Walsh, Notices, 2:430. For the paragraph, see ibid., 2:426–30 and Moreira de Azevedo, O Rio, 1:485–88. Moreira de Azevedo notes (ibid, 1:488) that the ground floor, once the post office, became the Tipográfia Nacional and, in 1861, the Caixa Económica e o Monte do Socorro. The building was replaced in 1926 by the Palácio Tiradentes (ibid., 1:489), to house the Republic’s deputies. 23. For examples of Anglo-French influence in these early debates, see Paula e Sousa, Annaes, 1831, t.1, 14 May, 38–40; 19 May, 65; 27 May, 107; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 18 May, 55; 20 May, 70–71; 26 May, 103; Lino Coutinho, ibid., 19 May, 63; Mario do Amaral, ibid., 26 May, 97; Montesuma, ibid., t.2, 5 August, 35. 24. Paula e Sousa, ibid., t.1, 14 May, 40. 25. Carneiro da Cunha, ibid., 27 May, 108. 26. Silva Dias, “A interiorização,” 169–77; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “ O processo,” in ibid., 310–32; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” chap.5; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, chap.1, especially 32–38; Barman, Brazil, chap. 3, especially 97–102, 107–8; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, chaps. 4,5, especially 118, 123–35; and, for the historical context of constitutionalism, Schultz, Tropical Versailles, chap.7. 27. Armitage, History, 2:113; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “O processo,” 318–21, 327–31; Javarí, Organizações, 5–31,425; Barman, Brazil, 111–23, 135, 137–38, 140–44, 150–59, passim. See Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 149, 153–57, 160–61, 174, 195–96, 205, 214–19, 221–22, 244–49, 251–52 (NB, Macaulay argues, passim, that the absolutist taint was a ploy by slavocratic Brazilian opponents of Dom Pedro I who dominated the Chamber and were associated with nativism). Ridings, Business, 80–81, 311–312; Kraay, “As Terrifying,” 504–505, 507–8, 512, 516–19; idem, Race, State, 49, 114, 116–21, 145–51; Reis, Slave Rebellion, chap.2, especially 21, 23–25, 26–31; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap.4 and idem, “Political Mobiliza-

342 / Notes to Chapter 2 tion,” 883–96; Maciel de Carvalho, Liberdade, chap. 9, especially 194, 195–97, 199, 202–3, 207; Röhrig Assunção, “Elite Politics,” 11, 14–15, 17–19, 24, 25, 31, 32; Ferreira Reis, História do Amazonas, 162, 166, 170–72, 173–74; Clearly, “Lost Altogether,” 116–17, 119, 122, 124–25, 126–27; Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 201, 205–8. One notes that in Maranhão, the congruence of liberalism with violent lusophobia was so great that Odorico Mendes, one of the national-level moderado chieftains, broke his electoral career there by condemning lusophobic excesses; see J. F. Lisboa, “Manoel Odorico Mendes,” 316, 320–21. On the local racial demography, one study argues that the Province of Rio de Janeiro’s free people of color were 16% of its total population, i.e., 36.4% of its free population, in 1840. In 1853, the chief of statistics reported that they were 37.5% of the free population (not counting Indians). One would expect a higher percentage in Salvador; certainly in Recife (1839), people of color were a majority (58.9%) of the free population. See Flory, “Race,” 201 and Anselmo Thomaz Amaral to Luiz Antonio Barboso, [Niterói?,] 4 April 1855, “Mappa da População,” BNSM, II 34, 23,23,1855. 28. Barman, Brazil, 111, 132–53; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 213–14, 228–30, 231–53; T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 19; C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 35. 29. Filler, “Liberalism,” chap.3; Flory, Judge and Jury, 12–16, chap.2, 131–32; Barman, Brazil, chap.5, passim; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, chaps.5–7, passim; Lenharo, As tropas, chaps. 2,5, passim; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chaps.1,4, passim; Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony and Rebellion,” chaps. 1,4,5,6, passim. Barman defines many of this liberal opposition as “Nativists” because of their localism and hostility toward perceived Portuguese political and economic domination; see idem, Brazil, 111, 152–53. 30. Specific examples will be the foci in the analysis below. On the general trends noted for the Portuguese-headed families and their close kin see Silva Dias, “A Interiorização,” 169–70, 172, 173–74, 177–80; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “O Processo,” 315–16, 331–32; Meneses Martinho, “Caixeiros,”chap.6; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” chap.4. For the Brazilian-headed families of the port and baixada, see Needell, “Party Formation,” 284–85 and the Flory, Barman, and Macaulay references in n. 29, above. 31. Lenharo, As tropas, chaps.2,5, passim; Barman, Brazil, 111–12, 137–39. The political role of the coffee planters is discussed below. 32. See the references cited in n.30, above. Note that T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 19–22 and C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 35–36 claim that most of the opposition was republican. Their own admission that the monarchists rose to power despite this, and that the republican street agitators turned to Vergueiro and accepted his decision for monarchy, suggest otherwise; cf. Barman, Brazil, 156–61. 33. The Regency’s initial partisan formation and divisions are recalled by the contemporary littérateur and reactionary militant, Pereira da Silva, in Historia, 24, 36, 43–44, 67–71; see, also, AF, 14 Nov. 1832, 2877, and ibid., 5 June 1833, 3311; and Barman, Brazil, 171. The restorationists were called caramurús after their periodical, O Caramuru, in turn a reference to the Portuguese castaway, gone native, who facilitated Portuguese success in Brazil in the early 1500s. The support for restorationism outside of Rio, because of established position, previous patronage, or Portuguese birth, as well as local epithets, are exemplified in Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 31–61, passim. The restorationists organized themselves in the Sociedade Militar and, then, in the Sociedade Conservadora da Constituição Jurada do Império (Society for the Conservation of the Constitution as Sworn), an explicit reference to their opposition to constitutional reform.

Notes to Chapter 2 / 343 34. Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:27–28. Nabuco notes that his reference to the fools’ day is taken from T. B. Ottoni’s memoir, Circular [in the edition used here, ibid., 19]. The three regents were Francisco de Lima e Silva, José da Costa Carvalho, and João Braúlio Muniz, replacing the provisional regents, the marquês de Caravelas, Nicolau [Pereira de Campos] Vergueiro, and Francisco de Lima e Silva. The latter’s role will be discussed later, as will Costa Carvalho’s. Muniz, Barman tells us (Brazil, 288n.14), was suggested by his cousin, Odorico Mendes, deputy from Maranhão, Coimbra graduate (1819), and, at the time, a leading liberal orator. T. B. Otoni used his journal, Sentinella do Serro (1830–33) to promote his views. A graduate of the Escola da Marinha (1826), Otoni was one of the several most significant ideologues of the exaltados and, particularly, a figure of great popular support among mineiro and Rio radicals; see Circular, 20–33. His program of reforms was published 25 June 1831, but the ideas surfaced earlier in the Chamber debates on the regents and the Chamber’s role in constitutional reform (through allies; he himself was not a deputy there until 1838); see Annaes, 1831, t.1, 20 May, 70–81. On Otoni himself, see Sisson, Galeria, 2:309–24; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:71–76; and Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 7:264–67. Feijó became a minister of the Permanent Regency (established 17 June 1831) on 5 July, before any of the other ministers of the new cabinet (generally dated 16 July). He thus served as a key transitional figure between the ephemeral cabinet of the Provisional Regency of 7 April and that of the Permanent Regency. On Feijó, see n. 35, below. Evaristo began the Aurora Fluminense in 1827, had become the key publicist of the liberal opposition by March 1831, and was one of its most capable representatives in the Chamber, as a deputy for Minas after 1830: see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:311–13; Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” 192–93; O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, chaps. 2–5, passim; Werneck Sodré, A história, 123, 125, 141–42; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 218–19; Flory, Judge and Jury, 12–13. Evaristo’s role in the debates was central, and his credibility doubtless owed much to his role in the political crisis of early 1831. He was a key figure in the parliamentary ultimatum of 17 March 1831, written at the Chácara da Floresta on the Rua da Ajuda, gathering place of the opposition leadership: see O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, 126–27; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 247–48; Leão Teixeira, ““Hónorio Hermeto,” and “Notas Sobre Atuação.” in IHGB,CLT, lata 750, pasta 14 [6–7]. 35. On Vasconcelos, see Walsh, Notices, 1:214–19; Sisson, Galeria, 1:271–77; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:415–16; Barão de Vasconcellos, “Ao archivo publico nacional: Traços historico-genealogicos de Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcellos,” ms., 9 Oct. 1907, in AN, Arquivo Particular Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, P769 CP28: Cx26; O. T. de Sousa, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcellos, chaps.1–5, passim; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 194–95, 216–17, 220–21, 243–45; Barman, Brazil, 185–201, passim; Lenharo, As tropas, 23–25, 34, 70–71, 76–77, 82–87, 99–104. On Feijó, see Sisson, Galeria, 2:241–46; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:173–74; Tavares de Lyra, Institutições, 246–47; Barman, Brazil, 169–71. On Evaristo, see no. 34, above. On Lino Coutino, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:7–8 and Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 304–5. 36. On Francisco Carneiro de Campos, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 255; on Caravelas, see ibid., 303. On Lima e Silva, later, 1854, barão de Suruí, see ibid., 319 and Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Suruhy. On Francisco de Lima e Silva, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:251–58 and Lery Santos, Pantheon fluminense, 303–10. On the Lima e Silva brothers and Dom Pedro I, see Armitage, History, 2:118–19; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 245, 248, 250, 251, 254, and cf. Sisson reference above. Macaulay states that one of

344 / Notes to Chapter 2 Manuel’s other brothers commanded the Imperial Guard on 7 April, probably a reference to José Joaquim de Lima e Silva, later (1854), visconde de Magé. While José Joaquim was the guard’s commander in 1822, that day it was probably Luís Alves de Lima e Silva (later, the duque de Caxias), Francisco’s son, who was in charge. See Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Magé, and Pinto de Campos, Vida, 33–35. 37. See Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Itaborahy; Lyra Filho, Visconde, 15–17; and Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93–97. 38. Rodrigues Torres was later (1854), visconde de Itaboraí. See ibid. and Sisson, Galeria, 1:49–52; T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 14–15; Macedo, Brazilian, 3:27–35; Lery Santos, Pantheon, 409–13; and Lyra, Instituições, 287–88. 39. Rodrigues Torres’s marriage probably occurred after his return from Paris in 1829; the fazenda was a Saquarema coffee plantation, Palmital (see Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93). On Cándido José Rodrigues Torres, later (1872), barão de Itambí, see Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Itamby. Note his importance, en passant, in I. F. Silveira da Mota to Eusébio de Queirós, Campos, 30 Nov. 1857, AN/AP07, PM1650, 1, in which the writer refers to Torres’s relations with the Carneiro da Silvas, perhaps the most important planting kin network of the eastern, coastal baixada: “There are always boats [from Rio] to Macaé belonging to the House of Torres, who is our friend and business representative. . . .” 40. On the moderados’ perception of the crisis of the early Regency, see, e.g., Evaristo da Veiga, Annaes, 1831, t.1, 25 May, 92–93, 94–95; idem, ibid., t.2, 8 Oct., 227; and Feijó, ibid., 1832, t.1, 16 May, 16–17. On the establishment and nature of the National Guard, see JC, 11 April, 1832, 2; O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, 160–66; Barman, Brazil, 172; Holloway, Policing Rio, 82–85. Narrative and partisan perceptions of the 1832 crisis are clear in JC, 11 April 1832, 2; JC, 14 April 1832, 1; JC, 18 April 1832, 1; JC, 19 April 1832, 1; JC, 26 April 1832, 1. An early analysis is Moreira de Azevedo, “Motim Politico,” 127–41 and idem, “Sociedades fundadas,” 296–305, 308–310. On Otoni, see T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 25–28. On the Northeastern and Northern troubles, see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap.1, and Kraay, Race, State, 145–46; Ferreira Reis, Historia, 160–65; Röhrig de Assunção, “Elite Politics,” 18–19, 26–27. 41. O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, 115–24, 128–32. NB that Sousa errs, unlike Javarí and Tavares de Lyra; Vasconcelos did not resign in July 1832 with the cabinet as Sousa claims; see JC, 15 May 1832,1. Vasconcelos’s ill-health was public knowledge. Sousa states that it was tabes; see Sousa, Vasconcellos, 37,38,78,133,141–42. Macaulay, however, suggests it was syphilis (Dom Pedro, 216). Syphilis can result, through neurosyphilis’s tertiary form, in tabes dorsalis, a wasting disease affecting the brain and the spinal cord and resulting in progressively more painful and crippling symptoms, much of which fits descriptions of Vasconcelos’s suffering over the years. 42. See the JC report on Vasconcelos’s resignation in n.41, above. On the alliance between opposition factions and the consequent danger to the regime, see, e.g., AF, 6 April 1832, 2609–2610; ibid., 10 April 1832, 2613, 2615–16; ibid., 13 April 1832, 2622–23; and ibid., 16 April 1832, 2665–66. Note, especially, moderado allegations that the restorationists exploited the radical rabble: AF, 21 April 1832, 2636–37 and JC, 11 April 1832, 1–2; ibid., 13 April 1832, 1; ibid., 14 April 1832, 1; ibid., 18 April 1832, 1,4; ibid., 26 April 1832, 1. The cabinet majority in 1831 was determined here by analyzing significant Chamber votes. The

Notes to Chapter 2 / 345 key vote of 12 May 1832 was on the fala do trono, any cabinet’s great test, and is in Annaes, 1832, t.1,8. 43. On the links between restorationists and radicals, see the contemporary journalism cited in n.42, above. On the coup of 16 April and the role of the Andradas, see AF, 21 April 1832, 2636–37 and JC, 18 April 1832,1,4 and ibid., 21 April 1832, as well as the Chamber debates in Annaes, 1832, t.2, 9 and 10 July, 34–55, passim. NB that the Chamber majority against José Bonifácio was 45 to 31 (ibid., 55). On restorationists, their persecution, and the failed attempt at José Bonifácio’s ouster, see JC, 16 July 1832, 1 and AF, 30 July 1832, 2995–97. 44. Pereira da Silva, Historia, 90–102; T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 29–31; O. T. de Sousa, Historia, chaps.1,2; Alencar, “O marquês de Paraná,” 258–59; Valledão, “O marquês de Paraná,” 310–11. Signs of the impending coup are clear: see JC, 16 July 1832,1; ibid., 21 July 1832,2; ibid., 24 July 1832, 1; ibid., 26 July 1832,2; ibid., 30 July 1832,1 and “Supplemento” no.262; ibid., 31 July 1832,4; ibid., 1 August 1832, 1–2,4; ibid., 4 August 1832,1. 45. On Vasconcelos’s exclusion, see his account in SA, 13 Dec. 1834,3. On Honório, later (1852) visconde, (1853), conde, and (1854) marquês de Paraná, there is disagreement as to whether he initially agreed with the conspirators or whether he always opposed a coup: see Pereira da Silva, Historia, 92–93, 99–100 and Valledão, “O marquês,” 310–11 for the latter opinion, and Alencar, “O marquês,” 258 for the former. On Honório, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:15–18; Leão Teixeira Filho, et al., “Centenârio,”. Although the conde de Baependí claimed Honório as a kinsman, this link to the Carneiro Leão merchant family remains obscure: see Conde de Baependy, “Familia Braz,” 384. 46. Annaes, 1832, t.2, 30 July, 128. This account of the speech and its ambiance is drawn from ibid., 121–29. 47. The analysis of Honório’s speech and the disarray of the moderados in this paragraph and those that follow derive from: Annaes, 1832, t.2, 30–31 July, 129–38; Pereira da Silva, Historia, 99–105, 112, 124–30, 133–34, 140–42, 151–52, 153–54; O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, chaps.5–7; AF, 3 August 1832, passim; ibid., 21 September 1832, passim; O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, 144; Anon., “A imposture,” 227–346; SA, 30 Nov., 1834, 1–2; Alencar, “O marquês,” 259, 273n.6; Valledão, “O marquês,” 311–14. On Aureliano, later (1855), visconde de Sepetiba, see Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Sepetiba; Sisson, Galeria, 2:337–45; Moreira de Azevedo, O Rio, 2:460–63; Feijó Bittencourt, Os fundadores, 229–52; Vianna, Estudos, chap.4; Holloway, Policing Rio, 123–24; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 46,49,77,83,88,94, 100–103,113–14. Barman, citing Sisson’s plate and Ewbank, a contemporary United States traveller, describes Aureliano as a “man of color.” No Brazilian source does, however, suggesting that he was not perceived as such in the milieu; the artist, Araújo Porto-Alegre, quoted in Vianna, Estudos, 80, describes Aureliano as being of “strong complexion,” but notes that he has “regular features.” On Chichorro da Gama, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 233. A bahiano, Chichorro was one of the most popular liberals of this and the following era, with electoral support in Minas, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro. 48. On the liberal reforms and restorationism, see T. B. Ottoni, Circular, 40; C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 34–35, 37–38; Barman, Brazil, 172–73, 176–78; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 293–94. On the reforms and their context, see, also, the 1831 debates of 20–24 May, 9 July, and 9 September in Annaes, 1831, t.1, 70–87, 220–24, and ibid., t.2, 133–42, particularly

346 / Notes to Chapter 2 Evaristo da Veiga and Carneiro Leão (ibid., 9 Sept., 127), Joaquim Manuel Carneiro da Cunha (ibid., t.1, 24 May, 84); and the commentary of Uruguay, Estudos, 1:xii–xviii; and Pereira da Silva, Historia, 23–27,43–44,106–10,150–58. 49. Honório had called for carrying out the reforms within the constitution’s procedures; these called for the special election of deputies empowered for such reform (see Constituição, Arts. 174–77). The election of 1833 was thus a test of the political mandate of moderado reformism and its leaders, as it was they who had embraced reformism in 1832, as a shield against the exaltados and a sword against caramurús. The clear support of the rural elite was crucial to the moderado victory; see Evaristo’s analysis in AF, 19 March 1833, 3199–3200 and passim. 50. On SA, see Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” 197; O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, 116, 126–28, 142–43. For the attacks and defenses, see SA, 4 Nov. 1834, 1; ibid., 30 Nov. 1834, 1–3; ibid., 13 Dec. 1834, 1–3; JC, 28 August 1843, 2; AF, 3,5,15,17,19, and 22 June 1835, passim. On Vasconcelos’s role in the legislation and reforms of 1834, see, also, the Pereira da Silva citation in n.48, above and O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, 143, 144, 147, 150–55. 51. Evaristo, Annaes, 1834, t.1, 4 June, 99; Vasconcelos, ibid., 10 June, 118–19. 52. On partisan perspectives and the moderados’ sustained solidarity between 1832 and 1836 (and the election of 1833), see AF, 20 August 1832, 2327; ibid., 21 Sept. 1832, 2890; ibid., 24 Sept. 1832, 2893–95; ibid., 1 April 1833, 3206; ibid., 29 March 1833, 3199–3200; ibid., 14 April 1833, 3204; ibid., 17 May 1833, 3283; ibid., 5 June 1833, 3311–12; ibid., 4 Nov. 1835, 4076; Carneiro Leão, Annaes, 1832, t.1, 19 May, 22–24; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 12 May, 14; José da Costa Carvalho to Paulino José Soares de Souza, 22 April 1832, IHGB, AVU, lata 3, pacote 22; Paulino, Annaes, 1841, t.1, 15 June, 556. On the deputies elected and Honório’s and Rodrigues Torres’s position, see Javarí, Organizações, 45, 288–91; AF, 14 May 1833, 3224; Annaes, 1834, t.1, 4 June 94–96; ibid., t.2, 29 July, 167. On the reform debate and key votes, see ibid., 1834, ts. 1–2, especially t.1, 9–34; Saturnino, ibid., t.1, 28 April, 44–46; Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 19 April, 47; Araujo Lima, ibid., 16 June, 140–41; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 142–44; the vote in ibid., 17 June, 149; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 18 June, 153; the vote in ibid., 18 June, 153; Vasconcellos, ibid., 23 June, 171; the vote in ibid., 25 June, 172; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 26 June, 182; idem, Rodrigues Torres, and Vasconcellos, ibid., 186–88; Behring and Ferreira França, ibid., 27 June, 188–89; the vote in ibid., 27 June, 192; Paula Araujo, ibid., 28 June, 195; Vasconcellos,ibid., 198; idem, ibid., t.2, 1 July, 10–12; the vote in ibid., 1 July, 13; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 2 July, 16,18; Paula Araujo, ibid., 3 July, 23; Mello and Vasconcellos, ibid., 4 July, 30–33; the vote in ibid., 7 July, 37; Vasconcellos, ibid., 41–45; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 8 July, 51–52; Vasconcellos, ibid., 11 July, 72–73; idem, ibid., 12 July, 76–78; the vote in ibid., 12 July, 79–80; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 14 July, 85–87; the vote in ibid., 89; Vasconcellos, ibid., 15 July, 93–94; Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 16 July, 96–97; Vasconcellos and Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 16 July, 99–105; Ernesto, ibid., 17 July, 106–7; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 109; idem, Vasconcellos, and Paula Araujo, ibid., 18 July, 114–16; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 21 July, 124, 127; projecto [de lei], ibid., 29 July, 161–65; the vote in ibid., 30 July, 167; Alcibiades, et al., ibid., 31 July, 171–75; Behring, C. Ferreira, Souza Martins, Carneiro Leão, and Vasconcellos, ibid., 4 August, 188–93; Mello and Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 5 August, 197–200; redacção da lei das reformas, ibid., 6 August, 200–202; H. Cavalcanti and A. Machado, ibid., 204–5; Vasconcellos, ibid., 19 August, 248–49; Evaristo da Veiga, ibid., 25 Sept., 290–92. 53. Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 16 July, 97.

Notes to Chapter 2 / 347 54. Vasconcellos, ibid., 1 July, 11. 55. See, as well, Vasconcellos in ibid., 1 July, passim; 4 July, passim; 7 July, passim; 11 July, passim; 12 July, passim; 16 July, passim; 18 July, passim. The vote was nominal, 64 to 20; see ibid., 167. 56. Arts.27–30. 57. Art.32. 58. The act, promulgated in accordance with Art.177 of the Constitution, may have had its name from Constant’s “Acte additionnel, aux Constitutions de l’Empire du 11 avril 1815,” in idem, Constitutions, as cited in Fontana, “Introduction,” to Constant, Political Writings, 12–13. It was passed in the Chamber on 29 July 1834, and appears in Annaes, 1834, t.2, 29 July, 161–65. It became law 12 August 1834. Its history is in Pereira da Silva, Historia, 23–24, 43–44, 106–10, 156–58; Uruguay, Estudos, 1:xii–xviii, 27; Araujo Leal, “Historia,” 321–26; and Barman, Brazil, 172–73, 176–78. Flory, Judge and Jury, chaps.7–9, passim, and 90, 158–59, argues that the act indicates an erosion from the radical, decentralizing liberalism of the 1820s, partly by vitiating local, municipal power. Uruguay made a similar point in Estudos practicos; see, e.g., 1:ix–x. The earlier liberal reformism, part of the liberal opposition of the 1820s, was exemplified in the 1827 law establishing the justice of the peace, the Criminal Code of 1830, and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1832. Vasconcelos wrote the 1830 code, Manuel Alves Branco, the 1832 code (see Flory, Judge and Jury, chap.4 and Barman, Brazil, 145,172,175). For the Additional Act’s specifics noted here, see “Ato Adicional,” in Pimenta Bueno, Direito público, 509–12,513–15. Regarding the 20 deputies voting against the act, of those better known, three had been moderado ministers (Honório, Rodrigues Torres, and [Cândido José de]Araújo Viana), one a moderado deputy (Francisco Gonçalves Martins), and at least three were radical reformists (the Ferreira França father and his two sons, Antônio, Cornelio, and Ernesto). By Evaristo’s 1837 count (see AF, 5 June 1833, 3311), some 55 of the Chamber were moderados and, thus, supporters of the cabinet; one assumes that some of the radicals supported the act and made up for the opposition of dissident moderados. 59. The historiography generally dates the reaction to 1836 or 1837; see Pereira da Silva, Historia, 209–226; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:40–41; O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, chaps. 7–8; idem, Feijó, chap.8; Barman, Brazil, 185–94. 60. The correspondence was copied (1931) by Honório’s biographer and descendant, Henrique Carneiro Leão Teixeira Filho, see IHGB, lata 219, Doc.49, nos. I and II; the original is with it and, to this author, now generally illegible. For José da Costa Carvalho, later (1841) barão, (1843) visconde, and (1854)), marquês de Monte Alegre, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:53–56; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 298–99, and Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Monte Alegre. His wife was Genebra de Barros Leite, widow of Luís Antônio de Sousa; the Barros [de Penteado], Ribeiro Leite, and Sousa [Queirós] families were among the most significant paulista planting clans. See ibid. and Barbosa de Oliveira, Memórias, nota V (209–13) and chap.6, passim. 61. H. H. Carneiro Leão to José da Costa Carvalho, Rio, 9 October 1834, IHGB, lata 219, Doc.49, no.1 62. For voting data, see AF, 14 May 1833, 3224. Of the 588 fluminense electors of Rio and the Province of Rio de Janeiro, Rodrigues Torres ranked first, with 375 voting for him among their ten candidates for deputy. In the restorationist stronghold of Rio, Rodrigues Torres ranked eighth (of 254 electors, 85 voted for him), better than any other

348 / Notes to Chapter 2 moderado. On Evaristo’s role in fluminense politics, see J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 46–47. For the provincial deputies of 1836–1837, see “Relação dos Deputados.” The four reactionary leaders in the first fluminense assembly were Belisário Soares de Sousa, José Clemente Pereira, Manuel Jacinto Nogueira da Gama, and Paulino. 63. Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93–98. On Belisário, see ibid., 1:93 and Javarí, Organizações, 287, ff. On Paulino, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:33–38; Macedo, Ano, 3:191–96; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:354–56; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Uruguay; A. P. Soares de Souza, “Tres brasileiros,” 16–45, especially 17–22; see, also, ibid., 16–17 for the bibliography to 1922; J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, chaps.1,2, especially 21,42–47; on Paulino’s “amigos, e o circulo em que eu vivia,” see Paulino, Annaes, 1841, t.1, 15 June, 556. 64. JC, 24 Nov. 1834, 1; ibid., 27 Nov. 1834, 1; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 292–94, 296–98, 302–5. 65. AF, 3 Dec.1834, 3630; see, also, Pereira da Silva, Historia, 162 and “Fragmentos,” 238, 240. 66. Holanda was, later (1854), visconde de Albuquerque. Honório’s correspondence with Costa Carvalho indicates he was still hopeful of a commitment as late as 2 December 1834 (see H. H. Carneiro Leão to José da Costa Carvalho, Rio, 2 Dec. 1834, IHGB, lata 219, Doc.49, no.2). In a confrontation with Holanda in the early 1840s, the next step taken was recalled: see Carneiro Leão, “Senado,” JC, 7 March 1843, 2 and, better, Honorio, “Senado,” ibid., 26 August 1843, 1–2. On Holanda, his family, and his provincial role, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:36–42, 77; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, v.s. Albuquerque; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 226–27; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 85–88, 97–108, 111–14; and Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony,” chaps.1,4,5. 67. No record has been found of an 1834–35 electoral accord between Honório and Vasconcelos, who had broken after 1832–33 (Vasconcelos had both undermined Honório’s ministry and his 1833 election as a deputy). What is clear from the cited correspondence is Honório’s appreciation of the need for such an alliance; Vasconcelos’s public break with Feijó, Aureliano, and Evaristo is clear in the pages of SA (see, e.g., ibid., 30 Sept. 1834, 1–2; ibid., 4 Oct. 1834, passim; ibid., 14 Oct. 1834, 1–2; ibid., 4 Nov. 1834, 1; ibid., 13 Dec. 1834, 1–3), and in Evaristo’s charge that Vasconcelos supported Holanda and a “third party” by the end of 1834 (see AF, 22 June 1835, 3596 and ibid., 1 July 1835, 3960). The electoral defeat makes it obvious that no effective alliance was made, for the numbers patently indicate that Feijó’s opposition had the majority, but lacked unity. See Annaes, 1835, t.2, 354–69, especially, 368–69 for the electoral data. If we take Holanda’s votes and those of the next five most successful candidates, we get a total of 5,687: Costa Carvalho (847), Araújo Lima (760), Lima e Silva (629), Paes de Andrade (605), and Vasconcelos (595). After Vasconcelos, the votes drop to 266 (Cipriano José Barata de Almeida). Of the six candidates immediately less sucessful than Feijó, all but one (Paes de Andrade) were either reactionary moderades (Costa Carvalho, Lima e Silva, and Vasconcelos) or conservative oppositionists (Holanda, Araújo Lima), with a total of 5,082. These new names are noteworthy for the reader. Manuel de Carvalho Paes de Andrade (1774/1778–1855), once a pre-eminent radical pernambucano chieftain, he was now reconciled to the Monarchy and a prominent provincial liberal; see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:46; Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony,” chap. 1, passim, especially 33–35, 39–40, 46–48, 190–91, 224–31, 238–39. He naturally opposed Holanda and, thus, the early Re-

Notes to Chapter 2 / 349 gency moderado cabinets, under attack by Holanda in the Court, allied with Paes de Andrade’s liberals in Pernambuco (themselves an alliance of newer, north Pernambuco planters and Recife radicals). The votes for Paes de Andrade (and Barata de Almeida, as he, too, had been a radical chieftain in 1824) demonstrate the continued political significance of the radical liberal tradition in the Northeast and an important reason for Holanda’s consequent, continued opposition to the moderados in Rio, who had fostered the post–1831 resurgence of his provincial enemies. Araújo Lima was not a provincial chieftain, despite his family’s prominence and kinship with the Cavalcantis (who he supported in provincial politics, despite differences with Holanda at the national level). Instead, he had moved directly from Coimbra into a loftier political sphere—the Lisbon Cortes, then, the Constituent Assembly in Rio (1823) and, then (1826), the first Legislature of the Chamber. He acquired broad, non-partisan admiration, serving as President of the Chamber in 1827 and 1829. Dom Pedro I had availed himself this deputy’s popularity, appointing him a minister in 1823 and 1827. He apparently retained provincial support, despite Dom Pedro I’s declining popularity, enough to survive the abdication in 1831, but he refrained from significant participation in the roiling politics of the early Regency. In the aftermath of the 1834 debates, however, he re-emerged decisively. We glimpse him again as one of Honório’s key Northeastern contacts among the conservative opposition (see the letter quoted in the text), and, then, as president of the Chamber again, in 1835. On Araújo Lima, later (1841) visconde, and (1854) marquês de Olinda, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:45–48; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Olinda; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 99, 214; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 330–31; and Camara Cascudo, O marquez, 34, 104, 152–53, 165–66. 68. This is best seen in the studies of local rebellions cited in n.10, above. 69. See the Maciel de Carvalho, Kraay, Mosher, Röhrig de Assunção, Ferreira Reis, Cleary, Chasteen, and Reis citations in n.10, above. 70. The response to slave revolt and the resumption of the African slave trade are analyzed in Needell, “The Abolition,” 681–711. Here, see ibid., 682–87, 688–96. 71. See the 17 November representation from the fluminense assembly noted in JC, 2 Dec.1837,1; Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1835, t.2, 24 July, 109. 72. Feijó to Antonio Pedro da Costa Ferreira, Rio, 5 Jan. 1836, BN,SM, CTM, P110. On Feijó’s perspective, see, also, in ibid., Feijó to Antonio Pedro da Costa Ferreira [president of Maranhão], [Rio,] 5 Oct. 1836 and same to same, [Rio,] 22 Nov. 1836. In the four cabinets, three ministers, [Antônio Paulino] Limpo de Abreu, later (1854), visconde de Abaeté, Manuel do Nascimento Castro e Silva, and Manuel Alves Branco, later (1854), second visconde de Caravelas, all moderate stalwarts, appeared and reappeared, supplying a valiant but vain defense for Feijó. The reactionary opposition to Feijó, while a minority, was clearly apparent in the Chamber in 1836, the first session with Feijó as sole regent; see Pereira da Silva, Historia, 208–10. 73. On Evaristo’s central role in Feijó’s election and subsequent support, see Pereira da Silva, Historia, 165–66; O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, 253–70; Barman, Brazil, 180–81. 74. This is assumed in Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:53, 56,58; it becomes explicit in Marxist and post-Marxist analyses seeking to link the agro-mercantile interests of fluminense coffee to the Conservative Party’s origins and purpose. See, e.g., Beiguelman, Formação, 58–60, 61; Pereira de Castro, “A regência,” 2:55–56; A. C. Ferreira Reis, “A Província do Rio,” 2:350–52; Silva Dias, “A interiorização,” 171; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 67;

350 / Notes to Chapter 2 Murilo de Carvalho, A construção, 83–84, 158–59, 165–66, 171–72, 173; idem, Teatro, 11, 16–17,143; Rohloff de Mattos, O tempo, 3–5, 57, 63–67,90–93,106–8; Graham, Patronage, 51–52, 178–81; Barman, Brazil, 196–97, 213. 75. On the Court, see Silva Dias, “A interiorizção,” 169–80, passim; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “O Processo,” 315–26, 331–32; Menezes Martinho, “Caixeiros,” chap.6; Gorenstein, “Comércio,” chap.4; Chapter One, part III, of this study; and specific cases to follow here. On the 1833 provincial fluminense support of the moderados, see AF, 29 March 3199–3200; ibid., 14 April 1833, 3224;Paulino, Annaes, 1841, t.1, 15 June, 556; and Pereira da Silva, Historia, 120–21. 76. On the dominant serra families, see the analysis in Chapter One, part III of this study and Taunay, Pequena história, chap.2; Stein, Vassouras, chaps.1–2, passim; Dean, With Broadax, 178–87; Lenharo, As tropas, 49–50, and chaps.2,5, passim. 77. For the traditional understanding, see the citations in n.74, above (after Nabuco). The argument here was first made in Needell, “Party Formation,” 294–99. 78. See Constituição, Arts.90–97 and Javarí, Organizações, 290. 79. On electoral influence by the patriarchs, see AF, 1 April 1833, 3206; ibid., 9 March 1833, 3199–3200. On the direction to patriarchs by Chamber leaders and their associates in Rio, see, e.g., Paulino José Soares de Souza to Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck, Santo Domingos, 29 Sept. 1837, in AN, AP29, PY, Caixa 379, Pacote 1, Doc. 235.2; same to same, Nichteroy, 25 March 1838, in ibid., Doc. 235.4. Cf. the same behavior between leaders in Rio and other provinces in H. H. Carno. Leão to José da Costa Carvalho, Rio, 9 Oct. 1834, IHGB, lata 219, Doc. 49, no.1, 1–3 and the letters from Honório to Evaristo, Rio, 12 Jan. 1832 in RIHGSP, vol.7 (1902), 488–89. Cf. Bieber, Power, chap.3, passim; Graham, Patronage, chap.4, passim; and Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 140–41. On the 1833 vote, see AF, 1 April 1833, 3207. Conclusions about deputies’ partisanship made here are based on the study of their speeches and/or biographies. Note, that of the ten deputies elected, two took their seats only in 1837, and both were reactionaries (Paulino and Antônio Pereira Barreto Pedroso). Of the eight remaining, Pereira da Silva identified all as moderados (see Historia, 120–21); note that seven voted for the Additional Act—the other was Rodrigues Torres, who voted against. Votes were not nominal in the key sessions of 1836 and 1837, but at least three of those same eight were reactionary by then, giving us a fluminense delegation at least half reactionary (i.e., 5 out of 10) by 1837. 80. AF, 5 June 1833, 3311; ibid., 3 Dec. 1834, 3630. Pereira da Silva recognized the shift of the former restorationists as manifest in the election of 1837; see Historia, 214–25. 81. Regresso means a backward movement. The earliest political use found is in July 1835, when Evaristo applied it to Vasconcelos’s leadership of the early Chamber movement against the 1834 reforms. Evaristo charged Vasconcelos then and later with attempting to break up the moderado majority and of allying with opposition reactionaries: see AF, 3,5,17,19,22 June 1835, passim; ibid., 14 Sept. 1835, 4076, and ibid., 1 July 1836, 3960. In ibid., 5 June 1835, 3311, Evaristo used the words “retrogrados, estacionarios e exaltados” for the moderados’ opposition, translated here as restorationists, conservatives, and radicals. Regresso was, thus, always used to attack the renegade moderados and their movement in relationship to the moderados, and as distinguished from the earlier partisan groups to the right (and left) of the moderados. In the analysis here, these earlier groups were now in the process of a new alliance, with most on the right adhering to the renegade moderados.

Notes to Chapter 2 / 351 82. The leadership of Vasconcelos and the others in ideological terms will be explored in Chapter Three of this study. On Paulino’s family and early career, see n.63, above. On Paulino’s intellectual perspective regarding the Monarchy, Brazilian society, and the law, key early public documents are the opinion of the legislative assemblies’ committee (Paulino, Annaes, 1837, t.2, 10 July, 68–73) and his annual reports as minister of justice in 1841 and 1843: idem, Relatorio . . . de Justiça . . . 1841, 1–2, 6–7,9–15,18–25; idem, Relatorio . . . de Justiça . . . na 1a. Sessão da 5a. Legislatura. . . . , 3–4, 6–7, 10–26, 35–36, 39–40. Paulino’s initial relations with Werneck and the serra planters are clear in his presidential correspondence: see, e.g., Paulino José Soares de Souza to Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck, n.p. 22 Sept. 1836, AN,AP29, PY Caixa 379, Pacote 1, Doc 183; same to same, Nictheroy, 19 Feb. 1837 in ibid., Doc. 233; same to same, Nictheroy, 15 March 1837, in ibid., Doc. 234; same to same, Santo Domingos, 29 Sept. 1837, in ibid., Doc 235.2; same to same, Nictheroy, 9 Jan. 1838, in ibid., Doc 235.3; same to same, Nictheroy, 25 March 1839, in ibid., Doc 235.4. The 1837 opinion of the Chamber committee, cited above, was the kernel of the Regresso legislation in the Chamber (the Interpretation of the Additional Act). It is important to note, however, that reactionaries laid the groundwork for this in the Chamber as early as the first weeks of the 1836 session: see Rodrigues Torres, Annaes, 1836, t.1, 6 May, 21; Calmon, ibid., 6 May, 23; Rodrigues Torres and Vasconcellos, ibid., 9 May, 32–33; idem, ibid., 13 May, 45–46,49–50; and Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 18 May, 69,71. 83. On José Clemente, see José Clemente Pereira [submission regarding senatorial election], n.p. n.d., AN,AP07, PM 1962, passim; [Arquivo: Inventário de Manuel José Ribeiro de Oliveiera: 1834], in ibid., PM 1968; “Testamento José Clemente Pereira,” Rio, 19 Oct. 1845, in ibid., PM 1907; “Declaração sobre o inventario de José Clemente Pereira: 1854,” Rio, 25 June 1854, in ibid., PM 1908; Sisson, Galeria, 1:27–31; Moreira de Azevedo, Rio, 1:481–84; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 4:384–86; Bittencourt, Os fundadores, 299–311; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 107, 113, 131–32, 148–51, 220–21; Falcón and Rohloff de Mattos, “O processo,” 320–28,331–34; Schultz, Tropical Versailles, chap.7, passim, especially 242–47. 84. On Eusébio’s family connections, see Chapter One, part III. On his career, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:19–22; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:308–10; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 252; Holloway, Policing, 103–5, 123–42. On the new law academies and Coimbra, see Kirkendall, Class Mates, 15–23. On the shift from the intendency to police chief, see Holloway, Policing, 100–3. 85. This argument is introduced in Needell, “Party Formation,” 298–301. On the debates and the vote, see Annaes references in nn.52–55, above. On Gonçalves Martins, later (1860) barão and (1871) visconde de São Lourenço, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 258; Kraay, Race, 231–32; idem, “‘As Terrible,’” 506, 520–23; P. C. Souza, A Sabinada, 49–52. On Araújo Lima, see the references in n.67, above. On the provincial deputations, see Javarí, Organizações, 288–91. Aside from the fifteen mentioned, there were a deputy from Pará, another from Sergipe, another from Rio de Janeiro, and two from Minas. Assignment of leadership status here derives from analysis of the key debates of 1837, the number of deputies who spoke, and which among these spoke most often; see Needell, “Party Formation,” 300. NB that their status was subsequently confirmed by their appointment to the cabinet of 1837 (see the text below), doubtless to ensure Chamber support for that cabinet. On Calmon, later (1841) visconde, then (1854), marquês de Abrantes, see Sisson,

352 / Notes to Chapter 2 Galeria, 1:69–74; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:273–77; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Abrantes; and Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 326–27; on Maciel Monteiro, later (1860) second barão de Itamaracá, see Macedo, Brazilian, 3:96; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:278–80; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 232–33; Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:368; Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony,” 224–29. NB that Maciel de Carvalho details the incisive role of the Cavalcantis in pulling Pernambuco’s liberal and conservative opposition to the moderados together in 1831 against the reforms’ radical threat, effectively anticipating the Regresso of 1837. Note, however, that both in 1834 and in the Regresso, the Cavalcanti oligarchy split in the province and in the Chamber: Holanda and his brother, Luís de Albuquerque, did not ally with the reactionaries, but their cousins, Sebastião do Rego Barros and Francisco do Rego Barros, did so, as did their kinsman, Araújo Lima, as well as Maciel Monteiro, a Cavalcanti protégé. NB, in the discussion of the positions taken by Northeasterners in the votes of 1837, the analysis is based on the positions taken by the political chieftains noted; the key votes were generally not nominal, and, thus, provincial deputations’ voting cannot be analyzed. 86. On Evaristo’s break with Feijó and his death, see JC, 13 May 1837, 3; Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” 193; “Sociedade Defensora,” 227; O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo, chap.8, especially 275–78, 283–87. Evaristo’s brother, Bernardo Ferreira da Veiga, would go over to the reactionary party. On this early phase of reactionary political journalism, see the correspondence quoted in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chaps. 1,2, and the memoir by J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 26 May 133–34. NB Rocha’s initial step into the reactionary political journalism he dominated for more than twenty years was in an ephemeral periodical, Atlante (1836), paid for by Sebastião do Rego Barros and the pernambucano reactionaries (ibid., 133). On J. J. da Rocha, see Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” 222–23; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:269–73; Magalhães Júnior, Três panfletârios, 127–59; Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:127–35; Cardim, Justiniano, 5–16; and Barman, “Justiniano,” 3–7. 87. For the deputies and delegations of 1837, see Javarí, Organizações, 289–91; reactionaries were selected here on the basis of the analysis of key speeches in the Annaes, 1833–37, passim, contemporary published sources, and secondary sources. The key debates of 1837 were the ministerial budget debates: see Annaes, 1837, t.2, 48,ff; 102,ff; 114, ff; 123, ff; 132, ff; 140, ff; 148, ff; 161, ff; 172, ff; 177, ff; 202, ff; 211, ff; 218, ff; 228, ff; 231, ff; 243, ff; 255, ff; 272, ff; 286, ff; 298, ff; 310, ff; 315, ff; 327, ff; 337, ff; 484, ff; 512, ff; 628, ff; and 633, ff. On the rhetorical capacity of the four reactionary leaders noted, see, on Vasconcelos, Sisson, Galeria, 1:275–77; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:45; and Macedo, Brazilian, 2:527, 532; on Calmon, see Sisson, Galeria, 2:70; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:274; on Rodrigues Torres, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:52; and Macedo, Brazilian, 3:35; and on Maciel Montiero, see Macedo, Brazilian, 3:96; and Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:278. On the significance of oratory for this generation, see, Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:42–44, who discusses the influence of literary Romanticism, nationalism, and sacral rhetoric. The latter may seem marginal to the reader; consider that this was an age in which elite preparatory education remained clerical and Catholic practice was integral to daily life; see, e.g., Nogueira da Gama, “Memorias,” in Calmon, chaps.2,3. The influence of the era’s legal education was also significant, of course; see Kirkendall, Class Mates, chap.2, especially 39–40, 54–55. 88. On Feijó’s state of mind, see the correspondence cited in n.72, above; cf. his key

Notes to Chapter 2 / 353 public pronouncements, the falas do trono in Regente [Feijó], Annaes, 1836, t.1, 3 May, 13–14; idem, ibid., 1837, t.1, 3 May, 13; idem, “Manifesto,” in ibid., t.2, 19 Sept., 547. Feijó made his pleas to succeed him to Alves Branco, Aureliano, Antônio Pinto da Costa Ferreira, Limpo de Abreu, and [Francisco de] Paula Sousa; see O. T. de Sousa, Feijó, chap.8, especially 255–58. 89. The portfolio for war was taken by Sebastião do Rego Barros. Although no great orator, he was, as noted earlier, a chief among Pernambuco’s conservative opposition, linked to the Cavalcantis, and in the Chamber opposition since 1830; see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 336–37. On Feijó’s resignation and the new cabinet, see JC, 20 Sept. 1837, 2. On Vasconcelos’s and Honório’s roles after the triumph, see T. Otoni and Honório’s exchange in ibid., 11 May 1838, 1.

