The Regency Era of Brazil

The Regency Era, 1831-40
The three regents that ruled in the young emperor's name from 1831
to 1840 witnessed a period of turmoil as local factions struggled
to gain control of their provinces and to keep the masses in line.
Out of desperation to weaken the radical appeals for federalism,
republicanism, and hostility toward the Portuguese, and to protect
against contrary calls for Pedro I's restoration, the regency in
Rio de Janeiro gave considerable power to the provinces in 1834.
Brazil took on the appearance of a federation of local pátrias
(autonomous centers of regional power) with loose allegiance to
the Rio de Janeiro government, whose function was to defend them
from external attack and to maintain order and balance among them.
The government's ability to carry out that function was impaired,
however, by the low budgets allowed the army and navy, and by the
creation of a National Guard, whose officers were local notables
determined to protect their private and regional interests. The
rebellions, riots, and popular movements that marked the next years
did not spring as much from economic misery as from attempts to
share in the prosperity stemming from North Atlantic demand for
Brazil's exports.
Many of the disturbances were so fleeting they were all but forgotten.
For example, in Rio de Janeiro alone there were five uprisings in
1831 and 1832. Another eight of the more famous revolts in the 1834-49
period included the participation of lower-class people, Indians,
free and runaway blacks, and slaves, which accounts for their often
fierce suppression. Republican objectives were apparent in some
of these revolts, such as the War of the Farrapos (ragamuffins),
also known as the Farroupilha Rebellion (1835-45), in Santa Catarina
and Rio Grande do Sul. Others, such as the Cabanagem in Pará
in 1835-37, the Sabinada in Salvador in 1837-38, the Balaiada Rebellion
in Maranhao in 1838-41, and the ones in Minas Gerais and São
Paulo in 1842, were propelled simultaneously by antiregency and
promonarchial sentiments. Such unrest dispels the notion that the
history of state formation in Brazil was peaceful. Instead, it shows
the confrontation between the national government and the splintering
pátrias , which would continue in varying degrees for the
next century.
Pedro I's death from tuberculosis in 1834 had sapped the restorationist
impulse and removed the glue that held uneasy political allies together.
With the regency attempting to suppress simultaneous revolts in
the South and North, it could not easily reassert its supremacy
over the remaining provinces. Brazil could well have split apart
in those years. It did not for three reasons. First, the military
was reorganized as an instrument of national unity under the leadership
of Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, who was ennobled as the Duke
of Caxias (Duque de Caxias) and who would later be proclaimed Patron
of the Brazilian Army. Second, the specter of slave revolt and social
disintegration had become all too real. And third, the "vision
of Brazil as a union of autonomous pátrias ," in Roderick
J. Barman's phrase, was replaced by the vision of Brazil as a nation-state.
Rather than risk their fortunes and lives, the elites, longing for
a focus of loyalty, identity, and authority, rallied around the
boy-emperor, who ascended the throne on July 18, 1841, at age fifteen
instead of the constitutionally specified age of eighteen. Thus,
the second empire was born in the hope that it would be an instrument
of national unity, peace, and prosperity.
The Second Empire, 1840-89
In the 1840s, the Brazilian nation-state coalesced as authorities
suppressed revolts and rewrote Brazilian law. These laws, however,
did not bode well for democracy because they shaped an electoral
system based on government-controlled fraud. In 1842, on the advice
of conservative courtiers, Pedro II used his constitutional moderating
power to dismiss the newly elected liberal Chamber of Deputies and
called new elections, which the conservatives won by stuffing the
ballot boxes. In so doing, he set a pattern of favoring conservatives
over liberals.
The constitution of 1824 had created the usual three governmental
powers--executive, legislative, and judicial--and a fourth, the
moderating power. The emperor held this power, which gave him the
right to name senators, to dismiss the legislature, and to shift
control of the government from one party to the other. In theory,
he was to act as the political balance wheel. It should be noted
that the parties were more groupings of members of Parliament than
ideologically based movements dependent on distinct electorates.
Historian Richard Graham observed that "No particular political
philosophy distinguished one group from another." Then, as
now, the political system had an artificial aspect to it; it did
not relate openly to the real power structure of the country--the
"lords of the land" (senhores da terra ) who ran local
affairs.
A good example of how the real power holders manipulated the system
to protect their narrow interests to the detriment of the national
interest was the Land Law of 1850, which set the pattern for modern
landholding. The Land Law ended the colonial practice of obtaining
land through squatting or royal grants and limited acquisition to
purchase, thereby restricting the number of people who could become
owners. By creating obstacles to landownership, the law's framers
hoped to force free labor to work for existing landlords. However,
proprietors sabotaged the law by not surveying their lands and not
resolving their conflicting claims in order to keep titles cloudy
and hence in their hands. One result of the uncertain titles was
that slaves were used as collateral.