Chapter 3 1. Murilo de Carvalho, A construção, 159; see, also, ibid., 157ff.; for Barman, see, e.g., Barman, Brazil, 223–27. The comments here concern much of the traditional historiography, which often goes unread. The surveys in Bethell, Brazil, are indicative of the commonplaces in that literature; the problem is quite clear in the more influential monographs. See, e.g., Bethell and Murilo de Carvalho, “1822–1850,” in ibid., 76–84 and Graham, “1850–1870,” in ibid., 138–45. For influential work dismissive of the significance of the parties and their ideology (and tending to generalize backward from the latter Monarchy), see, e.g., idem, Patronage, 129–30,148–49,219,232; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 61, 69–70,216. One notes that the most ambitious study of Conservative ideology to date, Rohloff de Mattos, O tempo saquarema, while it takes ideology seriously, does so without historical specificity, conflating institutions, classes, and ideas; see, e.g., 3–4, 45–57, 86, 90–93, 125–26, 157, 163, 171, 179, 183–85,189–91,216, 275, 283. For the Liberals, Flory is more satisfactory on the specifics of Liberal ideology, although problematic in working out the history of the parties. See idem, Judge and Jury, pt. 3, passim and his conclusion. Happily, more recent work on the local level has been far more satisfactory; see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chaps. 3 and 4, passim; Bieber, Power, Patronage, chaps.3,7, passim. See, also, Needell, “Party Formation,” 277, 279–80, 281–82 and idem, “Provincial Origins,”expecially 136–44. 2. Evaristo may have first used the word regresso to taint Vasconcelos; see AF, 1 July 1835, 3960; ibid., 4 Nov. 1835, 4076; cf. T. Ottoni, JC, 22 May 1838, 2. Vasconcelos’s response to such attacks can be sampled in SA, 9 May 1838, 1; ibid., 16 May 1838, 1–2; ibid., 25 May 1838, 1–2; JC, 21 May 1838, 4; Vasconcelos, Annaes, 1837, t.2, 9 Aug., 293–94; idem, ibid., 1838, t.1, 12 May, 106; idem, ibid., 7 June, 301. 3. Vasconcelos, Annaes, 1834, t.1, 23 June, 170; idem, ibid., t.2, 1 July, 10–12; idem, ibid., 4 July, 32–33; idem, ibid., 7 July, 43; idem, ibid., 12 July, 77; idem, ibid., 18 July, 114. This exceptionalist approach and the consequent problem of adapting liberalism to Brazilian circumstances were central to Oliveira Viana and the authoritarian tradition of twentieth-century Brazil, as well. The key difference is that Viana condemned liberalism as essentially inadaptable in Brazil, in favor of a “modern” adaptation of the Monarchy, which he understood as a centralized, authoritarian, elite (and “aryanist”) regime. See, Needell, “Oliveira Viana.” 4. At least initially, Vasconcelos’s concerns for a strong state in the aftermath of 1831’s abdication were shared with other moderado chiefs; see, e.g., Evaristo da Veiga, Annaes,

354 / Notes to Chapter 3 1831, t.1, 25 May, 92–93, 94–95; idem, ibid., t.2, 8 Oct., 227; Feijo, ibid., 1832, t.1, 16 May, 16–17; and the foundational document Vasconcelos wrote for the first moderado cabinet: “Exposição de 23 de July: Exposição dos principios do Ministerio da Regencia, em nome do Imperador, feita à Assembléa Geral do Brasil,” reproduced in toto in O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcelos, 269–72. On Vasconcelos’s authorship, see ibid., 119–20. Vasconcelos’s concerns with the radical revision of his reform project and the 1834 legislation that derived from it is clear from early on. See Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1834, t.1, 27 May, 188; idem, ibid., t. 2, 1 July, 10; idem, ibid., 4 July, 31–32; idem, ibid., 7 July, 44; idem, ibid., 11 July, 67; idem, ibid., 12 July, 77–78; idem, ibid., 19 Aug., 249; idem, ibid., 1837, t.1, 5 June, 191; idem, ibid., t.2, 27 Sept., 81; idem, ibid., 1838, t.1, 12 May, 102; idem, ibid., 7 June, 91–92. 5. Vasconcelos’s position as a champion of parliamentary monarchy was clear when he was chief of the liberal opposition: see, e.g., Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1829, t.3, 10 June, 66–68; idem, ibid., 12 June, 190–92; idem, ibid., 10 June, 139, 140–41. Cf. Walsh, Notices, 2:214–19, 424, 430–31. The continuity is clear in the later years; see, e.g, Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1834, t.1, 27 June, 188; idem, ibid., t.2, 12 July, 77; idem, ibid., 16 July, 102; idem, ibid., 1837, t.1, 5 June, 190–92; idem, ibid., t.2, 9 Aug., 287, 292; idem, ibid., 1838, t.1, 7 June, 291, 297. Calmon, introducing the policies of the Cabinet of the Capable, made the same points; see idem, ibid., 1837, t.1, 23 Sept., 569, 571–72. 6. On the reactionary journals and journalists, see Chapter Two, n.86. The reference to electoral reform refers to a later, increasingly central issue of the party, but one with clear ideological continuity back to Vasconcelos’s championship of representative government in the 1820s and 1830s; see his interview with Walsh (idem, Notices, 2:216) in 1829 and the 1846 position Vasconcelos took, discussed in F. B. Soares de Souza, O sistema eleitoral, 64–68. 7. See, e.g., Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1837, t.2, 9 Aug., 287–88, 292–95; Calmon, ibid., 23 Sept., 569–70, 572, 573, 576; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 27 Sept., 588–89; Vasconcellos, JC, 14 May 1838, 2–3; Rodrigues Torres, Annaes, 1839, t.1, 10 May, 56–57; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 27 May, 168; Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 5 June, 292; idem, ibid., 8 June 230–31. 8. On foreign models, see, e.g., Vanconcellos, Annaes, 1834, t.2, 1 July, 10–12; idem, ibid., 7 July, 41–44; idem, ibid., 11 July, 72–73; idem, ibid., 12 July, 77; idem, ibid., 16 July, 99–100; idem, ibid., 18 July 114; idem, ibid., 1837, t.1, 5 June, 191. On the influence of Guizot, the doctrinaires, and the reactionaries, see Limpo de Abreu and Vasconcellos, ibid., t.2, 17 July, 128–29; Vasconcellos, ibid., 1838, t.1, 7 June, 300. 9. On the French and access to French books, see, e.g., Walsh, Notices, 1:466: “They are . . . the only booksellers in Rio. There are twelve libraries and relieurs, some of whom keep circulating libraries, and they have a good collection of books in all languages, and they publish the best newspaper in the capital.” On the library noted, see ibid., 1:435–37. Cf. O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo da Veiga, 49, 52–55, 57–59. See, also, Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 180–82, 186 and idem, “La Sublime Puerta,” 170–73, and ff. Nabuco once noted “all our revolutions, it was said, were ripples begun in Paris.” See Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:99; see, also, on French influence in the early 1830s in the seminal Olinda faculty of law, ibid., 1:15, 17–18. The presence of Guizot’s influence is explicit not only in the reactionaries’s speeches, but implicitly, in their reading: Paulino’s library, at his death, for example, included Guizot’s Origines du gouvernement, Des moyens de gouvernement, Dictionnaire des synomymes, and Memoires. See “Catalogo do Esplendido Leilão de Delicados moveis, forte-piano, espelhos, importantissima livraria, bronzes, pinturas, finissimas porcellanas

Notes to Chapter 3 / 355 de Sevres, finos e delicados crystaes. . . .1 de outubro de 1867,” IHGB, AVU, uncatalogued, 3,4. On Guizot himself, see Johnson, Guizot, 1–2, 6–8, 32–37; Collingham with Alexander, The July Monarchy, 7,8,12, 298–302; Broglie, “L’itinéraire Guizot,” 297, 298, 299–301, 302–303, 305; Lefort, “Guizot théoricien du pouvoir,” 95–110; and Pesquino, “Sur la théorie,” 111–28, passim; Rosanvallon, “Présentation,” to Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation, 307–18; Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 17–19. 10. See Guizot, Philosophie politique, in idem, Histoire de la civilisation, chaps. 1–4; Johnson, Guizot, chap.2, especially 32–44, 51–54; and the Lefort, Pasquino, and Rosanvallon references cited in n.9, above. 11. On mention of foreign ideological influence, see, e.g., the references of O. T. de Sousa, Evaristo da Veiga, in n.9 above, but note the complete lack of theoretical consideration of foreign political models in idem, Vasconcellos, chap.8. Cruz Costa, A History of Ideas, 51–54, emphasizes Victor Cousin and Eclecticism (which are clearly related to Guizot, but distinct). Bethell and Carvalho, “1822–1850,” 78–79, note the citation of Guizot (and suggest the influence of Bentham). Barman, Brazil, 202, alludes to the reactionary embrace of the July Monarchy as a model, as he does with the title and analysis of Citizen Emperor; see, e.g., ibid., 64–65, where he notes its significance for O Chronista’s J. J. da Rocha. In analyzing the socio-economic terrain of elite interests, Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 62–67, glides over the specificity of, and dialectic between, political and ideological detail; the same may be said of Graham in Patronage, 47–53. Flory, Judge and Jury, 17–30,131–34, 143–44, 153–56, takes ideology seriously and provides good analysis of Brazilian polemic, but neglects French influence on the Regresso, as did Mercadante, A consciência conservadora, chap.7. Such concerns are also absent in Rohloff de Mattos, O tempo saquarema, 3–4, 45–57, 86, 90–98, 125–26, 157, 163, 171, 179, 185–87, 189–91, 216, 275, 283. Nor can one find much on French influence in Murilo de Carvalho’s discussion of political behavior and formation in Teatro, chap. 5 or idem, A construção, chap.1 and 29, 51–54,61–62,69–70,158–66. Murilo de Carvalho only notes in passing (ibid., 7) the significance of French post-revolutionary thought, particularly Cousin (following Mercadante’s generalizations about Eclecticism in A consciência, chap.14 and Cruz Costa,as cited above). As Murilo de Carvalho states (A construção, 157), the study of ideology demands a focused analysis of speeches and writing, beyond the scope of his concerns then. Happily, Murilo de Carvalho’s interest in the area has recently been piqued; see his study of Guizot’s influence on Vasconcelos’s disciple, Paulino; idem, “Paulino José Soares de Sousa.” There, however, he only finds this influence on the Paulino of the 1860s. Indeed, although he does suggest Guizot’s influence on J. J. da Rocha by 1843, he ascribes Vasconcelos’s inspirations to Bentham. 12. Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1834, t.1, 26 June, 199. 13. Limpo de Abreu and Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1837, t.2, 17 July, 128–29. Cf. idem, ibid., 9 Aug., 287. 14. Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1837, t.2, 9 Aug., 293. Cf. the entire speech with Johnson’s discussion of Guizot, representative government, and history in Guizot, 40, 51–52, 58–59, 62–63. 15. Vasconcellos, Annaes, 1838, t.1, 7 June, 300. 16. Paulino [speaking for the Committee of Legislative Assemblies, reading the committee’s official opinion], Annaes, 1837, t.2, 10 July, 68. 17. Ibid., 69–70.

356 / Notes to Chapter 3 18. Ibid., 71. 19. Vasconcelos’s role in the cabinet and Honório’s in the Chamber were noted by Otoni in JC, 11 May 1838, 1. The significance of the judicial code and the Council of State legislation will be discussed later in the text. That of the Interpretation has been noted. The issues related to the Interpretation can be understood by a close reading of the debates of May 1838 when the cabinet’s policies were first attacked: see Vasconcellos, JC, 14 May 1838, 2–3; idem, ibid., 21 May 1838,4; idem, ibid., 25 May 1838, 1–3. See, also, José Clemente Pereira, Annaes, 1838, t.2, 29 Aug., 415–27; Paulino, ibid., 30 Aug., 423–24; Honorio, et al., ibid., 31 Aug., 431–34. Cf. Flory, Judge and Jury, chap.8. 20. Holanda, an ally of the reactionaries in the first election for regent, 1834–35, shifted against them by 1838, when they supported Araújo Lima against him in the second; see Paulino José Soares de Souza to Francisco Peixoto Lacerda Verneck, Nictheroy, 25 March 1838, AN, AFW, Caixa 373, Pacote 1, Doc. 235.4; JC, 26 Aug. 1843, 1–2. Antônio Carlos’s position varied between 1836 and 1838; see JC, 25 May 1838, 2–3; Annaes, 1839, t.1, 25 May, 164; ibid., 28 May, 184–86; ibid., 1 June, 245. Montesuma, a key Bahia radical in the Independence era and the early First Reign, shifted and opposed the 1820s liberal opposition and the 1830s moderados, until Feijó offered him a portfolio. Made visconde de Jequitinhonha in 1854, his success did not dissipate a reputation for the ephemeral quality of his partisanship. He figured among the greatest orators of the era. See Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 257–58; Sisson, Galeria, 2:115–43. Henriques de Resende, a radical from the days of Pernambuco’s 1817 revolt against the king in Rio, was a fixture of the opposition (see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 7:343). Otoni’s “liberal” characterization of the late Regency opposition, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 2 June, 580, 584, belongs to a speech on parliamentary opposition, cabinets, and elections (ibid., 577–87). See the reactionary response of Carneiro Leão, ibid., 3 June, 598–602. On party origins and composition, cf. Barman, Brazil, 190–94, 196–97,224 and Murilo de Carvalho, A construção, chaps.7,8. Both emphasize a Coimbra education and career in the magistracy as a sociological and ideological basis for the reactionary-party leadership. Murilo de Carvalho, in particular, indicates the coincidence of their consequent ideological predisposition for centralized monarchy and the political necessities of the agro-export elites of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco, as opposed to the radical priests and urban professionals and domestic-sector elites of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul (see, e.g., ibid., 164–66). Barman, Brazil, 196–97, links the issue of centralization and the fluminense elites. Here, this study moves beyond the useful generalizations of both pioneering scholars to the specificities of mineiro-fluminense context, political leadership, and political discourse, which will sometimes lead to differences with these earlier works. This approach was introduced in Needell, “Party Formation,” 194, ff. and idem, “Provincial Origins,” 133–44, passim. A Coimbra law degree, for example, was less explanatory than these pioneers argue. Aureliano, Limpo de Abreu, and Montesuma all possessed this, while Rodrigues Torres, a Coimbra mathematician, did not. Nor, as both scholars would agree, are provincial interests as simple as might be assumed. Minas was divided economically and politically, as were Pernambuco and São Paulo. If one is to understand political and personal choices, one must work out the particulars. 21. On the cabinet’s policy failures, see Barman, Brazil, 198–99. Indeed, Barman concludes that the cabinet’s Chamber support could not be sustained. However, the Chamber committee elections, taking place shortly after the resignation, suggest contin-

Notes to Chapter 3 / 357 ued strength, something affirmed in the Chamber later in May; see Navarro, JC, 12–13 May 1839, 1. NB that this strength is among deputies elected in 1838, suggesting the support for the Regresso continued firm among the Empire’s elite. An historical appraisal of the reactionaries’ majority is in Rodrigues Torres, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 27 June, 867–68, 870–71 22. See Pereira da Silva, Historia, 257–74, passim, on friction with Vasconcelos. On the reactionaries’ support for Araújo Lima, see, e.g., Paulino José Soares de Souza to Francisco Peixoto Lacerda Verneck, Nictheroy, 25 March 1838, AN, AFW, Caixa 373, Pacote 1, Doc 235.4. 23. See JC, 11 May 1839, 2 and 13 May 1839, 1. See, also, Pereira da Silva, Historia, 257–74, passim. On Lopes Gama, later, 1854, visconde de Maranguape, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 240, and Sisson, Galeria, 1:95–97. 24. Rodrigues Torres, Annaes, 1839, t.1, 10 May, 56–57; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 27 May, 168; Rodrigues Torres, ibid., 5 and 8 June, 292, 330–331; Pereira da Silva, Historia, 280–82. Matters were not improved by the vague program of the new cabinet and its pallid, late presentation; see Conde de Lages, Annaes, 1839, t.2, 119–20 (cf. Javari, Organizações, 69). T. Otoni’s view of the cabinet’s fall was acid; see Ottoni, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 27 May, 493–94. 25. On the cabinet’s members, see Javari, Organizações, 69–71. The only exception to the background traced here was the minister of finance of the second cabinet, Manuel Alves Branco (1797–1855—later, 1854, second visconde de Caravelas), a veteran moderado. Alves Branco had been a key reformist and Feijó’s great champion and minister in 1835 and 1837 (when he ascended to the Senate). Perhaps Araújo Lima was attempting to use Alves Branco to straddle the partisan divide. See Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 316–17 and Sisson, Galeria, 1:119–22. On the May 1840 Chamber elections, see Annaes, 1840, t.1, 4 May, 206–7 and 5 May, 208–9. On the progress of the reactionary legislation, see Javari, Organizações, 70–71. 26. On Alencar, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:73–74. This Alencar was father and namesake to the better known writer and statesman (see Chapter Six). On the Majority Club and conspiracy, see Alencar Araripe, “Noticia,” and Leal, “Do Ato Adicional,” Alencar Araripe was a relative of Alencar and a witness. See, also, Barman, Brazil, 204–209; idem, Citizen Emperor, 68–73; O. T. de Sousa, Historia, chaps.2,3. Pernambuco liberals supporting the regent’s reactionary cabinet included Henriques de Resende, [Joaquim] Nunes Machado, and Lopes Gama; see, e.g., Henriques de Rezende, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 18 May, 345; Nunes Machado, ibid., 12 May, 265; Henriques de Rezende, ibid., 20 July, 309–10; Lopes Gama, ibid., 317; idem, ibid., 21 July, 332. On Lopes Gama, see Cabral de Mello, “Introdução,” to Lopes Gama, O capuceiro, 14–24. On the radical-reactionary alliance, see Lima Sobrinho, “Urbano Sabino,” 330–32, 335–37; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 109–10 (NB that Mosher traces the alliance back only to 1841, citing secondary sources, and to the reactionaries’ removal of the provincial president, the barão da Boa Vista, a Cavalcanti ally). 27. Constituição politica, arts. 121–23. 28. Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão to Luiz Alves de Lima, n.p., May 1840, IHGB, Lata 748, Pasta 29 [1935 transcript from undated O Jornal article by Vilhaena Moraes]. 29. Javari, Organizações, 73. The reactionaries’ sudden appointments transformed the cabinet into one obviously tied to the Chamber’s majority. Paulino was appointed to justice and Rodrigues Torres to navy, ten days after the Majority campaign opened in the

358 / Notes to Chapter 3 Senate and five days after the regent had appointed the original cabinet. Cf. Ottoni, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 27 May, 493–94. 30. On the reaction to the beijamão, see JC, 11 May 1838, 2. T. Otoni, who attacked the gesture in the Chamber, was among those in the Majority conspiracy two years later. Indeed, radical and reformist recruits into the plot included Otoni, Alencar, Marinho, and Limpo de Abreu (see Alencar Araripe, “Noticia,” 142). The immediate response of the reactionaries to the conspiracy is glimpsed in Carneiro Leão, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 13 May, 279–80; idem, ibid., 18 May, 337–42; idem, ibid., 19 May, 360. 31. On the Majority, O. T. de Sousa, Historia, chaps.2,3, is most thorough; Alencar Araripe and Leal, O golpe, passim, most detailed. Barman, Brazil, 204–9, is most acute on the Interpretation and its electoral consequences. The reactionaries’ appraisal of the opposition’s intent is manifest in Paulino José Soares de Souza to Fco. Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck, Rio, 15 July, 1840, AN,AFW, P4, Caixa 379, Pacote 1, Doc. 235.5 and Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão to Luis Alves de Lima, n.p., May 1840, IHGB, Lata 748, Pasta 29 [1935 transcript from undated article in O Jornal article by Vilhaena de Moraes]. The suppression of the Majority conspirators’ alternative response to the fala do trono is in Annaes, 340, t.1, 20 May, 397 (NB that the vote was 47 to 32; in the Senate, that same day, the Majority conspirators’ project had been voted down by only 18 to 16); see Alencar Araripe, “Noticia,” 150. The reactionaries’ parliamentary manoeuvers and success are evident in Carneiro Leão, Annaes, 1840, t.1, 13 May, 280–81; idem, ibid., 18 May, 337–42; Montesuma, Carneiro Leão, et al., ibid., 342–50. See, also, the contested passage of Honório’s project towards final debate in ibid., 25 May 448 and ibid., 1 June, 548; Carneiro Leão and Alvares Machado, ibid., 25 May, 448–50, 452–53, 460–63; Carneiro Leão, et al., ibid., t.2, 4 July, 61–65; Ottoni, et al., ibid., 6 July, 84–95; José Clemente Pereira et al., ibid., 10 July, 164–69. 32. Paulino José Soares de Souza to Fco. Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck, Rio, 15 July 1840, AN, AFW, P4, Caixa 379, Pacote 1, Doc. 235.5. On the trouble in the Chamber, see Carneiro Leão, et al., Annaes, 1840, t.2, 18 July, 291–303. 33. Limpo de Abreu, Clemente Pereira, et al., Annaes, 1840, t.2, 18 July, 301–303. 34. Limpo de Abreu, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 20 July, 307–308; ibid., 318; Ramiro, ibid., 21 July, 328, and Andrade Machado, Montezuma, et al., ibid., 328–47, passim. 35. See the partisan manipulation of the coercion issue in Carneiro Leão, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 18 July, 300–301; idem, ibid., 20 July, 313; Barreto Pedroso, ibid., 316; Limpo de Abreu, ibid., 317–318; Andrada Machado, Carneiro Leão, et al., ibid., 21 July, 322–23. Nunes Machado, ibid., 324, shows the anti-Majority tactics in his comments on their control of the committee; Honório makes clear the argument against an immediate vote as a vote born of fear in Carneiro Leão, ibid., 325; see, also, Paula Candido, ibid., 327. After the anti-Majority committee makes its proposal, the apparent plan to capture, control, and delay the Majority is clear: see the debate, ibid., 329–47, especially Montezuma, ibid., 328–29; Oliveira, ibid., 333; Ottoni, ibid., 333–34 (Otoni is, as usual, especially acute, particularly regarding the impact of the delay on elections); Nunes Machado, Henriques Rezende, ibid., 339–40; Ramiro and Andrada Machado, ibid., 344–45. 36. Alencar Araripe, “Noticias,” 152. 37. Ibid., 143, 144, 147, 152–53. 38. Pereira da Silva, Historia, 332. NB that the JC does not record these activities, although it refers to them.

Notes to Chapter 3 / 359 39. Navarro, JC, 21 July 1840, 1–2; idem, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 20 July, 312; cf. Pereira da Silva, Historia, 336–38, and Alencar Araripe,”Noticias,” 154. Navarro states his previous affiliation with the reactionaries, although he emphasizes his personal independence. Nonetheless, he had once demonstrated great loyalty to the reactionaries upon the fall of the Vasconcelos cabinet in 1839 (Navarro, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 21 July, 326; cf. JC, 12–13 May 1839, 1). In the debates, Navarro’s behavior was attributed to unspecified differences over patronage (e.g., Limpo de Abreu, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 20 July, 318). Honório, however, noting Navarro’s public threats about knifings, suggested that Navarro was mentally unstable (Carneiro Leão, ibid., 314). Certainly, the record of the debates manifests Navarro’s incoherence and inability to control either his language or his body, and a contemporary chronicler confirms the instability (Melo e Matos, Paginas d’historia, 38). Note, however, his continued role on 23 July in Annaes, 1840, t.2, 881–84, passim. 40. On Limpo de Abreu, see Annaes, 1840, t.2, 20 July, 312. On the dispute over Navarro, on coercion, calm deliberation, and on the people or all three, see, especially, Nunes Machado, ibid., 312–13; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 313–14; Marinho, ibid., 315; Andrada Machado, ibid., 316; Barreto Pedroso, ibid., Pontes Vegueiro, ibid., 317; Limpo de Abreu, ibid., 317–18; Andrada Machado, ibid., 21 July, 322; Carneiro Cunha, ibid, 323; Henriques de Rezende, ibid., 323–24; Nunes Machado, ibid., 324; Ribeiro de Andrada, ibid., 324–25; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 325; Veiga Pessoa, ibid., 325; Paula Candido, ibid., 327; Montezuma, ibid., 328–29,330–31; Goncalves Martins, ibid., 331; Lopes Gama, ibid., 332; Oliveira, ibid., 333; Tosta, ibid., 335; Nunes Machado, ibid., 337; Ribeiro de Andrada, ibid., 337; Alvaro Machado, et al., ibid., 339–40; Ramiro, ibid., 343–45; Andrada Machado, ibid., 347. Lack of spontaneous popular support for the Majority is supported by foreign diplomatic report: see William G. Ouseley to Lord Palmerston, Rio, 18 July 1840, no. 51, PRO/FO, 13, v.61; same to same, Rio, 28 July, 1840, in ibid., no. 53; same to same, Rio, 30 July 1840, in ibid., confidential memoir; [Dispatch,] 29 July 1840, BNSM, CTM, 32, 146. On Eusébio in the Senate, see Andrada Machado, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 21 July, 322. The JC account of the Senate session on 20 July does not mention this incident, but, unlike other points Andrada tried to make in the debate, his reference to Eusébio’s actions was not disputed by Carneiro Leão, lending it credibility (see Carneiro Leão, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 21 July, 325). 41. Pereira da Silva, Historia, 339. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.; cf. Alencar Araripe, “Noticias,” 155; Vasconcelos, “Exposição de Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, ex-ministro do Império,” in ibid., 217–18, 219. 45. The following account of the denouement of the Majority is drawn from the Annaes, 1840, t.2, 22 and 23 July, passim, 347–55; “Reunião de Senadores e Deputados” in ibid., 891–92; Alencar Araripe, “Noticias,” 155–61; B. P. de Vasconcelos, “Exposição,” passim; JC, 23 July 1840, 3; BN, SM, CTM, 116,10; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 72–73; and William G. Ouseley to Lord Palmerston, Rio, 30 July 1840, confidential memoirs, PRO/FO, 13 v. 161. 46. Alencar Araripe, “Noticias,” 143–44, 171–72. Cf. Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão to Luiz Alves de Lima, [Rio,] May 1840, IGHB, Lata 748, Pasta 29 [transcript of undated Vilhena de Moraes article in O Jornal], in which Honório claimed that though the opposition had been “spreading about the false news that the Emperor desired to be declared of age, I am . . . securely informed that . . . he always maintained silence over such

360 / Notes to Chapter 3 an object.” Barman, Citizen Emperor, 69–70, suggests that the emperor may have been deliberately noncommital, but that his entourage, interested in the benefits to themselves, conveyed the emperor’s support to the conspirators. It may be that the emperor’s entourage assured Honório of what he wanted to hear, as well, so that whichever party won, neither entourage nor emperor would lose. 47. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 45–57, 66; cf. Lyra, Historia, 1:95–113. 48. Pereira da Silva, Historia 324. Aureliano’s support for the reactionaries certainly evaporated by this crisis, however; his signature is on the Majority representação brought to the emperor before noon (see Annaes, 1840, t.2, 892). 49. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 70, 72. 50. This appraisal of the emperor is indebted to Barman’s; see ibid., chap.2, passim. 51. This narrative continues the synthesis derived from the sources cited in n.45, above. 52. Ibid., 72, indicates that Araújo Viana and others were the key advisors here; Lyra, Historia, 1:128–29, indicates that the emperor took the counsel of Inhaem and Frei Pedro. Cândido José de Araújo Viana, (later, 1854, visconde, then, 1872, marquês de Sepucaí) was appointed 1839 as the emperor’s supervisor of studies by Itanhaem. Araújo Viana, a mineiro, was a Coimbra graduate (1821), magistrate, deputy, and (1839) senator, and was known as a non-partisan monarchist of conservative bent (see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 242–43). Manuel Inácio de Andrade Souto Maior Pinto Coelho, marquês de Itanhaem, the emperor’s guardian (tutor), was a fluminense landholder formerly attached to the court of Dom João VI and of Dom Pedro I; he was tenacious, loyal, and dominated by Aureliano, who had been primarily responsible for removing Itanhaem’s predecessor, José Bonifácio, in 1834, and remained influential over Itanhaem and the other protégés that he had installed around the emperor then. Frei Pedro de Santa Mariana e Sousa, a Carmelite monk and pedagogue, had been chosen by Itanhaem, as well, and served as the emperor’s personal supervisor and science instructor (see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 49, 51, 68). 53. Vasconcelos, “Exposição,” 222. 54. Rural political violence almost always had urban roots in conspiracies and strife; see Chapter Two, n. 10, with respect to the upheavals in Pará, Maranhão, and Pernambuco. On Brazilian urban political violence and its context in the early nineteenth century, see Chapter Two, n.27; Araújo, Estudo historico, 55–63, 113–16, 120, 133–34 (NB, ibid., 55–56, refers to illegal camarões, “shrimp dinners,” which were pitiless beatings, incarcerations, and forced army recruitment, treatment meted out to “vagabonds and loiterers” [vagabundos e peraltas]); Flory, “Race and Social,” 205–10, passim; Barman, Brazil, 34–35, 71–72, 93, 153, 165, 167–68; Martinho, “Caixeiros e Pés-Descalços,” chap.4, passim; Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 236–47; Holloway, Policing Rio, 65–66, 71–75, 86–87, 96–97, 158–63; Líbano Soares, A capoeira escrava, especially, chap. 5, pt. 1 and chap.6, pt. 5, clarifies, in detail, the role of the Afro-Brazilian and African masses in the street violence of the time, both political and criminal, providing a sort of subaltern Afro-Brazilian narrative of the era treated in this study. Unhappily, his work is often detached from the larger, informing context, and does not attempt to link high politics and urban racialized violence, something attempted in this study (and in Mosher’s and Maciel de Carvalho’s analyses of Recife or Kraay’s of Salvador). The accounts of criminals, police, and soldiers make it clear that they generally shared African descent (except in the cases, such as

Notes to Chapter 3 / 361 Menezes Martinho discusses, where the Portuguese caixeiros [shop clerks] were mobilized). See, e.g., Líbano Soares, A capoeira, as cited above, Kraay, Race, chap.3; and Holloway, Policing Rio, chaps.4,5, passim. 55. The quotation is from Araújo, Estudo, 113. On the early traditional urban violence and politics in Rio, see the appropriate citations in Chapter Two, n.27 and in n.54, above. On Rio capoeiras, see Moraes Filho, Festas, 401–13; Araújo, Estudo, 56–63, 113–16, 120, 133–35; Karasch, Slave Life, 245–46, 298–99; Holloway, Policing Rio, 39–40, 223–28, 266–70; idem, “A Healthy Terror,” 637–76; Líbano Soares, A capoeira, as cited in n.54, above. Continuities between the Monarchy and the Republic in regard to urban popular political violence are manifest in, e.g., Carneiro, História das revoluções, v.2; Melo Franco, Rodrigues Alves,1: 392–436, passim; Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados; Needell, “The Revolta contra Vacina,” 233–69; Meade, “Living Worse and Costing More,” 241–66; idem, “Civilizing” Rio; and Chalhoub, Cidade febril, chap.3. 56. Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 153–57; Barman, Brazil, 115–18. Antônio Carlos’s role in popular political mobilization in 1823 is clear in Macaulay; note the parallels with 1840. Antônio Carlos’s political career began with the 1817 republican revolution in Pernambuco (see Sisson, Galeria, I:84–92 and Blake, Diccionario, 1:128). 57. The quotation is from Sisson, Galeria, I:183; see, also, ibid., 1:184–92. 58. Moderado reports on their violent opposition generally eschew racial identification, stressing, criminality, opportunism, and violence. See, e.g., Carneiro da Cunha, Annaes, 1831, t.1, 24 May, 87; Evaristo, ibid., 25 May, 92–93; Lino, ibid., 93–94; Xavier de Carvalho, ibid., t.2, 31 August, 94; Evaristo and Xavier de Carvalho, ibid., 8 Oct., 224, 227; recorder and Montezuma, ibid., 1832, t.1, 12 May, 8–9; Carneiro Leão, ibid., 19 May, 23; AF, 8 June 1831, 2091–92; ibid., 15 June 1831, 2094; ibid., 10 April 1832, 2613, 2616; ibid., 18 April 1832, 2622; ibid., 21 April 1832, 2636–37; ibid., 14 September 1832, 2877–78; ibid., 19 Sept. 1832, 2887; JC, 21 April 1832, 1. 59. For the circumstances of the Cabinet of Forty Days, see Chapter Two. That Evaristo meant to link the Andradas, the restorationists, this ephemeral cabinet, and the desordeiros is made explicit in AF, 14 Sept. 1832, 2877, as well as in the quotation in the text below. 60. AF, 19 Sept. 1832, 2887. The phrase “tender pupil in the hands of his guardian” is a reference to the most prominent of the Andradas, José Bonifácio, the emperor’s guardian at the time, and implicated in restorationist coup attempts. The word “giants” was italicized in the original, and, as the Sisson biography suggests (see ibid., Galeria, I:184), may also have been well understood as a reference to Antônio Carlos. The reference to 1822’s violent repression translates “camarões,” that is, “shrimp dinners,” contemporary street slang for violent repression (see the Araújo reference in n.54, above). The use of street nick-names for the desordeiros here suggests the assumption that they were well known to common readers, as discussed below in the text. The particular names here, in at least two of the cases, seem to be capoeira references: Girão (“Big Twist”), a possible reference to the capoeira’s movements; José dos Cacos (caco is slang for a head) may refer to José’s favorite target. 61. Andrade Machado, Annaes, 1840, t.2, 21 July, 322; AF, 19 Sept. 1832, 2887; Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 25–27; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 164; Mello e Mattos, Paginas, 37. 62. Previous treatments of the electoral violence of the Monarchy include the

362 / Notes to Chapter 3 Geertzian anthropological model in Graham, Patronage, chap.4, and the generalizations in Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 61,72,213–14. The acuity of Murilo de Carvalhos’s historicized survey introduces the issues better; see Teatro, ch.5; Barman’s reconstruction is indispensable (see Brazil, 219–27). Contemporaries and heirs were sensitive to the creation and the nature of the system precisely because it was a corruption of what was intended by the institution’s creators: see, e.g., the quotations by reactionary journalists and statesmen of the time in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 170–73; F. B. Soares de Sousa, O sistema, 20–23, 28–35, 52–59; Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 31–32, 39–40; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:128–39. The latter citation, like those in Lage Mascarenhas, points to specific provincial repercussions; in this regard, see Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 141–43; and, particularly regarding the shift toward greater partisan violence, Bieber, Power, 88, 90–93, 144–51. 63. The rapidity of cabinet turnover is suggested by the fact that between July 1840 and September 1848, there were ten cabinets, seven of them opposition/Liberal, three reactionary/Conservative. On the Interpretation of the Additional Act and the Código de Processo Criminal, see Javarí, Organizações, 70–71, 86–87; Flory, Judge and Jury, 171–79; Barman, Brazil, 193–94, 200–201, 219. Paulino’s role was noted earlier, regarding the origins of the Interpretation project in 1837; he signed the Código’s enabling legislation as the 1841 minister of justice; Eusébio’s role in the draft and that of Vasconcelos, Honório, and Antônio Augusto [Monteiro de Barros], is recalled in Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 32–33. For the local political impact, see n. 62, above. 64. The 1840s are a confused era in most interpretations. Barman, Brazil, 209–31 and Mosher, “Pernambuco,” ch.3, are the best documented guides, although Pereira de Castro’s magisterial narrative, “ A reação monárquica,” is indispensable. See, also, Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:40–111 and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: chs.1–10. The Cabinet of the Majority was dominated by the two Andrada brothers, Antônio Carlos and Martim Francisco, who disputed supremacy with Aureliano over Chamber politics (the cabinet confronted a reactionary majority) and the southern civil war. The two brothers also treated the emperor himself with insulting paternalism. See O Brasil, 23 March 1841, 3–4; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 29–30, 36–37, 50–51; Barman, Brazil, 210–13; Tobias Monteiro [notes and oral history ] BN, SM, CTM, 116:9–10. Monteiro cites an oral history on the day of the cabinet’s fatal crisis, in which Antônio Carlos said to Martim Francisco, in the emperor’s presence, “Let us leave, brother; he who beds with children wakes up pissed on [amanhece mijado].” The Elections of the Truncheon (see Barman, Brazil, 210–11) were a watershed for contemporaries; see Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 31–32; O Brasil, 27 March 1840, 1; ibid., 30 March 1841, 1–2; ibid., 27 May 1841, 2; JC, 2 May 1842; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I:30–37, passim. 65. Barman, Brazil, 212–14; Flory, Judge and Jury, 170–71, 179. 66. The first Council of State (created 13 November 1823) was dissolved by the Additional Act in 1834 (12 August). The second, created 23 November 1841, had twelve ordinary members and could have up to twelve “extraordinary” members. Of the first twelve, which included Vasconcelos and Honório, only Alves Branco, Feijó’s one-time minister and Chamber champion, could be termed a member of the opposition or a Liberal. The council’s political importance was its identification with the moderating power of the monarch, for it advised the monarch on its use. Hence, the opposition to it by the reformists and radicals of the 1830s. In their view, the council, appointed for life by the

Notes to Chapter 3 / 363 monarch, and instrumental in his interventions, was a symbol and tool of tyranny. See Javarí, Organizações, 86; Pimenta Bueno, Direito público, 238–313, 518–36; Uruguay, Ensaio, I:chap.26 and “Appendice”; Rodrigues de Sousa, Analyse, 2:chap.7. Some idea of its actual functioning is in Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:6–20; Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, chap.4, provides analysis. On the Revolt of 1842, see JC, 2 May 1842, 1; ibid., 3 May 1842, 1; ibid., 16–17 May 1842, 1; Mello e Mattos, Paginas, 55–57, 60–61; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I:chaps. 5–6; Francisco Iglesias, “Minas Gerais,” 404–12; Filler, “Liberalism,” chaps.4–6; and Barman, Brazil, 214–16. Filler provides useful socio-economic analysis of the regional factors impelling local oligarchies’ support for the rebellion. 67. Tobias Monteiro notes that the forces involved in 1842 ranged from several hundred to a few thousand, at most (BNSM/CTM, 32:116). On the division between the pernambucano opposition and that of Minas and São Paulo, see n. 26, above. Note Barbosa Lima Sobrinho’s comment that the radicalization and consolidation of pernambucano liberals (from chimangos into the praieiro party, to be discussed below) took place only after 1843 (“Urbano Sabino,” 341), i.e., apparently coincident with the consolidation and then fall of the reactionaries from power (1842–44), both of which may have taught the pernambucano liberals the limitations of such an alliance. When in power, the reactionaries had failed to give them sway over their province and their enemies; when the reactionaries fell, they left them to be viewed with coldness by their one-time southern liberal allies, now in power in cabinet and the Chamber. At the same time, their provincial enemies were strengthening their linkages to those same reactionaries, in a defensive alliance to face the hostile pressure of the liberal cabinets (see ibid., 338–39, 340–41), an alliance that turned on the leadership of Araújo Lima. See Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap.3, esp. 95–96, 99, 109–14. On the post–1842 reactionaries’ polemical use of the revolt as “anarchy,” see Vasconcelos, JC, 14 Jan. 1843, supplemento, 1; idem, ibid., 15 Jan. 1843, 1; Honorio, ibid., 14 Jan. 1843, 1; idem, ibid., 7 March 1843, 2–3; O Brasil, 11 May 1844, 1; ibid., 25 May 1844, 1; ibid., 30 May 1844, 1; ibid., 28 Sept. 1844, 1. 68. The quotation is from H. H. Carno. Leão to [Paulino,], n.p., 18 July [sic—probably June]1842, typescript copy, IHGB, AVU, lata 3, pasta 10, 82 [cf. original, partially illegible, in ibid., lata 3, pasta 10, 109/26]. Private correspondence of those leading the repression makes it clear how deeply felt this partisan cum monarchist perspective was among both national and regional chieftains. See, e.g., Barão de Caxias to [José Clemente Pereira,] São Paulo, 2 July 1842, AN, AP32, Caixa 53, Pasta 18, no.1; Laureano Corra. e Castro to Illmo. Snr., Vassouras, 27 June 1842, AN, AP29, Caixa 379, Pasta 1, doc. 216; V. Baependy to Illmo., Sr. Com. Supr. Franco. de Lacerda Vernek, Paraiso, 1 July 1842, ibid., doc 233; Joaquim José Teixeira Leite to Illm. Snr. Corel. Frco. Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck, Vassouras, 25 June 1842, ibid., doc. 227. NB. That both Werneck and Honório were careful to list the names of the great planters who merited reward by the cabinet (see ibid., doc. 213 and Franco. Peixoto de Lacerda Verneck to Illmo. Dr. Sr. Paulino José Soares de Souza, Rio Preto, 21 June 1842, ibid., doc. 214 [a printed version of the 1843 list]. 69. Laureano Corra. e Castro to Illmo. Snr. Commnte. Superior, n.d., n.p. [internal archival evidence indicates somewhere in the serra in early July 1842], ibid., doc. 222. Filler, “Liberalism,” chap. 5, demonstrates that concern with local hierarchy and slave insurrection was typically a brake on the elite among the rebels, too. 70. On the purges and on the elections of 1842, see e.g., Marinho, História, 292–93 and visconde de Montalegre et al. to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Rio, 15 Nov. 1851, quoted in

364 / Notes to Chapter 3 toto in Vianna, Vultos, 149–50; the correspondence in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chaps.3,4. Marinho, História, 292–331, 334–37, gives the opposition perspective on the cabinet’s abuse in Minas, and Barman, Brazil, 220, suggests the emperor’s response. 71. Filler, “Liberalism,” chaps.5–7, gives the context and the history of the revolts. The rebellion among fluminense local oligarchs of the western Paraíba, particularly Sousa Breves, was very much linked to the personal and regional concerns of an elite not articulated to the reactionaries politically and alienated by their centralized statism. See ibid., chap.5. They collapsed with their paulista allies. The more formidable rebels were the mineiros. On the resignation of the Cabinet of 23 March 1841, see BN, SM, CTM, 116:16; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 52, 55–56, 105–106; Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 55, 69, 73, 74, 79–80, 86–87, 90–91; J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 155–57; Paulino, Annaes, 1843, t.1, 23 Jan., 347–49. On Honório’s perception of the dilemma, see Honorio Hermeto Carno. Leão to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], [Rio, before 8 June 1843], AHMI, ACI, maço 27, doc 970, 1–2. 72. The letter cited in n. 71, above, was part of the manoeuvering over Paulino. Honório threatened to resign (within six months of coming to power), alleging a lack of Crown confidence and the rumored influence of “someone.” On the differences between Aureliano and Paulino in the previous cabinet as well as the election of 1842, see the references in nn.70,71, and Barman, Brazil, 220. Barman’s argument that the emperor was offended by the 1842 election “fixing,” would implicate Paulino, who directed the purges and appointments. Aureliano was especially angered because his brother, Saturnino, was denied a seat among the fluminense deputies, and they expected a measure of power in their native province (see ibid., 221–22; see, also, idem, Citizen Emperor, 94–95, 100–101). It seems clear from a letter between Aureliano and the emperor (cited in ibid., 94), that the emperor’s hostility to Paulino was also associated with the previous cabinet quarrels, rather than an issue of that cabinet’s policy. That hostility, associated with the emperor’s dislike of partisanship generally, doubtless set the stage for the crisis. On the crisis, see both Barman citations above and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 116–19; Mello Mattos, Paginas, 95–99; Leão Teixeira Filho, “Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão,” 303–4; Vianna, “Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão,” 336–40. NB Vianna’s observation (ibid., 334) that Honório had been in the same class as Aureliano and Saturnino in Coimbra, and that Honório and Aureliano had both fallen afoul of Vasconcelos in the aftermath of 1832. He points out that Honório had chosen a mineiro seat, rather than a fluminense one, in the 1837 Legislature, in order to allow Aureliano (elected only as a suplente) a seat in the fluminense delegation. This may explain Aureliano’s shift to Honório’s side of the aisle between 1837 and 1840. In that last year, what may have been a personal alliance dissolved in the heat of the Majority movement. Aureliano’s aspirations to a fluminense political base dated to the Regency. Saturnino had been elected in 1833, when his brother was in the moderado cabinet of the time. Neither brother, however, seems to have established an organic relationship with local fluminense chieftains comparable to that of the reactionaries; neither had been able to win an election in the shadow of the reactionary triumph of 1837. Thus, when Aureliano ascended to the Senate in 1842, he did so representing Alagoas, undoubtedly due to cabinet influence. 73. Honório’s position, congruent with the role of the cabinet articulated by Vasconcelos and the other party chiefs from at least 1837, is made clear again in the letter

Notes to Chapter 3 / 365 cited in n.71, above and in the post mortem speeches made before Parliament: see Honorio, JC, 15 May 1844, 2 and idem, ibid., 19 May 1844, supplemento, 1. 74. Honorio Hermeto Carno. Leão to Senhor [Dom Pedro II,] n.p., n.d. [Rio, before 8 June 1842], AHMI, ACI, maço 27, doc. 970. 75. Dom Pedro II, n.21, in Almeida, O conselheiro, 33 [the emperor annotated his copy of this 1867 work; the notes were published as footnotes to the second edition; see Carlos Pontes, “Prefacio,” to ibid., 10]. 76. See Pedro II, Conselhos, 54. This piece was initially private notes that the emperor wrote to guide his daughter before his first trip abroad (see Oliveira Torres, “Introdução” ibid., 16). 77. Honorio Hermeto Carno. Leão to Candido José de Aro. Vianna, Rio, 2 Feb. 1844, AHMI, ACI, maço 107, doc. 5174. NB the public pronouncements mixing frustration and outraged constitutionalism in the parliamentary pronouncements that followed this reversal, cited in n. 73, above, and the shock and the partisan concerns are evident in the correspondence quoted in Lages Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 111–13. One notes that Pereira da Silva (Memorias, I:119) and Mello Mattos (Paginas, 104) both state that the emperor’s turn away from the reactionaries followed an initial offer to Costa Carvalho, the former regent and an elder statesman among reactionaries. Such an offer made sense, given the reactionary majority in the Chamber. However, either because Costa Carvalho agreed with the reactionary position against amnesty for the 1842 rebels (something the emperor apparently thought prudent) or because he agreed with Honório about Aureliano, he declined. Clearly, the succession pivoted on one crucial point. The emperor wanted a cabinet led by a statesman who would defer. Costa Carvalho, a visceral monarchist, had been appealing, but, as he would not accept, the emperor turned to those who would, with partisan consequences of enormous significance. 78. [Cándido José de Araújo Viana] to Meu Senhor e Amo, [Rio,] 2 Feb. 1844, in AHMI, ACI, maço 107, doc.5174. 79. Barman (Brazil, 222–23), pointing to its leaders, José Carlos and Alves Branco, characterizes the cabinet that succeeded Honório’s as non-partisan. At least initially, it may have been so. Another characteristic tending to non-partisanship was regional. None of the ministers were born in the fiercely partisan south-central provinces; they were three Bahians, a pernambucano, and a son of Santa Catarina. As Tavares Lyra (Instituições, 296–97) argues, however, there were significant partisan aspects even from the beginning: It is true that both José Carlos and Alves Branco were men of distinct partisan origins who had broken partisan ranks to serve the Monarchy. In both, post-partisan pragmatism and loyalty to the monarch are the salient qualities. The same can also probably be said of Manuel Antônio Galvão, later (May 1844) minister of justice. Foreign affairs, however, was taken by Ernesto Ferreira França, a distinguished radical. More important, the cabinet’s incompatibility with the reactionary majority in the Chamber was clear at the outset and was simply made manifest at the beginnings of the annual session. The antagonism of the majority forced the issue immediately. Holanda, the great chieftain of the opposition, then joined the cabinet (navy), replacing Jerônimo Francisco Coelho (who remained minister of war), a liberal idealist, in any case (see ibid., 274). In effect, without reactionary support, the cabinet rapidly assumed the opposition character Honório had feared. Indeed, in such a context, the cabinet would have had little

366 / Notes to Chapter 3 choice. Unable to gain reactionary support, they would have had to look to the opposition. This would have been made still more inescapable by their 14 March 1844 amnesty of the 1842 rebels. The emperor may have thought the amnesty a way to calm the postrevolt partisanship and encourage rebel loyalty; for the Chamber, it necessarily represented an abrupt repudiation. For the cabinet, the amnesty may well have been a gesture to anticipate and to gain opposition support in the next election. Leaving nothing to chance, the cabinet “fixed” the next elections, gaining an opposition majority more amenable to the cabinet, though not without significant differences. These initial dilemmas of more moderate, pragmatic ministers with whom the emperor was comfortable would endure through the Quinquennium and explain the consistent instability and weakness of the administrations. Indeed, the difficulty in recruiting ministers who put the emperor above ideology, yet were able to fashion majorities out of the various opposition factions, apparently ensured that the same politically adroit ministers were appointed again and again. Thus, these first ministers often reappeared in the four subsequent cabinets, giving the era, despite the unstable, ephemeral quality of each administration, a consistency which is odd until one discerns the pressures from which they all derived. This confusing era of partisan frustration and political expediency enriched the polemical literature and memoirs, as we shall see. It is characterized sharply in, e.g., T. Ottoni, Circular, 118–28, 132–39, 143; Timandro [pseud. of Torres Homem], “Libelo do Povo,” 97–116, passim; Anonymous [Justiniano José da Rocha], “Ação; reação; transação,” 199–206; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: chaps.8–10. Among historians, see Nabuco, Um estadista, I:75–92, passim; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap. 3, passim; and Barman, Brazil, 222–25. 80. See the contemporary sources noted in n.79, above. NB Otoni’s acute sense of the convergence of reactionary and radical opinion on the corruption of parliamentary government through the emperor’s intervention and the electoral fraud so marked in the era (see Circular, 122–28) 81. As noted in Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 144, the clearest contemporary accounts found of the origins of “luzia” and “saquarema” are in Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 126–27. The term partido da ordem seems to derive from the early 1840s. In 1843, Honório spoke of “men of order . . . those to whose principles I take pride in having always belonged” (JC, 7 March 1843,1) and, on 9 May 1844, he spoke of “o partido de ordem” in reference to the reactionary majority that appeared in 1836 (JC 14 May 1844, 1). The usage, however, may well derive from Rocha. In the first issue of O Brasil (16 June 1840), he refers to the party as the heir of the party supporting the Cabinet of 19 September 1837 (the first reactionary cabinet) and the “politics of order of the future and of salvation and prosperity”(ibid., 3) and on 20 June 1840, he wrote “Order! Order! calls one party: Liberty! Shouts the other. As if it were possible to have order without liberty, or liberty without order!” (O Brasil, 20 June 1840, 4). By 28 September 1844, under the headline “O partido da ordem,” Rocha wrote of the party as a long-established institution (cf. Honório, above): “never has the procedure of a party been so admirable, as is that in the present situation of the party of the friends of the throne and of order; never have we been prouder of struggling in its vanguard.” (O Brasil, 28 Sept. 1844, 1). One suspects that Rocha’s inspiration for o partido da ordem may derive, like so much else, from contemporary French politics, particularly the ideas and politics of Guizot. However, no direct connection has turned up in the research for this study. Regarding saquaremas, the

Notes to Chapter 3 / 367 intimate association between Rodrigues Torres and Saquarema is obvious, given the location of his plantation and family relations; similarly one imagines the association between the embattled reactionary baixada stronghold and Eusébio and Paulino was strengthened not only by their emergent leadership roles in the reactionary opposition of the time (see the text, below), but by their private relations with the local political chieftains of the region (see Chapters One and Two). 82. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 126–27, 258–59; Mello Mattos, Paginas, 111, 119–23, 150–51; Nabuco, Um estadista, I: 80; the correspondence cited in Lages Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chaps.6,7, passim; Joaqm. Je. Ros. Torres to Amo. Snr. Paulino, M. Alegre, 13 April 1846, IHGB, AVU, lata 6, pasta 22, no.76; H. H. Carneiro Leão to Paulino, [Rio,] 18 April 1846, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 32, no.23; Joaqm. Je. Ros Torres to Paulino, M. Alegre, 18 May 1846, IHGB, AVU, lata 6, pasta 22, no.77. 83. See, e.g., O Brasil, 23 May 1844, 1–2; ibid., 25 May 1844, 2–3; ibid., 30 May 1844, 1–2; ibid., 28 September 1844, 1; ibid., 30 October 1847, 1–2; ibid., 9 November 1847, 1–2; and ibid., 23 November 1847, 2–3, 4–5; as well as Carneiro Leão, JC, 15 May 1844, 2. 84. Carneiro Leão, JC, 14 May 1844, supplemento, 1; idem, ibid., 15 May 1844, 2; Vasconcellos in ibid., 14 May 1844, supplemento, 2. 85. Joaqm. Je. Ros. Torres to Amo. e Snr. Paulino, M. Alegre, 18 May 1846, IHGB, AVU, lata 6, pasta 22, no.77. 86. Rodrigues Silva, A dissolução, 6,7,12–17, 20–21, 23–25, 33–34, 35, 37, 45–46, 61–66. The original was anonymous, but so clearly associated with the Party of Order chieftains that Vasconcelos was thought the author. Honório was alleged to be the author by T. Otoni, who applauded the analysis (Circular, 122–24). On the pamphlet and the faction, the best sources are Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chap.7 and Barman, Brazil, 229 and, idem, Citizen Emperor, 93, 94, 109, 112–14. Barman reminds us of the significance of Aureliano’s ally, Paulo Barbosa [da Silva], palace mórdomo, whose proximity to the monarch was central to the faction’s influence. At the time the palace faction was referred to as the Club de Joana, a reference to Paulo Barbosa’s residence, near the stream Joana, at the side of the Quinta da Boa Vista (see Helio Vianna, “Honorio Hermeto,” 335). Vianna deems the influence of the faction much exaggerated; see ibid., Lyra, Historia, I: 164–97, denies Aureliano the role of a favorite, preferring the title of a political advisor. Nabuco (Um estadista, I:56–57) characterizes the emperor’s attitude towards the man as “fascination,” and accepts the common view of the time that Aureliano enjoyed special favor and confidence on the prince’s part, a favor and confidence Nabuco thought owed to the man’s great personal gifts. 87. For the reform, see “Decreto n. 523 de 20 de julho de 1847,” in [Javarí,] Organizações, 98–99, n.1. 88. On the prime ministry, see Lyra, História, I: 196–97; Barman, Brazil, 229, idem, Citizen Emperor, 120–21. On Torres Homem and his pamphlet, see “Libelo do Povo,” 97– 105,108–109; R. Magalhães Júnior, “Sales Torres Homem e o ‘Libelo do Povo,’ ” in Três panfletârios, 3–43; Lery Santos, Pantheon, 386–92. Torres Homem, later (1872) visconde de Inhomerim, was a member of the first Romantic generation of literati in Brazil (he helped to publish Nictheroy, the movement’s first murmur, while an attaché in Paris in the 1830s), but had abandoned letters for radical politics, being exiled in 1842 in the aftermath of the revolt. On the impact of France’s 1848 revolution, see, also, Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:165–66 and Mello Mattos, Paginas, 355–56.

368 / Notes to Chapter 3 89. For the reactionary view of the emperor and Aureliano and the Liberal Quinquennium, see the citation for A dissolução in n. 86, above, particularly 13, 24–25, 34, 35, the editorials of Rocha in O Brasil in n.83, above, and the nearly post mortem analysis of the Liberals’ failure in the following speeches: Carneiro Leão, JC, 8 and 9 Sept. 1848, 2; idem, ibid., 29 Sept. 1848, 1; Rodrigues Torres, Vasconcellos and Carneiro Leão, ibid., 10 Sept. 1848, 1–2. The radical indictment of the monarch and the political order is in Torres Homem (see the citation of “O Libelo” in n. 87, above and T. Otoni, Circular, chaps. 10, 11). The contrast drawn here between the two parties expands an epigram of Nabuco; see Um estadista, I:92. 90. Barman, Citizen Emperor, aptly entitles the chapters dealing with the era 1840–1853 “Savior of His country” and “Taking Charge.” See especially, the contrast between, say, the emperor in 1842 (ibid., 92–93) and Barman’s observations regarding his maturation, increased independence, and mastery over the course of the era 1844–53 (ibid., 109, 110–15, 118–19, 122). 91. On the political crisis of 1848 and the fall of the Liberals, see the speeches noted in n. 89, above and Eusébio, Annaes, 1848, t.2, 11 Sept., 357 ff. (cf. Eusébio’s historical account in 1855: Eusébio de Queiroz, JC, 19 July 1855, 4); Pereira da Silva, Memorias, I: 63ff; Nabuco, Um estadista, I: 76–92. The best synthesis and analysis of the dynamic dialectic between pernambucano and Rio developments is Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 204–10. Barman, Brazil, 229–31, provides analysis of the impact of foreign-policy defeats on the Liberals’ disarray. We shall turn to this matter in Chapter Four.

Chapter 4 1. Bethell and Murilo de Carvalho, “1822–1850,” 84–88, 90–91; Graham, “1850–1870,” in ibid., 113–18. 2. Barman and Barman, “The Role of the Law Graduate,” 18:4 (Nov. 1976): 429, 432–47; Murilo de Carvalho, A construção, 79, 84; Needell, “Provincial Origins,”149; Kirkendall, Class Mates, 37, 38, 90–91, 100–1. 3. Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 53–56, 106, 142–43, 145–47, 181–82, 186; idem, “The Domestic Civilizing Mission,” 1–3; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 89–94; Ferrez, Bahia, 46, 53, 75, 107, 146, 160, 185; idem, Exposição, plates 124, 196; Debret, Viagem pitoresca, 2: plates 41, ff; Macedo, Um passeio, 44, 48, 49, 53, 156, 240–41, 244; Oliveira Lima, Dom João VI,1:250–56; Peard, “Tropical Disorder,” 6–7; Kirkendall, Class Mates, 20. 4. See, e.g., Visconde do Uruguay, to [Paulino José Soares de Sousa], Paris, 4 June 1855, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, pasta 4, no. 44; same to same, Paris, 30 Sept. 1855, in ibid., no. 48; Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 52–53, 58–59, 141–45. 5. Ibid., 25–26, 161–63, and idem, here, Chapter Three, n.9. 6. Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 49, 133, 141, 171; Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 200–2, cf. Walsh, Notices, 1:467, who estimated Rio’s population as 150,000 in 1828–29 “of whom two-thirds at least are blacks.” For population figures, see Lahmeyer Lobo, História do Rio, 1:136, 225. The figures are approximate and include urban parishes alone; the suburbs, which had slave majorities, were counted apart from the Court. On Eusébio’s household, see “Salvo-conduto . . . Eusebio de Queiroz Coitinho . . . Rio, 4 Decembro 1827,” AN, AP07, PM 1923. For national statistics on slavery, see Stein, Vassouras, 295–96 and Conrad, The Destruction, 6–7; on rural and urban comparisons, see ibid.,

Notes to Chapter 4 / 369 6–9; on commonality of slave-holding, see ibid., 10–11 and e.g., Karasch, Slave Life, 342– 43, 366. 7. On reactionaries’ opposition to the ban, see Chapter Two, nn.70,71; on the trade and the parties, see Needell, “The Abolition,” 686–87, 702–3. 8. Carneiro Leão, JC, 25 July 1897 [1854], reprinted in RIHGB, vol. 236 (July-Sept. 1957), 279–81; “Inventário de Manoel José Ribeiro de Oliveira: 1834,” AN, AP07, PM 1968; “Declarações sobre o inventário de José Clemente Pereira: 1854, Rio 25 June 1854,” ibid., PM 1908, 12; “Relação de bens de José Clemente Pereira: 1854,”ibid., PM 1909. On the expansion of the 1840s, see Silva, Barões e escravidão, 188 (cf. Bethell and Carvalho, “1822–1850,” 87). On Werneck, see Silva, “Introdução” to Lacerda Werneck, Memoria, 17. On his neighbors in the Paraíba, see Santos Gomes, História, 202–19, whose sampling suggests that Africans on the plantations comprised an increasing majority and that the slave crews could be very large (of 22 planters in 1837–1840, nine averaged 127 captives); cf. Needell, “Abolition,” 685n.6. 9. Eltis, Economic Growth, 244 (here, one assumes that his column, “Brazil South of Bahia,” means Rio). Bethell, The Abolition, 85–87, 220, 237, 252, 275–76, 317, 344–46; cf. Barman, Brazil, 230, 231. 10. Abreu, Chapters, 168–75; Teixeira Soares, Diplomacia, chaps.1–4; Delgado de Carvalho, História diplomática, chaps. 3,4; Alden, Royal Government, pt. 2, esp. chaps.3–5; Boxer, Golden Age, chaps. 10,12, passim. 11. See Teixeira Soares, cited in n.10, above; Cady, Foreign Intervention, chaps. 5, 7–9; Ferns, Britain, chap. 9; Lynch, Argentine Dictator, chaps. 7,8. 12. For Platine diplomacy’s centrality in the cabinet’s early history, seeJ. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 190–98. For Olinda’s resignation, see Tobias Monteiro, interview with João Alfredo (who heard the first-hand account of Eusébio), BN, SM, CTM, Armário 32, pasta 116. Cf. the official account in Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:207. 13. See Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 184–85; Needell, “Abolition,” 700–702; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:chaps.11,12; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:13–18; and Barman, Brazil, 132–35. 14. These matters, detailed in the previous two chapters, were traced in Needell, “Party Formation,” 294–301 and idem, “Provincial Origins,” 135–44. 15. The traditional historiography dates the origins of the parties to 1837 (see, e.g., Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:38–40). In Chapter Two, the origins are demonstrated to derive from the moderados’ schism after 1834; cf. Barman, Brazil, 224, where he disputes any enduring national party organization until 1842. On provincial party organization, see ibid., 224–27, and, for Bahia, Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 45–56, 66–72, 79–80, 89–95, 103, 125–27, 157, 167–72, 175–81; for Pernambuco, Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 99–101, 109–13, 115–22; for Minas, Bieber, Power, chap.3. 16. Ignacio Francisco Silveira da Mota to Illmo. Exmo. Senr., Oeiras, 9 Jan. 1850, AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1053. On Silveira da Mota, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 3:369–70. 17. Ignacio Francisco Silveira da Mota to Illmo. Exmo. Senr., Oeiras, 29 Jan. 1850, marked “particular,” in AN:AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1054. 18. Same to same, Oeiras, 11 Feb. 1850, in ibid., PM 1058. 19. Same to same, Oeiras, 28 May 1850, in ibid., PM 1064. 20. Eusébio’s relations with Silveira da Mota were close. Their families were joined

370 / Notes to Chapter 4 through marriage by the mid-1850s, and their correspondence continued. Regarding the party’s values with regard to the hinterland, see P. J. Soares de Sousa, Relatorio . . . Justiça . . . 1841, 7, 9, 21; idem, Relatorio . . . Justiça . . . sessão da 5a. Legislatura (1843), 3–4, 26; and Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão, Relatorio . . . Justiça . . . na 2a sessão da 5a. Legislatura (1843), 7. 21. H. H. Carneiro Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. Queiroz, Recife, 30 July 1849, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 28 [copy]. 22. On the Liberals’ importance and origins in both provinces, see Murilo de Carvalho, A construção, chap.8, especially 165–66, 196, 172–73 and Barman, Brazil, 212–13, 224–25. Bieber gives us the meshing of local and national politics in the far hinterland of Minas (see Power, chaps 3, 4, passim, for the era at issue here). 23. Honorio to Paulino José Soares de Souza, [Rio,] 15 Sept. [184], IHGB, AVU, lata 3, pasta 10, 114, no.31. 24. J. M. Pera. da Sa. to Exmo. Amo. e Sr., S. Paulo, 28 Dec. 1848, AHMN, CEQ, EQcr 15/1. 25. As indicated, cabinet appointments in the Quinquennium were disproportionately northern. Bahians were particularly well represented, partly, perhaps, because their elite had a strong Coimbra tradition of Crown service, associated with their colonial wealth and Bahia’s being the seat of the viceregal capital until 1763. Also, unlike the saquaremas or the luzias, this elite was not as markedly part of the partisan mobilization of the 1830s and 1840s. Early saquarema allies in Bahia, reactionaries such as Calmon, Tosta, and Gonçalves Martins, were exceptions to this rule and probably particularly valued partly for that reason. [Javarí,] Organizações, 91–104, lists the Bahians Alves Branco, Manuel Antonio Galvão, Ernesto Ferreira França, José Carlos Pereira de Almeida Torres, Joaquim Marcelino de Brito, and Bento da Silva Lisboa (barão de Cairú), as ministers in the era; i.e., six out of the era’s nineteen, two of whom held many portfolios over these years (Alves Branco and José Carlos). Pereira da Silva (Memorias, 1:122–23, 124, 140) notes the cabinet patronage which secured Bahian support (and Pernambucan, at least initially) for the first Quinquennium cabinet and further divided (1844) Gonçalves Martins and Wanderley (ibid., l:122–23), with Wanderley moving towards the cabinet. The significance of this seems to be reflected immediately in provincial politics, as well. Only six saquarema Bahians survived the 1844 vote (out of a delegation of fourteen); they made up most of the patrulha of eight reactionaries left to oppose the Liberal cabinet in the Chamber (see ibid., 1:127). See Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 67, 69–82, 94–101, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–23, 125, 127, 130–31, 144–48, 150, 153, 161–62, 167–73, for the vagaries of provincial politics in terms of the national parties and provincial rivalries, particularly between Gonçalves Martins and Wanderley. 26. On Pernambuco’s political history to 1840, see the text and notes in Chapters Two (nn.27, 29, 67) and Three (n.26). On the division between planters, see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 84–88 and Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony,” 32–34. 27. On Holanda and his faction, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:36–42, 77; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 226–27; Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 86–88, 97–100, 111–14; and Maciel de Carvalho, “Hegemony,” chaps.1,4,5, passim. Luís Cavalcanti died young, in 1838. 28. See the citations in n.27, above, and, also, on Boa Vista, Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 88–95 and Lima Sobrinho, “Urbano Sabino,” 330–31, 335–38. 29. For biographical, political information, see Lima Sobrinho, “Urbano Sabino,”

Notes to Chapter 4 / 371 329–30, 337–44; Cabral de Mello, “Introdução” to Lopes Gama, O Carapuceiro, 16–23; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:118–19; and Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:chaps. 2,3, passim. The best analysis of the movement is Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chaps. 3–5, passim. 30. Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chaps.3–4, passim; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:chaps8,9, passim; Lima Sobrinho, “Urbano Sabino,” 335–41; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:57–59, 78. 31. Besides Mosher and Pereira da Silva, cited above in nn.29,30, see Nabuco on the political manoeuvering at Court: Um estadista, 1:78, 79–82, 83–85, 89–92, but cf. Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 206ff. 32. On the revolt, see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap.5. On Tosta, later, 1855, 1872, 1888, barão, visconde, and marquês de Muritiba, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 324 and Mosher, “Pernambuco, 228–29, 230, 234. 33. On Honório in Pernambuco, here and below, see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 244–46. On saquarema pressure, see H. H. Carneiro Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Queiroz, Recife, 30 July 1849, IHGB, CLT, lata 248, pasta 26 [copy]; same to same, Recife, 6 Aug. 1849, AHMI, ACI, maço 112, doc. 5567; H. H. Carneiro Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Paulino, Recife, 7 Nov. 1849, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 32, 24 [copy]; same to same, Recife, 7 Nov. 1849, in ibid., 25 [copy]. 34. Justiniano José da Rocha to Firmino Rodrigues da Silva, [Rio,] 21 March 1844, quoted in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 113. The translation of cancaborradas, gentle reader, assumes it is a variation of cacaborrada (from caca, excrement, and borrada, from borra, diarrhea). 35. For Honório, see Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 244–46; Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão to [Dom Pedro II,] Recife, 8 Oct. 1849, AHMI: II—PAN, 8, 10, 849; and the correspondence cited in n. 33, above. 36. Mosher, “Pernambuco,” 245–46. 37. H. H. Carno. Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. Queiroz, Recife, 9 April 1850, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 26 [copy]; Eusebio Queirós Coitinho Mattoso Camara to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. [Francisco Antonio] Ribeiro, Rio, 15 March 1852, AN, AP07, caixa 5, pacote 2, PM 1281; same to [José Ildefonso de Sousa] Ramos, [Rio,] 3 Jan. 1851, marked confidencial, in ibid., caixa 9, pacote 1, PM 2095; same to same, [Rio,] 3 Jan. 1851, in ibid., PM 2094. 38. H. H. Carno. Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. Queiroz, Recife, 9 April 1850, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 26 [copy]. For the gifts sent home, see H. H. Carno. Leão to Minha querida Prima, Recife, 7 Dec. 1849, in ibid., lata 748, pasta 19, 10. 39. Honório’s desperation is striking, as is his rebuke of Eusébio for the latter’s treatment of Honório’s wife (who apparently interceded). See H. H. Carno. Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. Queiroz, Recife, 9 April 1850, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 26 [copy]; H. H. Carno. Leão to Exmo. Amo e Sr. Queiroz, Recife, 24 Feb. 1850, AN, AP07, caixa 9, pacote 1, PM 2029; same to same, Recife, 3 March 1850, ibid., PM 2030; same to same, Recife, 25 April 1850, ibid., PM 2031; H. H. Carneiro Leão to Prima, Recife, 9 April 1850, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 19. 40. For Eusébio’s attempt at conciliation, see his correspondence cited in n. 37, above. 41. The ministers’ correspondence continually identifies the party with ordem. The transition towards “Conservative” occurred after this cabinet resigned (1853). Saquaremas became a term reserved increasingly for the traditional leaders and their purist ad-

372 / Notes to Chapter 4 herents across the Empire. A similar transition was occurring with respect to luzias and Liberals, with the former referred to, increasingly, as “historic” Liberals as time went on and, particularly, as the Progressive League appeared in the 1860s (see Chapter Five). Thus, O Brasil refers to the partido ordeiro or to the “opposição” to the (Liberal) cabinet (see, e.g., ibid., 23 Nov. 1847,4), in explicit contrast to the other party, termed “o liberal ou Santa Luzia.” In 1850, Paulino still refers to the parties as “luzia ou saquarema” (see Paulino, Annaes, 1850, t.2, 15 July, 200). One also notes the continued use of the terms saquarema and Liberal in self-identification by the old guard of either party; see, e.g., Carneiro de Campos, a paulista saquarema, in JC, 30 June 1854, 2, and the use of the phrase “partido que se chama liberal” by Ferraz (referring to his liberal opposition, in ibid.). In 1855, however, Eusébio himself has accepted the new term and imposed it on the party post facto—he refers to the 1844 volte face as one in which “a opinião conservadora foi desalojada” and refers to his party as “conservadores” (JC, 19 July 1855, 4). 42. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:200, 213, 224–25; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:113. Both claim that Bernardo Sousa Franco (1805–1875), later, 1872, visconde de Sousa Franco, was the lone Liberal in the Chamber. Given the opposition apparent over the course of that year, however, they have clearly exaggerated. 43. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:123. 44. This analysis of Eusébio was introduced in Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 146–47. Eusébio’s family connections were noted in Chapter One, his political career, in Chapters Two and Three. His rapid rise is suggested in Rocha to Firmino, [Rio,] 21 March 1844, quoted in Lages Mascarenha, Um jornalista, 113. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:123, notes Eusébio’s position as relator [here, spokesman] of the reactionaries’ response to the first cabinet of the Liberal Quinquennium, in 1844, a great demonstration of his primacy. See, also, Eusébio’s son’s memoir, Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 29–30, 31–32, 40–44 and passim. Here and below, observations on Eusébio derive from his correspondence. See, on his fluminense electoral role during his ministry and the early 1850s, e.g., Diogo to Primo Euzebio, Bella Ala., 16 Nov. 1852, AN, AP07, caixa 6, pacote 1, PM 1360; same to same, n.p., 16 Dec. 1852, ibid., PM 1361; same to same, 7 Feb. 1853, Pirahy, ibid., PM 1362; Francisco Jose Teixeira Leite, Joaquim José Teixeira Leite, Carlos Teixeira Leite, João Evagelista Texieira Leite to Illmo. Exmo. Snr., n.p. [probably Vassouras, 1855], ibid., PM 1380; visconde de Baependy to Exmo. Amo. e Sor., Valença, 1 Dec. 1851, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr62/2; Francisco Jose Teixeira Leite [ and] Joaquim José Teixeira Leite to Illmo. Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro Euzebio de Queiroz Coitinho Mattoso da Camara, Vassouras, 10 Nov. 1852, ibid., Eqcr78/1; Joaquim José Teixeira Leite to same, Vassouras, 10 Dec. 1852, ibid., Eqcr78/2. On Eusébio’s role in other provinces, see, e.g., J. M. Pera. da Sa. to Exmo. Amo. e Sr., S. Paulo, 28 Dec. 1848, ibid., Eqcr15/1; Firmino Rodrigues Silva to Exmo. Amo. e Sr., Ouro Preto, 30 Jan. 1852, ibid., Eqcr7/2; João Evangelista de Negros. Sayão Lobato to Exmo. Amo. e Sr., Porto Alegre, 29 Dec. 1852, AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1094; same to same, 4 Nov. 1853, ibid., PM 1095; [Eusébio] to Illmo e Exmo. Amo. e Sr. [Rio,], n.d. [c.1848–1852], ibid., caixa 8, pacote 1, PM 1881; same to anon., [Rio,] 24 April 1849, marked confidencial, ibid., caixa 9, pacote 1, PM 2082; same to Dr. Figueira de Melo, [Rio,], 21 Jan. 1849, ibid., PM 2085; same to same, [Rio,] 9 March [1849], ibid., PM 2087; same to same, [Rio,] 20 March 1849, ibid., PM 2088; same to same, [Rio,] 23 April 1849, ibid., PM 2089; same to J. E. Sayão Lobato, [Rio,] 24 April 1849, ibid., PM 2091; same to Sousa Ramos, [Rio,] 3 Jan. 1851, ibid., PM 2094; same to same, [Rio,] 3 Jan. 1851, ibid.,

Notes to Chapter 4 / 373 marked confidencial, ibid., PM 2095; same to [unknown], Rio, 12 Nov. 1851, ibid., caixa 5, pacote 2, PM 1298; Wanderley to Illmo. e Exmo. Sñr., Bahia [Salvador], 19 Nov. 1848, ibid., caixa 1, pacote 1, PM 129; same to same, Bahia, 16 Nov. 1848, ibid., PM 130; same to same, Bahia, 16 Dec. 1848, ibid., PM 131. 45. [Eusébio] to [unknown,][Rio,] 24 April 1849, AN, AP07, caixa 9, pacote 1, PM 2082; cf. same to Ribeiro, Rio, 15 March 1852, ibid., caixa 5, pacote 2, PM 1281. 46. Aside from the language in the correspondence cited in n.45, above, see, also, the notes to Ramos cited in n.44, above. On the emperor, see Visconde de Montalegre, et al. to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Rio, 15 Nov. 1851, quoted in toto in Vianna, Vultos, 145–53, (here, 151). On Pereira da Silva’s claims, see his Memorias, l:184, 208, but cf. Barman, Brazil, 232. That Eusébio and the cabinet did not carry out a wholesale purge is suggested in the letter cited in H. Vianna, where they note the loss of local political support because they did not. Indeed, the protests of their amigos is the best testimony of their attempts to limit partisan appointments. See, also, in this regard, H. H. Carneiro Leão to Ilmo. Exmo. e Sr. Queiros, n.p., 22 Oct. 1848, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr3/9 and João José Coutinho to Paulino Jose Soares de Sza., Angra dos Reis, 11 Nov. 1848, AN, AP07, caixa 1, pacote 2. On Eusébio’s piecemeal reforms of 3 December, see B. P. de Vaslos. to Eusebio de Queros Couto. Matoso da Camara, [Rio,] 7 Nov. 1849, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr31; Nabuco, Um estadista, l:194–95; and[Javarí,] Organizações, 103. 47. Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:116–17. N.B. that Nabuco himself was notable for his lack of interest in partisan politics, as opposed to the grand political cause, abolition, which he conceived in moral terms of national regeneration The quotation’s gendered quality is noteworthy. Nabuco clearly uses “feminine” in a negative way, to indicate Eusébio manipulated politicians. On Nabuco’s politics and Um estadista, see Needell, “A Liberal,” 161–63, 170–73. 48. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:231–33. 49. Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 64. Eusébio’s son discusses (ibid., 64–69) the emperor’s alleged “personal power” and concludes with an evasive allusion to his father’s decision: “These considerations . . . could perhaps influence the mind of a prudent man not to accept the responsibility to govern. . . . Eusébio would have other reasons, which . . . I must keep silent. . . .” (ibid., 69). 50. Barman, Citzen Emperor, 165,167. 51. The analysis that follows was essentially introduced by Needell, “Abolition.” 52. On the slave-trade diplomacy, see Bethell, Abolition; see, also, Conrad, Destruction, 20–22; and Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 183–86. On the treaties’ failures, see, also, Conrad, “Neither Slave nor Free,” 50–70 and idem, “The Contraband Slave Trade,” 617–38. The figures, based on English estimates, are from Eltis, Economic, 244. These and Eltis’s are critiqued by Lovejoy, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 365–94, where he argues for a dramatic impact on African society and demography, based partly on the premier study of the legal Portuguese slave trade (Miller, Way of Death). For the mortality, see Miller, Way of Death, 153–54, 440, and chap.5, passim, and Lovejoy, “Impact,” 388–93. 53. Needell, “Abolition,” 682–83, 688–87, 703. On mortality rates, see Stein, Vassouras, 70 [citing Ferreira Soares, Notas estatísticas, 135, who gives us 75% mortality for slaves within five years of purchase. Miller, Way of Death, 440–41, suggests roughly 40% mortality in 3–4 years (NB, Miller argues, ibid., 440, that 15% of those sold died within the first year’s “seasoning.”) Since Miller argues that the first four years were “seasoning,”

374 / Notes to Chapter 4 one might argue that those who survived would do better afterward. However, Ferreira Soares’s figure for the longer period suggests that even the hardened survivors continued to weaken rapidly. 54. Lacerda Werneck, Memoria, 63. 55. Bethell, Abolition, 228–29, 234–41, 242–44, 248–49, 257–59; Needell, “Abolition,” 705. 56. Bethell, Abolition, 221, 235–36,237–38, 249–50, 277–79,281; Needell, “Abolition,” 686. On Brazilian abolitionists and debate on the trade, see the survey in Viotti da Costa’s, Da senzala à colônia, pt. 3, chap.1, particularly 323–46; see also, Conrad, Destruction, 17–18; Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 147–48. Bethell (Abolition, 70–72) notes ephemeral abolitionism in the early 1830s, mentioning Evaristo da Veiga’s support. One can confirm this, but, despite such pioneering ventures, abolitionism had no impact on policy. Initial compliance by the moderado cabinets quickly gave way to the consensus of the time. While it is clear that Vasconcelos’s 1837 reactionary cabinet implicitly supported contraband trade, the trade had begun under one moderado administration (1833) and first surged under another (1836); see ibid., 75–76, 77–78, 79. 57. Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:92; Barman, Brazil, 230–31; Bethell, Abolition, 293. NB English captures off the African coast were nearly 400 in 1845–1850 (see, ibid., 283). 58. William G. Ouseley to Lord Palmerston, Rio, 28 May 1840, no. 35, PRO/FO, 13 v. 160, 11. 59. On emancipados as political favors, see Navarro, JC, 12–13 May 1839, 1; J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 26 May, 134; Conrad, “Neither Slave,” 50–56; and Filler, “Liberalism,” 151–57. See the mutual accusations of connection to the negreiros in Annaes, 1850, t.2, 6 July and 15 July, passim; and in O Brasil, 22 Jan. 1850 and 16 July 1850. Honório’s reputation probably derived partly from his purposely leaked defiance of the English diplomats in 1843 (see Bethell, Abolition, 235–36). 60. Needell, “Abolition,” 686–87. Reis notes the sale of Bahian captives south to the coffee frontier as early as the 1830s; he also notes the continued purchase of people from the same African sources by Salvador merchants for Bahian planting; see Reis, Slave Rebellion, 15, 139–41. This is confirmed and amplified by Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 135–38, who suggests clear parallels with fluminense slave commerce. Barickman notes, however, that imports surged in Bahia only in the late 1840s (ibid., 137). Eltis (Economic, 244) claims 100,500 captives were sold in Salvador between 1831 and 1851. Maciel de Carvalho, in Liberdade, analyzing the contraband trade to Pernambuco, includes contrasts and parallels with fluminense trends regarding merchants and planters (see, ibid., chap.5), e.g., the lesser size and specialization of the commerce (ibid., 119–20) and strong links with Angola (ibid., 125–28). His estimate is 40,000 between 1836 and 1850 (dates suggesting, as in Rio, a strict correlation with sugar and cotton export expansion; see ibid., 133–37). He also notes a decline after 1845. This decline was due to a surfeit of free dependent labor, increasing drought, which nearly eliminated cotton exports (in increased competitition with the United States, in any case), and the booming coffee frontier market to the south (causing failing planters to sell their captives into the interprovincial trade)—see ibid., 137–52. While Maciel de Carvalho claims that the negreiros and established cane planters favored the monarchy in the 1820s and 1830s, he argues that the contraband trade was not a significant factor in the province’s politics after

Notes to Chapter 4 / 375 1840—neither local party attacked the traffic, their planters embraced it (ibid., 158–67 and passim), and leaders in both were connected to the traffic (ibid., 164). 61. The historiographical issue was raised in Needell, “Abolition,” 681–82, 687–88, 691–98. The scholarship alluded to here includes Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade, 186–98; idem, “The Politics of Disease Control,” 441–63; and idem, Cidade febril, 68–78; Graden, “An Act ‘Even of Public Security,’ ” 249–82; Santos Gomes, Histórias, 255–90; Slenes, “Malungu,” 48–67. Karasch anticipated revisionist positions in an aside (see Slave Life, 337), as did Alencastro, “La traite négrière,” 411–13. Bethell’s position, however, has been accepted for years; see, e.g., Conrad, Destruction, 22–23; Alencastro, “La traite,” 411–17; Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, 52–61; Barman, Brazil, 230–34; idem, Citizen Emperor, 124–25. Viotti da Costa anticipated Bethell in Da senzala, 22–27 and repeated it in idem, Brazilian Empire, 131–32; Graham did so, also, in Britain and the Onset, 164–66. Eltis amplified Bethell’s points in a concise review of the English evidence; he is dismissive of the Brazilian statesmen’s good faith (without consulting any Brazilian evidence); see Economic, 210–17. The trade’s abolition is skirted in Dean, Rio Claro, 50, 54; and is marginal in Stein, Vassouras, 62–65. 62. What follows in the text was initially proposed in Needell, “Abolition,” 683–88. Synthetic surveys of the diaspora have pioneered comparative analysis based on the monographs others have done; see, e.g., Klein’s early African Slavery and Andrews’ recent, magisterial Afro-Latin America. 63. Afro-Brazilian slavery and race relations’ historiography is too copious to discuss here. However, here and below, this analysis has particularly benefited from a number of published studies (although the interpretation and conclusions here are not always congruent with the sources cited). These include those cited in n.61, above, and Conrad, World of Sorrow, chaps. 2–6; Karasch, Slave Life, chaps. 3,5, 7–11, passim; Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 4–5, pt.3, and chap. 18, passim; Florentino, Em costas negras, chaps.3,4; Barickman, A Bahian, chaps. 6,7; Schwartz, Slave Plantations, 340–53, 426–29, 437, and pts.3 and 4, passim; Reis, Slave Rebellion, 139–53 and pts. 1–3, passim; Maciel de Carvalho, Liberdade, chaps.8–10; and Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito, passim. 64. See ibid.; Reis, Slave Rebellions, pt. 3, passim; Karasch, Slave Life, chap11; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, pt.4. 65. Cf. James, The Black Jacobins, chaps.1–4. On Afro-Brazilian literati, see Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 185–87; Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:367–86, passim; Brito Broca, Românticos, 147–50, 196–99, 227. NB among such literati important in the politics of the era were Rocha, Torres Homem, and [Francisco de] Paula Brito. The works by Karasch, Reis and Silva, and Maciel de Carvalho are particularly revealing of the ambiguity of freedmen’s relations with their former masters and between themselves and the captives. Such potential for (and reality of) individual social mobility, particularly on the part of mulattos, is the historical basis for the myth of racial democracy, as Freyre initially conceived of it; see Freyre, “Social Life,” 597–630. For Freyre’s ideas on race and slavery, see Needell, “Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity,” 51–77. 66. See Lacerda Werneck, Memoria, 62–65; E. Silva, “Introdução,” to ibid., 22–41; Stein, Vassouras, chaps.6–8; Reis and Silva, Negociação, chaps.1–4; Santos Gomes, Histórias, chaps. 1,2; and the Barickman and Schwartz citations in n.63, above. 67. Needell, “Abolition” 688–89. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 474–78, notes some fif-

376 / Notes to Chapter 4 teen or sixteen revolts c.1809–1837 in Bahia; Santos Gomes, Histórias, 255–80, lists eleven plots between 1831 and 1838, with one actual revolt, and seven plots between 1844 and 1850, with two very minor revolts. On the quilombos, see Santos Gomes, Histórias, “Introdução,” passim, and chap.1 and Stein, Vassouras, 134–47. 68. On the 1838 rising, see P. J. Soares de Souza, Discurso . . . 1839 . . . , 1; J. A. Soares de Sousa, “O Efémero Quilombo,” 33–69; and Santos Gomes, Histórias, chap.2. On the 1840s rumors, see Santos Gomes, Histórias, 291 and Slenes, “Malungu,” 64–67. On what is made of rumors by contemporaries and historians, a comparison of Soares de Sousa, Slenes, and Santos Gomes is striking, particularly since they are often dealing with the same or similar material. See, also, Needell, “Abolition,” 691–96. 69. On the comparative ethnic and occupational origins of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro captives, see, especially, Miller, Way of Death, chaps. 4–5, pt. 3, and chap. 18, passim; Florentino, Em costas negras, chaps.3,4; Reis, Slave Rebellion, 139–53; Santos Gomes, Histórias, 202–19; Lovejoy, “The Impact,” 375, 378. Reis makes the point about the military and Muslim explanation with great care (Slave Rebellion, 139–41, 146–47, 152–53). NB Reis’s table 5 and the analysis on 146–47, in which he shows that 68.1% of the defendants in the trials following the 1835 revolt were Nagô (Yoruba) in a population in which Nagô captives and free people were only 26 %, compared to the relative absence of Angola-origin Africans (3% of those arrested), and his useful attempt at discussing ethnic differences relating to resistance. Reis notes the importance of the Sokoto caliphate in the African wars; Lovejoy also refers to the Sokoto jihad. On the word “malê” see Reis, Slave Rebellion, 96–97. 70. Needell, “Abolition,” 691–93; Reis, Slave Rebellion, chaps.4, 11, especially 90ff. 71. Rodrigues Torres to Limpo de Abreu, aviso reservado, [Niterói?] 17 Dec. 1835, quoted in J. A. Soares de Sousa, “O Efémero,” 33–34, citing AN, Correspondência do Presidente da Província do Rio de Janeiro com o Ministro da Justiça, IJ1 859. 72. Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho Matoso da Câmara to Limpo de Abreu, [Rio,] 29 Dec. 1835, in ibid. 73. On both 1835 and 1838, as well as the alleged 1840s conspiracy, see the officials’ reports, often cited in extenso in Santos Gomes and J. A. Soares de Sousa, and compare them to the historians’ interpretations. The disjuncture is striking. Regarding the Malê revolt, in particular, the distance between the evidence and the claims is noteworthy. The news from Salvador stirred ephemeral apprehension privately and little attention publicly. In the imperial capital, see JC, 10 Feb. 1835, extracting from the Diario da Bahia’s 19 Jan. 1835 reprint of Gonçalves Martins’ official report as juiz de direito and chefe de polícia to the provincial president. The JC also cites a private letter. No further mention of the revolt is made over the next week or so, and this in the most important national periodical of the time. AF, the ruling moderado party’s periodical, had a brief comment 16 Feb. 1835 by Evaristo da Veiga, calling for the end of the contraband trade and the expulsion of African freed people. Afterward, there is no further notice. There was no mention of the revolt, despite Gonçalves Martins’ presence as a deputy, in the Chamber session’s opening days. Indeed, the only relevant debate then concerned the contraband trade and another, inconsequential, call to abolish slavery (voted down, as always) (see Annaes, 1835, t.1, 6,7 May). There was no debate on the revolt in the budgetary deliberations on the Ministry of Justice, either (Annaes, 1835, t.2, 22 and 31 July), nor was there much mention of the revolt in the relevant ministerial report, which provided a brief ac-

Notes to Chapter 4 / 377 count of the repression and consequent measures. The report only noted its unusually capable and organized character before concluding (as quoted in the text here) with failed attempts to discover a similar danger in Rio (see Alves Branco, Relatorio . . . 1835, 9–11 [quotation is from 10]). Yet, despite this obvious lack of significance, the revolt’s importance has been built up in the literature for some time. Flory, “Race and Social Control,” presents no direct evidence for his claims regarding 1835. Reis, Slave Rebellion, cites the 1835 correspondence of Gonçalves Martins and Alves Branco, but only through May 1835, and he only discusses repression in Bahia. Chalhoub, Visões, 187ff, cites only two memoranda from Alves Branco to Eusébio and the latter’s consequent precautions, and nothing more. Santo Gomes, Histórias, 258–60, cites these and then more local fluminense and Rio police correspondence through Dec. 1835, only a dozen memoranda, generally relaying rumors and precautions. Graden, “End,” 257, 260, cites Reis and three 1835 memoranda for Bahia, and three for Rio (1835, 1836, 1849). This, then, is the sum total of the evidence presented by historians for the claims of many years of general, pervasive, abiding and significant fear derived from the 1835 revolt. Slenes’ intriguing claims of widespread insurrectionary conspiracies in the Paraíba Valley in 1847 and 1848 remain to be demonstrated. Although Slenes notes his own, unpublished research, he and Santos Gomes cite only the fruitless police reports of investigations (see Slenes, “Malungu,” 61, 64 and Santos Gomes, Histórias, 279, 281, 296). Santos Gomes’ discussion of fears are generally based on similar reports. However, the reports themselves only convey episodes of baseless fear, quickly squelched, and occasional, prudent measures to prevent conspiracy or insurrection. 74. Bethell notes that the North Atlantic market for Brazilian coffee between 1846 and 1850 was 50% higher than in 1841–1845 and that even sugar expanded from 22% of Brazil’s exports to 28%. He also notes the volume of slave sales in 1846–1849 was 50–60,000 per annum, despite a rise in prices (see Bethell, Abolition, 284–85) 75. This disagreement with Flory (see “Race and Social Control,” 210, 215–17) was first raised in Needell, “Abolition,” 693. Flory claimed that the disappearance of racialized political discourse derived from the reaction to the 1835 revolt, as alluded to in n.73, above. As already stated in that note, he supplies no direct evidence for this. On Haitianism, see Barman, Brazil, 37, and Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 210,215–17. Although Haitianism may have been leeched out of the political press after 1835, the concern, as Barman notes, survived through the 1840s. Paulino noted the luzias’ appeal to gente de cor (people of color) in the Liberal Revolt of 1842, an appeal based on spreading the rumor of plans to reduce them to slavery. Rocha reported being slurred with the accusation of Haitianism that same year, in an effort to destroy his electoral ambitions; see P. J. Soares de Sousa, Relatorio . . . (1843), 16–17 and J. Rocha to Firmino Rodrigues da Silva, [Rio,] 9 Nov. 1842 and same to same, 25 Dec. 1842, both quoted in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 78, 82. Although racial politics may have ebbed in published or formal political discourse, it was explicit or implicit in much of the era’s street lusophobia; see, e.g., Mosher, “Pernambuco,” chap.4 and passim and Maciel de Carvalho, Liberdade, chap. 9, passim. The point remains, though, that neither Haitianism nor the fear of slave rebellion has been shown to be of such pervasive importance as to move slaveholders against the African slave trade. 76. The case for yellow fever has been argued by Chalhoub, “Politics,” 446–551; idem, Cidade febril, 68–78; and Graden, “End,” 272–73, and was suggested earlier by Karasch,

378 / Notes to Chapter 4 Slave Life, 337. On the epidemic’s impact, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:214–16. On the history of the disease in Rio, see Chalhoub, Cidade, chap.2; Graham, The House and the Street, chap. 5, especially 111 ff; Benchimoll, “Pereira Passos,” chap.6; idem, Dos micróbios aos mosquitos; Cooper, “Brazil’s Long Fight,” 672–96; idem, “Oswaldo Cruz,” 49–52; and Stepan, The Beginnings. On the 1849 statistics, see Pereira Rego, História, cited in Chalhoub, “Politics,” 442, n.3. 77. On the contemporary medical debates and Pereira do Rego, see ibid., 443–51. On Pereira do Rego, see, also, Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:126–30. Graden paraphrases Chalhoub’s main points (“End,” 272–73; cf. Chalhoub, “Politics,” 443–51). Thus, as Chalhoub does (ibid., 451), Graden posits a causal relationship between the alleged origins of the fever and the abolition of the slave trade, using the circumstance of the timing of the decision to draw his conclusion. As Chalhoub did, Graden assumes that ending the trade was perceived as the best solution to ending the disease, in a context where a glut in the number of slaves on the market in Brazil at the time removed the pressing necessity for continued traffic. Glut had never appeased the appetite for captives before, and there was no dramatic threat to the population, given Pereira do Rego’s published analysis, so the logic here is problematic on its face. Indeed, Chalhoub writes that, given Pereira do Rego’s conclusions, “there was no real feeling of great urgency concerning the disease in the 1850s.” (“Politics,” 451). 78. Again, Graden relies upon Chalhoub, “Politics,” for his points here (“End,”’ 272– 73), so it is best to address Chalhoub. Chalhoub actually develops better evidence in Cidade febril, so, here, this is the evidence generally addressed (see Cidade febril, 71–78). The evidence is largely circumstantial and speculative. The parliamentarians noted were Paula Cândido, Jobim, Sousa Franco, and Ângelo Ramos—all members of the minority opposition, all speaking after the cabinet’s policy was established—in effect, of no logical consequence. It is true that Graden notes two senators who spoke in Jan. 1850, but he cites Chalhoub, “Politics,” 448n.14, who, in turn, cites Luíz Felipe de Alencastro’s thesis. Neither historian provides names for the senators, much less identifies their partisan affiliation. Indeed, the method of citation speaks to these historians’ apparent assumption that the cabinet was moved by speeches irrespective of partisan considerations. It is indicative of this (and troubling) that Chalhoub, who quotes Ramos, neglects to note (or engage) the fact that Ramos’s words come from a very long speech comprising the opposition attack on cabinet policies in general—hardly the sort of thing that would persuade the cabinet (see Annaes, 1850, t.1, 5 June, 312–17). In “End,” 272–73, Graden also cites Alves Branco (Sept. 1850) (an old opponent of the saquaremas) and popular concerns (citing a single police report dated August 1850); again, sources of problematic quality and post facto, in any case. On Hudson and the abolitionist press, see Chalhoub, Cidade, 73 and Bethell, Abolition, 313–14, 334n.1. One might also note that Alencastro’s analysis of yellow fever and the trade (“La traite,” 413), cites no primary sources and errs in the claim that the disease affected “whites and recent European arrivals most.” 79. In Visões, 195, Chalhoub acknowledges the “decisive” nature of English pressure and cites Bethell, only to ignore that pressure in his subsequent analysis. In idem, “Politics,” 448, the reference to English pressure is left vague and static and Bethell is cited only in reference to Hudson and Vasconcelos; in idem, Cidade febril, 72,73, 75–76, this is repeated. Graden is slightly more engaged with the issue of English action (“End,” 247, 250–51, 267, 275), even noting naval actions in mid-1850 (actually, they began with the

Notes to Chapter 4 / 379 year), but then dismisses the factor, noting only a sudden shift in English efforts in late 1849 and the desire of the cabinet “not to lose domestic and international prestige in the face of aggressive British naval commanders” (ibid., 275). English pressure, however, is entirely ignored in his conclusion (ibid., 282) and his citation of Bethell seems entirely perfunctory. Santos Gomes, in Histórias, does not have Bethell in his bibliography, nor English pressure in his discussion; Slenes, “Malungu,” 50, 66, uses Bethell and refers vaguely to English pressure combining with African resistance, but that is all. Karasch, Slave Life, notes English abolitionism (ibid., 11) but ignores its role in her mention of 1850 (ibid., 337), although she cites Bethell. Alencastro, “La Traite,” 407–13, while he puts English pressure into the foreground, does so as one of a combination of causes (including yellow fever and fear of the large captive population) without priority and without mentioning Bethell’s contribution to the issue (he is content to cite him as a source for African trade figures and the treaty history; see ibid., 395, 400, 403, 405). 80. Bethell, Abolition, 216–17, 237, 242–43, 252, 257–59, 275–79, 306, 308–11. 81. Ibid., 311–12, 315, 320, 328–29, 334–38, 341–42, 344–46, 363. 82. Eusébio’s antecedents have been discussed more than once above. On his actions here, see Mattoso Camara, Relatorio . . . 1850 . . . , 21–22; cf. Annaes, 1849 [sic], t.1, 14 Jan. [1850], 148; and Bethell, Abolition, 316. Note that Eltis (Economic, 216–17), who disputes the cabinet’s good faith and effective measures does so without benefit of Brazilian sources. Note, as well, Rocha’s careful support in O Brasil throughout January 1850. The edge of the embittered Liberal opposition is clear; see Annaes, 1849 [sic], t.1, 18 Jan. [1850] and ibid., 1850, t.2, 6 and 15 July, passim. 83. English ships left the Platine blockade by October 1849 and began coastal patrols off Brazil late that year, capturing negreiros, frequently in territorial waters; see Bethell, Abolition, 309–11. On the ongoing English diplomatic pressure, see ibid., 328–29, 335–37, 344–58, and J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 204–27, passim. On Liberal opposition responses, see the last citation in n. 82, above. On the saquaremas’ constituency’s pressure, see Bethell, Abolition, 338n.2, citing Southern, no. 78, 10 May 1852, F.O. 84/878; Lyra, História, 1:324 (citing memoranda from the French diplomat, St. Georges, [Rio,] 23 July 1850 and 4 Sept. 1850); and Pereira da Silva, JC, 29 August 1871, 3. 84. The English had made Platine support a hostage to the African trade issue since the early 1840s, something Paulino would have known as a minister of foreign affairs, 1843–1844, when the linkages (initially suggested in 1842 by Henry Ellis in Rio to Aberdeen) were first explored; see Bethell, Abolition, 237–41. 85. See, e.g., O Brasil, 19 Jan. and O Brasil, 22 Jan. 1850. The mid-1850 crisis is reflected in O Brasil, 13–17 July 1850, passim. For Rocha’s relationship to the saquarema leadership, see J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 25 May, 131–37. 86. See Annaes, 1850, t.2, 15 July, 197–208. The significance of this speech is indicated by its publication; see P. J. Soares de Souza, Tres discursos. See, also, Tosta, Annaes, 1849 [sic], t.1, 18 Jan. [1850], 196–97; ibid., 26 June [1850], 550–51; Angelo Ramos, Tosta, et al., ibid., 22 June [1850], 565–72; Eusébio de Queirós, Rodrigues Torres, et al., ibid., 1850, t.2, 8 July, 113 ff and José Inácio Silveira da Mota, ibid., 15 July, 192–97. 87. Paulino, Annaes, 1850, t.2, 15 July, 208. 88. Ibid. 89. See Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 3:247–67 [Ata de 11 de julho de 1850], especially 248. Note the deliberations’ context: First, the debate was shaped and organized around questions

380 / Notes to Chapter 4 set earlier by Paulino. Second, of the nine councilors present, five were saquaremas or their allies and one of the Liberals was publicly committed to abolition (i.e., Paula Sousa). On the discussions with party stalwarts, see the references to Bethell and Pereira da Silva in n. 83, above. 90. As was his wont, the emperor made his personal position known obliquely. See the reference to Bethell and to Lyra in n.83, above. 91. In Needell, “Abolition,” 703–704, it is pointed out that J. J. da Rocha’s columns made no mention of either yellow fever or slave insurrection; in fact, Rocha tried to persuade the party readership that their labor needs could be met despite abolition by more humane practices to promote natural reproduction and, thus, an expanding slave population (see O Brasil, 16 July 1850). This is hardly an argument supporting the idea that slaveholders feared more slaves. The public statements by the policy makers themselves do not seek support based on either fear of insurrection or of fever. Eusébio barely alludes to a growing concern over internal security once in the two speeches at issue (see below). In the key speech by Paulino (15 July 1850), the minister never mentioned either concern. It has been argued that Eusébio mentioned public security as a rationale for the policy in 1852, citing two or three foiled revolts. Paulino and Honório have also been cited as making similar allusions (in 1851) to public security as a concern in the policy. These comments, however, made en passant in 1851 and 1852, could not have compelled Chamber support in 1850. These are more likely best viewed as brief references made to justify a decision (and support for that decision) after the fact. Could the fear of insurrection have weighed in these statesmen’s private deliberations in 1849–1850 and been kept secret out of prudence? If so, one would expect to see them arise in the secret deliberations of the Council of State. They do not. Moreover, in a review of what remains of the correspondence of the key figures, nothing was found to suggest that these issues were factors. See, on these matters, e.g., Chalhoub, Visões, 194–96; Graden, “End,” 276; and Mattoso Camara, Relatorio . . . 1a. sessão da 8a. Legislatura . . . (1850), 21–22 and idem, Relatorio . . . na segunda sessão da Octava Legislatura . . . 1850), 12. Internal security arises in the second report: “the opinion, which sees in the continuation of the traffic a grave threat against our internal security, is making notable progress. It is this conviction which has to produce the complete cessation of the traffic.” Eusébio was arguing that public opinion was shifting toward support of a policy the cabinet presently promoted for other reasons, and he is explicitly contrasting this new perception with the old fear of agricultural catastrophe in the event of the traffic’s end (see ibid.). 92. O Brasil, 2 May 1850, 3. 93. See JC, 2 May 1850, 2; 5 May 1850; and O. T. de Sousa, Vasconcellos, 255–58. James Hudson, England’s representative during the African slave-trade crisis, rejoiced, assuming the death removed one of the greatest obstacles to the trade’s end. This opinion has been relayed and even supported by others (see, e.g., Bethell, Abolition, 317, 320; Barman, Brazil, 233–34; Chalhoub, Cidade febril, 72). It is dubious. The cabinet had pursued its policy from initial negreiro harassment in 1849 to public policy in January 1850, months when Vasconcelos remained alive. He did not oppose the policy in public; indeed, he defended the ministers (albeit on other grounds) while he remained active (late April). Honório, another champion of the trade, did not oppose it, either. Indeed, as Graden has shown, Honório supported the abolition subsequently. One imagines that both Vas-

Notes to Chapter 4 / 381 concelos and Honório accepted the same political logic that the cabinet did, and put their nation-state first. 94. Pereira da Silva, Historia, 321. Vasconcelos’s enmity with Aureliano dated back to the initial schism in the moderados, in 1832. 95. The location of the ministries is in AL, 1850, 1851. For the diplomatic picture and personal details on Paulino, see J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, chaps.9–14, passim, and idem, Honório Hermeto, chaps.1,2. 96. On Silva Paranhos, later, 1870, visconde do Rio Branco [to be distinguished from his celebrated son and namesake, the barão do Rio Branco (1845–1912), later minister of foreign affairs], see Sisson, Galeria, 1:137–42; Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, chaps. 1–4, especially 10–13; Rodrigues, “Explicação,” to Silva Paranhos, Cartas ao amigo, vi–xi. See, ibid., vi,nn.2,3, for the traditional biographies. On the JC, founded 1827 by the Frenchman Emile Plancher, see ibid., viii, or, better, Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” RIHGB, t.28, pt.2a. (1865), 191. On the Corréio Mercantil, see ibid., 207–8. The Corréio begin in 1843, the year before the Liberal Quinquennium began, as Pharol, on the Rua do Cano (now the Rua da Assembleia); in 1844, it became the Mercantil and moved to the Rua da Quitanda; the name became Corréio Mercantil in 1848, at another Quitanda address. 97. J. H. Rodrigues, “Explicação,” vi–ix; Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, 13. On Paranhos’s ancestry, see Alvaro Lins, Rio-Branco, 1:10–14. Paranhos’s Portuguese father was a Salvador merchant. His mother never married this man, who died when Paranhos was a child. 98. Rodrigues suggests (“Explicação,” ix) that Paranhos’s influential support for the Platine policy is explanation enough for the choice. Given the nature of fluminense politics and the taint of Aureliano, this seems a bit ingenuous. Initially, Paulino dealt with Honório’s choice without much enthusiasm. The emperor was warmer in his appreciation, something Paulino (and, presumably, Honório) anticipated; see J. A. Soares de Souza, Honório, 13, 14. The quotation and the scene are family oral history conveyed by the barão do Rio Branco to Baptista Pereira. See idem, Figuras do Imperio, 86–87 99. Quoted in Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 52. 100. Paulino J. S. de Sousa to [Paulino José Soares de Sousa, filho,] Rio, 20 May 1853, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, 3/19. 101. Same to same, Rio, 24 April 1851, ibid., lata 4, 3/4. 102. On the Platine diplomacy, see the J. A. Soares de Souza sources cited in n.95, above. Honório’s support for Paranhos will be demonstrated in the text below. On Paulino’s support, see Paulino J. Soares de Souza to [Honório,] Rio, 12 April 1852, IHGB, AVU, lata 5, pasta 18, no. 49; same to J. Maria da Sa. Paranhos, Rio, 12 May 1852, ibid., lata 5, pasta 18, no. 16; M. M. de Castro to Meu bom amigo [Paranhos], Rio, 12 Feb. 1853, AHI, APVRB, CE, vol.1, lata 338, maço 1, no.1; Paulino José Soares de Souza to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Paranhos], Rio, 11 Sept. 1853, ibid. no.2. 103. See the J. A. Soares de Souza citations in n. 95, above and Lynch, Argentine Caudillo, 139–58. Paulino also took his later title from his diplomatic triumph. In 1863, Paulino’s emphasis on his role as minister of foreign affairs is as notable as his lack of attention to his domestic political achievements; see Visconde do Uruguay, [ms. autobiographical essay], Rio, 1863, IHGB, AVU, lata 7, pasta 26, no.38. 104. On the legislation, see Javarí, Organizações, 106–10, passim, and Barman, Brazil,

382 / Notes to Chapter 4 234–35. The significance of the land law is discussed by Dean in “Latifundia,” 610–21 and Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, 86–94. The 1850 Commercial Code is discussed in Graham, Britain, 25, 222. On the financial and banking reforms, as well as controversies associated with Ireneu Evangelista de Sousa, later, 1854, 1874, barão and visconde de Mauá, see Barman, “Business,” 239–64, especially 242–44. On many of the reforms and Mauá’s relations with the saquaremas, see Caldeira, Mauá, chaps.16–23, passim and visconde de Mauá, Autobiografia, chaps 5, 7–9. Sousa Ramos, a mineiro and a fluminense coffee planter and lawyer was a saquarema stalwart; a provincial president in 1843–44 and 1848–51 and a deputy; he was later (1867) barão de Tres Barras and (1872) visconde de Jaguarí. Zacarias emerged now onto the national scene as a protégé of Gonçalves Martins. A bright young Bahian saquarema, early a rival of Wanderley and professor at Olinda (1841–56), he had taken his degree in 1837, going on to serve as provincial president with both the Bahian ministers of the Liberal Quinquennium (1845–47, in Piauí) and the saquaremas (in Sergipe, 1848–49). His ascent to the cabinet came when he was serving as a Sergipe deputy (1850–52). See Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 338–40; Calmon, “O Conselheiro Zacarias,” in Góes e Vasconcelos, Da natureza, 9–11; and Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 7:407–409. Interest in opening up the Amazon had increased with the region’s exploration and, most especially, the steady increase in the export of natural rubber (of which Brazil was the sole source of the best type) after the discovery of vulcanization (1839). The cabinet decision to resign is discussed in the text below; the negotiations of Rodrigues Torres are explicit in Paulino’s account: see Paulino José Soares de Souza to J. Maria da Sa. Paranhos, Rio, 2 May 1852, IHGB, AVU, lata 5, pasta 18, no.16. 105. Visconde de Montealegre et al. to Senhor [Dom PedroII], Rio, 15 Nov. 1851, in Vianna, Vultos, 150. 106. Eusebio Queirós Coitinho Mattoso Camara to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. [Francisco Antonio] Ribeiro, Rio, 15 March 1852, AN, AP07, caixa 5, pacote 2, PM 1281. 107. Paulino José Soares de Souza to [Nabuco de Araújo,] Rio, 27 Sept. 1851, IHGB, AVU, lata 367, livro 01, no. 100. 108. The claim that the saquarema ministers engaged in a more limited partisanship, clear even in the ambiguity of Eusébio’s instructions to saquarema provincial presidents, was recalled by Pereira da Silva and explicit in the Montealegre letter cited in n.105, above. For Pereira da Silva, see idem, Memorias, 1:184, 208. 109. Montealegre, et al. to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Rio, 15 Nov. 1852, in Viana, Vultos, 150. 110. On the particular pressure for patronage in the Northeast, see the citations in n.2, above. 111. Vasconcelos sensed the difference in the Chamber of the time; see B. P. de Vazlos, to Eusebio de Queiros Couto. Matoso da Camara, [Rio,] 7 Nov 1849, AMHN,CEQ, Eqcr31. On the leadership’s sense of the party’s discipline and history of struggle, see, e.g., Euzebio de Queiroz, JC, 19 July 1855, 4. On the difficulty of such organization and discipline during the 1840s, cf. the correspondence of J. J. da Rocha in Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalist, chaps.4–6, 9, passim. The sense of a generational shift was noted by Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:144–45, 148–60 and by Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 1–3, 4. 112. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:144–45, 148–60.

Notes to Chapter 4 / 383 113. Paulino José Soares de Souza to J. Maria da Sa. Paranhos, Rio, 12 May 1852, IHGB, AVU, lata 5 pasta 18, no.16. 114. The enhanced strength of a new cabinet vis à vis the Chamber was the central motif of the cabinet’s letter of Nov. 1851 (cited in n.109, above). 115. Paulino José Soares de Souza to Carneiro Leão, Rio, 13 Dec. 1851, BN, SM, CTM, armário 32, pasta 22, no.2. 116. Same to same, Rio, 12 Jan. 1852, ibid., armário 32, pasta 24. The reference to Louis Bonaparte’s actions is to the coup by which Napoleon’s nephew, president of France’s Second Republic of 1848, put an end to that regime and made France a monarchy again and himself emperor, as Napoleon III (2 Dec. 1852). See Cobban, A History, 2:148–61; and Bresler, Napoleon III, chap.17. 117. Same to Firmino Rodrig. Silva, 27 Dec 1852, published in A Noticia, 14 Dec. 1942, 2, apparently clipped by J. A. Soares de Sousa, in IHGB, AVU, lata 9. 118. On the cabinet’s fall, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:238, which suggests the ministers’ nausea and exhaustion had been kept to themselves and their correspondents. Nabuco’s account centers upon his father’s opposition, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:148–60. The correspondence makes it clear that the cabinet asked to resign for the same reasons that motivated the cabinet’s original ministers, i.e., frustration with Parliament. See, e.g., Paulino José Soares de Souza to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Paranhos], Rio, 11 Sept. 1853, AHI, APVRB, CE vol.1, lata 338, maço 1. Cf. same to Meo amo. e Sr. [Francisco Inácio de Carvalho Moreira, later barão de Penedo], Rio, 15 March 1854, AHI, APP, 907: “I left the ministry because of being irritated, tired, and nauseated by power among us. There was no other motive.” See, also, Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 2–3.

Chapter 5 1. See Cardim, Justiniano, 69–72 and Rocha, “Ação,”, 214–18. See, also, Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:209, 213, 230–31, 233, 239, Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:144, 145–46, 159–60, and Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 7–9, 37–48, and, idem, “Justiniano José da Rocha,” 3–32. 2. Eusebio de Queirós Coitinho Mattoso Camara to Meu bom amigo [Carvalho Moreira], Rio, 16 Nov. 1853, AHI, APP, lata 899:2,1,6. 3. In addition to the sources cited in n.1, above, see C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 73–74; Stein, Vassouras, 102–4; Graham, Britain, chaps.2–4, passim and 24–27, 94–98, 188–90, 209; Mattoon, “Railroads, Coffee,” 276–77, 278–79; Sweigart, Coffee Factorage, chap. 4, especially 116–20, 125–28. 4. J. A. Soares de Souza, Honório, 268–69; visconde de Paraná, “Discurso Autobiográfico,” 281; Morales de los Rios, “Notas Históricas,” 1; [Henrique Carneiro Leão Teixeira Filho,] “1856: Apontamentos,” IHGB, CLT, lata 747, pasta 11. 5. “Marques de Paraná,” ms. notes, card catalog, IGB. On the Rodrigues Torres family and the Araruama clan (Carneiro da Silva), see Chapter One. Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior, later (1888), visconde do Cruzeiro, was the son of Jerônimo José Teixeira and Ana Maria Neto, sister to Honório’s cousin and wife, Maria Henriqueta Neto Carneiro Leão (see Genealogical Table I). On Teixeira Júnior, see Lery Santos, Pantheon, 467–82; and Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 3:302–3. 6. In V. de Paraná to Exmo. Amigo e Snr Paranhos, Rio, 12 May 1853, AHI, APVRB,

384 / Notes to Chapter 5 lata 320, maço 1, pasta 14. Paraná made it clear that the “Emperor desires to maintain the cabinet, at least during the Chamber session. . . . Only by suicide can the Cabinet come apart.” On Honório’s ennoblement, see J. A. Soares de Souza, Honório, 269. 7. Visconde de Paraná to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Dr. José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Rio, 12 Sept. 1853, AHI, APVRB, lata 320, maço 1, pasta 14. On Eusébio’s being asked, see Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 50. 8. Eusébio lived on the Rua do Sacramento, now the Rua Imperadora Leopoldina; the Praça da Constituição is now Praça Tiradentes. On the rest, see Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 64–65, 69, 74–75; Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Piedade; “Visconde de Araruama,” ms. notes, card catalog, IGB; “Condessa de Piedade,” AGB, v.7 (1945), 225–33; see Genealogical Table IV. José Manuel da Silva, barão de Tietê in 1854, had just served as a deputy (1850–1852); he was a rich merchant and paulista saquarema; Santa Rita was a Portuguese merchant and Campos cane planter closely knit to the Carneiro da Silvas; Souto was a Portuguese financier in Rio. The links to the Carneiro da Silva family, as the table shows, are multiple. Typically, the Carneiro da Silva family married into families of powerful Crown servants; see “Araruama (1o. Visconde de)” in AGB, 5 (1943), 45–46; Vasconcellos e Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Araruama, Santa Rita, Tietê, and Uruay. On the visit to the Campos region, see Silveira da Mota to Exmo. Amo. e Sr., Matto de Pipa, 20 Oct. 1857, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1648; same to same, Campos, 30 Nov. 1857, ibid., PM 1650; same to same, Matto de Pipa, 10 Dec. 1857, ibid., PM 1651; same to same, n.p., 3 Jan. 1858, ibid., PM 1652. 9. See the correspondence cited in Chapter Four, n.118 and P. J. S. de Souza to Paranhos, Rio, 12 Dec. 1852, IHGB, AVU, lata 321, maço 2, pasta 1. On Paulino’s plight, see J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 198–99, 266–67, and A. P. Soares de Souza, “Tres brasileiros Illustres,” 36, 40–41. On the Macacu refuge, see Paranhos, Ao amigo, 3; on Petrópolis, see ibid., and Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 149–50. 10. See J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, chaps. 16–23; Paulino José Soares de Souza to [Paranhos], Rio, 11 Sept. 1853, AHI, APVRB, lata 321, maço 2, pasta 1; Visconde do Uruguay to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Eusébio], Paris, 30 May 1855, in AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr84/4; same to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Paranhos], Paris, 1 Sept. 1855, AHI, APVRB, lata 319, maço 5; Visconde do Uruguay to Paranhos, Paris, 2 May 1856, IHGB, AVU, lata 321, maço 2, pasta 1. The author has studied the Paulinos’ correspondence in IHGB, AVU and in BN, SM, CTM, armário 32, pasta 24. On Paulino’s birth, see J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 44 and A. P. Soares de Souza, “Tres brasileiros,” 40, 48. Paulino (filho) has his biography in ibid., and in Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 329–30; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:356–57; and M. Azevedo, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 793–819. See, also, Ferreira de Rezende, Minhas recordações, 277–79. For Uruguai’s other children, see Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:108–9. 11. See Joaqm. Je. Roz. Torres to Paulino, 13 April 1846, M. Alegre, IHGB, AVU, lata 6, pasta 22, no.76; same to same, M. Alegre, 18 May 1846, ibid., no.77; Visconde do Uruguay to [Paulino], Paris, 3 August [1855], ibid., lata 4, 10/47; Caldeira, Mauá, chaps. 22–26, passim; Tavares de Lyra, Institutições, 287; Machado de Assis, “O velho Senado,” 2:616–18. On Itaboraí’s plantations, see Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93, 101–2; Monte Alegre was his wife’s. 12. Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:93, 101–2. Itaboraí’s sons-in-law included José Dias Delgado de Carvalho (National Guard officer in the coastal baixada and Rio mer-

Notes to Chapter 5 / 385 chant); José Custódio Cotrim da Silva Júnior (the same, and son of a planter near Saquarema); and his brother, Custódio Cotrim da Silva (physician and Rio import merchant); and Pedro Bossio (an architect). 13. For Paraná’s comments to Paranhos, see the letter cited in n.7, above. On the cabinet’s program and the emperor, see “Instruções de D. Pedro II ao Visconde de Paraná: 1853,” in Vianna, D. Pedro I, 134–43; Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 416–19; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 162, 164–65. On conciliation, see n.1, above. On the cabinet’s selfproclaimed politics, see Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Century,” 146–51. 14. On Paraná’s 1850 treatment, see Chapter Four. On Paulino and Paraná, see J. A. Soares de Souza, Honório, 242–46. 15. Pedreira became (1867, 1872) barão, then visconde de Bom Retiro. Wanderley became (1860) barão de Cotegipe. Divisions among the Bahian Conservatives were noted in Chapter Four. Paraná’s difficulty with Gonçalves Martins is glimpsed in H. H. Carneiro Leão to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Queiros, Recife, 9 April 1850, AHMI, maço 113, doc. 5618. The Conciliation is better known than most Second-Reign eras, because it is critical to Um estadista, Nabuco’s classic history of the Monarchy. For the cabinet, one may defer to Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:162–76; cf. Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” chap.5. See, also, Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 395–432; and Almeida Magalhães, O visconde, 143–261, passim. 16. A veteran of the Independence-era capture of Salvador in 1822 and the war over Uruguay in the late 1820s, Caxias became celebrated for his successful repression of 1830s and 1840s revolts. He was in command of the generals who led Brazilian troops in the alliance against Rosas. See Sisson, Galeria, 1:57–66 and J. A. Soares de Souza, Honório, chap.9. 17. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:168; Honorio Hermeto Carneiro Leão to Illmo. Exmo. Amigo e Snr. Conde, Montevideo, 13 Nov. 1851, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 29 [copy by Henrique Carneiro Leão Teixeira Filho]; same to same, Montevideo, 15 Nov. 1851, ibid., [copy by same]; same to same, 18 Nov. 1851, ibid. [copy by same]; and, especially, same to same, Montevideo, 22 Nov. 1851, ibid. [copy by same]. On the family links, see Genealogical Table II. Caxias’s loyalty towards the Monarchy is legendary, and will be borne out below. 18. In this section, the analysis differs occasionally with Barman’s (see Citizen Emperor, chap.6). Although much in Murilo de Carvalho generally supports the analysis here (see Construção, chap.8 and Teatro, chap.5 and “Conclusão”), his work treats the issue of the emperor at a level so impersonal that much is obscured (see, e.g., ibid., 143–45). For Viotti da Costa, Graham, and Rohloff de Mattos, the role of the emperor (and, indeed, that of the political parties, the Constitution, and the ideologies of the time) is inconsequential. The first two discuss these as dependent variables when they address them at all, and dismiss ideology and politics by treating them abstractly as façades facilitating class domination, state-making, and social order, with the parties as indistinguishable clubs for the acquisition of power and the distribution of patronage. Rohloff de Mattos, while focusing upon ideology, ignores historic specificity in an attempt at hegemonic discourse analysis; he conflates the saquaremas’ perspective and role with that of a monolithic ruling class and reified state. Cf. Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 137n.10, 138, n.12, 144 n.21, 149n.28, and 151n.31.

386 / Notes to Chapter 5 19. Constituição, titulo 3o., arts. 10,11,12; titulo 4o., cap. II, art. 37, II; cap. IV, arts. 52, 53, 54; titulo 5o. cap. I, arts. 98, cap. II, arts. 102, 103. On the reactionaries’ ideas about cabinet government and the Chamber, see Chapter Three, part I. 20. Constituição, titulo 4o. cap. VI, arts.43, 90, 91, 92; titulo 5o., cap. I, art.101, I. On early partisan electoral activity, see Chapter Two, parts III and IV and Needell, “Provincial Origins,” 138–41. 21. See Chapter Three, part II. 22. Paulino J. Soares de Souza to Firmino Rodrig. Silva, 27 Dec. 1852, clipping from A Noticia, 14 Dec. 1941, 2, in IHGB, AVU, lata 9. 23. Visconde de Montalegre, et al. to Senhor [Dom Pedro II,] (Rio,] 15 Nov. 1851, in Vianna, Vultos, 152. 24. See Eusébio’s correspondence with appointees and friends throughout the Empire, cited in Chapter Four. The emperor’s predilection for the free press stems partially from this need to weigh the broadest possible range of opinion and, as a central part of his administration, is well studied; see, e.g., Lyra, História, 2:chap.4, passim; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 173, 180–82, 183–84. 25. See Chapter Three for the Majority and the 1840s. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 95, 100–3, 165, 168–70, 172, comes to similar conclusions but not always for similar reasons. 26. See Chapter Three and cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 100–3, 113–14, 123–24. The intervention of the emperor and his favorite, Aureliano, were identified by both parties, as Chapter Three demonstrates. 27. See Chapter Four, particularly the discussion of Eusébio’s resignation. 28. Although the emperor’s interventions and fundamental distrust of political parties has been discussed here, Barman, Citizen Emperor, 165,167 is indispensable. However, this present study contradicts Barman’s analysis of the parties. He indicates that they only emerged in the mid-1840s and, by 1853, were indistinguishable and principally concerned with power and patronage (see Citizen Emperor, 120, 165 and Brazil, 224–27). Although departing from a different focus and research, these conclusions are comparable to Graham’s in Patronage and Politics, 51–53, 148–49 and Viotti da Costa’s, in Brazilian Empire, 60–61, 68–70. In Barman’s case, his assessment may derive from evidence focused on the emperor. Here, the author focuses upon the partisans’ evidence, as well, with more complicated results. In the case of Graham and Viotti da Costa, their assessments about the parties may derive from their failure to study the politics, language, and self-perception of the principle statesmen and their followers as they developed over time. In these analyses, for example, one notes a common presumption that privileges material preoccupations as “real” over ideological political concerns and perspective, dismissed as “façade.” More, there is an ahistorical conflation of the latter decades of the Monarchy and the earlier; the later era was one in which increasing political corruption and incoherence were more typical. It will not do to uncritically extrapolate that reality backwards into the Regency and the early Second Reign. 29. The Constitution of 1824 placed the monarch above statesmen, but not in front of them; as the moderating power, he exercised oversight and only intervened to maintain the working harmony of the other powers. He was advised in this by the Council of State. As the Chief of the Executive Power, the emperor executed policy through his ministers (see Constituição, titulo 5o., cap. I, art.98; cap. II, art.102; Pimenta Bueno, Direito Público, “Lei No. 234 . . . ” art.4o., art.7o., 518–19). On the emperor and his statesmen, see

Notes to Chapter 5 / 387 [Pedro II] to Condessa [de Barral], Rio, 2 Nov. 1880, AHMI, 3. 1.880, PII.B.c1. DBN; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 128, 147–49, 164, 184–85, 190–91; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:94–95, 240–41; 3:6–7; Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, 77–79; Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 55, 57. 30. For this and much of the following paragraphs’ analysis, the sources are Barman, Citizen Emperor, chaps.5,6; and Lyra, História, 2:chap.4. 31. Detail on the reforms is provided in Vianna’s explication; see idem, Dom Pedro I, 134–43; cf. Barman’s analysis (Citizen Emperor, 164–65) of the political consequences. 32. Here and below, the source is Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:chaps.1–5, passim 33. See, aside from Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:chaps.1–5, passim; Nabuco, A vida, chap.1. 34. Paulino quoted in Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:189. See ibid., 1:188–89, for the reform vis à vis saquarema judicial thought; for saquarema perceptions of the state’s civilizing mission, see Chapter Four. More specifically, on Vasconcelos’s assumptions, see Chapter Three, part I. On Paulino’s see, e.g., idem, Relatorio (1843), 3–4, 24–25, 26. 35. B. P. de Vazos. to Eusebio de Queiros Couto. Matoso da Camara, [Rio,] 7 Nov. 1849, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr31. See, also, Wanderley’s response: “. . . it is a complete revolution and I have much fear of revolutions” (quoted in Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:189). The saquarema response in 1854, among statesmen and provincial partisans alike, is discussed in the present study, below. 36. On early 1854 apprehensions, see Franco. de Paula de Negros. Sayão Lobato to Meu estmo. Compr. e Sr., Sorocaba, 18 March 1854, AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1035; I. F. Silveira da Mota to Exmo. Amigo e Snr., [Mato de Pipa, early 1854,] ibid., PM 1075. On Nabuco de Araújo’s project, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:190–204. On parliamentary opposition, see ibid., 1:177–85; and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:243–49. 37. On Ferraz, see Sisson, Galeria, 2:257–64; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:177–78; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 219–20. 38. Ferraz, JC, 30 June 1854, 2. 39. Ibid. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:243 and Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:178–79; and Silveira da Mota, JC, 30 June 1854, supplemento, no.179. 40. See the resume and quotations in Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:179–82, and ibid., 1:183–85 for Paraná and Nabuco de Araújo, respectively. 41. See Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 176–77, 205–7; V. do Uruguay to Exmo. Amo. Colleg. e Sr., [Paris,] 10 Dec. [1854], AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr84/2. 42. Visconde do Uruguay to Exmo. Ao. e Sr., Paris, 30 May 1855, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr84/4. 43. For the origins and electoral basis of the party, see Chapter Two. The importance of magistrates among Regency reactionaries and the Party of Order is well known; it has even been understood to explain political behavior and identity; see Pang and Seckinger, “The Mandarins,” 215–44. More nuanced support is in Murilo de Carvalho, Construção, 21 and chaps.1–4, passim; Flory, Judge and Jury, pt.3, particularly chap.10, passim; Barman, Brazil, chaps.5,6,8, passim. However, as magistrates and bachareis in general served as chieftains in both parties, a causal explanation seems problematic. Instead, here, the socio-economic, regional, and personal circumstances have been emphasized (they have also been noted by some of these colleagues) as more explanatory. In effect, the preponderance of magistrates or bachareis among the Party of Order (or of priests in the first generation of their opposition, for that matter), seems consequent to

388 / Notes to Chapter 5 such circumstances. Recent analysis tends to support this; see Kirkendall, Class Mates, 125–38. 44. F. B. Soares de Souza, O sistema, 58–71. 45. See the initial Senate discussion in JC, 10 May 1855, 1. Barman (“Brazil at MidEmpire,” 2,10, 326n.18) shows that the project was not put into debate until 20 June. The bill’s introduction did not pass unobserved in the Chamber; see J. J. da Rocha in Annaes, 1855, t.1, 19 May, 45. The reform is central to the great debates of July 1855 (see below); see F. B. Soares de Sousa, O sistema, chaps.3,4. Patronage in the post-reform political world represented a sea-change (however anticipated during the previous administration) and goes a long way to explaining the values central to Graham’s analysis, in which ideology is insignificant and patronage is everything. F. B. Soares de Sousa’s analysis serves his political position as a fluminense saquarema, close kinsman to Paulino (see Genealogical Table I). It is, however, remarkably balanced analysis, superior to Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:213–16. Neither Souza nor Nabuco attributes to Paraná the intent to undercut the Party of Order argued here. Both state that he found the reform ideologically attractive, noting that he supported it earlier, in 1848. The coincidence of his new relationship with the emperor and his old party and the emphasis that Paraná gave the reform at this particular moment suggest a more cynical reading, as they did to contemporaries, something Barman indicated first in “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 205–11, 219–21. 46. See Ferraz, JC, 30 June 1854, 2, idem, ibid., supplemento no. 179; Barman,”Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 177; Visconde do Uruguay to Exmo. Amo. Colla. e Sr. [Eusébio], 10 Dec. 1854, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr84/2; Franco. de Paula Negros. Sayão Lobto to Meu estmo. Compr. e Sr., Sorocaba, 18 March 1854, AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1035. 47. See C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 74,75; Taunay, “Um irmandade,” 2:484–87; Stein, Vassouras, 16–20; Lenharo, As tropas, 54–56. For the family’s proximity with Eusébio, e.g., Joaquim José Teixeira Leite to Illmo. Exmo. e Snr. Eusébio de Queiroz Coitinho M. da Cama., Vassouras, 10 Dec. 1852, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr78/2. Their disaffection with Paraná over the railroad is clear in in Sayão Lobato’s speech (see the text, below). That the Teixeira Leite group were either mobilized by Eusébio or, at least, supported by him, is suggested by the apparent draft of the JC piece written to Eusébio and by the post facto political assessment written by a Teixeira Leite to the barão de Capivari. The significance of the latter is suggested in Genealogical Table III; note the kinship to the barão de Pati do Alferes, key saquarema serra ally in the 1830s and 1842. See Francisco Jose Teixeira Leite, Joaquim José Teixeira Leite, Carlos Teixeira Leite, João Evangelista Teixeira Leite to Illmo. Exmo. Snr., n.p., n.d. [probably Vassouras, c. May 1855], AN, AP07, caixa 6, pasta 1, PM 1380; cf. “Vassouras,” JC, 26 May 1855 in “Publicações a Pedido.” The impact of the Vassouras planters is noted in Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:203 and Barman, “Brazil at MidEmpire,” 178–79. 48. Joaquim Jozé Teixeira Leite to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Barão de Capivary, Vassouras, 30 June 1855, “Cartas familiares Teixeira Leite,” in AFPG. 49. On Sayão Lobato, later (1872) visconde de Niterói, see Sisson, Galeria, 2:347–50; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 262–63; Lery Santos, Pantheon fluminense, 337–43. 50. Sayão Lobato, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 18 May, 35. 51. See Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, 218–22 and J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 25 May, 132–37; Barman, “Justiniano,” 13–16. It is worth noting that Rocha was economically vulnerable to cabinet bribery as the impoverished head of a large household.

Notes to Chapter 5 / 389 Nonetheless, he would cut such support in a matter of months to go into public opposition. Two of the saquarema triumvirate (men with either life positions in Crown service or substantial private means or both) only opposed Paraná through others or waited him out. Eusébio, who advised Rocha, would be the only one to oppose Paraná and even he did so cautiously, possibly to avoid dividing the party or offending the prime minister or the monarch, men with whom he doubtless wished to work in the future. Eusébio had already distanced himself from favor. While so many others were graced with titles in 1854, he either refused one or no offer ever came (his son noted Eusébio’s lack of any of the normal decorations or titles after 1849; see Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 76). Rodrigues Torres, in contrast, became a visconde and, as will be shown, sought political accommodation in the new milieu. Paulino, a visconde in 1854 as well, also accepted a mission to Paris and asked the appointment of his eldest son as attaché (see Visconde do Uruguay to Exmo. Ao. e Sr., Paris, 1 Sept. 1855, AHI, APVRB, lata 319, maço 5). 52. J. J. da Rocha, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 19 May, 45. The parallels with Rocha’s celebrated pamphlet, “Ação,” were demonstrated by Barman, in “Justiniano,” in which he contextualizes it as part of Rocha’s attacks on Paraná before and after this speech (see ibid., 26–25); this reverses the common assumption that the pamphlet was written in support of the cabinet. Barman’s reading provides useful clues to Rocha’s intellectual debts, particularly to Guizot and Hegel, the latter being central to “Ação” (“Justiniano,” 24–26). One might add that Guizot was influenced by German philosophy; his widely read history (c.1820s) used a progressive dialectic from early on. Guizot’s continued influence on Rocha is no surprise; we have seen (Chapter Three) his prestige among the party leaders since the 1830s. Alencar suggests the linkage by a reference to Guizot when he wrote about Rocha’s break with Paraná (see Barman, “Justiniano,” 21n.47). On Guizot’s German influence and use of dialectic, see Johnson, Guizot, 333, 334, 338; and Rosenvallon, “Presentation,” to Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation, 31. Alencar’s 27 May 1855 piece is one of his crônicas, an ironic allegory presuming the political sophistication of the Corréio Mercantil’s readership; see Alencar, Ao correr da pena, 227–35. 53. See Sayão Lobato, Annaes, 1855, t.1, 19 May, 39–42, passim; Sr. presidente do conselho [Paraná], in ibid., 21 May, 53–63; Ferraz, ibid., 22 May, 74–81; Sayão Lobato et al., in ibid., 23 May, 89–95; J. J. da Rocha, Ferraz, in ibid., 25 May, 111–12, 112–19, passim; J. J. da Rocha, ibid., 26 May, 132–37; Marquez de Paraná (presidente do conselho), in ibid., 137–50; J. J. da Rocha, in ibid., t.3, 3 July, 26–29. For the Vassouras open letter, see “Publicações a Pedido: Vassouras,” JC, 26 May 1855. On the autobiographical oration by Rocha, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:205–9. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:247–50, takes no special note of it. 54. On the project in the history of the cabinet, see Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 209–11, 219–20; on Paraná’s intimidation of the Senate, see JC, 18 July 1855, 1. 55. For Eusébio’s speeches, see JC, 19 July 1855, 3–4; ibid., 7 August 1855, 1. Paraná’s speeches are in ibid., 20 July 1855, 1–2 and ibid., 10 August 1855, 1. 56. Eusebio de Queiroz, ibid., 19 July 1855, 3–4. 57. Idem, ibid., 7 August 1855, 1. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 226.

390 / Notes to Chapter 5 61. On the vote of confidence, see Marquez de Parana, et al., Annaes, 1855, t.4, 27 August, 235–51. On the electoral calculations, see Barman, “Brazil at mid-Empire,” 221. 62. See Annaes, 1855, t.4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 August, 235–51, 253–71, 272–90, 290–306, 307–31. The vote is in ibid., 1 Sept. 1855, 340. Barman, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 227, argues that Paraná’s use of the vote of confidence implied knowledge that the emperor would support his retention and Chamber dissolution; he cites the rumors of the emperor’s support of the reform alleged to be circulating (Annaes, 1855, t.4, 30 August, 290–91). Alternatively, other evidence from the debates can suggest that the rumors were not persuasive, and that Paraná took a calculated risk; see, e.g., Ferraz, ibid., 27 August, 245. 63. On Um estadista’s place in the historiography, see Needell, “A Liberal,” 170–77. For Nabuco’s view of the Conciliation, see Um estadista, 1:390–91. For the established view, see Graham, “1850–1870,” 147. The best analysis is Barman’s “Brazil at Mid-Empire.” His view is more sober (see ibid., 267–88ff) but essentially sanguine, and informs Citizen Emperor (see ibid., 159, 162–63, 164, 165–66, 192). 64. See Barman, Citizen Emperor, 159, 162–63, 164, 165–66, 192. 65. See Chapter Three, passim, for these events and analyses. The texts cited are Rodrigues Silva, A dissolução, and T. B. Otoni, Circular, chaps. 10, 11, especially 122–27. 66. See, e.g., Visconde do Baependy to Exmo. amo. e Sor., Valença, 1 Feb. 1854, AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 981; same to same, Valença, 23 Jan.1854, ibid., PM 982; Francisco Jose Teixeira Leite, to Illmo. Exmo. Sñr. Conselho. Eusebio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso da Camara, Vassouras, 25 Jan. 1854, ibid., PM 1029; Diogo [Texeira de Macedo] to Primo Euzebio, 7 Feb. 1853, Pirahy, ibid., caixa 6, pacote 1, PM 1362. 67. Same to same, Sta. Rosa, 17 Feb. 1854, ibid., PM 983. 68. Ignasio Francisco Silveira da Mota to Exmo. Amigo e Sr., 12 April 1856, Matta de Pipa, ibid., caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1645; see, also, Jose Lino de Campos to same, Cidade de Guaratiguetá, 29 July 1856, ibid., PM 1730. 69. V. do Uruguay to [Paulino,] Paris, 14 July 1856, BN, SM, CTM, Uruguai, Armário 32, pasta 22, no.2. NB the reference to Otaviano is “tal capoeira forro” (“that freed capoeira”). 70. Same to same, Rio, 10 Dec. 1856, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, 2/54. 71. Same to same, Paris, 13 August [1855], ibid., lata 4, 10/47. 72. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:258–59. See, also, “Senado,” JC, 18 August, 1856, 1; “Gazetilla,” ibid., 24 August 1856, 2; ibid., 29 August 1856, 2; ibid., 31 August 1856, 1; ibid., 1 Sept. 1856, 2; ibid., 2 Sept. 1856,2; ibid., 3 Sept. 1856, 2; ibid., 4 Sept. 1856, 1–2, passim; “Camara,” ibid., 5 Sept. 1856, 1. A detailed account is in IHGB, CLT, lata 749, pasta 31. Ironically, one of the earliest accounts of Paraná, that for Sisson’s Galeria, was supposed to have been written by Rocha. In death, as in life, the man’s enemies remembered his career with respect. The emperor had a confidential report which charged that Paraná had been medicated to a painful death; see Bedault to Sire, Rio, 23 Sept. 1856, AHMI, POB, maço 123, doc.6157. 73. Paulino Je. S. de Souza to Exmo. amo. e Sr. Conselheiro, Paris, 13 Nov. 1856, IHGB, AVU, lata 10, pasta 2. 74. See Visconde do Uruguay to [Paulino,] Rio, 13 Nov. 1856, AHI, APP:Uruguay; same to same, Rio, 13 Jan. 1857, ibid.; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:259–60; Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:392–407. 75. See the citations in nn.73,74, above. On the fluminense deputies, see [Javarí,] Or-

Notes to Chapter 5 / 391 ganizações, 323–24. The deputies were Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo (Eusébio’s cousin, a saquarema), Paranhos (a minister); Alexandre Joaquim Siqueira, João de Almeida Pereira Filho (saquarema), Luís Pedreira do Couto Ferraz (minister), Otaviano (Liberal), Paulino (saquarema), Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior (minister’s son-in-law and cousin), Joaquim José Teixeira Leite (saquarema), José Joaquim de Lima e Silva Sobrinho, Torres Homem (ministerial protégé), and the conde de Baependí (saquarema). Lima e Silva is kin to Caxias; by family, a saquarema, by relations through Caxias himself and to Paraná and Paranhos, more likely a ministerial protégé 76. Visconde do Uruguay to [Paulino], Rio, 13 Nov. 1856, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, 1/53; see, also, same to same, ibid., 2/54. 77. Same to same, Paris, 26 July 1855, ibid., 9/46. 78. Same to same, Rio, 10 Dec. 1856, ibid., 2/54; same to [Eusébio], Paris, 30 May 1855, AHMN, CEQ, Eqcr.84/4; same to [Paranhos,] Paris, 2 May 1856, AHI, APVRB, lata 321, maço2, pasta 1; same to Meu Tio e Amo. [probably Belisário], Paris, 2 Jan. 1856, AHMI, I-DST, 12.3.855, Sov.c1–20; same to Carvo. Moreira, Rio, 9 May 1857, AHI, APP:Uruguai; Uruguay, Ensaio, 1:iv–v, vi–vii; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:260. 79. Graham exemplifies the common muddle about the era when he argues: “To speak of parties is somewhat misleading, for parliamentary agglomerations lacked unity and did not depend on disciplined electorates, nor represent ideologically defined movements. Several important leaders abandoned the Liberals to join the Conservatives and vice versa . . . No particular political philosophy distinguished one group from another. Their elected representatives, once in Parliament, formed unstable alliances with each other”; see Graham,”1850–1870,” 145. 80. One notes that these Liberal youths were part of a generation, emerging c. 1848–1860, distinguished by the mingling of Romanticism and literary, oratorical, and political talent, irrespective of partisan loyalty; see Ferreira de Rezende, Minhas recordações, chs.34–35; cf. Verissimo, Historia, 288–89 and Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:152–54, 198–204. On Liberalism’s lack of substantive change, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:255, 283–84, who emphasizes the collapse of the Liberals and their ideas in 1848 and then their resurgence in 1860, without distinguishing any ideological shift. Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:14–21, makes it clear that Otaviano, key publicist of the Liberal youth, while he attacked the established old men of either party as out of touch with the idéas do tempo in the late 1850s, was firmly allied with Otoni in the great campaign of 1860. As Nabuco emphasizes Otoni’s inability to change, this apparent contradiction is resolved; Otaviano allied with Otoni because they shared the same essential position of Liberal opposition and reform. The triumph of their common position had more to do with the socio-economic transformation of the Rio electorate between the 1840s and 1860, than any substantive transformation in ideology (see, also, ibid.,2:74–75). José Bonifácio, o moço, was the first José Bonifácio’s nephew (his father was Martim Francisco); he, Otaviano, and Tavares Bastos will be discussed below. 81. The cabinet (5 May 1857–12 October 1858) included Maranguape (Foreign Affairs, José Antonio Saraiva (Navy), and Jerônimo Francisco Coelho (War); Olinda took Empire for himself. On Sousa Franco, see Sisson, Galeria, 1:79–82 and Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:1,2,22–26. 82. On Mauá and the saquaremas, see Chapter Four. The relationship between Mauá, Sousa Franco, and Olinda is in Caldeira, Mauá, 335ff. On conflict between Itabo-

392 / Notes to Chapter 5 raí and Mauá in the early 1850s, see ibid., chap.22 and passim and Barman, “Business and Government,” 242–47,251–57, passim. 83. See Caldeira, Mauá, 266–67 and chaps.26–30, passim; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 287; João Lyra Filho, Visconde de Itaboraí, 124–25, 134ff. 84. See Caldeira, Mauá, chaps.26–30, passim, especially 335–36; Barman, “Business and Government,” 244; and Lyra Filho, Visconcde de Itaboraí, 134 ff. 85. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:233, 253, 255, 263–64; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:24–26; Graham, Britain, 24–27, 32–34 (although Graham is writing of a later era in these last pages, they pertain to the mid-century, too); Ferreira Lima, História, 92–94, 110–15, 124, 126; Lahmayer Lobo, História do Rio, 1:116–21, 170–71, 173–87, 206–16; Soares, “A Indústria,” 283, 285, 289, 290–91, 292, 294–97, 300–306. 86. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:263–67; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:22–26, 28–30; Fereira Lima, História, 93–96, 120, 121; and Caldeira, Mauá, chaps. 29,30. 87. See the citations in n.86 above, for Torres Homem’s role. Torres Homem had taken medical degrees in Rio; as chargé d’affaires in Paris, his legal studies led him to political economy and finance. Paraná appointed him to the treasury after his 1853 support for conciliation, published in the Corréio Mercantil. The articles and appointment compelled históricos’ reproaches. However, although elected in 1856 under the protection of the Conciliation Cabinet, Torres Homem was only finally rejected by the históricos when his financial views challenged Sousa Franco. See Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 3:115,117; Lery Santos, Pantheon fluminense, 388–89. 88. The speeches are in Annaes, 1858, t.1, 17 May, 31–36; and, ibid., t.2, 25 June, 12–33 [!!!]. See, also, Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:266–67; H. C. Leão Teixeira Filho, “Attitude Parlamentar,” 498–99, 501. 89. Paulino, Annaes, 1858, t.2, 23 June, 258 (the entire speech was ibid., 251–58). The first speech is in ibid., t.1, 29 May, 135–41. On response to the speeches, see M. Azevedo, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 794; P. J, Soares de Souza Neto, “Conselheiro Paulino,” RIHGB, v. 169, 491. Paulino’s grandson (ibid.) claims that it was this parliamentary debut to which Paulino owed his sobriquet of “Marshal of the Future,” published by Firmino Rodrigues da Silva, the saquarema publicist and statesman. 90. Pereira da Silva claims that the emperor is supposed to have thought Eusébio’s Senate speeches relatively moderate, and, thus, suitable for Conciliation policies. Although Eusébio was suffering from eye problems, and had lost his wife in 1856, he was healthy enough to remain saquarema leader in the Senate (and vigorous enough to have an affair with a well-known beauty by 1860); see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:269; Visconde do Uruguay, JC, 29 May 1858, 1; Machado de Assis, “O velho Senado,” 617. In effect, Eusébio’s ill-health served as a fairly transparent subterfuge. Indeed, Eusébio’s son states that Eusébio only left “a politica militante” after May 1861, and continued public service until 1864; see Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 74–75. Nabuco baldly states that Eusébio refused the emperor because of his opposition (Um estadista, 2:30). The emperor’s recollection is that Eusébio and Uruguai refused, “In spite of agreeing with the ideas that I expounded to them concerning my relations with cabinets”; he then concludes that “Probably they judged that the epoch of the puritan Conservatives [i.e., the saquaremas] had not arrived” (see quotations in ibid., 2:30n.2). This seems typical. The emperor assumes ministers agree with him if they do not explicitly contradict him, and presumes hidden, entirely partisan motivations on their part. It seems more likely that their re-

Notes to Chapter 5 / 393 sponse, implicit dissent and consequent refusal to serve, derived from the views on the appropriate relations between monarch and dissident statesmen paraphrased in the text here; see, also, Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 66–69, likely repeating his father’s lesson. 91. On the cabinet, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:270–71; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:30, 34–35. Texeira de Macedo’s appointment, alongside Paraná’s former ministers, suggests the incongruity of the cabinet. One notes that Teixeira Macedo had been unjustly subjected to great public humiliation by Paraná, who afterward was apparently forced by the emperor to soften the blow of the ambassador’s dismissal with the offer of various appointments. See Marquez de Paraná to Illmo. Exmo. Sr. Francisco Ignacio de Carvo. Moreira, Rio, 15 Oct. 1855, AHI, APVRB, lata 905/2,2,7; C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 75; Caldeira, Mauá, 322–23; and Sisson, Galeria, 1:291–92. 92. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:273–76; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:40–42, 43–44, 48–50. João de Almeida Pereira Filho to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro Euzebio de Queiroz Couto. Matto. Camara, Quissamá, 9 March 1856, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1676; same to same, Bahia, 2 Oct. 1859, ibid., PM 1682. The other ministers were from Piauí, Alagoas, and Pernambuco. Ferraz (Bahia) took finance himself. 93. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:279–82; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:55–60. 94. See Góes e Vasconcelos, Da natureza, 23, 27–42, 44–46, 48–49, 51–54, 58, 64.; Calmon, “O Conselheiro Zacarias,” introduction to ibid., 11; Venâncio Filho, “Introdução,” Perfis, 19, 21–24. The 1849 reference is to Torres Homem’s Libelo do povo. The Liberals’ challenge to the emperor along similar lines is evident in, e.g., Martinho Campos, Annaes, 1860, t.1, 31 May, 64–66; Landulpho, ibid., 22 June, 286–97. 95. See Almeida Pereira, ibid., 20 June, 259–65; Paulino de Souza, ibid., t.2, 6 July, 61–68. On the point noted in the text, see ibid., 67. 96. Ibid. 97. On the decision to abstain from electoral intervention, Pereira da Silva provides no explanation (see Memorias, 1:283); nor does Nabuco (Um estadista, 2:71–76). However, in Nabuco’s research, the cabinet was under saquarema control. Thus, one could argue that the saquaremas pressed for this policy. If so, one wants to ask why. They must have done so precisely to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Chamber as a representative power and to make clear their support in the Empire. They must have assumed that they remained the party of the majority and would triumph in the vote—this time, with little taint. 98. Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:71–76. In 1860, Nabuco de Araújo saw a danger of Liberal triumph under T. Otoni; instead, he hoped for the development of Conservative moderates as the Conciliation’s natural heirs and an alternative to saquaremas and Liberals alike. He feared Liberals’ triumph would give them primacy in the anti-saquarema opposition, pulling it too far left. He preferred an opposition dominated by moderates. As we shall see, this is what came to pass with the Progressive League—because of the emperor’s support, and despite the Liberal triumphs of 1860. 99. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:283–84; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:74–75. 100. On party morale and disarray, see João de Almeida Pereira Filho to Illmo. Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro Euzebio, Bahia [Salvador], 27 Oct. 1859, AN, AP07, caixa 7 pacote 1, PM 1682; Visconde do Uruguay to Meu charo Carvo. Mora. Rio, 9 May 1857, AHI, APP, maço 907: Uruguay; same to same, Rio, 7 Aug. 1857, in ibid.; same to same, Rio, 12 Sept. 1857, ibid.; same to same, Rio, 11 Feb. 1858, ibid.; same to same, Rio, 8 Sept. 1858, ibid.;

394 / Notes to Chapter 5 same to same, Rio, 8 Nov. 1859, ibid. On the saquarema electoral mobilization, see Rodrigo [Augusto da Silva] to Meu Pae e Snr., S. Paulo, 15 Sept. 1860, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1809; same to same, S. Paulo, 24 Sept. 1860, ibid., PM 1810; same to same, S. Paulo, 5 Oct. 1860, ibid., PM 1812; C. de Baependy to Meu caro Dr. Teixa. Jor., Sta. Rosa, 26 Oct. 1860, AN, AP23, 99; Visconde do Uruguay to Illmo. Sr. Dr. Innocencio Góes, Rio, 12 Dec. 1860, IHGB, lata 135, pasta 5; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Visconde [do Uruguai], 22 Dec. 1860, IHGB, AVU, lata 3, pasta 2, no. 43; Francisco José Teixeira Leite to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Conselheiro Eusebio de Queiroz Coitinho Mattoso da Ca., Vassouras, 20 Jan 1861, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1688 [here, one extrapolates from a discussion of the 1861 provincial elections]. On the opposition’s mobilization, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:chaps.15,16, passim; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:48–49, 55–56, 74; Uruguai’s letter to Carvalho Moreira, 8 Nov. 1859, cited above, Texeira Leite’s letter to Eusebio on 20 Jan. 1861, cited above. 101. On Otaviano, see Lery Santos, Pantheon fluminense, 311–16; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 3:62–64; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:14–21. Otaviano had married the daughter of Joaquim Francisco Alves Branco Moniz Barreto, whose family owned the Corréio Mercantil. On the latter and the general milieu, see n.102, below. 102. On this era in fluminense literature and the periodical press, see Moreira de Azevedo, “Origem,” 202–23, passim; Macedo, Brazilian, 2:373–74; 403–8; Antonio Candido, Formação da literature, 2:chaps.1–5 and “biografias sumárias,” passim; Werneck Sodré, A história, 200–31. On Saldanha Marinho, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 4:237–41. On Paula Brito, see ibid., 3:68–71 and Ribeiro Gondim, Vida. On Machado and the sociology of the era’s literati, see Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 185–87. Machado briefly recalls his entry into the Diário and the era in “O velho Senado,” 613–14. 103. [Visconde do Uruguai] to Visconde de Camaragibe, Rio, 23 Sept. 1860, BN, SM, CTM, armário 32, pasta 22, no.2. 104. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:283–84. Tavares Bastos’s reputation among publicists of his generation is suggested by Verissimo, Historia, 389. If Otaviano spoke to resurgent Liberalism’s political articulation and mobilization over the 1850s, and José Bonifácio, o moço, exemplifies the party’s young reformists in the Chamber after 1860, Tavares Bastos’s writing and oratory spoke to a growing intellectual edge and specificity as the party challenged the nation’s status quo in the 1860s. 105. Ibid.,1:284. A subsequent electoral reform introduced in 1859 by Eusébio’s cousin, Sérgio, and passed with general Conservative support in 1860, enlarged each circle into a district electing three deputies, rather than a circle electing one; see F. B. Soares de Sousa, O sistema, 92ff. The reform represented a reasonable compromise between saquarema interest in recruiting a more elite, better known candidate and the opposition interest in local, more representative candidates. This compromise won widespread support; the opposition was largely Liberal; with twelve Conservative supporters, the vote was 24 versus 74 (ibid., 96). The Liberals sustained the original reform, hoping that it would increase their representation and fearing that the new reform was only a first step back towards the old system; see ibid., 94–96. 106. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:284, mentions only that Almeida Pereira became incompatible. Nabuco argues, instead, that the cabinet resigned because the saquaremas who controlled it wished the appointment of a saquarema cabinet to confront the mounting Liberal “subversion”; see Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:74–76.

Notes to Chapter 5 / 395 107. The political identification of Sá e Albuquerque is based on his appointments. Saraiva’s politics are well known. On both, see Nabuco, as cited below, and Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 223–24 and 292–93, respectively. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:287–88, characterizes the cabinet as one of party unity, containing all Conservative fractions. Nabuco argues that “the emperor did not want a pure [i.e., saquarema] Conservative cabinet,” referring to Saraiva and Sá e Albuquerque’s entrance; see Um estadista, 2:82. 108. M. de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. e Amo. [Rio,] 20 June 1861, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. 109. Same to same, [Rio,] 27 June 1861, ibid. 110. Caxias served as a calming counselor to Paranhos, torn between acting out of offended pride and holding back out of duty and political calculation; see M. de Caxias to Meu Amo., S. Clemente, 3 [Rio], 2 Feb. 1857, in ibid. and same to same, S. Clemente [Rio], 8 Feb. 1857, ibid., and cf. the same friendly concern with Paranhos’s political future in same to same, [Rio,] 19 Sept. 1862, ibid., in which he commends Paranhos’s independence of saquaremas. The distance from their old allies was clear and accepted. 111. See, Pedro II, “Diário do Imperador,” entries for 9,11, 21, 22,24, and, especially, 26 May. These demonstrate that Caxias apparently had reason to think that he could count upon a dissolution and he conveyed this to his ministers, who doubtless conveyed this to party leaders. Hence, the shock and humiliation of Caxias and the sense of betrayal among Conservatives. The entries also demonstrate the emperor’s preference for the solution of the Progressive League. On the Caxias’s cabinet’s problems with Parliament, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:288–97 and Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:82–94. 112. For Nabuco de Araújo’s role and the result, see ibid. 113. On this cabinet, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:297–301; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:95–96. Its duration length is disputed—see ibid.; Calmon,”O Conselheiro Zacarias,” 13; and Venâncio Filho, “Introdução,” 126–27. The emperor made it clear to Zacarias that he supported the idea of the League but that he would withhold his support until Zacarias secured a Chamber majority. He made this ambivalence clear on two different days in a way that suggests that he was obliquely pressuring Zacarias to “fix” the Chamber, despite his explicit warning that the minister should not use subornation; see Pedro II, “Diário,” entries for 21 and 22 May. There is a very disingenuous quality to this; it smacks of a desire for “deniability” regarding subornation, while making the latter indispensable. Particularly under these fractious circumstances, how could the emperor have expected Zacarias create a majority in a matter of days without egregious subornation? The diary also shows that the emperor was initially unsure about who should replace Zacarias after his failure; the two asked were Abaeté and Olinda. The emperor actually thought about recalling Caxias, but Abaeté cautioned him that such a move would suggest that the emperor had “set up” Zacarias and the League for a demonstration of weakness. Plainly, the choice between Abaeté, Olinda, and Caxias suggests again the emperor’s useless search for another Paraná—a statesman willing to serve the emperor’s ends and able to control the Chamber to make that possible. See ibid., entry for 29 May and cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 166–67 and idem, “Brazil at Mid-Empire,” 245, 265, 276–77. 114. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:301–2; he also notes that all factions in the Chamber initially supported the cabinet in the hope of its patronage. However, Nabuco (Um estadista, 2:96–97), notes that the cabinet was considered neutral but was clearly as-

396 / Notes to Chapter 5 sociated with the League, given Olinda’s past support for it and the links between his ministers and Nabuco de Araújo. 115. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:303–4, who notes that the 1862 session generally went placidly. The impression afterwards among Conservatives was that they had been intentionally lulled to sleep. Nabuco simply writes of the purge, dissolution’s necessity, and the dangers of its delay; see Um estadista, 2:97–99. 116. Christie was the English plenipotentiary at the Court. He made demands regarding incidents affecting English interests and honor dating back to 1861 and 1862 and used the English navy to interrupt commerce when his demands went unmet. It was assumed then that this show of force was designed by Christie to press his actual mission, the abolition of Brazilian slavery. While the cabinet paid an indemnity for one incident, it brought the other to international arbitration, which found in Brazil’s favor. When the English refused to accept the judgment, diplomatic relations were broken (1863–1865). See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:chap.18, passim; Graham, Britain and the Onset, 169–70; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 191, 205. As will be seen in Chapter Six, the most serious consequence may have been the impression the incident made on the emperor in terms of the threat the English posed so long as Brazil did not confront slavery’s abolition. The Conservatives’ manifest support in the Chamber throughout the crisis embittered their sense of betrayal later. 117. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:304,305,315–17,320; and Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:96–106. Neither discusses the dissolution as the emperor’s decision in the way done here (although Nabuco saw the League as the logical evolution of the Conciliation and both as phenomena the emperor personally promoted; see ibid., 2:75–76n.1). The decision goes without discussion in Barman’s Citizen Emperor or “Brazil at Mid-Empire.” Nabuco, quotes (Um estadista, 2:101n.1) the emperor, who admitted he was willing to grant a dissolution both because the election under Olinda would be non-partisan and because the Chamber’s majority, being Conservative, was opposed to the cabinet and thus undermining effective government. Again, this is rather disingenuous. Nabuco himself makes clear that Olinda’s cabinet was tilted towards the League; it was not nonpartisan. Indeed, it was favored precisely because its tilt was toward the “party” which the emperor fostered. As for the Chamber’s polarization and opposition being a justification for dissolution, this would have been painful news to Caxias. The reader will recall that manifested opposition by that same polarized Chamber had not satisfied the emperor’s criteria for dissolution when Caxias made his request (or when Zacarias did, for that matter) in 1862. The emperor had been willing to let Zacarias try to “fix” the Chamber and resign when he could not. Now, he apparently decided against repeating the same gambit with Olinda, doubtless fearing the same result. If he wanted Olinda to succeed, he needed to give him an amenable Chamber. This led to more hypocrisy. The emperor’s previous stated concern with dissolution because of the way in which Caxias’s cabinet might “fix” the elections, seems to have disappeared. Apparently, the issue had never been “fixing” the election, but the results of the “fix.” Indeed, the emperor’s concern with non-partisan appointments evaporated. He enabled Olinda’s purge of Conservatives, and the insertion of their anti-saquarema opposition. The emperor was comfortable with Olinda’s actions because they were likely to produce the electoral triumph of that opposition. Neither the emperor nor his prime minister were interested in a nonpartisan election; they were interested in one dominated by the new party that they both

Notes to Chapter 5 / 397 favored: an opportunist, non-ideological alliance of Conservative moderates and Liberals. The emperor’s diary makes it clear that he knew about the tilt of the 1862 provincial purges and the forthcoming request for dissolution; see Pedro II, “Diário,” 1862, 25, 31 August, 2,9,11,15,17,23 Sept. 118. Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:99–100, 102; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:316–17, 320. 119. For the election results and the new Chamber, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:320 and Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:107. For the purge and elections themselves, see Rodrigo [Augusto da Silva] to Snr. Conselheiro, S. Paulo, 4 August 1863, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1832; C. de Baependy to Meu caro amo., Sta. Rosa, 12 Sept. 1863, AN, AP23, 105; Henrique José Vieira et al. to Euzebio de Queiróz Coutinho Mattoso Camara, Cuiabá, 14 Nov. 1862, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1575. See, also, Lage Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chap. 13, passim, particularly Firmino’s comments (ibid., 264–66, 269–71, 272–74, 274–75, 278–79). Machado gives us a sense of the Senate during the early 1860s in “O velho Senado,” passim. Paranhos’s role will be taken up later. 120. On Olinda’s resignation, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 1:321; and Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:107–9. The political logic of the resignation is patent. Olinda’s cabinet represented nothing from the new Chamber—it had merely been the emperor’s instrument, and its purpose had been served. Pereira da Silva is more oblique; if edged: “The continuation of a cabinet of old and wasted men did not serve . . . [the Chamber]; [it was a cabinet] in which predominated something of a courtier spirit alien to their congress.” (Memorias, 1:321). On the cabinet consequently organized, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:108n.1; on Zacarias, see the celebrated portrait in ibid., 2:115–18 and the data in P. Calmon, “O Conselheiro,” 10–13; Venâncio Filho, “Introdução,” 17–26; and Machado de Assis, “O velho Senado,” 617. In the cabinet, Zacarias was minister of justice, Liberals took empire and finance. Foreign affairs went to a pernambucano friend and kinsman of Nabuco de Araújo, Francisco Xavier Paes Barreto. 121. The emperor’s attitude towards the Liberals was colored by his opposition to constitutional reform and the Liberals’ antagonism towards his role. Much of this antagonism was represented by Teófilo Otoni. Indeed, in 1831, he had triumphed as a provincial radical involved in the liberal opposition of the 1820s which had toppled the emperor’s father; in 1842, he had figured among the rebellious luzia chiefs, and, once amnestied, had returned to lead the Liberal majority in the mid-1840s Chamber. He had recently returned from a self-imposed political exile and had organized the Liberal electoral victories of 1860 and 1863. The emperor, in turn, had twice blocked Otoni’s ascent to the Senate and any possibility of Otoni’s presence in a cabinet. See Barman, Citizen Emperor, 189–92; cf. Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:71–75, 106–109,118–21. Zacarias’s cabinet resigned when it unexpectedly lost a vote to the Liberals over a minor question; the vote manifested the struggle between the League’s two components, which would tincture and complicate the next three years (see ibid., 2:129–31). Pereira da Silva (Memorias, 2:17–18) claims that Zacarias attempted to replace the minister embarrassed by the Chamber’s vote, but that the emperor preferred not to reshuffle the cabinet. Zacarias took this as a sign of a lack of confidence, and offered to resign. The emperor accepted, and then replaced Zacarias with the very man Zacarias had proposed as a new minister—Furtado. Both the emperor and Zacarias had chosen a man amenable to themselves and popular in the Chamber, where he had been elected president, suggesting that he was palatable to progressistas and Liberals alike. Most important, his personal status was

398 / Notes to Chapter 5 the sort the emperor liked. In the Liberal Quinquennium of the 1840s and the postParaná 1850s, the prime ministers were similar—rarely men of independent strength, or figures of vigorous partisan leadership. Neither was Furtado. If the emperor had wanted to provide the Liberals with a strong leader in 1865, he could have chosen Otoni or Otaviano. One assumes, then, that Furtado was preferred over them precisely because of his relative inexperience and lack of established leadership. He offered no threat. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:133, 135; cf. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:20. The point was made clearer with the cabinet: of the four men Furtado suggested, two refused (Otaviano and Martinho de Campos) and two were rejected by the emperor (Otoni and Sousa Franco); see ibid., 2:19. All of Furtado’s nominees were his political superiors and might well have strengthened him and the cabinet, but none joined him; it was clear what the emperor had in mind. 122. On the cabinet’s weakness, note the analysis in n.121, above; those who joined novice Furtado were novices as well, except for Carlos Carneiros de Campos, later third visconde de Caravelas. On the banking crisis, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:131–41; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:21–23; Caldeira, Mauá, chap.35. The crisis in the Platine region degenerated into the War of the Triple Alliance (the Paraguayan War), to be dealt with in Chapter Six. On Furtado’s fall, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:239; and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:39. 123. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:40–42, 59–61; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:239–45, 355–63,404,408–15. 124. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:62–64, 76; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:1–3. This third Zacarias cabinet was made up of two old hands and three relative novices and was regionally diverse: Zacarias took Finance and accepted Ferraz from the previous cabinet to ensure continuity in War; two more northerners took Empire and Justice. Foreign Affairs went to a paulista Liberal scion and Navy to a mineiro. 125. Ibid., 3:108. 126. See the quotations from Rodrigues da Silva, established saquarema publicist, taken from the party journal Constitucional, in Lages Mascarenhas, Um jornalista, chap.13, passim.

Chapter 6 1. Paulino’s preparation and his father’s oversight have been noted in Chapter Five. On his oratory and his persona, see Paulino, Annaes, 1858, t.1, 29 May, 141; Paulino, “Ao Sr. ministro do Imperio,” JC, 9 August 1871, 1; M. Azevedo, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 794–95; Ferreira Rezende, Minhas recordações, 277–78. 2. Paulino’s grandson notes that Paulino refused the 1861 portfolio after “his father judged him still very young to be a minister,” (P. J. Soares de Souza Neto, “Conselheiro Paulino,”492). Paulino was only twenty-seven; Uruguai had refused a ministry in early 1835, when he, too, was only twenty-seven (J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 46). 3. Visconde do Uruguay to [Carvalho Moreira,] Rio, 13 Nov. 1859, AHI, APP:Uruguay; P. J. Soares de Souza Neto, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 493–95; A. P. Soares de Souza, “Tres brasileiros illustres,” 52. 4. Paulino and most Conservatives were victims of the fraud and violence of the election of 1863. Given his position by 1867, he probably followed the advice Uruguai dispensed to others during these hard years: “The Conservative party needs to rehabilitate

Notes to Chapter 6 / 399 itself . . . in my view it is appropriate to conserve what Conservative strength is possible for what may be possible and for what may come, even if [that strength] is dispersed and in embryo . . . loyal Conservative chieftains must not fall apart and allow themselves to be destroyed, [instead, they must] remain united and attentive for what awaits. Nothing else is possible . . .” (Visconde do Uruguay to Joaquim Pedro de Melo, [Rio,] [c. June 1863], quoted in toto in J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, 619). Paulino’s efforts are indicated in Paulino to Primo e amo. [Francisco Belisário Soares de Sousa], Novo Friburgo, 7 Jan. 1862, in IHGB, Coleção Francisco Belisário [hereafter, CFB], lata 277, pasta 71no. 1; and same to same, Cantagalo, 24 June 1863, ibid., no.21; and same to same, [Rio,] 14 April 1865, ibid., no.4. 5. Visconde do Uruguay to [Paulino,] Paris, 30 Nov. 1855, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, 11/48. 6. P. J. S. de Souza to Meo caro Sr. Conselheiro, Rio, 10 August 1857, [typescript copies in] ibid., lata 10, pasta 2, no.4. 7. P. J. S. de Souza to [Carvalho Moreira], Cantagallo, 23 Sept. 1857, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, lata 10, pasta 2, no.5. 8. Ibid. 9. Same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 13 Feb. 1858, ibid., no.6. 10. Ibid. 11. See, e.g., same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 7 Nov. 1858, ibid., no.7. 12. Paulino’s wife inherited Val de Palmas (see P. J. Soares de Souza Neto, “Conselheiro,” 493): his grandson emphasizes Paulino’s presence there and identity as a planter (see ibid.). 13. On Paraná and Paranhos, see Chapter Five. On Paranhos, Paraná, and the Conservatives, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 1:167–68. Cf. Visconde de Paraná to Illm. Sr. Commendador, Rio, 12 Nov. 1852, IHGB, CLT, lata 748, pasta 18, from Alvarenga Peixoto, Apontamentos, 25–27; Marquez de Caxias to Illmo. Exmo. Sr. Dr. e Amo. Valença, 19 Jan. 1853, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço, 4, pasta 1; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to J. J. Teixeira Junior, [Rio,] 2 June 1861, copy by Leão Teixeira in IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 76, no.88; Diogo to Primo Euzebio, Pirahy, 7 Feb. 1853, AN, AP07, caixa 6, pacote 1, PM 1362; Franco. de Paula Negros. Sayão Lobato to Meu estmo. Compr. e Sr., Sorocaba, 18 March 1854, ibid., caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1035. Two of the significant fluminense figures opposing Paranhos and Paraná in the 1850s were I. F. Silveira da Mota and Sayão Lobato, both very close to Eusébio. Their enmity may go back to past provincial conflicts in which Silveira da Mota defended the Carneiro da Silva interests against Paranhos, then provincial vice president (1854), Sayão Lobato spoke for the Teixeira Leite family’s interests against Paraná and his cabinet (of which Paranhos was a member, of course); see Silva Gouvêa, “Politics,” 242–44, and Chapter Five and this chapter, below. Finally, both partisan veterans were bloodied in the fluminense 1840s, when Paranhos served Aureliano, then provincial president, in his attacks on the saquarema heartland. 14. See Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, chap.1 and Chapter Four, nn.97–98 (for additional references). 15. See Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, chaps. 2–5, passim. On the emperor’s first impression, see [Dom Pedro II] to Condessa [de Barral], Rio, 2 Nov. 1880, AHMI, 3.1.880, PII. B.c 1. DBN. In the debates of the era, Paranhos’s talents and rapid rise were often extolled in introducing speeches which then attacked his character. One senses prejudices against Paranhos as an arriviste. Nabuco has provided the assessment of versatile talent

400 / Notes to Chapter 6 (see n.13, above) accepted by posterity. On the patronage to Uruguai, see Visconde do Uruguay to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Paranhos], particular, Paris, 1 Sept. 1855, AHI, APVRB, lata 319, maço 5. On the cabinets and policies favored by the emperor in the 1850s and 1860s, and Paranhos’s relationship with Caxias, see Chapter Five. 16. On this paragraph and many of the observations just below in the text, see Chapter Four, nn.96–98. 17. See Taunay, O Visconde, chaps.5–8, passim; Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:165–89; Teixeira Soares, Diplomácia do Império, 231–53; Viana Filho, A vida do Barão, 24–26; Whigham, Paraguayan War, 231–37. See, also, M. de Caxias to Meu Compe. e Amo., Rio, 6 March 1865, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1; Pera. da Sa. to Exmo. Amo. e Snr. Cola., Paris, 10 April 1865, AHI, APVRB, lata 321, maço 1, pasta 10; Eusebio de Queirós C.M.C. to Meu Bom Amigo e Collega., n.p., n.d., ibid., lata 320, maço 3, pasta 19. Paranhos compelled the surrender of Montevideo and the installation of a client government without direct use of force. Liberals and other enemies of Paranhos successfully reversed the positive response to this feat by a rapid public campaign, arguing that Brazilian honor should have been redeemed by the bombardment of the Uruguayan capital. Pereira da Silva recalled that the emperor was unhappy that the convention signed did not explicitly address Brazilian complaints (see idem, Memorias, 2:28–31). 18. Eusebio de Queirós CMC to Meo bom Amigo e Collega, [n.p., n.d.], AHI, APVRB, lata 320, maço 3, pasta 19; see, also, Rodrigo to Meo Pae, S. Paulo, 15 April [1865], AN, AP07, caixa 6, pacote 1, PM 1450. 19. Machado de Assis, “O velho Senado,” 619. See, also, Paranhos, JC, 9 June 1865, 2; and M. de Caxias to Meu Compe. e Amo., 6 March 1865, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. 20. Zacarias’s and the emperor’s appreciation for Paranhos is suggested by the fact that Zacarias apparently asked him to join his cabinet (he was refused) (see M. de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. [Rio,] 11 Sept. 1866, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1), after nominating him councillor of state (see Taunay, Visconde, 69–70). At the time, the Council of State was made up of Olinda, Abaeté, Cândido José de Araújo Viana (then, visconde de Sapucaí), Montesuma (then, visconde de Jequitinhonha), Itaboraí, Eusébio, Pimenta Bueno (not yet visconde de São Vicente), and Souza Franco. Paranhos was appointed with Ferraz, Nabuco de Araújo, Domiciano Leite Ribeiro, Luís Pedreira do Couto Ferraz, and Torres Homem; see [Javarí,] Organizações, 426–27. 21. On Uruguai’s decline and death, see J. A. Soares de Souza, A vida, chap. 23; A. P. Soares de Souza, “Tres brasileiros,” 43–44; JC, 16 July 1866, 2 and ibid., 23 July 1866, 1; on his economic status, see Visconde do Uruguai to Exmo. Ao. e Sr. [Paranhos], particular, Paris, 15 Sept. 1855, AHI, APVRB, lata 319, maço 5; Paulino [draft] to Marques de Olinda, [Rio,] 25 June 1866, IHGB, AVU, lata 9, no.4,7, and Visconde de Abaeté to Illma. e Exma. Sra. [Viscondesa do Uruguai], Rio, 5 Sept. 1866, ibid., no. 8. See, also, the “inventorio,” in ibid., lata 3, pasa 14, nos 11, 12; “Catologo do Esplendido Leilão . . . 1 de Outubro de 1867,” in ibid. Regarding Uruguai’s Ensaio, see, e.g., Oliveira Tôrres, Os construtores, chap.8, sec.1 and Murilo de Carvalho, “Paulino,” 2; cf. [Dom Pedro II,] “Diário . . . 1862,” entries for 30 Jan., 27 Feb. 22. “Preambulo,” v–xxii, passim. For the context, see Uruguai’s correspondence, with Carvalho Moreira, Eusébio; his uncle, Belisário; and his son, Paulino, all cited in Chapter Five. The presence of both Vasconcelos and of Guizot (as Murilo de Carvalho

Notes to Chapter 6 / 401 has recently argued, in the article cited in n.21, above) is explicit in citations and implicit in much of the analysis; see Ensaio, 1:6n.1, 139–41n.1, 221, 261–63, 294, 295, 300, 301; 2:153–56. 23. This exceptionalism, so clear in Vasconcelos (see Chapter Three) is manifest in Ensaio, 1:104ff, 111–13, 127–28, 2:7–8ff, 155, 165ff, chap.31, especially, 275–76. One’s references to speeches and reports of the 1830s and 1840s have to do with Uruguai’s championship of the Interpretation of the Additional Act in the Chamber (see Chapter Two) and his reports as minister of justice in the early 1840s (noted in Chapters Three and Four). This idea of the state as having a civilizing mission with respect to Brazilian society has been emphasized as a Party of Order perspective in Chapter Four. Its resonance with the post-Enlightenment statist interventionism elsewhere in Latin America (e.g., Sarmiento in Argentina, Alamán and Gutiérrez de Estrada in Mexico), is both obvious and striking, as is its linkages to the post-Pombaline statist perspective general among Coimbra magistrates about which Silva Dias wrote. See, e.g., the study of Enlightenment statism in Góngora, Studies; and, on specific national-period instances, the classical analysis of Romero, A History, pts. 1–2, passim; and of Hale, Mexican Liberalism, 17–32, 263–89, 294–97; more recent studies include Costeloe, The Central Republic, chaps.2,7, especially, 38–39,170–72, also, 284–86; and Brading, The First America, chaps. 21,28. The author’s debt to Silva Dias, “Interiorização,” is clear in Needell, “Party Formation” and Chapter Two, here. Readers will also recognize suggestions along these lines in both Murilo de Carvalho (Construção, chap.3, passim) and Barman (Brazil, chaps.1,2, especially 32–33, 49ff). 24. Here, Uruguai returns to the great themes of the Party of Order and his 1840s justice relatórios, as suggested above in n.23. See, e.g., Ensaio, 1:114,256n.1; 2:chap.30. 25. See ibid., 1:115, 131–33, 246–47; 2:33–34, 165ff, and chaps.27,28. 26. Uruguai makes a nearly oblique reference to the Liberal attacks on the emperor’s role as they began to develop in the early 1860s (see Chapter Five). He does this in a note—in the text, Uruguai maintains the apolitical character of the Ensaio. This use of the note for the current political furor both muffles his partisanship and strengthens it at the same time, by effectively dismissing the Liberal arguments as marginal. The significance of the debate was something contemporary readers would obviously know. Note, too, his care to cite Paulino’s (and others’)defense of the emperor’s role against such Liberal and progressista champions as Martinho de Campos, Landulpho, Tito Franco, Otaviano, Furtado, José Bonifácio (o moço), Saldanha Marinho, and Zacarias in Ensaio, 2:33–34n.1, chap.28, passim, 238n.1, 148–49, 151, 151–56. 27. See Chapter Three, here. 28. For the reforms and their purpose, see Uruguay, Ensaio, 2:chaps.30, 31. The discussion of the moderating power, the monarch, and the appropriate separation of powers takes up ibid., 2:chaps. 27–29. The Ensaio’s first volume is where Uruguai lays out the distinctions appropriate to an efficient, constitutional state. Uruguai’s assumptions regarding the monarch seem to be particular to many of the elder statesmen of his party (except Vasconcelos—the first emperor’s antagonist, after all). One never finds a criticism of the emperor in Uruguai’s correspondence or public discourse. The necessity and centrality of the monarch was a deeply held value, and the Constitution explicitly excluded the monarch from censure. This monarchism is also suggested by superficial phenomena (e.g., Uruguai’s pride at being seated “at the right hand of El Rey Dom Pe-

402 / Notes to Chapter 6 dro I” in Lisbon) and analytic conclusions (e.g., Uruguai’s account of Brazilian history in his interview with the Pope, in which the abdication of Dom Pedro I is portrayed as catastrophic and the ascent of Dom Pedro II as the essential element in national recovery). For these matters, see Visconde do Uruguay to [Paulino,] Lisbon, 7 April 1855, IHGB, AVU, lata 4, pasta 14, no.4/41; and same to [Paranhos], Paris, 5 April 1856, AHI, APVRB, lata 321, maço 2, pasta 1, respectively. Yet, Uruguai was fully capable of condemning a poorly-run monarchy, which lacked the “ordered liberty” he prized in his own. He condemned the notorious Bourbon regime in Naples as “o Paraguay da Europa,” writing “The conviction that modern civilization, broad economic theories and a well ordered liberty are compatible with royal power, strong and protective of all interests, cannot yet penetrate there.” (see ibid.). 29. Paulino’s political analysis of the era is clear in his speeches in 1871 (see Chapter Seven, here) and is anticipated in his correspondence and speeches of the 1850s and early 1860s (see, e.g., Paulino Je. S. de Souza to Meu caro Sr. Conselheiro [Carvalho Moreira], Rio 13 May 1857, IHGB, AVU, lata 10, pasta 2, no.3; Paulino de Souza, Annaes, 1858, t.2, 23 June, 251–58; idem, Annaes, 1860, t.2, 6 July 1860, 67–68). His personal despair is recalled by P. J. Soares de Souza Neto, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 495–96. Uruguai’s political relations with the province were generally from Rio and indirect (initially through Evaristo da Veiga, Itaboraí, Lacerda Werneck, and, most important, his wife’s kin). The electoral reform of 1853 and the consequent local focus of political organization meant that Paulino’s career depended not only on his Corte relations but his personal fluminense network, enhanced by his planter status and milieu. 30. Machado de Assis, “O velho Senado,” 616. This translation benefited from the advice of M. Fátima Lima Maia de Needell. For Eusébio’s later years, see Mattoso Ribeiro, Apontamentos, 75. On Eusébio’s political involvement in fluminense elections, the latest notice found here is 1862: see Ignacio Francisco Silveira da Mota to Exmo. Amo. e Snr., Quissimá, 5 Feb. 1862, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1672. The 1863 correspondence is more in the way of political news: see Rodrigo to Snr. Conselheiro, S. Paulo, 4 August 1863, in ibid., PM 1632. In 1862, Eusébio himself confirmed his decline in political influence; see his marginal notes to Henrique José Vieira, et al., to Eusebio de Queiróz Coutinho Mattoso Camara, Cuiabá, 14 Nov. 1862, ibid., PM 1575. 31. The project for the statue was initiated in 1854, the era of saquarema mobilization against the Conciliation (see Chapter Five). It was begun by saquarema clients and chieftains and undertaken by a committee headed by Eusébio and dominated by select saquaremas. It was explicitly conceived of as an affirmation of the monarchy as constitutional and representative—an implicit condemnation of the Conciliation’s impact— note that neither Paraná nor anyone else associated with the Conciliation Cabinet was involved. The statue’s 1862 completion brought a scandalous attack by the históricos (particularly T. Otoni), true to the liberal opposition of the 1820s. They would have none of the saquaremas’ sanitized historical memory, which elided the first emperor’s absolutism and celebrated him only as the source of a stable, representative regime of balanced powers dominating a half-continent. See JC, 8 Nov. 1854, 2; JC, 26 March 1862, 2; JC, 28 March 1862, 1–2; JC, 29 March 1862, 1–2; JC, 30 March 1862, 1; JC, 31 March 1862, 1; AL, 1854, 254; AL, 1862, 321; Ignacio Fco. Silveira da Mota to [Eusébio,] Matto de Pipa, 16 Jan. 1862, in AN, AP07, caixa 4, pacote único, PM 1072; Needell, “Comments.” 32. On Dom Pedro I’s abolitionism, see Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 147–48; for other

Notes to Chapter 6 / 403 early abolitionists, see Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, pt. 3, chaps.1,2, passim. Dom Pedro II’s early abolitionism is noted in Pinto de Campos, JC, 31 August 1871, 2–3. The origins of, and foreign influence on, Brazil’s 1871 abolitionist legislation have not been resolved in the historiography. The impact of the United States Civil War is emphasized in Conrad, Destruction, 67–68, 70–71, 81; in ibid., 74, Conrad cites its impact on Dom Pedro II specifically (drawing on Lyra, História, 2:235–36). Conrad’s comments alleging a growing popular or elite abolitionism are based on diplomatic reports by abolitionist Englishmen (thus evidence questionable on its face) and a dubious reading of the significance of Wanderley and Tavares Bastos. Toplin, The Abolition, 41–46, also emphasizes the United States’ case and rising abolitionist sentiment but refers to abolitionist sources (hardly an impartial basis for judgment) and elides the significance of the emperor. Graham disputes both popular or elite support for abolition in the 1860s, and explicitly dismisses the importance of the United States Civil War; see “Causes,” 131. The emperor’s views are best analyzed in Barman, Citizen Emperor, 163, 194ff, where he makes it clear that the main impact of United States events was the problem of moral and political isolation (ibid., 195). The evidence cited for a significant abolitionist movement in the 1860s (as Barman suggests, in ibid., 195–96, joining Conrad and Toplin, as cited just above) is simply inadequate. Indeed, as we shall see, the emperor was moving very much against public opinion, as Barman’s analysis itself suggests (ibid., 194–95). Finally, although regional distinctions regarding slaveholding had emerged, they did not represent the dramatic distinctions in society or politics obvious in the United States by 1860. Regional distinctions became important, but not in the same way—there were ardent opponents of abolition among the Northeastern political chieftains and their constituencies, as we shall see. On the regional distinctions that did exist, in slaveholding and in export production, see the contemporary report in JC, 21 August 1870, 3–4. 33. For the greater significance of English intervention, see Graham, “Causes,” 130– 33; idem, Britain and the Onset, 169–70; Conrad, Destruction, 43, 70, 73; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 191, 195. On the Christie Affair itself, see Chapter Five, n.116. 34. Pedro II to Zacarias, quoted in Barman, Citizen Emperor, 195. On Perdigão Malheiro’s family connections, see Genealogical Table IV. On his career, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:18–19. A lawyer since his São Paulo degree (1849), he was a deputy for Minas in 1869–1872. On the speech, see Conrad, Destruction, 73–74. The Order of Brazilian Advocates was dominated by abolitionists from early on; see Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:24–25. The emperor’s primacy and driving force behind the abolitionist project and the way in which prominent men sympathetic to the idea took their cue from the monarch is clear in ibid., 2:388–90. Nabuco, an abolitionist and a contemporary, also makes it clear there that public opinion had nothing to do with the project’s origins, contradicting more recent historians (see n.32, above, and cf. Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:389 and 3:21–22, 26–27). For the “free womb,” and its legislative history in Brazil, see, also, ibid., 3:27–42. The concept derives principally from an 1858 Portuguese precedent. 35. See ibid., 2:389–95 and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:75–76. See, also, Barman, Citizen Emperor, 208. 36. See the citations in n.34, above. Barman argues that the emperor was the source of the project, but does not address the constitutional question, emphasizing the political difficulties, instead (Barman, Citizen Emperor, 195, 208). 37. Constituição, cap.4, art. 53.

404 / Notes to Chapter 6 38. Ibid., cap. 4, art.52. 39. Ibid., cap.4, arts.53–70. On all of these matters, see Rodrigues de Sousa, Analyse, 1:75–77, 249–51; Pimenta Bueno, Direito, 32–34, 40–41, 49–50, 112, 139–40, 144–45, 207–8, 232. 40. See Zacarias’s account in JC, 7 Sept. 1871, 2 and JC, 14 Sept. 1871, 1. 41. As the text will show, there was a second meeting, as well. Both are in the atas for 2 and 9 April 1867 in Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 6:171–253. 42. Ibid.,6: 171–72. 43. Ibid., 6:176–218. 44. Ibid., 6:196. 45. Paranhos’s opinion is in ibid., 6:189–201; signatures are listed in ibid., 6:218. A careful reading of the opinions suggest five councilors supported the project (Torres Homem, Sousa Franco, Jequitinhonha, São Vicente, and Nabuco de Araújo); the bare majority of six (i.e., Olinda, Muritiba, Itaboraí, Eusébio, Abaeté, and Paranhos) either opposed the project or resisted strenuously and in considered detail. The cabinet ministers said nothing; they were there to be advised. Cf. Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:42–43. 46. Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 6: 219. 47. Ibid., 6:222–23. 48. Ibid., 6:223. Paranhos’s complete opinion is in ibid., 6:223–30. 49. On the committee members, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:65. Nabuco notes that São Vicente, as author of the first projects, was invited to attend, and that Nabuco de Araújo was, in effect, the most responsible for what the committee produced (see ibid., 3:65–68ff). On the legislative permutations and influences, see ibid., 3:68–74. On São Vicente’s political position, see the text here, below. On that of Jequitinhonha, see ibid., 3:44. The latter’s abolitionism dates from at least 1865 (Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:455). Although Jequitinhonha had talents and positions (he was one of the era’s great orators, a veteran of Independence, a Regency statesman, the founder of the Order of Brazilian Advocates in 1843, a member of the IHGB, and a senator), his perennial opposition, political inconsistency, and notorious venality doubtless undercut his credibility. One finds no evidence that his obvious African descent played a role in this choice one way or the other (see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 257–58 and Sisson, Galeria, 2:115–43). 50. Falas, 334. 51. On the shock in Parliament, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 2:38, 3:65–66; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:75–76. The official Chamber committee response, reflecting majority support for the cabinet, was actually supportive, if cautious; that of the Senate (a committee made up entirely of Conservatives, i.e., São Lourenço, Muritiba, and Paranhos) was a carefully crafted statement of alarm: see JC, 28 May 1867, 1 and JC, 30 May 1867, 1, for each, respectively. Pereira da Silva (see citation above) notes that resistance was led by the Senate but articulated in the Chamber, as well. A taste of the Chamber’s divisions and the two radical (Liberal and saquarema) fractions’ hostility is evident in one of the first debates on the fala (see JC, 10 June 1867,1); see, also, Paulino de Souza, JC, 15 July 1867, 1. 52. See Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” especially 98–124, upon which this and the next two paragraphs’ account and analysis rely, along with Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:104–18 and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:chap.4 53. The reference to Zacarias’s 1860 position is to his published call for the

Notes to Chapter 6 / 405 monarch’s being limited by the policies and direction of the cabinet (Da natureza; see Chapter Five). By 1868, Zacarias had effectively reversed that principle in practice. Nabuco and Wanderley Pinho (see n. 52 citations, passim) suggest Zacarias sought both independence and domination but was willing to sacrifice the former to secure the latter. 54. The war’s narrative is laid out up to 1866 in Whigham, Paraguayan War. See, also, Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:chaps.2–7, passim, and Castro Magalhães, ed., A Guerra, chaps. [1–4]; particularly Bethell (chaps.1,2). Caxias’s relations with Paranhos were discussed in Chapter Five. 55. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 197, 199, 200–1, 206, 211. 56. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:66–67, 69–70, 71–73. 57. Ibid., 2:70–71. Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 58, 59–65; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:90–91; and Zacarias, quoted in ibid., 3:109–10. The enmity between Ferraz and Caxias dated from the former’s opposition to Caxias’s cabinet in 1862. Caxias indicates that Zacarias had been willing to offer War to Paranhos, who refused, in M. de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. [Paranhos], Flamengo [Rio], 11 Sept. 1866, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. 58. Considerable light on Caxias’s approach and perspective is in M. de Caxias to Compe. e Amo., Týutý, 7 Dec. 1866, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1; same to same, Tyutuy [sic], 6 April 1867, ibid. Between Caxias’s departure and resignation threat, relations between the Conservatives and the progressistas had steadily deteriorated. Surely, the abolitionist project must have colored these. The April 1867 Council of State resistance to it involved Caxias’s intimate friend, Paranhos; the May Senate attack on the project was led by Paranhos. Even before the Council of State meeting, Paranhos had begun oblique pressure on the cabinet; he did so in political journalism as early as March (see, e.g., Z de Góes Vasconcellos to Illmo. Exmo. Sr. Consro. Paranhos, Rio, 30 March 1867, ibid.; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Conselheiro Zacarais, Rio, 31 March 1867, AHMI, I.-ZGV–31.3.867 -RB.C1–5). Before the Senate response to the abolition issue, Paranhos wrote frankly to Zacarias that his concern with it was not partisan, but personal (see same to same, [Rio,] 22 May 1867, in ibid.). In effect, during the legislative session the Conservatives, not least Paranhos, were very much in opposition to the cabinet (see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:75). Caxias’s opinion of the cabinet’s Paraguayan criticism derived from articles published by the paid press linked to the cabinet (see ibid., 2:84 and William Scully to His Excellency the President of the Council, etc. etc. etc., Rio de Janeiro, 17 Jan 1868, AHMI, I-ZGV–17.1.868 -Scu.c), private correspondence (which this author has not seen), and his interpretation of the cabinet’s denials and a recent memorandum by the minister of war (see the letter from Caxias to Paranaguá, minister of war, quoted in Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 65–66n.2, from the transcription in Suetonio, O antigo, 88–91, 92–93). The memorandum and letter are also quoted in toto in Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 7:336–41, and suggest that Suetonio’s copy was incomplete. One wonders how much Paranhos’s hostility to the cabinet and his own experience of betrayal in similar circumstances in 1864–1865 colored his advice and Caxias’s perception. See Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 70–81; cf. Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 7:355. 59. Interpretation of these crucial events here and through to the end of this section varies. This is a synthesis of the best secondary sources (Nabuco, Wanderley Pinho, and Barman), Pereira da Silva, and the ata, as well as an informed sense of the personalities

406 / Notes to Chapter 6 involved. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:109–16; Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 65–84; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 219–20; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:84; Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 7:335–58. 60. See [Paranhos, et al.] to Illmo. e Exmo. e Amigo e Sr. Marquez de Caxias, Particular e reservada, Côrte do Rio de Janeiro, 23 Feb. 1868, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. The minister of war’s letter is quoted in Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 68 [n.2]; in ibid., 78–80n.3 the draft cited above from the AHI is published as a letter signed by the visconde de São Vicente, barão de Muritiba, barão de Bom Retiro and José Maria da Silva Paranhos. Caxias’s response is Marquez de Caxias to Illmos. Snrs. Consos. Visconde de S. Vicente, et al., Tuju Cué, 19 March 1868, AHMI, POB M 142 Doc.6973 (this is probably a copy made for the emperor; the original is in AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1). See, also, M. de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. e amo. [Paranhos], Espinhola, 24 March 1868, ibid. 61. On the impact of the war, particularly with respect to the emperor, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:88–89; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:112–15; Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 89–93, 121–23; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 220–21. For the Conservative appraisal of the situation, see J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Exmo. amigo e Sr. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio, 29 Feb 1868, quoted in toto in Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 71–72; Wanderley to Exmo. Amo. Sr. Paranhos, Bahia [Salvador], 10 March 1868, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to [Cotegipe,] Rio, 23 March [1868], in Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 73–74. Note, especially, Paranhos’s concern with the emperor’s support in ibid. If Zacarias expected a more muted Conservative opposition after the reconciliation with Caxias, he was quickly disabused; see Z. de Góes e Vasconcellos to Exmo. Amo. Snr. Conselheiro [Paranhos], Rio, 9 March 1868, AHI, APVRB, lata 321, maço 4, pasta 1; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Conselheiro, Rio, 9 March 1868, AHMI—ZGV–93.868-RB.C 1–2; same to same, Rio, 9 March 1868, ibid. On the rumors of the cabinet’s proximate fall, see [Pedro] Leão Veloso to Paranaguá, Ceará [Fortaleza], 12 March 1868, ibid., DPP–3.2.868.Vel.c.1–5 (P.P. CE); on the public political mood at the beginning of the session, see J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Exmo. Compe. Amo. e Sr. Marquez, Rio, 19 [or 14] May 1868, AN, AP32, no.5; on the ongoing rumors about the February crisis, see Z. de Góes e Vasconcellos to Illmo Exmo. Senr. Marquez de Caxias, Rio, 6 July 1868, ibid., no.6. 62. Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 119–23. 63. This is speculation based on the speeches and part of the analysis in ibid., 101, 102, 121–25; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:116–18; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 221–22; cf. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:87–88. Nabuco (Um estadista, 3:118) cited direct evidence that the emperor’s primary motivation was the war. 64. Zacarias, quoted in Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 105. 65. Eunapío Deiro to Meu caro Sr. Barão de Cotegipe, Bahia [Salvador], 15 July [1868], quoted in toto in ibid., 119–20. 66. Cotegipe in the Senate, 30 June 1868, quoted in ibid., 106. 67. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:114–15; Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 98–105. 68. Silveira da Mota in the Senate, 30 June 1868, quoted in ibid., 112–13. This Silveira da Mota, the brother of Eusébio’s kinsman, was a saquarema maverick, as an outspoken abolitionist. 69. Itaboraí, quoted in ibid., 114–15.

Notes to Chapter 6 / 407 70. See Menezes, José de Alencar, 250; visconde de Itaboraí, quoted in [Javarí,] Organizações, 151n.1; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:88–89; and the emperor’s marginalia in Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:118n.1; and Nabuco, ibid., 3:117–18; cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 222–23. 71. On Antão, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 284–85. 72. Alencar, now better known than his father, is so as Brazil’s pre-eminent Romantic novelist, not as a statesman. See Machado de Assis, “A estátua de José de Alencar” in Obra completa, 2:602–3; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:73–81 [both Alencars]; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 307; Menezes, Alencar; Magalhães Júnior, José de Alencar; and Viana Filho, A vida de José de Alencar; Antonio Candido, Formação, 2:408–9. Alencar is the failed contrast to Machado de Assis in Schwarz’s celebrated Ao vencedor. On C. A. Soares, see Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 40–41; and Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:2–3. 73. See Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, chap.5 and Barbosa, “Prefácio,” to Alencar, Ao correr, 15–16,18–21. The Corréio Mercantil championed Paraná and was a stable of political talent: it had housed not only Otaviano but Paranhos, Torres Homem, and Sousa Franco. On Alencar’s literary emergence, see Broca, Ensaios, 160–63. 74. Alencar, Ao correr, 179. Alencar’s ambivalence towards the cabinet is exemplified in ibid., 174ff. Alencar and Eusébio may have met in the more worldly, literary circles both frequented by late 1855; see Viana Filho, A vida de José de Alencar, 56–57. 75. See Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 138–39, 142–45; José Martiniano de Alencar to Illmo. Exmo. Amigo e Snr. Conselheiro, Ceará [Fortaleza], 31 Jan. 1861, AN, AP07, caixa 7, pacote 1, PM 1742. 76. On the 1863–1868 era and the League, see Chapter Five. Alencar’s pamphlets are in Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:74–81: Ao Imperador: cartas politicas do Erasmo (1865), Ao Imperador: novas cartas politicas do Erasmo (1866), Ao povo: cartas politicas do Erasmo; Ao Marquez de Olinda, ao Visconde de Itaborahy: carta sobre a crise financeira (1866), Paginas de actualidade: os partidos (1866), Uma these constitucional (1867), and O Systema representativo (1868); see, also, Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, chap.19. 77. Alencar’s marriage followed his failure to win Francisca Calmon Nogueira Vale da Gama, an even more impressive “catch.” This blow and his life in high society had marked impact upon his oeuvre. See Wanderley Pinho, Salões, 170–77; and Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, chap. 17. Note that Alencar’s wife was Francisca’s cousin (see, ibid., 168). For the Cochranes, see ibid., 168–69. His father-in-law was among those Alencar attacked for speculative improprieties in the mid-1850s. 78. See Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 212–13; Broca, Ensaios 164–65. Alencar ms., written August 1868 and quoted in toto in Menezes, Alencar, 249–50. Menezes plausibly suggests that the nomination was Paulino’s. Alencar suggests the nomination was due at least partly to avoid the ascent of another, unnamed candidate (probably the emperor’s, the most plausible possibility for someone who could impose someone on Itaboraí, undisputed chieftain of the party at the time): “I understood that it was this . . . reason which made me necessary to the cabinet; it was indispensable that I take the place, which in my absence would be occupied by another. I must sacrifice myself to avoid an imposition upon the [Cabinet’s] organizers, against which I would serve as an argument.” (Menezes, Alencar, 249–50). 79. Cotegipe, quoted in Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 329.

408 / Notes to Chapter 6 80. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:88–92, 95; and, especially, Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:118–50, 187–96; cf. Wanderley Pinho, “O incidente,” 124–28 and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 222–24. NB that the Liberal leaders urged abstention in the election that followed the Chamber’s dissolution. Note, as well, the difficulties some of the Liberals and progressistas had upon climbing into bed together (e.g., Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:131). 81. J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Exmo. e Sr. Conselheiro, S.C. [i.e., Sua Casa], 20 Aug. 1868, IHGB, CN, lata 365, pasta 8, no. 13. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:131,n.2. 82. On the course of the war here and below, see the appropriate source cited in n. 54, above, as well as Barman, Citizen Emperor, 225–30. On the last months of the war, see the correspondence cited in n.83. 83. See M.de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. Amo. e Senr. Conselheiro Paranhos, VillaFranca, 10 Sept. 1868, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4 pasta 1; same to same, Agatha Pê, 16 Sept. 1868, in ibid.; same to same, Assumpção, 14 Jan. 1869, ibid.; same to same, Montevideo, 8 Feb. 1869, ibid.; D. de Caxias to Compe. e Amo., Tijuca, 29 March 1869, ibid.; D. de Caxias to Exmo. Compe. e Amo., Quissaman, 13 Jan. 1870, ibid.; cf. V. de Itaborahy to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Conselheiro, Ro. de Janeiro, ibid., CE, lata 338, vol.2, no.7; Visconde de Itaborahy to Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro, Ro. de Janeiro, 19 Feb. 1869, ibid., vol.3, no.4; Muritiba to Exmo. Amo. e Collg., Rio, 28 Feb. 1869, ibid., vol.2, no.8:1; same to same, 21 March 1869, ibid., no.11; same to same, 30 March 1869, ibid., no. 10 [sic—probably no.11]; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 30 April 1869, ibid., no.13; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 22 May 1869, ibid., no. 16; V. de Itaborahy to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Conselheiro, Ro. de Jano., 29 May 1869, ibid., no. 17; Barão de Muritiba to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. C. d’Estado J. M. da Silva Paranhos, Rio de Janeiro, 7 Sept. 1869, ibid., no. 25; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 15 Oct. 1869, ibid., no. 26; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 25 Oct. 1869, ibid., no. 28; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 30 Oct. 1869, in ibid., no. 29; Barão de Muritiba to Exmo. Sr. C. d’Estado José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Rio de Janeiro, 3 Jan. 1870, ibid., no. 38. NB Muritiba’s note, after discussing the resignation of two ministers and the refusal of others to accept portfolios: “however the 4 present [ministers] are resolved to uphold the church until more happens. The Boss seems to fear complete dissolution very much and acts very agreeably.” Same to same, Rio, 20 March 1870, ibid., no.56; same to same, Rio de Janeiro, 21 March 1870, ibid., no. 61; V. de Itaborahy to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro, Ro. de Janro. 23 March 1870, ibid., no. 63; Barão de Muritiba to Illmo e Exmo. Sr. C. d’E. José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Ro. de Janeiro, 4 April 1870, ibid., no. 65. On the threat posed by the Liberal Party and its possible ascent, see, also, M. P. Souza Dantas to Exmo. amo., Ba. [Salvador], 9 June 1870, IHGB, Coleção Araújo Pinho, lata 363, pasta 5, no.7. 84. On the war’s last months, see the later correspondence cited in n. 83. The final treaty between Brazil and Paraguay was signed only on 9 Jan. 1872, nearly a year after Paranhos had left. 85. Quoted in Barman, Citizen Emperor, 223, italics in original. Barman cites Calmon, História, 2:734,n.2. 86. José Maria da Silva Paranhos to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Côrte, 2 Nov. 1868, AHMI, POB M144 Doc 7040. Indeed, the cabinet did not promote further abolitionist discussion in the Council of State in 1868, despite these vague assurances of Paranhos, and for two years the issue was successfully buried. However, it is clear that the emperor continued to press, privately, in 1869. See Barão de Muritiba to Illmo. E Exmo. Sr. Con-

Notes to Chapter 6 / 409 selheiro d’Estado J. M. da Silva Paranhos, Rio de Janeiro, 30 April 1869, AHI, APVRB, CE, lata 338, vol.2, no.13. 87. The most useful study of this aspect of the cabinet’s life is Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” in idem, Politica. See, also, Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:120–28; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:164–77; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 222–23, 231–34. Except for Barman, these other sources give us the perspective from outside the cabinet. Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe’s descendant, using his great-grandfather’s papers, places us inside. 88. See [Paulino] to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Visconde de Itaboray, n.p., n.d. [probably Rio, early 1870], IHGB, AVU, lata 10, pasta 1, no.85; cf. Uruguai, Ensaio, 2:33–34, 55, 78–79, 89, 96–100; Paulino de Souza, Annaes, 1860, t.2, 6 July, 61–68. 89. Here and in the following paragraphs, see Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” passim, especially D. Pedro II to Sr. Itaborahy, [Rio,] 1 May 1870, quoted in ibid., 132–33; notes by Cotegipe on despachos of 4 and 5 May 1870, quoted in ibid.,135–45; Cotegipe to Paranhos, [Rio,] 15 May 1870, quoted in ibid., 149 and 151–52; quotations from Cotegipe regarding despachos and dated 20 May 1870 and “Circumstancias que precederam a retirada do ministerio de 16 de Julho depois da chegada do sr. Paranhos,” in ibid., 150, 170; quotation from Cotegipe, “Conferencia dos ministros no dia 20 de Maio,” in ibid., 157–60; quotation from Cotegipe, “Conversação com o Visconde de São Vicente,—21 de Outubro de 1870,” in ibid., 153–55. 90. Quoted in Wanderley Pinho, “Queda,” 136–37. 91. Ibid., 140. 92. Cotegipe, “Conversação com o Visconde de São Vicente,” quoted in ibid., 153–54 and testimony (second-hand) by way of João Alfredo, quoted in ibid., 155–56 from Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas (see ibid., 17); cf Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 161–62, n.11. 93. The sense of malaise is clear in ibid., 149–64, passim, especially Cotegipe to Paranhos, Rio, 15 May 1870, quoted in ibid., 151. See, also, the letter from Mauá, who could hear from Montevideo the rumors of the cabinet’s decline: Barão de Mauá to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Conso. Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, Montevideo, 9 June 1870, in AHI, APVRB, lata 319, maço 4, pasta 1. 94. Also, Alencar noted that he was used in place of another being imposed on Itaboraí (presumably by the emperor); see n.78, above. Given the emperor’s emphasis on non-partisan appointments, Alencar’s public morality may have been thought a foil against the emperor’s candidate. 95. On divergence over patronage, see Alencar, quoted in Menezes, Alencar, 283. Magalhães Júnior judges both Cotegipe and Paulino Alencar’s opponents, while Menezes shows the enmity was imputed and Paulino was a friend right through the Senate fiasco: see Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 213–22, especially 219 and chaps.21,22, especially 241–44; as well as Menezes, Alencar, 252–85, especially 254–55, 264–65. 96. His resignation was fruitless; Alencar was not appointed to the Senate, despite achieving the highest number of votes. The emperor had not encouraged Alencar’s hopes; rather, the minister had misinterpreted the monarch’s customary use of the oblique (see Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 224–25; cf Menezes, Alencar, 280). Magalhães Júnior suggests the emperor was offended by some of Alencar’s “impertinent” pronouncements as a minister and deputy. Menezes suggests suspicion of Alencar’s involvement with electoral abuse (Alencar, 280–81). One might more likely assume that

410 / Notes to Chapter 6 Alencar’s association with a cabinet lacking the emperor’s confidence was more to the point. In any case, the failure embittered Alencar and further marginalized him from the state and those wielding power; the edge of his blade was sharpened and its swing widened, cutting his former colleagues soon enough. 97. On Nebias, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 288–89. On Muritiba, and his faction, see Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Murtiba, and Cotegipe, “Circumstancias,” in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 164–70. Manuel Vieira Tosta (Filho), became the second barão de Muritiba. At this point, he was a bacharel who had married into the serra acima elite (see Genealogical Table III). Cotegipe also points to Luís Antônio da Silva Nunes (deputy for Espírio Santo), Muritiba’s son-in-law. Silva Nunes and the younger Tosta took an interest in Santa Catarina; Tosta became its chief of police and first vice-president, and used justice appointments to dominate the province by a faction loyal to them and opposed to the cabinet’s favorites. Silva Nunes also came to exercise similar influence in Rio Grande do Sul (where Muritiba had been president in 1858–1859) and Espírito Santo. Worse still, as the justice offical de gabinete, Silva Nunes created a patronage network distinct from the cabinet’s. As Cotegipe relates it, while the Tosta faction was engorging, his concerns and his ambitions were ignored by Paulino and Itaboraí. His ally, Paranhos, was absent most of the time and preoccupied with Paraguay. 98. Ibid., 169–70 and Wanderley Pinho in ibid., 170–74. See the letter by Ferreira Vianna, quoted in ibid., 171–74n.15. Conservative factions within the Chamber will be discussed here in the text, below. 99. See Cotegipe, “Circumstancias,” in ibid., 164–65, 170. 100. [Interpelação do] Teixeira Junior, JC, 12 May 1870, 1. Itaboraí’s immediate response was published in JC, 15 May 1870, 1. Teixeira Júnior is rather summarily dealt with in the literature. Conrad (Destruction, 87) entirely omits his name, in a vague reference to the incident itself; Toplin mentions neither name nor incident (Abolition, 49), and Viotti da Costa (Da senzala, 380, and Brazilian Empire, 163–66) loses sight of the indispensable political history altogether. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 233–34, while omitting Teixeira Júnior’s name, provides a clear, if brief, sense of the incident’s significance. Teixeira Júnior’s grandson’s account is the best: see H. C. Leão Teixeira Filho, “Atitude parlamentar,” 497–535. See Chapter Five and the references cited in Chapter Five, n.5, above, for the standard biography, along with Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 274 and Vasconcellos and Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v., Cruzeiro. On this particular incident, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:121–23 and Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:165. 101. Jerônimo José Teixeira married the daughter of João Neto Carneiro Leme, Paraná’s uncle, father-in-law, and patron. Teixeira and several other of Paraná’s kinsman, including Teixeira Júnior, Paraná’s son-in-law, the latter’s brother, and Paraná’s half-brother were key investors in Mauá’s banking firm, Mauá, MacGregor e Companhia (Paraná himself was president of Mauá’s Banco do Brasil); on this, see Barman, “Business and Government,” 252–53n.48. On the Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II and the associated conflict, see C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, chap.7, especially 73–77; Caldeira, Mauá, 322–24; Magalhães Júnior, Alencar, 56–57. The Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II stockholders listed in the Corréio Mercantil (5 July 1855, 1–2) includes more than 2,500 and their shares. There were 103 with 100 shares each; obviously, the dominant group. Around 20% (about 17) of these were serra acima planters; nearly twice that (about 37)

Notes to Chapter 6 / 411 were Rio/baixada investors (including Teixeira Júnior). Indeed, of these, 15 were officers or directors of the Banco do Brasil or the Banco Rural e Hipotécario (see AL, 1856, 369, 371–72). The committee in charge, nominated by Paraná, suggests Paraná’s interest in an alliance of new and old money under his direction. More, his new interest in the newer urban money (and its Liberal linkages) over the older urban and baixada interests is indicated by the election of the first board of directors. This included C. B. Otoni (an engineer and entrepreneur, a former exaltado and a brother to Teófilo B. Otoni), Roberto Jorge Haddock Lobo (a physician become urban entrepreneur), Teixeira Júnior, Alexandre Joaquim de Siqueira (a high judge on the commercial tribunal—see AL, 1856, 107), and J. B. da Fonseca (not only an entrepreneur, as noted above, but an associate of T. B. Otoni). On the mid-1850s conflict making up the backdrop here, see Chapter Five, particularly for the response of the saquaremas and their old political base in opposition to Paraná. 102. See Lery Santos, Pantheon, 468–70; C. B. Otoni, Autobiografia, 78; and Joaquim José Teixeira Leite, Francisco Jose Teixeira Leite, João Evangelista Teixeira Leite, Carlos Teixeira Leite to Illmo. Sr. Dr. Jeronimo José Teixeira Jor., Vassouras, 14 Sept. 1860, AN, AP23, 170; Joaquim José Teixeira Leite to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Dr. Jeronymo José Teixeira Junior, Vassouras, 28 May 1863, ibid., 168; and Carlos Teixeira Leite to Illmo. Sr. Dr. Jeronimo Teixa. Jor., Vassouras, 29 May 1863, ibid., 169. 103. Lery Santos, Pantheon,470–71. On his Conservative support in the 1860s, see Visconde de Itaborahy to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. dr. Teixeira [Júnior], Ro. 20 Nov. 1863, AN, AP23, no.157; same to same, Ro. 26 Jan. 1864, ibid., no. 158; same to same, SC 10 Oct. 1864, ibid., no.228; same to same, Ro. de Janro., 17 Oct. 1865, ibid., no. 227; J. M. da Silva Paranhos to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Dr. J. J. Teixeira Junior, SC, 2 June 1861, IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 76, no.88 [copy from original in AN]; cf. same to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Marquez [Caxias], SC, 21 June [1861], ibid., pasta 6; Joaquim Francisco Vianna to Illmo. Snr. Dor. Jeronimo José Teixeira Jor., SC, 14 Oct. 1860, ibid., no. 213; C. de Baependy to Meu Caro Dr. Teixa. Jor., Sta. Rosa, 26 Oct. 1860, ibid., no.99; same to same, Valença, 30 Jan. 1861, ibid., no. 101; same to same, Sta. Rosa, 12 Sept. 1863, ibid., no. 105; same to same, Sta. Rosa, 1 Oct. 1863, ibid., no. 106; Barão do Paty do Alferes to Illmo. Sr. Jeronimo Jose Teixeira [Junior], Paty do Alferes, 6 Feb. 1861, ibid., no. 100; Barão de Tieté to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Dr. Jeronimo Jose Teixa. Junior, S. Paulo, 25 May 1860, ibid., no. 107 [cf. Rodrigo [Augusto da Silva] to Amo. Teixeira [Júnior], SP[aulo], 8 July [1863?], ibid., no. 173. Baependí, a serra planter and the political heir and son of the marquês de Baependí, a First-Reign minister and first-rank political actor then, was also kin to the Carneiro Leão merchant family through his mother and, thus, kin to Caxias and ennobled planters in both the serra acima and the baixada (see Genealogical Table II). Tieté was a paulista merchant and a saquarema political player who was president of the paulista branch of the Banco do Brasil. His son, in the last letter above, asks Teixeira Júnior, his “friend from childhood,” for political support. 104. The Alfândega intercession comes from Teixeira Filho, “Atitude Parlamentar,” 501–503, an account derived from Teixeira Júnior’s “oral deposition” to his son, Henrique Carneiro Leão Teixeira, Teixeira Filho’s father, who transmitted it in written form to him (see ibid., 502n.3). 105. Ibid., 502. Regarding Teixeira Júnior’s health, Lery Santos, Pantheon, 470, notes that it compelled his absence from active politics at one point in the 1860s.

412 / Notes to Chapter 6 106. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:121; Cotegipe to Sr. Conselheiro Paranhos, [Rio,] 15 May 1870, in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 151. Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:178–79, 348–49. See, too, Barman, Citizen Emperor, 168–72, 176, 215, 234. 107. On the committee, see “Elemento Servil,” JC, 24 May 1870, 1 and the ms. archived by Leão Teixeira Filho, “Anotações do Conso. Jerônimo José Teixeira Jr. sobre suas atividades parlamentares na questão do elemento servile.” IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 12. 108. See “Elemento Servil” and “Voto em Separado,” JC, 21 August. 1870, 3–4. 109. See Teixeira Junior et al., JC, 17 May 1870, 1; J. de Alencar, et al., JC, 19 May 1870, 1. 110. See n. 107, above, for the abolitionist support in May 1870. On dissidents from Bahia and São Paulo, see J. J. O. Junqueira to Amigo e Collega, Bahia [Salvador], 11 Oct. 1870, IHGB, CLT, lata 572, pasta 57; same to same, Bahia [Salvador], 30 Oct. 1870, ibid.; Duarte de Azevedo to Amo. Sr. Conselheiro, S. Paulo, 24 Oct? 1870, confidencial, ibid., lata 452, pasta 46; same to same, S. Paulo, 24 Nov. 1870. Duarte de Azevedo’s discussion of paulista leadership conflicts suggests a generational and possibly socio-economic conflict between the established provincial saquaremas and new men. See, also, João Mendes de Almeida to Exmo. amo. e Sr. Conso., S. Paulo, 28 Oct. 1870, ibid., lata 752, pasta 45. For Rodrigo da Silva’s opinion, see JC, 21 August, 4. On the cabinet’s attempts to resign again by early September, see Visconde de Itaborahy, [Rio,] 9 Sept. 1870, in AHMI, ACI, maço 146, Doc 7327; same to same, [Rio,] 10 Sept. 1870, ibid.; Cotegipe, “Circumstancias,” in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 164–65. The assumption about the emperor’s decision not to accept the resignation letters of 9 and 10 Sept. is the author’s. Rodrigo’s argument about public opinion raises a crucial point about contemporaries’ concept of such opinion and that which is conveyed in the historiography. Rodrigo obviously meant the opinion of the Brazilian ruling class and its client networks. This was hardly atypical. As was the case in many contemporary European polities, public opinion referred to the opinion of those who dominated political discourse and office-holding, rather than to the broad mass of national society. Abolitionists remained a minority in this restricted sector; even the Liberal Party, despite its use of abolitionism in 1868, was divided over the issue through the 1880s. It is true that abolitionists often claimed a rising tide of abolitionist sentiment, part of an inevitable Civilization and Progress; see, e.g., Nabuco’s seminal Abolicionismo (1883) (cf. Needell, “A Liberal,” 163–65). Yet, however contradictorily, Nabuco knew enough about his contemporaries to assume that he had to help create that opinion, and make it a political force—see, e.g., Abolicionismo, 57–58 and, better, idem, Um estadista, 3:21–27. However, while he and his allies were obviously aware that Brazilian opinion was largely indifferent or hostile to abolition, the historiography alleges rising public abolitionism before 1871, without good evidence. See, e.g., Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, 379–80 (using no direct evidence, relying on post–1889 memoirs); idem, Brazilian Empire, 164 (again, no direct evidence, relying on vague references to literature and the press); Toplin, Abolition, 41–49 (here, tainted evidence, relying on abolitionist publicists, memoirs, and selective debate excerpts and secondary sources); Conrad, Destruction, 80–85 (again, tainted evidence: pro-abolitionist diplomatic reports, one traveler’s account, abolitionist publicists and periodicals). 111. The decision to solicit a vote of confidence was apparently taken after the letter of 10 September (see Cotegipe, “Circumstancias,” in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 165), in

Notes to Chapter 6 / 413 response to Teixeira Júnior’s committee; see Teixeira Junior, JC, 14 Sept. 1870, 3; Paulino de Sousa, JC, 13 Sept. 1870, 1. 112. Linkage of the cabinet’s dilemma with the emperor, the cabinet’s role with public opinion, and the need for electoral reform, was made explicit by prominent saquaremas linked to the cabinet: Andrade Figueira, JC, 4 Oct. 1870, 2; José de Alencar, ibid., and Pereira da Silva, ibid. See, also, on Pereira da Silva and Paulino regarding electoral reform, F. B. Soares de Souza, O sistema, 106–8 and Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:124. F. B. Soares de Sousa (in O sistema, 106), notes the influence of Antônio Alves de Sousa Carvalho’s O imperialismo e a reforma (1865) on a bi-partisan, electoral reform proposal in 1867 in which Paulino participated. Indeed, F. B. Soares de Sousa notes the general inclination towards such electoral reform as a remedy as early as the Conciliation, but with increasing fervor in the 1860s, supported by Liberals and Conservatives alike (ibid., 105–6). The coincidence between this and the rise of the League is telling. 113. See JC, 13 Sept. 1870, 1. Cf. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:123; Pereira da Silva mistakenly reports a majority of four fifths, possibly because a fifth of the deputies opposed the cabinet (as usual, a substantial minority were not present to vote). Of the 21 opposing the cabinet, one can only identify six as established abolitionists. 114. See “Senado,” JC, 21 Sept. 1870, 1; cf. Paulino, JC, 2 Sept. 1870, 2. 115. Both Nabuco (Um estadista, 3:171–77) and Pereira da Silva (Memorias, 2:125–26, 127–29) emphasize the significance of Nabuco de Araújo’s pro-abolitionist speech of 20 Sept. in the cabinet’s fall. Nabuco de Araújo proposed a budget amendment allowing for the purchase and manumission of slaves, and allowing the state to intervene when a captive had accumulated his or her purchase price and the owner refused to sell. The proposal was defeated. Nonetheless, Nabuco and Pereira da Silva agree that Nabuco de Araújo’s speech occasioned the cabinet’s resignation. Nabuco also claims that the defense of the cabinet by Paranhos anticipated the latter’s pro-abolitionist position and demonstrates the cabinet’s division. All of this seems dubious. Nabuco provides no evidence for this alleged cabinet division on abolition; the speeches recorded demonstrate no significant difference between Paranhos and Paulino. Indeed, Paranhos denied any difference then, and did so with Itaboraí at his side. Certainly the account by Cotegipe (who Nabuco claims was allied with Paranhhos in this regard) contradicts this entirely. See “Senado,” JC, 2 Sept. 1870, 2; JC, 21 Sept. 1870, 1; Cotegipe, “Circumstancias,” in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 164–65. Note, as well, the correspondence between Itaboraí and the emperor asking to resign in early Sept., cited in n. 110, above. Itaboraí was looking to resign; he did not need Nabuco de Araújo’s push. The speech, and the emperor’s indiscreet support of it (on this, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:125–26) served only as the last straw, rather than a battering ram. Cf. Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 173–76. Where one might differ from Wanderley Pinho is his assumption that Cotegipe fully expected the cabinet to survive until 1871’s session. It seems clear from his ancestor’s own words at the time (and not the partisan appraisal Wanderley Pinho quotes on this matter in ibid., 175n.16) that resignation was much desired, offered, and expected by the cabinet. Indeed, one could argue that the vote of confidence may well have been partly designed as a final provocation to the emperor. Certainly, the Liberals in the Senate rose to the bait, Nabuco de Araújo, especially. The emperor’s support of the senator’s proposal simply gave Itaboraí a public (if indirect) demonstration of the cause of his resignation. The whole political world would understand; Muritiba’s resignation provided a convenient

414 / Notes to Chapter 6 excuse, so as not to make abolition and the emperor’s role formally explicit. Thus, having demonstrated the emperor’s withdrawal of confidence and its reason, while providing an obvious “cover” for resignation, Itaboraí satisfied his obligations as a party chieftain and as a monarchist. The “private” statement he made to party chieftains, quoted in the text, confirms much of this. The emperor’s frustration with the saquaremas was clear. Pereira da Silva (Memorias, 2:127–28) records that in the regular formal interview with the emperor regarding his successor, Itaboraí initially suggested Caxias and then Paranhos. The emperor discarded both, summing up that what was needed were people entirely new. Precisely. The emperor wished to be rid of obstruction, and dared not trust even such loyal moderates at the time. Perhaps both had drawn too close to the saquaremas in the 1860s. He wished to return to ruling through amenable non-partisans again, without regard to the Chamber’s majority and its saquarema leadership. 116. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:131. 117. Ibid., 2:131. On the cabinet and São Vicente, here and in the following paragraphs, see ibid., 2:129–32; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:178–86, 196–201; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 4:303–4; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 291–92. 118. Nabuco, in the citation above, in n.117, makes the distinction between São Vicente (and others like him) and the saquaremas one between moderate and pure Conservatives. However, Nabuco means the differences between those loyal to the emperor, above all, and the party’s ideological and partisan hard core, who conflated party, ideology, and monarchy. Nabuco obscures matters further in attempting to suggest a Conservative tradition of abolitionism (rather than the incidence of a few Conservatives who happened to be abolitionist); see Um estadista, 3:179, 183–85, 198. These seem attempts by Nabuco (an abolitionist and the son of an abolitionist and former Conservative moderate) to force a place within the Conservative tradition for São Vicente and other stray abolitionists. 119. One imagines the emperor and São Vicente accepted Tres Barras because his latter career had been relatively moderate and he was recommended by Nabuco de Araújo as a reformer, too. He not only worked against abolition, however, he contested São Vicente’s leadership and blocked Teixeira Júnior’s oppositionist allies in Bahia and São Paulo from gaining ground at saquarema expense. See Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:131, 132; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:182, 199n.1; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 302–3; Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 20, and the provincial glimpse provided in the Duarte Azevedo and Junqueira letters cited in n. 110, above. 120. Teixeira Júnior’s travails are suggested in [Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior] to Illmo. Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro d’Estado Visconde de S. Vicente, Rio Comprido [Rio], 26 Nov. 1871, IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 42; same to same, Baependy, 29 Dec. 1870, ibid., 121. Camaragibe, though Conservative, was the brother to Holanda, visconde de Albuquerque, the old, pragmatic oppositionist, and one of the early leaders of the Liberals in the Court. 122. The academy of law had been moved from Olinda to Recife in 1854; see Venancio Filho, Das arcadas, 68. 123. On João Alfredo, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:208; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 275–76; and Correia de Andrade, João Alfredo, chaps. 2, 4.0, 4.3, 5,7. 124. Correspondence revealing São Vicente’s interest in Paranhos will be cited below. On Cotegipe’s early appraisal, see Wanderley to Exmo. Amo. Sr. Paranhos, Ba. [Sal-

Notes to Chapter 6 / 415 vador], 1 March 1868, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. On the emperor’s appraisal in 1870, see Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:127–28; and Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:200. The title Rio Branco commemorated a river significant in Paranhos’s diplomatic successes with Paraguay over the southern boundary of Mato Grosso; Viana Filho (A vida do Barão, 47) states Paranhos received the title in Montevideo, after São Vicente recommissioned him for Platine diplomacy in October 1870. 125. See Barão das Tres Barras to Exmo. Colla. e Amo. Sr. Consro. Teixa. Jor., Ro., 30 Dec. 1870, IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 80; Visconde do Rio Branco to Illmo. e Exmo. Sr. Visconde de S. Vicente, Buenos-Aires, 9 Jan. 1871, Particular, AHMI, POB, maço 162, doc. 7464; same to same, Buenos Aires, 9 Jan. 1871, Particular [this second piece is apparently a longer and more official letter than the first one with the same date], ibid.; [Teixeira Júnior] to Illmo. Exmo. Snr. Conselheiro d’Estado—Visconde de S. Vicente, Rio Comprido [Rio], 30 Jan. 1871, IHGB, CLT, lata 752, pasta 42 [two drafts]; Caxias to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Compe., Rio de Janeiro, 30 Jan. 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. Cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 235, who states that São Vicente transmitted the emperor’s wish that Rio Branco organize a cabinet in December 1870. This is contradicted by the longer Rio Branco letter to São Vicente of 9 January, cited above. 126. Caxias to Exmo. Amo. e Sr. Compe., Rio de Janeiro, 30 Jan 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 317, maço 4, pasta 1. 127. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:199–201, relying partly on São Vicente’s son-in-law, Oliveira Borges; cf. Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1.

Chapter 7 1. Here, the text refers to events and processes analyzed in Chapters Two and Four. 2. Although the historiography has recovered the agency of the captives in the Abolition Movement of 1878–1888, their participation, if any, has not been successfully argued for 1871. For treatment of 1871 and the 1880s, respectively, see Beiguelman, Formação, 112–22; Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, for 1871, see 377–85 (where she argues, without direct evidence, for political mobilization nas ruas); for her sense of slave or popular agency in the 1880s, see ibid., 396, 403–4, 406ff, 429ff.; Toplin, Abolition, for 1871, see 47–57; on the 1880s, see ibid., chaps.8,9; and idem, “Upheaval,” 639–55; Conrad, Destruction, for 1871, see chaps.5,6; for the 1880s, see ibid., 184–86, 189–90, and chaps.16,17, passim; Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, 61–78, focuses upon the parliamentary and political process and will be discussed below, in the text; he discards the idea that 1871 was a response to slave agency (ibid., 63); Gerson, A escravidão, chap.2, does not indicate agency in 1871, although it is evident in his 1880s analysis (ibid., 299–305); Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 33–34, also does not argue agency in 1871, yet see the speculation regarding growing resistance, 34–37; cf., for the 1880s, ibid., 37–42. A more speculative argument about 1871 and slave agency is in Chalhoub, Visões, 151–61, particularly 159–60, but the logic and the evidence are problematic and the focus entirely on Rio. Dean, Rio Claro, 124–52, entirely ignores politics in Rio; he argues 1871 was a defensive response to slave agency. His chapters on the process leading up to 1888 are similar; the actions and motivations of the free are all absent or marginal in Dean’s explanations. He makes no connection between captives’ resistance and the policymakers who actually formulated and passed the legislation. A similar critique can be made of the assumptions and use of evidence in Laud-

416 / Notes to Chapter 7 erdale Graham’s “Slavery’s Impasse,”669–94. Abreu, “Slave Mothers,” JLAS, 228:3 (Oct. 1996): 567–80, focuses on a dubious point (that 1871 signifies the novel recognition of slave agency and humanity), ignoring the larger debate. 3. Here and in the following two paragraphs, see, for the nature of slavery and its demographics c. 1850, Chapter Four. On the dynamics of the internal slave trade and its results, see Rodrigo da Silva, “Voto em Separado,” JC, 21 Aug., 1870, 3; Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 355–79; Stein, Vassouras, 66–72, 295; Klein, “Internal Slave Trade,”567–85; Galloway, “The Last Years,”546–605; Eisenberg, “Abolishing Slavery,” 580–97; Maciel de Carvalho, Liberdade, chap.6; Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, chap.6, especially 138, 140–41ff. Citing Slenes, Barickman notes a total of 200,000 captives sold into the southeast coffee region, 1851-early 1880s. See Slenes, “The Demography,” chaps.3–5. Klein, “Internal Slave Trade,” however, argues that the regional disparity was established between 1820 and 1850, that the subsequent internal trade was small, and that most of the coffee frontier was probably supplied by a local regional trade, from urban to rural sites and from older to frontier areas (see ibid., 579–85). Also, Bieber has recently argued that some local regional trade involved stealing free people; see Bieber Freitas, “Slavery and Social Life,” 597–619. 4. For this issue in the debate, see below in the text; for this issue in 1867–1870, see Chapter Six and the references there to the atas of April 1867 and to Cotegipe’s notes on the discussions with the emperor in May 1870. This was also raised in the Chamber debates cited in 1867 and in May, August, and Sept. 1870. 5. For the emperor’s motivations and the origins and development of the “freewomb” project see Chapter Six. 6. The recent historiography and the two issues noted will be discussed in this chapter. Most of the historiography in question is cited in n.2, above. For the traditional works, see the notes in Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, and Conrad, Destruction, as cited in n.2, above. Nabuco, Um estadista notes the tradition of Brazilian abolitionism in ibid., 3:bk.5, chap.2, particularly 22–27. That the 1871 legislation had negligible impact on the captives and galvanized the Abolitionist movement of 1878–1888 is the consensus of the sources cited in n.2, above. 7. The deputies taking personal issue with “slavocrat” [escravocrata] were [Domingos de ]Andrade Figueira, (b. 1834), Perdigão Malheiro, and Nebias. The reader will recall Perdigão Malheiro from Chapter Six. Nebias was noted there, too, as a temporary minister in the Itaboraí cabinet of 1868–1870. As shall be discussed here, Perdigão Malheiro’s alternative abolitionist project has gone unnoticed; instead, his 1871 opposition has been criticized as “incoherent”; see, e.g., Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, 383; Toplin, Abolition, 52–53; Gerson, Escravidão, 95, 181–216, passim, particularly 181–82, 197–99. Conrad, Destruction, 95–96, 97–98, 103, notes Perdigão Malheiro’s opposition without alluding to his earlier abolitionism. 8. On Rio Branco’s residence, see Viana Filho, A vida do barão, 16, and AL, 1872, 210. The Rua do Aterrado is now Avenida do Mangue. For the interview and subsequent conversations, see Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1; Barão de Muritiba, JC, 7 Sept. 1871, 3; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:132. 9. Barão de Muritiba, JC, 7 Sept. 1871, 3; cf. Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 20–21; he

Notes to Chapter 7 / 417 confirms Muritiba’s account but adds that Itaboraí made precisely the same points, while Caxias, Bom Retiro, and Tres Barras “promised complete support” (ibid., 21). 10. Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. 11. Ibid. The earlier correspondence from Buenos Aires has not been found. There is no way to follow, then, changes in Rio Branco’s opinion from 1870 to 1871; the phrase does suggest that he had decided that the emperor could not be thwarted, but nothing suggests a change in his judgment of the prudence, origins, and necessity of the project itself. 12. Ibid. 13. See Paranhos, ata, 2 April 1867, in Rodrigues, ed., Atas, 6:195, 196 and Cotegipe, “Duas conferencias,” in Wanderley Pinho, “Quéda,” 137. Cf. Rodrigo da Silva, “Voto em separado,” JC, 21 Aug. 1870, 4. 14. Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. B. de Cotegipe to Exmo. Amo. Sr. V. do Rio Branco, Ba. [Bahia, i.e., Salvador], 9 March 1871, ibid. Rio Branco objected to direct elections, as did the emperor, on the ground that they required constitutional reform; he also doubted the advantages; see Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. and, same to same, Rio, 25 March 1871, ibid. Cotegipe advocated constitutional reform as the legal and obvious solution; see B. de Cotegipe to Exmo. Amo. Sr. V. do Rio Branco, 11 March 1871, ibid. For the emperor, see Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:183–85. 19. Same to same, Ba. [Bahia, i.e., Salvador), 11 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 18, maço 1, pasta 1. Regarding the cabinet’s composition, on 6 March, Rio Branco named those who would take justice, empire, foreign affairs, navy and agriculture; see Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo. Amigo e Sr. Consro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1; same to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Côrte, 22 March 1871, AHMI, POB maço 162, doc. 7464; on this and his disappointments with the Conservatives, see same to Meo caro Amigo e Sr. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio, 25 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. It is clear in these that he and Cotegipe had entirely underestimated Conservative opposition. Indeed, Rio Branco considered making such saquarema stalwarts as Ferreira Viana and Perdigão Malheiro ministers (on Ferreira Viana, see n.64 below), unaware of the saquaremas’ gathering opposition to the reform. On the cabinet’s members, João Alfredo’s background was noted in Chapter Six. On M. F. Corrêia and Teodoro, see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 319–20, 337. Corrêia was a politically colorless figure. Taking a São Paulo degree in 1854, he served two administrations, was a provincial president (under the League), and then, a deputy with the Conservative resurgence of 1869, voting with the Itaboraí cabinet in 1870. Teodoro was similar; he took an Olinda degree in 1852 and was a magistrate for years, taking a provincial presidency under Itaboraí, and another under São Vicente. Colson, “The Destruction,” I:87, posits that both represented Pernambuco’s hinterland cotton interests, which

418 / Notes to Chapter 7 were less wed to slavery than coastal sugar and more dependent upon state support for new railroads. Duarte de Azevedo, a key paulista member of the Conservative opposition of 1870, supported Teixeira Júnior then. He had taken a paulista degree in 1856, ascended to the São Paulo faculty in 1862, became a judge briefly, and then entered provincial and national politics, rising to presidencies under the moderate Conservatives Ferraz and Caxias in the early 1860s; he entered the Chamber in 1868. He is not to be confused with his younger brother, [Manoel Duarte] Moreira de Azevedo (b.1832), a physician, academic, and litterateur, the distinguished chronicler of Rio. See Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 6:16–18 and 6:61–64. 20. Visconde do Rio Branco to Exmo Amigo e Sr. Constro. Barão de Cotegipe, Rio de Janeiro, 6 March 1877, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1. 21. We met Sayão Lobato in Chapter Five. Chapter Six, n.13, discusses his particular antipathy towards Paraná and Paranhos, as a saquarema stalwart, veteran of the 1840s and 1850s, compadre to Eusébio, and representative for the Teixeira Leite clan of serra acima planters. His willingness to serve, with Paranhos, in Caxias’s moderate cabinet when the saquarema leadership itself held aloof (but continued to press their policies behind the scenes), suggests a break then, even in his relations with Eusébio. The evidence is indirect. Albino José Barbosa de Oliveira, a protégé of Eusébio and kin to Eusébio’s brother-in-law, Perdigão Malheiro, had his career threatened in a purge of the Commercial Tribunal administered by Sayão Lobato as minister of justice in 1861. In the aftermath, the saquarema leadership, particularly Eusébio and his kin, supported Barbosa de Oliveira publicly; see Barbosa de Oliveira, Memórias, 252–52, 263ff. Note that Barbosa de Oliveira referred to Sayão Lobato as the emperor’s “lackey and dependent” (ibid., 252) and called him “o Patife do Sayão” [Shameless Sayão] (ibid., 263). 22. Rio Branco held finance temporarily until 15 May and then took it as his own. That same date, he won over Domingos José Nogueira Jaguaribe, later (1888) visconde do Jaguaribe, for war. A cearense magistrate, former Conservative deputy, and new senator, it was Jaquaribe, a relative of Alencar, who the emperor had chosen in Alencar’s stead for the upper house; he now owed the emperor a great deal. Thus, Rio Branco may have chosen Jaguaribe precisely to offset Alencar’s regional influence; see Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 249. 23. On the emperor’s role in April, see Visconde do Rio Branco to Senhor, Côrte, 20 April 1871, AMHI:POB, maço 162, doc. 7464; same to same, Côrte, 22 April, 1871, ibid., same to same, Côrte, 26 April 1871, ibid., D. Pedro 2o. to Snr. Visconde, [Rio,] 22 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 320, maço 2, pasta 1; same to same, [Rio,] 10 April 1871, ibid., same to same, [Rio,]13 April 1871, ibid.; same to same, [Rio,] 20 April 1871, ibid.; same to same, [Rio,]29 April, 1871, ibid.; same to same, [Rio,]6 May 1871, ibid.; same to same, [Rio,] 9 May 1871, ibid.; same to same, [Rio,] 10 May 1871, ibid. On the threat to abdicate, see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 235, citing C. Otoni (Autobiografia, 149). Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:133–34, claims the emperor traveled to promote abolition by having the popular Imperial Princess Isabel left in charge. 24. D. Pedro 2o. to Snr. Visconde, n.p., 9 May 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 320, maço 2, pasta 1. 25. Itaúna to Meo Caro Visconde e amo. do C., Alexandria, 28 Sept. 1871, AHI, APVRB, CE, vol.1, lata 338:1, no.7. On his motivations for the voyage, cf. Barman, Citizen

Notes to Chapter 7 / 419 Emperor, 235–36. Barman also argues (ibid., 235) that the emperor traveled to avoid the charge of stifling parliamentary discussion. 26. D. Pedro 2o. to Sñr. Visconde, [Rio,] 9 May 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 320, maço 1, pasta 1; cf. same to same, [Rio,] 22 March 1871, ibid., and same to same, [Rio,] 6 May 1871, ibid. 27. See Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:202–7. Barman (Citizen Emperor, 223) also draws attention to Rio Branco’s relative personal dependency, if in an earlier context. 28. Parliament’s sites and usages were described in Chapter Two. 29. The regulations of the Parliament have been reconstructed by reading the debates and the Constituição; see, ibid., chap. IV, arts. 55–62. See, also, Pimenta Bueno, Direito público, Titulo II, chaps. 5–7. 30. For the cabinet’s assumptions and the organization of the dissident opposition, see Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 23, 25; Taunay, Visconde, has nothing on the subject, nor does Vieira, A vida, nor Gerson, A escravidão. The election of committees suggests how fogged the schism still was; see JC, 5 May 1871, 1 and JC, 6 May 1871, 3. See, also, João Alfredo, JC, 22 August 1871, 2. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:136, indicates that Paulino organized parliamentary resistance after the fala; over fifty deputies and senators came to his home. Early opposition includes José de Alencar, JC, 12 May 1871, 2 [9 May]; NB that Alencar focused upon the degradation of the constitutional system and the encroachment of absolutism; the voyage of the emperor and abolition were discussed as dependent and exemplary of these larger questions. Rio Branco dismissed absolutism and attempted to cast abolitionism as a Conservative Party position (see JC, 14 May 1871, 4 [9 May]) setting the pattern for the next several months. In ibid., 16 May 1871, 1, Silveira da Mota attacked Rio Branco as a political arriviste and a traitor, who presided over the Conservatives’ implosion and aspired to a dictatorship. The introduction of the abolition project is in JC, 13 May 1871, 1 [12 May]. The Chamber committee for the project was voted in on 15 May (see JC, 18 May 1871, 4). 31. Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 26–27. 32. See Paulino de Sousa, JC, 1 June 1871, 1 [29 May]. The speech introduced points which were subsequently the motifs of the dissident opposition: first, that policy does not derive from the monarch but from constitutionally responsible cabinets; second, that Paulino supported the ministers personally, but not this policy; third, a particularist argument about abolitionism’s unique threat to Brazil; fourth, that no shift in public opinion between 1870 and the present session justified abolition; fifth, that the fala, by making abolition central, threatened support for the cabinet because abolition contradicted the party’s established position, and, thus, sixth, that the fala should be revised to allow party support by not insisting on it for abolition, which should be designated a matter of individual choice. 33. See Visconde do Rio-Branco, JC, 3 June 1871, 1–2 [25 May]; see, also, idem, et al., ibid., 2 and JC, 7 June 1871, 3–4 [31 May] for the clarifications of this position in the rhetorical melée that followed, particularly the comments of Rio Branco, Andrade Figueira, Teixeira Júnior, and Pereira da Silva. See, also, the accusations regarding Paulino and defending the cabinet made by Alencar Araripe, JC, 1 June 1871, 2 [29 May]. Alencar Araripe, a close kinsman of José de Alencar, was the latter’s bitter enemy in this debate.

420 / Notes to Chapter 7 34. See JC, 2 June 1871, 1 [1 June]. NB that the vote was not nominal. Pereira da Silva successfully requested that the vote on Paulino’s amendment to the fala be nominal. The amendment lost, 63 to 35, too. Most voting, important or not, was done by less than the complete Chamber. In the 1830s, 60 to 80 voted in a Chamber of 104. The Chamber here was 125, so the 63 supporters Rio Branco mustered represented a bare minimum; one fewer, and there would be no quorum if all of the dissidents stayed away. When the majority did establish a quorum, the 35 dissidents would muster all of their members, particularly if there were any hope of swaying the wayward among the majority. Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 25, notes that the 25 or so who never showed up were absent or their seats disputed. 35. The shift to budgetary debate is clear in JC, 20 June 1871; dissidents’ use of them to continue their attack is explicit; see, e.g., Duque-EstradaTeixeira, JC, 20 June 1871, 3 [13 June]. See, also, Andrade Figueira and Pereira da Silva in ibid., and cf. João Alfredo in JC, 4 July 1871, 2 [29 June]. 36. One of the most significant speeches on whether Rio Branco’s position was legitimate in terms of the party and the Constitution is Andrade Figueira’s of 30 May (see JC, 11 June 1871, 3). See, also, idem, JC, 13 June 1871, 4 [10 June]; and Rodrigo da Silva, ibid., 2 [10 June]. The most telling frontal attack on the project itself was by Perdigão Malheiro, whose abolitionism was undisputed; see ibid. See, also, Antônio Prado, JC, 2 July 1871, 2–3 [21 June]; and Paulino de Sousa, JC, 11 July 1871, 1 [28 June]. 37. Paulino de Sousa, JC, 11 July 1871, 1 [28 June]. 38. Nineteen petitions were entered into the record by dissidents; Pang’s analysis uses 11 in the Senate records. See JC, 25 May 1871, 1; JC, 11 June 1871,4; JC, 20 June 1871, 3; JC, 23 June 1871, 3; JC, 30 June 1871, 2; JC, 5 July 1871,1; JC, 7 July 1871, 2–3; JC, 8 July 1871,1; JC, 15 July 1871, 3; JC, 16 July 1871, 3; JC, 21 July 1871, 2; JC, 27 July 1871, 4; JC, 7 August 1871, 1; JC, 8 August 1871, 4; JC, 10 August 1871, 4; JC, 22 August 1871, 2; JC, 31 August 1871, 3–4; JC, 10 Sept. 1871, 3 (on 5 July, two were published); and Pang, “The State,” passim. The petitions amplify the saquaremas’ tactic of 1855 (i.e., the Teixeira Leite open letter in the JC, part of the successful saquarema effort to defeat Paraná’s judicial reform; see Chapter Five, n.47). Once again, party stalwarts rallied their social-political base to bury a cabinet abusing state power against that base’s interests; as many of the same people (or their kith and kin) were involved, the significance must have been crystaline. Rio Branco, of course, had been one of Paraná’s ministers in 1855 and must have recognized the thrust when it first gleamed on 25 May. It doubtless hardened his will to parry and riposte; see J. de Alencar, JC, 25 August 1871, 2. The slaveholders’ concerns with the incendiary potential of the emperor’s project were carefully addressed by Perdigão Malheiro (see JC, 13 June 1871, 3) and, later, in his own abolitionist project; see, also, Paulino de Souza, “A rectificação do Sr. Visconde do Rio Branco,” [letter], JC, 18 July 1871,5. The significance of the threat of state intervention in the rural moral economy is clear from attempts by pro-cabinet orators to address the issue; see, e.g., Barão de Villa da Barra, JC, 15 July 1871, 1–2 [11 July], Theodoro da Silva, JC, 18 July 1871, 2; Teixeira Júnior, ibid., 3–4. 39. See Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 26, 30–32; and, on public opinion, Rodrigo da Silva, JC, 13 June 1871, 2 [10 June]. 40. See, e.g., Visconde do Rio Branco, JC, 14 May 1871, 4–5 (response to Alencar); idem, JC, 25 May 1871, 1 (response to Zacarias); idem, JC, 3 June 1871, 1 (response to Paulino); idem, JC, 7 June 1871, 4 (attack on Paulino); idem, JC, 20 July 1871, 1–2 (re-

Notes to Chapter 7 / 421 sponse to Alencar); Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 30–32; Taunay, O visconde, 81–87; H. Vieira, A vida, 393–94. Ministers included Sayão Lobato, JC, 11 June 1871, 3 [31 May] and João Alfredo, JC, 4 July 1871, 2 [29 June]; supporters included Alencar Araripe, JC, 1 June 1871, 2 and Teixeira Júnior, JC, 7 June 1871, 3–4, and they were much more useful. Rio Branco published his speeches, presumably as propaganda, in Silva Paranhos, Discursos. The índice, ibid., lists 41 speeches for 1871. 41. See, e.g., Andrade Figueira (JC, 11 June 1871, 3 [30 May]), Duque-Estrada Teixeira (JC, 28 June 1871, 3 [13 June]); Antônio Prado (JC, 2 July 1871, 2–3 [21 June]); Paulino (JC, 11 July 1871, 1–2 [28 June]). 42. Andrade Figueira was the most frequest apartista and orator and probably the most ferocious, seconded, perhaps, by Duque-Estrada Teixeira. Tours de force were provided by these and the less frequent Paulino, Alencar, Ferreira Viana, Pereira da Silva, and Perdigão Malheiro, with rarer efforts by Barros Cobra, Rodrigo da Silva, Capanema, Francisco Belisário, Almeida Pereira, and Antônio Prado. 43. See JC, 1 July 1871, 1–2 [30 June]. 44. See “A comissão especial incumbida de dar parecer sobre a proposta do poder executivo relativo ao estado servil,” JC, 3 July 1871, 3, which makes clear that the committee had worked closely with the cabinet. On the proximity between Teixeira Júnior’s committee project (1870) and the 1871 project, see JC, 12 July 1871, and Teixeira Junior, JC, 18 July 1871, 3–4; on the origins and weaknesses of the project, see Silveira da Mota, JC, 13 Sept. 1871, 1; Zacarias, JC, 7 Sept. 1871, 2; idem, ibid., 14 Sept. 1871, 1; Nabuco de Araújo, ibid., 27 Sept. 1871, 4. On the project’s origins with respect to São Vicente, Nabuco de Araújo, et al., see Nabuco, Um estadista, 3: bk.5, chap.2. 45. See Andrade Figueira, JC, 11 June 1871, 3; José Calmon, JC, 2 August 1871, 3; Andrade Figueira, JC, 12 August 1871, 2; idem, JC, 22 August 1871, 1–2; José de Alencar, JC, 25 August 1871, 2. On the Baependí residence meeting, see Andrade Figueira, JC, 22 August 1871, 1–2 [17 August] and Paulino de Sousa, JC, 10 Sept. 1871, 1–2 [23 August]. The address is in AL, 1872, 65. We have met Baependí before, as Eusébio’s ally and as a scion of the established Rio and serra oligarchies crucial to the emergent Party of Order (see Genealogical Table II). 46. See JC, 12 July 1871,1. One proposed amendment would have freed 60-year old captives with a small indemnization; it failed 38 to 28. The adoption of the Teixeira Júnior project was even more successful; the “Chronica parlementar” (pro-cabinet) in JC, noted rumors 11 July that the dissident minority had swelled to about 56, and that rumor was published in other dailies. 47. See Antônio Prado, JC, 2 July 1871, 2–3 [21 June]; João Alfredo, JC, 4 July 1871, 2 [29 July]; João Mendes, et al., JC, 27 July 1871, 3 [22 July]; Ferreira de Aguiar, et al., JC, 29 July 1871,2 [26 July]; J. de Alencar, JC, 6 August 1871, 4 [1 August]; “Camara de Deputados,” JC, 8 August 1871, 2 [2 August]; Duque-Estrada Teixeira, JC, 10 August 1871, 2 [5 August]; Antônio Prado, ibid., 2–3 [1 August]; minister of agriculture, ibid., 3 [1 August]; Evangelista Lobato, JC, 13 August 1871, 3 [9 August]. Cf. Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 28–30; Nabuco, Um estadista, 3:247–48. 48. Francisco Belisário, a São Paulo bacharel (1861) would emerge as one of the Monarchy’s great financiers and orators, as a deputy, senator (1887), and minister (1885). He was both first and second cousin to Paulino, and married Francisca Bernardina Teixeira Leite, daughter of one of the four brothers dominating Vassouras. See

422 / Notes to Chapter 7 Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:408–9; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 253–54; and Genealogical Table I. 49. See JC, 2 August 1871, 2 [27 July]. 50. Almeida Pereira, JC, 13 August 1871,3 [2 August]. Reconstruction of 2 August here and below derives from JC, 8 August 1871, 2 (for the first account and the debate record); JC, 13 August 1871,3 (for Almeida Pereira’s speech); and ibid. (for Pinto Moreira’s speech and the following uproar). 51. The vote is in JC, 3 August 1871, 1, along with each faction’s views on the session’s events (cf. JC, 4 August 1871,3). 52. Andrade Figueira is known to historians as bequeathed by the victors. See, e.g., Conrad, Destruction, 168, 219; or Toplin, Abolition, 108, 139. Contemporaries could be more balanced; see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:192–93, from whom the quotation comes (ibid., 2:192). Perhaps his most impressive oratory was prepared, but it did not lack for barb or bait or transparent allusions to the emperor; see Andrade Figueira, JC, 11 June 1871, 3 [30 May]. 53. Andrade Figueira, JC, 8 August 1871, 3 [2 August]. 54. See B. de Cotegipe to Exmo. Amo. Sr. V. do Rio Branco, Ba. [Bahia, i.e., Salvador], 9 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 4:25–26. 55. Taunay, O Visconde, 104–5; cf. Sisson, Galeria, 1:138–39. 56. Pinto Moreira, JC, 13 August 1871,3 57. This account is based on the contemporary record, as indicated above. The incident endured, tainted in its significance by contemporary passions. See, e.g., Taunay, O Visconde, 82–83; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:141; Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 27–28. Tobias Monteiro (doubtless through João Alfredo) notes that Rio Branco’s use of “lackey” in 1865 was a quote from Chateaubriand. It was this elegant reference that Pinto Moreira had seized upon, using a dagger his enemy himself had provided. 58. JC, 13 August 1871, 3 [2 August]. 59. JC, 8 August 1871, 2 [2 August]. 60. Andrade Figueira, JC, 11 June 1871, 3 [30 May]; cf. idem, JC, 12 August 1871, 2 [20 July]. 61. See Pinto Moreira, JC, 18 August 1871, 1 [7 August]; Pereira da Silva, JC, 15 August 1871, 2 [10 August]; Perdigão Malheiro, JC, 15 August 1871, 2–3 [9 August]; Nebias, JC, 5 Sept. 1871, 2–3 [21 August]. 62. The project was outlined and explained by Perdigão Malheiro in “Elemento Servil,” JC, 23 August 1871, 4; see, also, “Reforma servil,” JC, 22 August, 1871, 5 and JC, 5 Sept. 1871, 3–4 [26 August]; supportive economic analysis was provided by C. Otoni (linked to Rio’s established merchants and planters at the time) in “Emancipação I,” JC, 22 August 1871, 3 and “Emancipação II,” in ibid., 5. The analysis of the underlying political appeal of this alternative, of course, is the author’s. 63. João Alfredo, JC, 31 August 1871, 4. 64. See Paulino de Souza, JC, 10 Sept. 1871, 1–2 [23 August]. Ferreira Vianna, JC, 12 Sept. 1871, 3 [29 August]. Ferreira Viana, a São Paulo classmate of Paulino (1855), was appointed promotor público in the Court in 1857 and laid the foundation of a respected private practice. Author of the celebrated pamphlet, Conferência dos divinos (1867), he was appointed editor of the Diário do Rio de Janeiro after the Conservatives had taken it over,

Notes to Chapter 7 / 423 completing his Conservative conversion from his student radicalism. What held constant was his opposition to the erosion of the constitutional balance of powers. After his election to the Chamber in 1869, Cotegipe had spotted his potential but failed to get Rio Branco to co-opt him as a minister. Ferreira Viana would remain very much the same throughout his career, even as a minister in the 1880s: a dévoté of the monarchy, but a critic of its constitutional decline, noted for inimitable acuity and wit. Murilo de Carvalho’s title, Teatro de sombros, is taken from Ferreira Viana’s observation regarding parliamentary corruption. See B. de Cotegipe to Exmo. Amo. Sr. V. do Rio Branco, Ba. [Bahia, i.e., Salvador], 9 March 1871, AHI, APVRB, lata 318, maço 1, pasta 1; A. Ferreira Vianna to Exmo. Sr. Conselheiro, S. C. [Rio], 21 March 1871, ibid., lata 321, maço 4, pasta 5; Visconde do Rio Branco to Senhor [Dom Pedro II], Côrte, 24 March 1871, AHMI, POB, maço 162, doc. 7464; Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 1:164–66; Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 225–26; R. Magalhães Júnior, “Ferreira Vianna e a ‘Conferência dos divinos,’ ” in idem, Três panfletários, 219–64.; Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro de sombras, 163–67; cf. Magalhães Júnior, “Ferreira Vianna,” 247. 65. See JC, 13 Sept. 1870, 1 [12 Sept.] and JC, 1 Sept. 1871,2 [28 August]. 66. Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:137–38. 67. That the cabinet would have to use its customary influence to obtain a majority was assumed and stated; see, e.g., Ferreira Viana’s speech, cited in n.64, above, or Zacarias’s early remarks, JC, 21 May 1871, 3; Pereira da Silva, Memorias, 2:137; and Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 25–29. Murilo de Carvalho argued years ago for the regional nature of deputies’ support for the 1871 legislation, following Viotti da Costa and Conrad; however, only he emphasized not only the Northeastern flagging dependence upon slave labor, but the vulnerability to the influence of state patronage; see Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, 64–67, 70–71; cf. Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, 381, 384; Conrad, Destruction, 91–93. One uses [Javarí,] Organizações, 347–54 to identify the provinces and occupations of the deputies of 1870 and 1871, and cross-lists them with the voting listed in JC (cited in n. 65, above) for the analysis done here. To be specific, of the 26 who switched, 6 represented Pernambuco; 4, Bahia; 2, Ceará; 2, Alagoas; 2 Paraíba do Norte; 2 from Mato Grosso, and 1 each from Amazonas, Pará, Paraná, Maranhão, and Rio Grando do Norte. There were three mineiros, as well; they are less easy to account for: one was a businessman (negociate); one, a physician; and one has no listed profession. 68. See the citations in n.65, above and “Votação da proposta do governo e das amendas do Sr. Dr. Perdigão Malheiro sóbre a questão servil,” JC, 30 August 1871, 1 [29 August.]. 69. On deputies’ expectations, 12 August, see JC, 20 Sept. 1871, 1–2. The project’s Senate committee was elected 30 August; the first reading must have been nearly immediate, for the second began 4 Sept. (see JC, 31, August 1871, 5) and ended 27 Sept. The maverick saquarema, the abolitionist Silveira da Mota, was the most tenacious opponent, another indication of what the central issues were; see, Silveira da Mota, JC, 14 May 1871, 5; JC, 16 May 1871, 1; JC, 13 Sept. 1871, 1; JC, 18 Sept. 1; JC, 20 Sept. 1871,3; JC, 22 Sept. 1871, 3; JC, 26 Sept. 1871,3; and JC, 28 Sept. 1871, 3. Itaboraí repudiated claims about his Council of State position in the JC, 8 June 1871, 3, and spoke at length only twice after that: see JC, 12 August 1871, 1–2 and JC, 15 Sept. 1871,1; Muritiba also spoke only twice: JC, 7 Sept. 1871, 3 and JC, 14 Sept. 1871, 1. São Lourenço, although supportive of Rio Branco, was clearly ambivalent (see JC, 15 Sept. 1871,1) Aside from Silveira da Mota, the most significant attacks

424 / Notes to Chapter 7 came from Tres Barras and Zacarias. On the former, see JC, 16 August 1871,1; JC, 19 Sept. 1871, 3; JC, 20 Sept. 1871, 3; JC, 23 Sept. 1871, 3–4. On the latter, see JC, 20 May 1871, 3; JC 7 Sept. 1871, 2; JC, 14 Sept. 1871,1–2; JC, 19 Sept. 1871,3; JC, 23 Sept. 1871, 4; JC, 26 Sept. 1871, 3. Rio Branco was generally present, and often responded. Two of his best efforts are in JC, 22 May 1871, 1 and JC, 12 August 1871, 1–2. Although Torres Homem defended the reform, the most interesting, if carefully ambivalent, discussion favoring abolition was that of Nabuco de Araújo; see JC, 20 May 1871, 1; JC, 27 Sept. 1871, 4; and JC, 28 Sept. 1871,3. On Carneiro de Campos, later (1872), third visconde de Caravelas, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 2:58 and Tavares de Lyra, Instituições, 244–45. His vote was a quiet, almost private act; his sole speech seems inconsequential and entirely non partisan in its impact. It is not even in the JC, although summarized in Brasil, Discussão da reforma, 2:313–15. This ineffective opposition may explain his later ennoblement and cabinet ascent, 28 June 1873. 70. See JC, 28 Sept. 1871,3 and “A ovação do elemento servil,” JC, 29 Sept. 1871, 2. The latter, noting the claim that the police chief had refused to participate in the “patriotic demonstration,” concluded, “Honor to the Petalogical Society, which organized everything!” 71. See “Parte Official,” JC, 29 Sept. 1871, 1. 72. See Duque Estrada, JC, 30 Sept. 1871, 3–4 [20 July]. 73. Macedo Soares, Nobiliarquia, 1:85, indicates the relations between the Duque Estradas and Álvares de Azevedos. For Duque-Estrada Teixeira, see Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 5:422–23 and Lery Santos, Pantheon, 575–78. 74. See Duque Estrada, JC, 30 Sept. 1871, 3–4 [20 July]. 75. “Observações feitas no imperial meterologico observatorio astronomico no dia 27 de Setembro,” JC, 29 Sept. 1871, 4. 76. On the emperor in the Old World, see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 236–38, 245–46; Lyra, Historia, 2:298–99 and chap.7, passim. On Itaúna, see Vasconcellos e Smith de Vasconcellos, Archivo, s.v. Itauna, and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 303, 309, 316. Itaúna, the emperor’s intimate, was court physician. Elected a deputy representing Rio de Janeiro under Paraná’s protection, the emperor appointed him senator for the same province in 1857. Rio Branco made him his minister for agriculture in April 1872. 77. Itaúna to Meo Caro Visconde e amo. do C., Alexandria, 28 Sept. 1871, AHI, APVRB:CE, vol. 1, lata 338:1, no.7. 78. See the works cited in n.2, above. The exceptions are Abreu, Chalhoub, Gerson, Lauderdale Graham, and Murilo de Carvalho. Abreu, Chalhoub, and Lauderdale Graham do scrutinize 1871 in and of itself, but focus upon the captives, whose agency they attempt to demonstrate. Gerson also examined 1871, with some care, but, again, in terms of the issue of abolition. Murilo de Carvalho is the exception in his capable treatment; see below, in text and nn. 79. Nabuco dominates this traditional literature, not only through Um estadista, but through Abolicionismo and Minha formação, chaps.3, 20, 21. Other contemporaries are liberally cited by Viotti da Costa, Toplin, and Conrad (for such sources, see Conrad’s Brazilian Slavery). They include Tristão Alencar Araripe, Tobias Monteiro, Osório Duque Estrada, Evaristo de Morais, and Alfredo de Escragnolle Taunay. One cannot charge the historians here with ignorance of the dissidents’ point of view; the issue is what they did with it. Viotti da Costa, Conrad, Toplin, Gerson, Murilo de Carvalho, and

Notes to Chapter 7 / 425 Abreu all sample the dissidents’ speeches in the Annaes and the Diário do Rio de Janeiro. However, save for Murilo de Carvalho, none of them comes to grips with the political issues, as discussed in the text here. 80. The contemporary polemics have seemingly influenced later scholars—even the term “slavocrat” has endured. The way in which Viotti da Costa, Conrad, or Toplin describe the dissidents is indicative of this. Viotti da Costa argues that it was Paulino’s resistance that divided the Conservatives and explains “Once more, personal interests prevailed over partisan discipline.” (Da senzala, 381); summarizing what she suggests were arguments in bad faith, she concludes “Thus . . . the adherents of the established order turned to attack the reformers and to forecast catastrophes, in case the reforms went forward” (ibid., 383). Toplin refers to Andrade Figueira as “Arch-slavocrat” (Abolition, 108); and Conrad describes dissidents as “pro-slavery theoreticians” (Destruction, 97), concluding that such opposition’s arguments “did not convince the ministry or the majority of the legislators, who saw the bill as a reasonable and needed compromise” (ibid., 100). 81. For most of these authors, see the citations in n. 2, above. For Barman, see Citizen Emperor, 194–96, 207–10, 231–34, 238–39. The other analysts may note the constitutional issues, but they do so dismissively, en passant, if they do; see, e.g., Viotti da Costa, Da senzala, 152–54, 381–84; and Conrad, Destruction, 99–100 and compare with Murilo de Carvalho, Teatro, 67–68, 78–79. 82. See Conrad, Destruction, 95–100; for the emperor, see ibid., 99–100. As noted earlier, Viotti da Costa, Toplin, Gerson, and Abreu also use dissident sources, but inadequately for a serious analysis of the debate. 83. Paulino de Souza, JC, 10 Sept. 1871, 2 [23 August]. 84. João Alfredo, JC, 31 August 1871, 4 [24 August]. On João Alfredo’s role, see Tobias Monteiro, Pesquisas, 27; for the quoted phrase of contemporaries, see Nabuco’s appreciation in Um estadista, 3:247–48. The word “leader” is in English. 85. João Alfredo disputed the calculations Perdigão Malheiro employed; they were ably defended by the entrepreneur C. Otoni and endorsed by the Centro da Lavoura e Agricultura, presumably people whose practical and arithmetical skills are credible; see João Alfredo, JC, 31 August 1871, 4. For Perdigão Malheiro’s amendment project, see “Elemento Servil,” JC, 23 August 1871, 4 (the project had been submitted to the Chamber on 18 August). C. Otoni made a comparative assessment (dated 22 August) of this project and the cabinet’s project in “Emancipação I,” in JC, 22 August 1871, 3 and in “Emancipação II” in ibid., 5. Perdigão Malheiro cited the support of the Centro and Otoni in a public letter defending his proposal (dated 22 August) in “Reforma servil” in JC, 22 August, 1871, 5. Perdigão Malheiro defended and enlarged upon his project in JC, 5 Sept. 1871, 3–4 [26 August]. Perhaps the most troubling historiographical omission in regard to this project is made by Nabuco, an abolitionist and a contemporary, who avoids it entirely and, worse, discusses Perdigão Malheiro’s opposition in terms of “incoherence and aberrations” (see Um estadista, 3:237–38n.2). While Gerson mentions the project (A escravidão, 214), he does so in passing and in a completely distorted fashion; other historians do not mention it at all. 86. See “Elemento Servil,” JC, 23 August 1871, 4 and Perdigão Malheiro, JC, 5 Sept. 1871, 3–4. 87. See the citations in this regard in n.81, above.

426 / Notes to Chapter 7 88. See, e.g., J. M. Wanderley to Exmo. Amo. Snr. Conso., Ba. [Salvador], 27 June [1850], in AN, AP07, C4, Pacote único, PM1105, when Cotegipe was Chief of Police in Salvador; O subdelegado Bento Carneiro da Silva to Illmo. e Exmo. Snr. Presidente da Provincia do Rio de Janeiro, Quissimá, 19 Feb. 1851, in APERJ, PP2, 10.6 col.102, p.17, m.29. Note that both men, Eusébio’s allies, were linked organically to the provincial elites whose interests were wounded. Indeed, Wanderley would soon marry into the highest rung of the Bahian planter elite and the Carneiro da Silva cited above (later the visconde de Araruama) wrote from his ancestral plantation and represented one of the greatest clans of the baixada fluminense’s sugar elite. On local enforcement of the 1850 legislation, see Wanderley Pinho, Cotegipe, 194–99, 203–22, 225–27; and Viotti da Costa, Da Senzala, 25–34; Stein, Vassouras, 65; and Conrad, Destruction, 23 are cursory. Viotti da Costa is particularly detailed on local resistance, corruption, and evasion and the difficulties of state enforcement against provincial oligarchs. Her own evidence, however, makes it clear that state enforcement, however difficult, was pursued and effective within a few years even at the local level.

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Index

In this index, an “f ” after a number indicates another reference on the next page, an “ff ” indicates references on the next two pages, and passim after a span of pages is used to indicate a cluster of references there. Numbers in bold font indicate brief biographical information for a person of importance. All administrative units indicated here as provinces were captaincies in the colonial era. The date in parentheses after a cabinet indicates its date of ascent; the date in parentheses after the name of a party or partisan faction indicates the approximate date of the group’s coming into play or that name’s coming into use; the date after an event, institution, or act of legislation indicates when it was effected. Except for members of the Brazilian and Portuguese ruling dynasty, a person is indexed by the last family name; when appropriate, cross-references are provided from the names (or titles) more commonly used. As is customary, the rank (e.g., barão, visconde, conde, marquês, duque) noted indicates the highest level of the title finally acquired by the person. Abaeté, visconde de, see Abreu, Antônio Paulino Limpo de, visconde de Abaeté Abdication (1831), see Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, duque de Bragança Aberdeen Bill, 140, 148 abolitionists, 238, 262, 288, 298, 323, 374n56, 403nn32, 34, 412n110, 413n113, 414n118 abolition project, alternative, 277, 291, 298–99, 309–10, 311–12, 320, 416n7. See also Malheiro (filho), Agostinho Marquês Perdigão abolition project of the “free womb,” 233–40, 274–78, 285–301, 302–3, 403n34. See also Cabinet of 16 July 1868 and Cabinet of 7 March 1871

Abrantes, marquês de, see Almeida, Miguel Calmon du Pin e, marquês de Abrantes Abreu, Antônio Navarro, 88f, 359nn39, 40 Abreu, Antônio Paulino Limpo de, visconde de Abaeté, as Regency moderado, 76–81 passim, 87–89 passim, 349n72, 353n88, 356n20, 358n30; as moderate pragmatist, 100–102 passim, 147, 173–75 passim, 193, 201, 206–9 passim, 221, 227, 395n113, 400n20, 404n45 absolutism, 39, 77, 189f, 195, 253, 321, 419n30 Academy of Medicine, 113, 119 Additional Act (1834), 55ff, 61, 65–86 passim, 350n79. See also liberal reforms.

444 / Index Africa, 13–18 passim, 28, 61f, 138–41 passim, 146, 376n69. See also West Africa; West Central Africa African slave trade, see slave trade Afro-Brazilians, identity and role, 2–6 passim, 18ff, 39–40, 41, 113, 120, 143ff, 212, 274, 277, 375n63; and politics, 40, 96ff, 130, 143, 148f, 360n54 agregados (rural dependents), 274 Alagoas, Province of, 46, 364n72, 393n92, 423n67 Albuquerque, Antônio Coelho de Sá e, 214 Albuquerque, Antônio Francisco de Paula e Holanda Cavalcanti de, visconde de Albuquerque, and Regency opposition, 60, 68, 81, 84, 100, 348nn66, 67, 352n85, 356n20; after Majority, 130ff, 157f, 217, 226, 365n79, 414n121 Albuquerque, Luís Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de, 68, 130, 370n27 Albuquerque, Pedro Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de, visconde de Camaragibe, 212, 269, 414n121 Alencar, José Martiniano de, 83f, 86, 88, 156, 357n26, 358n30 Alencar (filho), José Martiniano de, 250ff, 257, 262f, 389n52, 407nn72, 74, 77, 78, 409nn94, 95, 96, 418n22, 419nn30, 33, 421n42 Alfândega (Customshouse), 21, 106, 118, 411n104 Almeida, Miguel Calmon du Pin e, marquês de Abrantes, 69–72 passim, 82, 101, 217, 351n85, 354n5, 370n25 Álvares de Azevedo family, 24–29 passim, 45, 57f, 63, 65, 328 (Genealogical Table I) Amado, Gilberto, 9 Amazon River, 10, 36, 61, 161, 202, 382n104. See also Amazonia Amazonas, Province of, 423n67 Amazonia, 10, 36, 39–40, 61, 202 Andrada, Martim Francisco Ribeiro de, 362n64 Angola, 14, 18, 25, 28, 61, 67, 374n60, 376n69

Antão, see Lobo, Joaquim Antão Fernandes Antônio Carlos, see Silva, Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada Machado e aparte (parliamentary interjection), 38, 223. See also Chamber of Deputies Araripe, Alencar, 88, 375n26, 419n33, 421n40, 424n79 Araruama, town of, 45 Araruama, visconde de, see Silva, José Carneiro da, first visconde de Araruama Araújo, Joaquim Aurelio Barreto Nabuco de, 1, 137, 194, 210, 290, 304, 323 Araújo, José Tomás Nabuco de, from reactionary to moderate, 117, 164, 173ff, 180–83 passim, 194, 200, 206f; from moderate to Liberal, 216–21 passim, 236–38 passim, 246, 252f, 301, 393n98, 396n114, 397n120, 400n20, 404nn45, 49, 413n115, 414n119, 421n44, 424n69. See also Cabinet of the Conciliation; Progressive League Argentina, 121f, 169, 220, 240f, 401n23 army, 31f, 35, 41, 44ff, 99ff, 103, 240f, 253f, 322, 360n54 Assis, Joaquim Machado de, 212, 228, 232, 407n72 Aureliano, see Coutinho, Aureliano de Sousa e Oliveira, marquês de Sapucaí Aurora Fluminense, 30, 43f, 53, 70, 343n34 authoritarian dictatorship (1937–45), 3 authoritarianism, 1–6 passim, 14, 54, 100, 123, 189, 277, 314f, 321, 353n3 Azevedo, Manuel Antônio Duarte de, 282, 418n19 Baependí, conde de, see Gama, Brás Carneiro Nogueira da, conde de Baependí Baependí, marquês de, see Gama, Manuel Jacinto Nogueira da Gama, marquês de Baependí Baependí, town of, 46 Bahia, Province of, and First Reign and Regency, 14f, 40, 56, 61, 71, 124, 142–46

Index / 445 passim, 174, 356n20, 374n60, 375n67, 377n73; and the Liberal Quinquennium, 110, 129, 365n79, 370n25; after 1848, 245, 263, 267, 300, 414n119 baixada (lowland), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy Balaiada revolt (1838–41, Maranhão), 83 balance of power, constitutional, 34f, 76, 80, 189, 231, 235, 316f, 320, 432n64 Banco do Brasil (1851, 1853), 160, 203, 260, 411nn101, 103 Bantu, Bantu speakers, 18f Barbosa, Francisco Vilela Barbosa, marquês de Paranaguá, 91, 101 Barickman, B. J., 4, 374n60, 416n3 Barman, Roderick J., 4, 306, 355n11, 356nn20, 21, 360n46, 365n79, 385n18, 386n28, 389n52 Barros, Francisco do Rego, barão da Boa Vista, 103, 130f, 352n85, 357n26 Bastos, Aureliano Cândido Tavares, 201, 213, 291n80, 394n104, 403n32 Beiguelman, Paula, 4 Belém do Pará, provincial capital, 36 Bellegarde, Pedro de Alcântara, 174 Benguela, African port, 14ff, 139 Bethell, Leslie, 142, 151, 374n56, 357n61, 377n74 Bieber, Judy, 4, 362n62, 370n22, 416n3 Bight of Biafra, African coast, 13 Boa Vista, barão da, see Barros, Francisco do Rego, barão da Boa Vista Bocaiuva, Quintino, 323 Bom Retiro, visconde do, see Ferraz, Luís Pedreira do Couto, visconde do Bom Retiro Bonifácio, José, see Silva, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Bonifácio, o moço, José, see Silva, o moço, José Bonifácio de Andrada e books, book trade, 21, 43ff, 77, 119, 212, 250f, 354n9 Bragança, duque de, see Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, duque de Bragança Branco, Manuel Alves, second visconde

de Caravelas, 102, 108–13 passim, 147, 347n58, 349n72, 353n88, 357n25, 362n66, 365n79, 370n25 O Brasil, 73, 76, 110f, 153, 188 Brito, Antero José Ferreira de, 51 Brito, Francisco de Paula, 212, 375n65 Bueno, José Antônio Pimenta, marquês de São Vicente, 278–86 passim, 301, 309, 320, 400n20, 404nn45, 49, 414nn118, 119, 415nn124, 125, 421n44; and abolition and his cabinet, 234–38 passim, 256, 262–71 passim. See also abolition project of the “free womb”; Cabinet of 16 July 1868 Buenos Aires, 121f, 151–54 passim, 240, 278f, 317. See also Platine affairs Cabanagem revolt (1835–40, Pará), 39f, 61f, 340n10 cabinet (Council of Ministers), 34–43 passim, 72, 76, 107, 122f, 179, 349n72, 362n63, 364n73, 365n79, 370n25; and crisis of 1844, 106ff, 109, 133, 163, 365n77; responsibility and resignation, 223, 255f, 288–89, 419n32; and crisis of 1868, 243–48; and crisis of 1870, 255–56, 408n86, 410n97, 413n115 Cabinet of the Aged (30 May 1860), 217. See also Lima, Pedro de Araújo, marquês de Olinda Cabinet of the Anjinhos (dead infants) (24 May 1862), 217. See also Progressive League; Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e Cabinet of the Capable (19 September 1837), 72–79, 351n85, 356n21, 366n81. See also reactionary party; Regresso Cabinet of the Conciliation (6 September 1853), 169–75 passim, 180–200, 245, 250ff, 318, 402n31. See also electoral reform; executive power; Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná; Rocha, Justiniano José Cabinet of the Eagles (29 September 1848), 116, 122–41 passim, 152–55, 160–66 passim, 177, 378n78, 383n118.

446 / Index See also Câmara, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho Mattoso da; Party of Order; Platine affairs, Praieira Revolt; saquaremas; slave trade; Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, visconde do Uruguai Cabinet of Forty Days (3 August 1832), 49f, 97. See also July 1832, conspiracy of Cabinet of the Majority (24 July 1840), 100–102, 362n64. See also Majority movement Cabinet of 7 March 1871, 278f, 285f, 292, 300, 417n19, 419nn30, 32. See also abolition project of the “free womb”; Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, visconde do Rio Branco Cabinet of 16 July 1831, 43–49. See also caramurús; July 1832, conspiracy of; exaltados; moderados Cabinet of 16 July 1868, 248–67, 269, 275, 281–83 passim, 288, 407n78, 408n86, 410n97, 413n115. See also abolition project of the “free womb”; cabinet, under responsibility and resignation; Torres, Joaquim José Rodrigues, visconde de Itaboraí Cabinet of 13 September 1832, 50f. See also Additional Act; liberal reforms; moderados, under divisions in Cabinet of 31 August 1864, 220f, 227, 239, 397nn121, 122. See also Furtado, Francisco José cachaça (cane liquor), 14–18 passim, 23, 141, 338n39 Calmon, see Almeida, Miguel Calmon du Pin e, marquês de Abrantes Câmara, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho Mattoso da, 28f, 63, 67ff, 98–99, 120, 147–49 passim, 164, 170, 180f, 234, 362n63, 369n20, 404n45; role in party, 110, 116, 133–37 passim, 158ff, 167, 170–72 passim, 201, 205–7 passim, 228, 232f, 247, 310; and Cabinet of Eagles, 122–41 passim, 152–57 passim, 162ff, 367n81, 369n20, 373nn46, 49, 380n91, 426n88; and Conciliation and after,

168–73 passim, 181–96 passim, 201, 205, 210, 227, 232, 237, 251, 259f, 389n51, 392n90, 402n31 Camaragibe, visconde de, see Albuquerque, Pedro Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de, visconde de Camaragibe Campos, Carlos Carneiro de, third visconde de Caravelas, 128, 301 Campos, Francisco Carneiro de, 44, 340n12 Campos, José Joaquim Carneiro de, first marquês de Caravelas, regent of Brazil, 44, 340n12 Campos, Martinho Álvares da Silva, 213 Campos, town of, 14, 17, 25, 170, 187, 196, 338n39, 384n8 Cantagalo, town of, 18, 224f capoeira (Afro-Brazilian street fighter), 96–99 passim, 360n54, 361nn55, 60, 390n69 caramurús (1831 restorationist party), 42, 46f, 128, 342n33, 346n49 Caravelas, second visconde de, see Branco, Manuel Alves, second visconde de Caravelas Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 3 Caribbean, 14, 17 Carneiro da Silva family, 25, 63, 125, 338n39, 344n39, 383n5, 384n8, 399n13, 426n88 Carneiro Leão family, 25–29 passim, 45, 63, 99, 103, 174, 329 (Genealogical Table II), 345n45 Carvalho, José da Costa, marquês de Monte Alegre, regent of Brazil; as regent and reactionary ally, 55f, 60, 343n34, 347n60, 348nn66, 67; after 1835, 102, 116, 128, 132, 162, 170, 310, 365n77 Carvalho, José Murilo, 4, 74, 305f, 355n11, 356n20, 385n18, 400n22, 415n2, 423n67 Cavalcanti Albuquerque family, 60, 84, 131ff Caxias, duque de, see Silva, Luís Alves de Lima e, duque de Caxias

Index / 447 Ceará, Province of, 46, 126, 211, 250ff, 257 centralization, 3, 100, 123, 231, 356n20 chácara (small farm), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy Chácara da Floresta, 47–49, 343n34 Chalhoub, Sidney, 4, 150, 378nn77, 78, 79, 415n2, 424n78 Chamber, see Chamber of Deputies Chamber of Deputies: political role of 1, 32, 36, 40–71 passim, 74f, 124, 166, 238f, 243–44, 341n27; site, constitutional role, and sessions, 9, 22, 34–38, 75–76, 78, 284–85, 343n34, 393n97, 420n34; noted debates in, 47–49, 52–55, 59–71 passim, 153ff, 285–301. See also electoral reform; Parliament; patronage; representative constitutionalism chapa (electoral candidates’ slate), see elections charismatic authority, of the monarch, 3, 6, 33–35 passim, 43, 61, 75, 95, 100, 138, 179, 316f; of the state, 3, 6, 61, 73–75 passim, 133, 180, 316 Chichorro, see Gama, Antônio Pinto Chichorro da chimangos (1830s provincial party), 84f, 102f, 130f, 363n67. See also Pernambuco, Province of Christie Affair, 218, 233f, 396n116 O Chronista, 70, 76 Clemente, José, see Pereira, José Clemente Club of the Majority (1840), 85–88 passim, 92f. See also Majority movement Código do Processo, see Código do Processo Criminal Código do Processo Criminal (Code of Criminal Procedure) (1832), 68, 80, 100, 123, 347n58. See also 3 December 1841, law of Coelho, Manuel Inácio de Andrade Souto Maior Pinto, marquês de Itanhaem, 91, 360n52 coffee trade, 2, 5f, 15–20 passim, 74, 118ff, 141–45 passim, 202, 259, 322, 337nn23,

28, 349n74, 377n74; plantation and planters, 6, 17f, 22f, 27ff, 41–48 passim, 57, 61–71 passim, 103, 110, 127, 141, 168, 182, 224, 268, 286 Coimbra, University of, 40, 67, 119 Colégio Dom Pedro II, see Imperial Colégio Dom Pedro II (1837) commerce, 1, 5, 10–19, 21–29 passim, 41–43 passim, 61f, 118, 160f, 202–3. See also coffee trade; merchants; slave trade; sugar trade communication and transport, 2f, 31, 36, 119, 126, 161, 169, 171, 202f, 259, 273, 388n47, 418n19 Conciliation (Conciliação), 168, 172–75 passim, 180–83 passim, 194f, 204ff, 385n15, 390n63; legacy of, 201–5 passim, 212–19 passim, 226f, 245, 249–61 passim, 278–82 passim, 318, 392nn87, 90, 393n98, 396n117, 402n31. See also Cabinet of the Conciliation; Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná Confederation of the Equator (1824), 251, 340n12 Conrad, Robert E., 4, 305f, 323, 403n32, 410n100, 412n110, 416n7, 423n67, 424n79, 425n80 Conservative dissidents (1871), 286–301 passim, 305–11 passim, 419n32, 420nn34, 38, 421n46, 424n79, 425nn80, 82. See also abolition project of the “free womb”; reactionary ideology; saquaremas Conservative moderates (1853), 166, 200– 227 passim, 239, 245–50 passim, 258–61 passim, 282, 318, 393n98, 397n117, 414n118. See also Araújo, José Tomás Nabuco de; Progressive League; Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e conservative opposition (1831), 42, 49, 65–74 passim, 81, 348n67, 352n85, 353n89 Conservative Party (c. 1850), 1f, 6, 63–64, 134, 173, 182, 195–201 passim, 212ff, 221–33 passim, 276f, 302, 306–18

448 / Index passim, 398n4, 419n30. See also Cabinet of 16 July 1868; Conservative dissidents; Conservative moderates; Progressive League Constant, Benjamin, see Rebecque, Benjamin Constant de constituent assembly, radical promotion of, 132, 136 Constituent Assembly of 1823, 34–39 passim, 69, 97, 349n67 Constitution of 1824, 2, 32–36, 46–55 passim, 176, 230, 235. See also Additional Act; liberal reforms; monarch, constitutional role of; reactionary legislation contraband slave trade, see slave trade, under contraband and support for Corrêia, Manuel Francisco, 281f Corréio Mercantil, 157, 211, 250, 381n96, 389n52, 392n87, 394n101, 407n73 Costa, Emilia Viotti da, 4–7 passim, 305f, 323, 355n11, 375n61, 385n18, 386n28, 410n100, 412n110, 415n2, 423n67, 424n79, 425n80, 426n88 Cotegipe, barão de, see Wanderley, João Maurício, barão de Cotegipe cotton, 118, 129, 141, 274, 374n60, 417n19 Council of State, 34, 48, 54, 80, 101f, 179, 230, 242f, 340n12, 362n66, 386n29; and abolition issues, 152–55 passim, 233–38 passim, 254, 261–63 passim, 268, 290, 306, 380n91, 400n20, 405n58, 408n86, 423n69 coup of 1868, see cabinet, under crisis of 1868; Progressive League; Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e Court, see Rio de Janeiro, city of Coutinho, Aureliano de Sousa e Oliveira, visconde de Sepetiba, 55ff, 67, 92ff, 100, 345n47, 353n88, 356n20, 360nn48, 52; as favorite, 100–115 passim, 131f, 156f, 211, 226, 258, 362nn64, 72, 364n72, 367n86, 399n13 Coutinho, José Lino, 44 Coutinho, Rodrigo de Sousa, first conde de Linhares, 26

Coutinho, Saturnino de Oliveira e, 101, 106f, 113, 364n72 creole (crioulo, Brazilian-born slave of African descent), 19f, 113, 145, 274, 337n30. See also slaves (African and Afro-Brazilian) creolization (mixture of Euro-African and native elements in the Americas), 19–20 Crown magistrates, 2, 18, 22–29 passim, 34f, 41–45 passim, 51, 57, 61–63 passim, 68, 104, 127, 184, 387n43 Cuba, 15, 153, 274, 337nn22, 23 culture, cultural influence, 1, 19f, 24, 118f, 144. See also French; political models, foreign Da senzala à colônia (From Slavery to Foreign Rural Laborers), 305 Dean, Warren, 4, 323, 415n2 decentralism, decentralization, 5, 48, 53f, 61f, 70, 75, 81, 86, 347n58. See also liberalism; liberal reforms desordeiro (hoodlum), 97ff, 361nn59, 60. See also capoeiras; urban political mobilization despacho (deliberation and action meeting), 179f, 254f, 283 Diário do Rio de Janeiro, 211, 250, 306, 422n64, 425n79 Dias, Padre José Custódio, 47 Discussão da reforma do estado servil (Debate on the Reform of the Servile Status), 305 Dissolution of the Cabinet of 5 May, or, the Hall Faction, The (A dissolução do Gabinete de 5 de maio ou a facção aulica), 112 Duque Estrada family, 25, 302, 424n73 economic change, 13–18 passim, 27, 61–64 passim, 118–20 passim, 160, 168f, 201–4 passim, 210f, 267, 274, 371. See also commerce; melhoramentos elections, 34–36 passim, 46, 64, 76, 99f,

Index / 449 108–10 passim, 136f, 176f, 364n72, 396n117; significant, 52–63 passim, 67–70 passim, 82, 108, 110, 195–99 passim, 209–11, 212–14, 218f, 346n49, 356n20, 350n80, 396n117, 398n4 Elections of the Truncheon, 101f, 362n64. See also Cabinet of the Majority; purges; violence electoral reform, 76, 112, 180, 245, 294, 318; and Conciliation, 184f, 191–96 passim; and saquarema reaction, 263f, 281, 354n6, 394n105, 413n112 English, 14–19 passim, 23, 38f, 43, 62, 120f, 138–42 passim, 146, 150–55 passim, 218, 233, 275, 313, 396n116 Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo (Essay on Administrative Law), 223, 229–31, 288, 401nn26, 28 Espírito Santo, Province of, 11, 410n97 Eu, comte d’, see Orleans, Louis Gaston d’, comte d’Eu Eusébio, see Câmara, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho Mattoso da Eusébio de Queirós Law (1850), 155, 314 Evaristo, see Veiga, Evaristo da exaltados (enraged) (late 1820s), 40–47 passim, 51, 61–69 passim, 75–86 passim, 97–102 passim, 116, 129, 191, 195, 204, 343n34, 346n49, 411n101 exceptionalism, 1, 39, 75–79 passim, 181f, 229, 231 executive power, 34–40 passim, 54, 167, 175, 189–95 passim, 208f, 223, 235, 260, 277, 294, 302, 309–18 passim; aggrandizement of, 183, 190–95 passim, 207, 209, 231, 251, 263, 309, 319. See also Cabinet of the Conciliation facção áulica (hall faction) (c. 1840), 73, 112 Faoro, Raymundo, 4 Farroupilha (1835–45, Rio Grande do Sul revolt), 61, 81, 83, 96, 100, 356n20 fazenda (plantation), see coffee trade under plantations and planters; or sugar

trade under fluminense planters and economy or Northeast’s planters and economy Fazenda, Vieira, 99 federalism, federation, 48, 53f, 62. See also decentralism, decentralization; liberalism; liberal reforms Federalist Papers, 76 Feijó, Diogo Antônio, regent of Brazil, 42–75 passim, 81–84 passim, 92, 101–5 passim, 120, 149, 173, 343n34, 348n67, 349n72, 353n88, 356n20, 357n25 Ferraz, Ángelo Moniz da Silva, 182–94 passim, 201, 207–9 passim, 221, 241, 246, 322n41, 393n92, 398n124, 400n20, 405n57 Ferraz, Luís Pedreira do Couto, visconde do Bom Retiro, 173, 242, 270, 278, 385n15, 406n60, 417n9 Ferreira França brothers, 68, 347n58. See also França, Ernesto Ferreira Figueira, Domingos de Andrade, 188, 293–97 passim, 308, 322, 416n7, 419n33, 420n36, 421n42, 422n51, 425n80 financial affairs, 168f, 202–7, 217–21 passim, 259f, 319 Flory, Thomas, 4, 347n58, 353n1, 355n11, 377nn73, 75 fluminense (of or from Rio de Janeiro), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of fluminense political assembly, see Provincial Assembly of the Province of Rio de Janeiro Fonseca, Antônio Borges da, 130 França, Ernesto Ferreira, 108, 111, 347n58, 365n79, 370n25 Franco, Bernardo de Sousa, visconde de Sousa Franco, 202–6 passim, 210, 236–38 passim, 258, 372n42, 378n78, 392n87, 398n121, 404n45, 407n73 French, 10, 21, 69, 119, 122, 171, 196, 211, 235, 267, 321, 354n9; political influence of, 34–39 passim, 77–80 passim, 109, 113–15 passim, 165, 229, 354n9, 355n11, 366n81, 367n88, 383n116

450 / Index Freyre, Gilberto, 1, 375n65 Furtado, Francisco José, 220f, 227, 239, 397nn121, 122, 401n26 Gama, Antônio Pinto Chichorro da, 50, 131f, 345n47 Gama, Brás Carneiro Nogueira da, conde de Baependí, 26–27, 195f, 260, 291–97 passim, 391n75, 411n103, 421n45 Gama, Caetano Maria Lopes, visconde de Maranguape, 81–85 passim, 130, 156, 217f, 391n81 Gama, Luís, 323 Gama, Manuel Jacinto Nogueira da, marquês de Baependí, 26–27, 252, 411n103 Gama, Padre Miguel do Sacramento Lopes, 85, 130, 357n26 gerebita (watered cane liquor), see cachaça Goiás, Province of, 11, 15, 26, 125 Gomes Ribeiro family, 27f Graham, Richard, 4, 355n11, 362n62, 375n61, 385n18, 386n28, 388n45, 391n79 Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume, 76–80, 167, 316, 354n9, 355n11, 366n81, 389n52, 400n22 Haiti, 2, 15, 243, 245 haitianismo (Haitianism, advocacy of a Haiti-style revolt), 148f, 245, 377n75 Haitian Revolution, see Haiti highlands (serra), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy históricos (Liberal Party traditionalists, after c. 1853), 201, 221 passim, 245–47 passim, 392n87, 402n31 historiography, discussion of, 1–9 passim, 63f, 74, 142–51 passim, 194, 263, 276f, 304–7, 311 Homem, Francisco de Sales Torres, visconde de Inhomirim, 113f, 204–12 passim, 236ff, 242–44 passim, 260ff, 268, 367n88, 375n65, 392n87, 393n94, 400n20, 404n45, 407n73, 424n69 Honório, see Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná

ideology, 1–9 passim, 33, 38, 42, 49, 61, 65, 71–76 passim, 125, 133, 163, 167, 175, 246, 306–9 passim, 366n79, 388n45; and historiography, 353n1, 355n11, 385n18, 388n45. See also liberalism; monarchism; reactionary ideology Imperial Colégio Dom Pedro II (1837), 119, 169, 171 Inácio, Joaquim José, visconde de Inhauma, 241 Independence of Brazil (1822), 2, 21, 66f, 99, 138, 337n23, 356n20, 385n16, 404n49 Indians, 10–13 passim Inhauma, see Inácio, Joaquim José, visconde de Inhauma Inhomirim, visconde de, see Homem, Francisco de Sales Torres, visconde de Inhomirim Institute of the Order of Brazilian Advocates (1843), 234, 250, 403n34, 404n49 Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (1838), 119 Interpretation of the Additional Act (1840), 66, 79, 84, 86, 100, 351n82, 362n63, 401n23 Isabel, imperial princess of Brazil, 27, 107, 302, 418n23 Itaboraí, town of, 14, 25, 45, 147, 171, 199, 224 Itaboraí, visconde de, see Torres, Joaquim José Rodrigues, visconde de Itaboraí Itú, town of, 43 Jequitinhonha, visconde de, see Montesuma, Francisco Gê Acaiaba de, visconde de Jequitinhonha João VI, prince regent, later king of Portugal and of Brazil, 2, 26, 31, 50, 119, 138, 360n52 Jornal do Commercio, 37, 47, 95, 157, 164, 169, 186, 190f, 211, 289, 293, 302 José Bonifácio, see Silva, José Bonifácio de Andrada e José Bonifácio, o moço (the younger), see Silva, o moço, José Bonifácio de Andrada e

Index / 451 journalists, see political press; publicists July 1832, conspiracy of, 47–53 passim, 85, 97. See also Feijó, Diogo Antônio, regent of Brazil; Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná; moderados July Monarchy (France, 1830–48), 77, 88, 113, 316, 355n11 Karasch, Mary, 4, 375n65, 377n76, 379n79 Kraay, Hendrik, 4, 360n54 Lacerda Werneck family, 27ff, 330 (Genealogical Table III) Lavradio, marquês do, see Lencastre, Luís de Almeida Portugal Soares Alarcão Eça Melo Pereira Aguilar Fiel de Lugo Mascarenhas Silva Mendonça e, marquês do Lavradio, viceroy of Brazil law academies, 67, 119, 351n84 Law Academy at Olinda (1827), 67, 119, 208, 354n9, 414n122 Law Academy at Recife (1854), 119, 269 Law Academy at São Paulo (1827), 55, 57, 69, 119, 301 law schools, see law academies Leão, Brás Carneiro, 22, 25, 45, 63 Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná, 48, 197, 169, 310, 390n72; and moderado divisions, 48–59 passim; and reactionary party, 56–72 passim; and Majority movement, 85–89; and Pedro II, 105f, 133, 156–58 passim, 169, 205, 229, 318; and saquaremas and Cabinet of the Eagles, 133f, 156–60 passim, 173, 183f, 201, 207, 389n51, 402n31; and Conciliation, 172–75, 183–84, 186, 193–97 passim, 204, 251, 259–61 passim, 266f, 318, 388n45, 407n73, 410n101 Leão, Maria Henriqueta Neto Carneiro, marquesa de Paraná, 48, 169, 383n5 Lencastre, Luís de Almeida Portugal Soares Alarcão Eça Melo Pereira Aguilar Fiel de Lugo Mascarenhas

Silva Mendonça e, marquês do Lavrádio, viceroy of Brazil, 24f, 27 Libel of the People (Libelo do povo), 113, 393n94 liberalism, 1–5 passim, 39–44, 45–54 passim, 74–77 passim, 113, 148, 231, 340n10, 341n27, 347n58, 353n3 liberal opposition (1826), 5, 31–35 passim, 39–55 passim, 77, 97, 194, 316, 340n11, 347n58, 402n31 Liberal Party (c. 1847), 74, 81, 108–14 passim, 123, 131; and post-Conciliation resurgence, 201, 210, 213, 220, 239, 244–47 passim, 252f, 307, 412n110. See also luzias; opposition minority party; Otoni, Teófilo Benedito; Progressive League Liberal Quinquennium (1844–48), 100, 108–16, 124, 129, 140, 162, 186, 190, 195, 201f, 207, 317, 366n79, 370n25, 398n121 liberal reforms, 60, 65f, 68, 103, 340n11, 345n48 liberal reformists (c. 1826, 1857), 35f, 40–61 passim, 76, 105, 109, 115, 130, 173, 191; after the Conciliation, 201, 204, 208, 214ff, 220f, 239, 244, 253, 280 Liberals, see Liberal Party; luzias Lima, Pedro de Araújo, marquês de Olinda, regent of Brazil, 56, 60, 68f, 197, 205; as regent, 72, 76, 80–95 passim; from 1848, 116–23 passim, 130, 132, 201–4 passim, 217–22 passim, 227, 234–39 passim, 246, 258, 395n113, 396n114, 397n120, 404n45; and saquaremas, 72, 82, 122, 217–22 passim, 239, 246, 396n117 Lima e Silva family, 26, 44f, 103, 343n36, 391n75 Lisbon, 26f, 121, 349n67, 402n28 literature and literary milieu, 21, 38, 69, 77, 113, 143, 158, 188, 211f, 250f Lobato, Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayão, visconde de Niterói, 182, 187, 190, 214f, 232, 259f, 270, 282, 292, 388n7, 399n13, 418n21 Lobo, Joaquim Antão Fernandes, 249f

452 / Index local oligarchies, 18, 23–29, 40–41, 45f, 53–55 passim, 61, 63f, 68–74 passim, 84f, 100, 110, 117, 123–30 passim, 166 London, 186, 202, 226 lowland (baixada), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy Luanda, 14ff, 28, 139 Luso-Africans, 14, 28f, 67 lusophobia, 39–42 passim, 52, 63–66 passim, 97, 109, 116, 124, 342n27, 377n75 luzias (c. 1842) (1842 rebels, Liberals), 109–10, 123–27 passim, 131, 139, 168, 174–77 passim, 183–92 passim, 198f, 366n81, 370n25, 371n41, 377n75. See also Liberal Party; Revolt of 1842 Lyra, Tavares de, 99 Macedo, Sérgio Teixeira de, 28, 186, 206, 259, 391n75 Machado, Joaquim Nunes, 89, 130, 132, 357n26, 358n35 magistrates, see Crown magistrates Majority movement (1840), 83–95, 98f, 105, 177, 317 Malê Revolt (1835, Salvador), 61, 69, 142–49 passim, 376nn69, 73, 377n75 Malheiro, Agostinho Marquês Perdigão, 28 Malheiro (filho), Agostinho Marquês Perdigão, 28, 234, 238, 250, 262, 403n34, 417n19, 418n21; and crisis of 1871, 277, 298, 301, 308–12 passim, 320, 420nn36, 38, 421n42, 425n85 Maranguape, visconde de, see Gama, Caetano Maria Lopes, visconde de Maranguape Maranhão, Province of, 15, 46, 62, 83, 98, 340n10, 342n27, 343n34, 360n54, 432n67 Maria da Glória, princess of Brazil, queen of Portugal, 51 Marinho, Joaquim de Saldanha, 211f, 213, 401n26 A Marmota, 212 marriage, role of, 16, 24–29 passim, 45, 57, 65, 67f, 170, 384n8, 421n48; and specific cases, 50, 67, 125, 169–74 passim, 181,

211, 224, 251, 269, 394n101, 407n77 Martins, Francisco Gonçalves, visconde de São Lourenço, 68f, 149, 161, 173ff, 182, 219f, 246, 300, 342n58, 370n25, 376n73 Marxist historiography, 4, 349n74 Mato Grosso, Province of, 11, 15, 27, 267, 415n124, 423n67 Matos, Luís José Melo e, 99 Mattos, Ilmar Rohloff de, 4, 353n1, 355n11, 385n18 Mauá, visconde de, see Sousa, Irineu, Evangelista de, visconde de Mauá melhoramentos (development, reforms), 153, 161, 168f, 172, 202f, 209, 266, 317 Melo, Paulo Sousa e, 115 Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho e, conde d’Oeiras, marquês de Pombal, 10, 401n23 Melo, Urbano Sabino Pessoa de, 130 merchants, 2, 16–30 passim, 39–50 passim, 57, 62–70 passim, 122, 146, 170ff, 232, 289, 312, 316, 422n62. See also coffee trade; commerce; financial affairs; negreiros; sugar trade Mexico, 7, 401n23 military dictatorship (1964–85), 3 Military School (1810), 40, 60, 92, 226 military schools, 40, 119 militia, 24, 26, 46 Mina Coast and minas (Africa), 146 Minas Gerais, Province of, 11–18 passim, 23, 27ff, 41, 48, 61ff, 139, 142, 268, 273, 294, 345n47, 351n85, 356n20; political role of, 27, 40f, 46, 52, 60–63 passim, 70–73 passim, 82f, 127, 356n20 mineiro (of or from Minas Gerais), see Minas Gerais, Province of ministries, location of, 21f Mitre, Bartolomé, president of Argentina, 241 moderado dissidents, see moderado renegades moderado renegades (1834), 53–55 passim, 59–67 passim, 72, 81–84 passim, 350n81. See also reactionary party moderados (moderates) (1831), 30, 40–72

Index / 453 passim, 81–87 passim, 97, 129ff, 180, 194, 316, 342n27, 346n49; divisions in, 49–66 passim, 73ff, 81, 92, 101f, 347n58, 350n81, 356n20, 369n15, 381n94 moderate reformism, 3, 168, 209, 220, 246 moderate pragmatists (1844), 108f, 114, 175, 177 moderating power (o poder moderador), 34, 48–54 passim, 101, 175f, 208, 223, 230, 237f, 244, 362n66, 386n29, 401n28; abuse of, 73, 112, 208, 223, 235, 272 monarch, constitutional role of, 3, 33–36, 38, 51, 98, 107, 161f, 175–80 passim, 235, 237–38, 266, 386n29, 401n28; differences over, 112f, 138, 167, 177f, 208f, 230f, 255–56, 265–67 passim, 272, 283, 288–89, 309, 318 monarchism, 2, 6, 23–24, 38–45 passim, 53–54, 59–66 passim, 86, 91–95 passim; and the Party of Order, 75–80 passim, 96, 111–17 passim, 129, 134–38 passim, 195, 206, 232, 289, 316, 402nn28, 31 Monte Alegre, marquês de, see Carvalho, José da Costa, marquês de Monte Alegre Monteiro, Antônio Peregrino Maciel, second barão de Itamaracá, 69, 71f, 130, 352n85 Monteiro, Cândido Borges, barão de Itauna, 199, 303 Montesquieu, 76 Montesuma, Francisco Gê Acaiaba de, visconde de Jequitinhonha, 81, 236ff, 356n20, 400n20, 404nn45, 49 Moreira, João Pinto, 272, 294–98 passim, 422n57 Mosher, Jeffrey C., 357n26, 360n54, 362n64, 368n91 Mota, Inácio Francisco Silveira da, 125ff, 170, 210, 370n20, 399n13 Mota, José Inácio Silveira da, 128, 153, 246, 301, 406n63, 419n30, 423n69 Mozambique, 18 município (county), 64, 124 Muniz, João Braulio, regent of Brazil, 343n34

Muritiba, barão de, see Tosta, Manuel Vieira, first barão de Muritiba Nabuco, Joaquim, see Araújo, Joaquim Aurelio Barreto Nabuco de National Guard (1831), 24–27 passim, 46–49 passim, 66–69 passim, 92, 103f, 123, 136, 145, 279 nationalism, 3, 39–40, 41, 124, 352n87 nativism, see lusophobia; nationalism Naval School, 45, 157f Navarro, see Abreu, Antônio Navarro Nebias, Joaquim Otávio, 128, 257, 298, 416n7 negreiros (Atlantic slave traders), 14–18 passim, 23–29 passim, 61, 161, 139–42 passim, 146–48 passim, 152, 313, 374n60 negros de ganho (skilled slaves for hire), 19. See also slaves (African and AfroBrazilian) Niterói, provincial capital, 57, 119, 199, 259 Northeast, 2, 46, 56, 68–72 passim, 141–44 passim, 174, 273f, 282, 300, 316; economic change and patronage in, 13–18 passim, 118, 163, 185, 203f, 245f, 269, 274 Oeiras, provincial capital, 126 Of the Nature and Limits of the Moderating Power (Da natureza e limites do poder moderador), 208, 404n53 Old Republic (1889–1930), 3 Olinda, marquês de, see Lima, Pedro de Araújo, marquês de Olinda Oliveira, João Alfredo Corréia de, 269, 282, 291f, 299, 310ff, 425n85 Oliveira, Maria Custódia Engracia Francisca Ribeiro de, 68, 170 opposition minority party (c. 1837), 74, 78, 81ff, 102f, 108f oratory, 38f, 43, 49–52 passim, 60–62 passim, 67–71 passim, 228, 286–98 passim, 302–3, 308–10 Orleans, Louis Gaston d’, comte d’Eu, prince imperial of Brazil, 253f Otoni, Cristiano Benedito, 33, 312, 342n32, 411n101, 422n62, 425n85

454 / Index Otoni, Teófilo Benedito, 42, 46–48 passim, 81, 102, 108f, 195, 201, 343n34, 358n30, 366n80; and Liberal resurgence, 201, 214f, 220, 247, 252, 312, 391n80, 393n98, 398n121, 402n31, 411n101 Ouro Preto, provincial capital, 12, 108, 213 Paço da Cidade, 21f, 31f, 37 Palheta, Francisco de Melo, 17 Pará, Province of, 15, 36, 46, 61f, 79–83 passim, 96, 134, 205, 269, 340n10, 351n85, 360n54, 423n67 Paracatú, town of, 48 Paraguayan War, 220f, 240–43, 253–54. See also Platine affairs Paraíba, Province of, 56 Paraíba do Sul, River and Valley of, 11, 15–18 passim, 210, 377n73 Paraná, see Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquês de Paraná Paranaguá, marquês de, see Barbosa, Francisco, Vilela Barbosa, marquês de Paranaguá Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, visconde do Rio Branco, 157, 206, 214, 226–27, 381n97, 391n75, 399nn13, 15, 400n17, 407n73, 415n124, 417n18; and Platine affairs, 157–64 passim, 170–74 passim, 202, 226ff, 240, 408n84; and Conservative Party, 170, 175, 186, 219, 226–27, 246, 250–54 passim, 269–71 passim, 399n13, 410n97, 413n115, 417n19; and Pedro II, 174, 178, 227–29, 282–83, 303–4, 400nn17, 20, 404nn45, 51, 405n58, 417n11; and abolition, 236f, 286–87, 289–91, 295–97, 307–11 passim, 320, 417n11, 419n30, 420nn34, 38, 422n57 Paris, 45, 113, 119, 183, 188, 225f, 344n39, 354n9, 367n88, 389n51, 392n87 Parliament, 22, 34–44, 62, 112, 114, 155, 165, 272, 284f, 291f, 296, 306–10 passim, 316, 320; and ideology, 39–43 passim, 53f, 73–80 passim, 107, 111, 95, 229, 263f, 276, 291, 354n5

partisan mobilization of the 1850s and 1860s, 200ff, 207–11, 247 partisan organizing, 2, 40–46, 52–80 passim, 103f, 110, 124–29 passim, 135–38 passim, 174, 184, 198, 224f party names and origins, 35, 40ff, 55–58 passim, 68, 75, 81, 130, 175, 216, 218, 342n33, 350n81, 366n81, 371n41. See also chimangos; Praieira Revolt Party of Order (c. 1843), 1–6 passim, 25–29 passim, 55–72 passim, 124, 163, 317f, 401n23; after 1853, 166, 175–81 passim, 186, 194, 198, 208, 245, 249, 253, 297, 312–14 passim, 321, 317, 388n45; and conflation with state, 125ff, 134–38 passim, 162, 166, 232, 401n23; and crisis of 1871, 297, 312–14 passim, 321. See also Conservative Party; reactionary party; saquaremas Patí do Alferes, barão de, see Werneck, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda, second barão de Patí do Alferes Patrocínio, José do, 323 patronage, 41, 51, 62, 66, 118, 158f, 162–66 passim, 178, 300–301, 317–20 passim, 423n67; and local partisan organization, 125, 370n25, 385n18, 386n28, 388n45 Paulino (before 1854), see Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, visconde do Uruguai Paulino (after 1854), see Sousa (filho), Paulino José Soares de Pedro I, emperor of Brazil, then duque de Bragança, 2, 21, 31–36 passim, 39–51 passim, 58–62 passim, 66–75 passim, 97, 138, 140, 232, 340n12 Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, 2, 31f, 36, 47–50 passim, 80–83 passim, 91ff, 100, 104–8 passim, 114, 359n46, 360n52, 364n72, 365n77; perspective and intervention of, 92–95 passim, 108–16 passim, 137f, 161, 166f, 172, 177–80 passim, 233–38, 282–83, 318ff, 360n64, 386n24, 392n90, 395n113, 397n121; “anti-partisanship” of, 100, 104–8 passim, 136, 157–61 passim, 166ff, 172, 177f, 200ff,

Index / 455 220, 239, 318f, 364n72, 365n77, 366n79; policy and party initiation of, 200–209 passim, 214ff, 221, 233–40, 243–48, 254–57, 258–67 passim, 275–78, 283–313 passim, 318ff, 395nn111, 113, 396nn116, 117, 403nn32, 34, 408n86 Pena, Herculano Ferreira, 132 Pereira, Engracia Maria da Costa Ribeiro, condêssa da Piedade, 29, 67 Pereira, José Clemente, 29, 62–69 passim, 120, 141, 160, 170, 348n62 Pereira (filho), João de Almeida, 167, 207, 218, 214, 292, 391n75, 394n106, 421n42 Pernambuco, Province of, 13–15 passim, 40, 46, 56, 68–71 passim, 117f, 124–29 passim, 141, 166, 173, 203–5 passim, 263, 300. See also Cavalcanti Albuquerque family; chimangos; Praieira Revolt Piauí, Province of, 110, 125f, 268, 382n104, 393n92 Platine affairs, 121ff, 140, 152–64 passim, 171–74 passim, 202, 220, 234, 240, 270, 301, 379n84 police, 26–29 passim, 45f, 50, 66ff, 89, 132–35 passim, 147–52 passim, 377n73, 424n70; and political and slave repression, 46, 98ff, 123, 131, 145ff, 155, 246, 176, 360n54, 377n73, 378n78, 410n97 political ceremonial, 31f, 86, 179, 228 political culture, 64, 68, 75, 179, 210, 231, 316, 321 political models, foreign, 3, 34–39 passim, 48, 53f, 76–80, 109, 113–15 passim, 229 political press, 37, 40–46 passim, 55, 62, 70, 74, 110–15 passim, 124, 176f, 377n75. See also publicists; and specific periodicals Pombal, see Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho e, conde d’Oeiras, marquês de Pombal Portugal, 2, 10, 20, 25, 36, 40–43 passim, 51, 58, 66, 86, 92, 119, 340n12 Portuguese, 2, 10–29 passim, 39–42 passim, 63–68 passim, 97, 116, 125, 129, 139, 203, 340n12, 342nn29, 30, 33, 361n54, 384n8. See also lusophobia

Portuguese Cortes (Parliament), 43, 349n67 Portuguese court in exile (1807–21), 2, 16, 21, 23, 30f Pouso Alegre, town of, 46 Prado Júnior, Cáio, 4 Praieiro Revolt (1848–50) and praieiros (c. 1843), 115ff, 130–34, 135, 138, 163, 363n67 prime minister (President of the Council of Ministers), 112–13 Progressive League (1862), 200, 215–32 passim, 238–42 passim, 243–48, 252, 372n41, 393n98, 405n58, 408n80. See also Araújo, José Tomás Nabuco de; Conservative moderates; Pedro II, under policy and party initiation of; Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e provedor (steward), see Santa Casa de Misericôrdia provinces and Court politics, 84f, 117, 123–31 passim, 134, 180, 198 Provincial Assembly of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, 57f, 62–67 passim, 259, 294, 302 publicists, 28, 74–76 passim, 103, 112, 133–35 passim, 153–55 passim, 168, 195, 204, 213, 343n34, 391n80, 392n89 public opinion, 73–79 passim, 177, 263–65 passim, 276, 288–90 passim, 380n91, 403nn32, 34, 412n110, 419n32 pumbeiros (Luso-African hinterland slavers), 14 purges, 100–104 passim, 110f, 123, 131–36 passim, 162, 177–79 passim, 218, 226, 317f Queirós, Eusébio de, see Câmara, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho Mattoso da Queirós Mattoso family, 28f, 331 (Genealogical Table IV) quilombo (escaped-slave settlement), 144f Quinta da Boa Vista, see São Cristóvão, Paço de race, racial distinctions, racial relations, 13, 19, 39–40, 61, 95, 192, 143–49 passim,

456 / Index 277, 307, 342n27, 360n54, 375n65, 377n75 radicals (c. 1826), 30–33 passim, 40ff, 347n58, 362n66; until 1837, 40ff, 46–60 passim, 65–68 passim, 76, 250, 343n34, 344n42, 350n81, 356n20, 357n26; after 1837, 78, 89, 102, 108–16 passim, 123, 168, 175–78 passim, 358n30, 366n80, 397n121; in Pernambuco, 84f, 127, 130–33 passim, 348n67, 363n67 Ramos, José, Ildefonso de Sousa, barão de Tres Barros, visconde de Jaguarí, 161, 268ff, 301, 382n104, 414n119, 417n9, 424n69 reactionaries, see Party of Order; reactionary party; reaction of 1830s; Regresso reactionary ideology, 3–6 passim, 49, 53–54, 65f, 74–80, 103–15 passim, 126f, 138, 161, 184, 263–66 passim, 321 reactionary legislation, 66, 80–83 passim, 100ff, 118, 137, 180, 316f reactionary party, 2f, 55–59, 62–74, 85–95 passim, 101–5 passim, 124, 148f, 312, 315–21 passim, 351n82. See also Conservative Party; Party of Order; saquaremas reaction of 1830s, 2, 30, 48, 52–72 passim, 347n59 Rebecque, Benjamin Constant de, 34, 76, 340n13, 347n58 Rebouças, André, 323 Recife, provincial capital, 18, 46, 69, 116–19 passim, 127–33 passim, 139, 180f, 269, 349n67, 360n54, 414n122 reformists, see liberal opposition; liberal reformists; moderados reforms, see liberal reforms regent, single, see Additional Act; Feijó, Diogo Antônio; Lima, Pedro de Araújo, marquês de Olinda; regents regents, 26, 32, 36, 42–44 passim, 48f, 55–60 passim, 89–95 passim, 103, 116, 122, 131, 174, 297, 343n34 Rego, José Pereira do, 150, 378n77 Rego Barros family, 84, 130f, 269, 352nn85,

86, 353n89. See also Cavalcanti Albuquerque family Regresso (1837), 65f, 75–79 passim, 180, 194, 230, 297, 350n81, 351n82 Reis, João José, 4, 146, 374n60, 376n69, 377n73 representative constitutionalism, 32–35 passim, 39–43 passim, 53, 66, 72, 77f, 111–15 passim, 175ff, 184, 194f, 208, 230ff; and abolition project of the “free womb,” 263–66, 272, 276–81 passim, 297, 304, 309–14 passim, 315–21, 402n31. See also reactionary ideology republicanism, 30–33 passim, 40, 44, 53, 78, 129f, 186, 340nn10, 12, 342n32, 361n56 Republican Party (1870), 253, 280, 323 Resende, Estêvão Ribeiro de, marquês de Valença, 28 Resende, town of, 17f Resende, Venâncio Henriques de, 78, 89, 356n20, 357n28 restorationists, 30, 42–68 passim, 74, 78–86 passim, 92, 97, 129, 342n33, 350n81, 361n60. See also caramurús Revolt of 1842, 102–5, 108–11 passim, 131, 174–77 passim, 366n80 revolts and coups, 2, 5, 33–36 passim, 41f, 46f, 51–52, 61f, 69f. See also Malê Revolt; Praieiro Revolt; Revolt of 1842; Sabinada Revolt; slaves, under revolts and resistance Ribeiro, Maria Custódia Francisca, 68, 170 Ribeiro Avelar family, 27f Rio, see Rio de Janeiro, city of Rio Branco, visconde do, see Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, visconde do Rio Branco Rio Branco Law (1871), 276, 314. See also abolition project of the “free womb” Rio de Janeiro, city of, 1, 10–18 passim, 23–28 passim, 40–50 passim, 58–63 passim, 99, 120, 124; description and locations in, 19–23, 77, 91, 119, 156, 169, 179, 212, 252, 278 Rio de Janeiro, Province of, 1, 36, 342n27;

Index / 457 geography and economy of, 11–19, 225; local oligarchies and politics of, 23–29, 40–46 passim, 56–62 passim, 63–68, 70f, 110, 182, 195–99 passim, 210f, 219, 347n62, 356n20; and Party of Order, 1, 6, 9f, 56–62 passim, 63–68, 70f, 110, 224f Rio de la Plata, 10, 16, 121, 140, 152–55 passim, 160f, 169–71 passim, 240, 264, 271, 278 Rio Grande do Sul, Province of, 16, 25f, 205, 268, 410n97 Rocha, Justiniano José, 70–76 passim, 110–12 passim, 128, 133, 153, 165–67 passim, 211f, 352n86, 355n11, 366n81, 375n65, 377n75, 379n82, 380n91; and Conciliation, 168, 188–95 passim, 321, 388n51, 389n52, 390n72 Rodrigues Torres family, 25, 45f, 57, 344n39, 366n81 Rosa, Francisco Otáviano de Almeida, 196–99, 211ff, 232, 244–51 passim, 259–61 passim, 390n69, 391nn75, 80, 394nn101, 104, 398n121, 401n26, 407n73 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 121f, 151f, 159f, 174, 385n16 Sabinada Revolt (1837–38, Salvador), 69, 83, 95, 149, 180 Salvador da Bahia, provincial capital, 10f, 18, 36, 69, 119, 129, 139, 149f, 211, 277, 342n27, 374n60, 381n97; revolts in, 46, 61, 69, 83, 95, 129, 142, 146, 148, 360n54, 376n73 Santa Casa de Misericôrdia, 21, 67, 170 Santa Luzia, town of, 104, 110 São Cristóvão, Paço de, 24, 31f, 91–94 passim, 105f, 169, 179, 215, 219, 232–35 passim, 244, 248, 256, 271 São João d’El Rei, town of, 46 São Lourenço, visconde de, see Martins, Francisco Gonçalves, visconde de São Lourenço São Luís do Maranhão, provincial capital, 46, 213 São Paulo, Province of, 11, 15–17 passim,

40–43 passim, 50, 102–4 passim, 118–20 passim, 127f, 139–42 passim, 170, 263, 273, 322, 336n6, 356n20, 414n119 São Paulo, provincial capital, 10, 43, 46, 57, 128, 213, 336n6 São Paulo electoral Junta (1821), 43 São Vicente, marquês de, see Bueno, José Antônio Pimento, marquês de São Vicente Saquarema, town of, 45, 110 saquaremas (c. 1842) (Party of Order or its traditionalists and leadership), 101, 110, 204–12 passim, 216–25 passim, 239, 249–66 passim, 309–19 passim, 366n81, 370n25, 385n18, 414n118; and Conciliation, 173–75 passim, 181–94, 195, 402n31. See also Conservative dissidents; Conservative Party; Party of Order; reactionary party Saraiva, José Antônio, 214f, 391n81, 395n107 School of Fine Arts (1826), 119 School of the Navy, see Naval School Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, 4, 336n2 season of waters (estação de aguas), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy Seminary of São José, 45, 67 Senate, 22, 36f, 47–54 passim, 59, 83–95 passim, 110–11 passim, 115f, 132, 173–76 passim, 184–93 passim, 244–48 passim, 257, 397n119; and saquaremas, 163, 172, 204, 210, 215, 219–24 passim, 232, 269, 282, 397n121; and abolition project, 238, 264, 278–88 passim, 301ff, 404n51 Sentinela do Serro, 46 Sergipe, Province of, 56, 68, 227, 351n85, 382n104 serra, serra acima (highlands), see Rio de Janeiro, Province of, under geography and economy sertão (hinterland wilderness), 46, 95, 127 O Sete d’Abril, 52 Silva, Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada Machado e, 47, 81–84 passim, 90–98 passim, 115, 361nn56, 64, 362n64

458 / Index Silva, Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho e, 28, 63 Silva, Firmino Rodrigues da, 70–73 passim, 112, 128, 165, 195, 392n89 Silva, Francisco de Lima e, regent of Brazil, 26, 44f, 60, 103, 181, 343n34 Silva, João Manuel Pereira da, 88–90 passim, 128, 136f, 156, 196f, 213, 259, 261–65 passim, 198, 420n34, 421n42 Silva, José Bonifácio de Andrada e, 47, 50f, 92, 345n43, 360n52, 361n60, 391n80 Silva, José Carneiro da, first visconde de Araruama, 25, 338n39 Silva, Josino do Nascimento, 70 Silva, Luís Alves de Lima e, duque de Caxias, 26, 45, 103, 160, 174, 241–43 passim, 253, 385n16; and political role of, 174f, 193, 197, 201, 214–19 passim, 241–43, 247–53 passim, 319, 344n36, 391n75, 395nn111, 113, 396n117, 405nn57, 58, 414n115, 417n9; and Paranhos, 174, 214f, 227f, 240, 270f, 278, 280, 395n110 Silva, Manuel da Fonseca Lima e, barão de Suruí, 44 Silva, o moço (the younger), José Bonifácio de Andrada e, 201, 213, 391n80, 394n104, 401n26 Silva, Rodrigo da, 260–63 passim, 421n42 Silva, Teodoro Machado Freire Pereira da, 282 Sinimbu, João Lins Vieira Cansansão de, 217f slave holding, 142–49, 272–75, 403n32, 425n80; as ideological and social assumption, 2–5 passim, 43, 64, 71, 139, 143, 222, 238, 272–78 passim, 295, 299, 304–8 passim, 316, 323, 418n19 slaves (African and Afro-Brazilian), 1–6 passim, 14–22 passim, 61f, 96f, 139, 143–46 passim, 149–51, 273–74, 337n23, 368n6, 369n8, 373n53, 376n69; and historiography, 3f, 142–43, 146–51 passim, 375n63; revolts and resistance of, 61, 69, 104, 142–49 passim, 363n69, 377n75, 380n91, 415n2 slave trade, 6, 14–29 passim, 48, 67, 121,

139–42 passim, 149–51, 233f, 273–74, 378n77, 416n3; contraband and support for, 18, 28, 43, 61f, 67–70 passim, 120, 138–42 passim, 145–48 passim, 152–54 passim, 374nn56, 60; abolition of, 43, 62, 67–70 passim, 120, 138–55, 160, 164–68 passim, 203, 233, 312–14, 317, 377n75, 378n79, 379n84, 380n93 slavocrats (escravocratas), 176f, 305, 307, 416n7, 425n80 Soares, Caetano Alberto, 250 Soares de Sousa family, 25 Sociedade Defensora de Liberdade e Independência Nacional (1831), 46, 59, 70 Sociedade Harmonizadora (1830s), 69 Sodré, Nelson, 4 Solano López, Francisco, president of Paraguay, 240, 253ff Sousa, Ana Maria de Macedo Álvares de Azevedo Soares de, viscondêssa do Uruguai, 25, 171 Sousa, Bernardo Belisário Soares de, 25, 48, 57, 348n62 Sousa, Francisco Belisário Soares de, 292, 296, 421nn42, 48 Sousa, Irineu Evangelista de, visconde de Mauá, 16, 202f, 259, 410n10 Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, visconde do Uruguai, 1, 9, 25–29 passim, 57f, 65– 69 passim, 312, 348n62, 351n82, 355n11, 362n63, 364n72, 379n84, 398n2, 401n23, 402n29; in Cabinet of Eagles, 121ff, 152f, 156–60, 164–66, 170f, 381nn98, 103; final perspective of, 170f, 181, 199–200, 223, 229–31, 392n90, 398n4, 401nn23, 26, 28 Sousa (filho), Paulino José Soares de, 171, 178, 204f, 223–26, 231–32, 391n75, 392n89, 398nn2, 4, 401n26, 402n29; as saquarema leader, 252–64 passim, 286, 299–300, 308–15 passim, 409n95, 410n97, 413nn112, 115, 419nn30, 32, 421n42, 425n80 Spain, 10 state, 21f, 33–36 passim, 40–54 passim, 61f,

Index / 459 70, 133, 137f, 168, 313–17 passim, 353n4, 385n18, 401nn23, 28, 420n38; and society, 2–5 passim, 9, 23–24, 29–33 passim, 40–43 passim, 48–51 passim, 103, 114, 312–21 passim; and repression, 46f, 62, 70, 103f, 131–34 passim, 148; autonomy of, 115, 138, 266–64, 302–3, 309, 314–21 passim, 420n38; and Party of Order, 124–27 passim, 133f, 138, 161f, 317f sugar trade, 2; and fluminense planters and economy, 6, 11–18 passim, 23–25 passim, 64, 74, 118f, 125, 141–44 passim, 168–71 passim, 196, 202f, 224, 337n22, 338n39, 384n8; and Northeast’s planters and economy, 14f, 60, 69, 74, 118ff, 124–29 passim, 144, 163, 269, 274, 316; and slavery, 14–19 passim, 61–64 passim, 68–71 passim, 141–44 passim, 337n23, 374n60, 377n74, 417n19, 426n88 suplente (runner-up replacement), 69, 196, 364n72 Supreme Tribunal of Justice, 28, 67, 234 Teixeira, Luís Joaquim Duque-Estrada, 302f, 421n42 Teixeira de Macedo family, 28f, 67, 331 (Genealogical Table IV) Teixeira Júnior, Jerônimo José, visconde do Cruzeiro, 169, 178, 198, 204f, 268–70 passim, 281, 410n101, 414n119, 418n19; and abolition project of the “free womb,” 258–63 passim, 291, 298, 410n100, 421n46 Teixeira Leite family, 101, 186f, 259, 388n47, 399n13, 418n21, 420n38, 421n48 3 December 1841, law of, 100f, 123ff, 137, 162, 176, 180–84 passim, 189 Torres, Cândido José Rodrigues, barão de Itambí, 46, 169, 224, 344n39 Torres, Joaquim José Rodrigues, visconde de Itaboraí, 25–28 passim, 45–48 passim, 356n20; until 1848, 53–72 passim, 85f, 93f, 105f, 110ff, 347nn58, 62, 350n79, 367n81; in Cabinet of Eagles, 120–23 passim, 129, 135–37 passim, 141, 147–49 passim, 159–66 passim; in Conciliation

and its aftermath, 169–72 passim, 183, 195–99 passim, 201–9 passim, 224–27 passim, 389n51; and abolition project and Cabinet of 16 July 1868, 237f, 246–71 passim, 275–91 passim, 300f, 404n45, 407n78, 410n97, 413n115, 417n9 Torres, José Carlos Pereira de Almeida, 108, 370n25 Tosta, Manuel Vieira, first barão de Muritiba, 28, 132f, 160, 206, 236, 270, 370n25, 404nn45, 51; and abolition project and Cabinet of 16 July 1868, 249, 253, 257f, 265, 278, 301f, 410n97, 413n115, 417n9 Tosta (filho), Manuel Vieira, second barão de Muritiba, 28, 410n97 United States, 48, 53f, 75f, 118, 140, 229, 233, 274f, 337n23, 374n60, 403n32 urban change, 118f, 168f, 250 urban political mobilization, 2–5 passim, 32–44 passim, 46–52 passim, 61, 86–95 passim, 113–16 passim, 123f, 129, 148, 323, 381n56; and post-1850 era, 210–16 passim, 247, 322, 394n104, 415n2 Uruguai, visconde do, see Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, visconde do Uruguai Uruguay, 121f, 160f, 165, 227, 240–43 passim, 385n16, 400n17 Valença, marquês de, see Resende, Estêvão Ribeiro de, marquês de Valença. Valença, town of, 18, 27, 46, 196, 268 Vasconcelos, Bernardo Pereira, 43, 155, 344n42, 362n66; among the moderados, 43–53 passim, 54f, 344n41, 353n4, 354nn4, 5, 6, 362n66, 364n72, 402n28; and the reactionary party, 55–72 passim, 74f, 91–95 passim, 155–59 passim, 188, 310, 316, 348n67, 350n81, 374n56, 380n93; and reactionary ideology, 74–79, 159, 175, 181–84 passim, 194f, 224, 230–33 passim, 312, 362n63 Vasconcelos, Francisco Diogo Pereira de, 202 Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e, 161, 208, 219, 229, 271, 382n104, 397n120,

460 / Index 398n124, 400n20, 405n57; and Pedro II, 201, 208, 216–19 passim, 230, 234–40 passim, 248f, 254, 301, 395n113, 396n117, 397n121, 401n26, 404n53; and Progressive League and Liberal Party, 216–21 passim, 239–48 passim, 252f, 397n121, 405n58, 406n61 Vassouras, town of, 18, 145–49 passim, 186–90 passim, 421n48 Vassouras slave revolt (1838), 142–49 passim, 376nn68, 73. See also slaves, under revolts and resistance Veiga, Evaristo Ferreira da, 30, 43–53 passim, 57–65 passim, 70f, 97–99 passim, 343n34, 350n81, 353n4, 374n56, 376n73, 402n29 Velho da Silva family, 27f Venezuela, 15, 337n23 Vergueiro, Nicolão Pereira de Campos, regent of Brazil, 33, 342n32, 343n34 Viana, Antônio Ferreira, 300, 417n19, 421n42, 422n64 Viana, Cândido José de Araújo, marquês de Sapucaí, 101, 108, 347n58, 360n52, 400n20

Viana, Joaquim Francisco, 172, 259 Viana, Oliveira, 1, 3, 353n3 Viana, Paulo Fernandes, 26, 29, 45 violence, 87–90 passim, 95–101, 105f, 110, 131f, 165, 192, 218–21 passim, 317, 360n54, 361nn58, 62, 398n4 Walsh, R., 31, 36ff Wanderley, João Maurício, barão de Cotegipe, 129, 173–75 passim, 204, 219, 245f, 252f, 370n25, 382n104, 403n32, 409n95, 423n64, 426n88; and abolition project of the “free womb,” 255–63 passim, 279ff, 300f, 410n97, 413n115, 417n19 Weffort, Francisco, 3 Werneck, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda, second barão de Patí do Alferes, 27–29 passim, 66, 86, 103, 121, 145, 149, 388n47, 402n29 West Africa, 18, 139, 146 West Central Africa, 14, 28, 139, 146 Zacarias, see Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e