Also in 1850, British pressure finally forced the Brazilian government
to outlaw the African slave trade. London, tiring of Brazilian subterfuge,
authorized its navy to seize slave ships in Brazilian waters, even
in ports. Rather than risk open war with Britain, paralyzation of
commerce, widespread slave unrest, and destabilization of the empire,
the government outlawed the African slave trade. It deported a number
of Portuguese slavers and instructed the provincial presidents,
police, judges, and military to crack down. Over the next five years,
even clandestine landings stopped, and despite the tempting rise
of slave prices in the coffee districts of Rio de Janeiro Province,
the trans-Atlantic trade ended. Although the British claimed credit,
it should be noted that for the first time a Brazilian government
had the power to enforce a law along the length of the coast. Also,
internal support for the trade had weakened. Most slave importers
were Portuguese, who had been selling the ever more expensive Africans
to landowners on credit at climbing interest rates, in some cases
forcing the latter into insolvency and loss of property. Xenophobia
and the debts of the landed classes combined to support the government
action.
Ending the slave trade had a number of consequences. First, because
labor needs increased in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as
the world demand for coffee rose, Northeastern planters sold their
surplus slaves to Southern growers. In addition, Parliament passed
laws encouraging European immigration, as well as the Land Law of
1850. Second, ending the slave trade freed capital that could then
be used for investment in transport and industrial enterprises.
Third, it ensured that Britain did not interfere in Brazil's military
intervention to end the rule in Buenos Aires of Juan Manuel de Rosas
(president of Argentina, 1829-33, 1835-52).
Coffee dominated exports in the last half of the nineteenth century,
going from 50 percent of exports in 1841-50 to 59.5 percent in 1871-80.
But sugar exports also increased, and cotton, tobacco, cocoa, rubber,
and maté were important. The vast cattle herds that grazed
the Northeastern sertão , the plains (cerrado ) of Minas
Gerais, and the pampas of Rio Grande do Sul foreshadowed Brazil's
status in 1990 as the world's second largest meat exporter. Meat-salting
plants (saladeros ) in Rio Grande do Sul shipped sun-dried beef
to the expanding coffee-growing region to feed its slaves and freed
tenant farmers (colonos ). In addition to beef, Brazilians ate protein-rich
beans, rice, and corn, much of which came from Minas Gerais or the
immigrant colonies of Rio Grande do Sul. Interregional trade was
budding, but for the most part local self-sufficiency was the norm.
Indeed, more people produced food for the domestic market than labored
on export crops.
Expanding coffee production in the 1850s and 1860s attracted British
investment in railroads to speed transport of the beans to the coast.
The Santos-São Paulo Railroad (1868) was the first major
breach of the coastal escarpment, which had slowed development of
the Southern plateau. Similarly, in the Northeast railroads began
to cut into the interior from the coast. But generally the pattern
was to connect a port with its export-oriented hinterland, creating
a series of enclaves that were connected with each other by sea.
Well into the twentieth century, Brazil lacked railroads and highways
linking its major regions, urban areas, and economic zones. The
country was laced together by intricate networks of mule trails
that moved goods and people throughout the vast interior. Viewed
as archaic by modern observers, the mule train trails nonetheless
were important in Brazil's formation, tying the various regions
together and spreading a common language and culture.
The empire had lost the East Bank of the Río de la Plata
with the founding of Uruguay in 1828, but it continued to meddle
in that republic's affairs. Brazil's most important businessman,
Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, the Visconde de Mauá, had such
heavy financial interests there that his company was effectively
the Uruguayan government's bank. Other Brazilians owned about 400
large estates (estancias ) that took up nearly a third of the country's
territory. They objected to the taxes the Uruguayans imposed when
they drove their cattle back and forth to Rio Grande do Sul, and
they took sides in the constant fighting between Uruguay's Colorado
and Blanco political factions, which later became the Colorado Party
and the National Party (Blancos). Some of Rio Grande do Sul's gauchos
did not accept Uruguayan independence in 1828 and continually sought
intervention.
In the mid-1860s, the imperial government conspired with Buenos
Aires authorities to replace the Blanco regime in Montevideo with
a Colorado one. The Blancos appealed to Paraguayan dictator Francisco
Solano López (president, 1862-70), who harbored his own fears
of the two larger countries and who regarded a threat to Uruguay
as a menace to Paraguay. A small landlocked country, Paraguay had
the largest army in the region: 64,000 soldiers compared with Brazil's
standing army of 18,000. In 1864 Brazil and Argentina agreed to
act together should Solano López attempt to save the Blancos.
In September 1864, wrongly convinced that he would not be so foolish,
the Brazilians sent troops into Uruguay to put the Colorados in
power. Each side miscalculated the intentions, capabilities, and
will of the other. Paraguay reacted by seizing Brazilian vessels
on the Rio Paraguai and by attacking the province of Mato Grosso.
Solano López, mistakenly expecting help from anti-Buenos
Aires caudillos, sent his forces into Corrientes to get at Rio Grande
do Sul and Uruguay and found himself at war with both Argentina
and Brazil. In May 1865, those two countries and Colorado-led Uruguay
signed an alliance that aimed to transfer contested Paraguayan territory
to the larger countries, to open Paraguayan rivers to international
trade, and to remove Solano López. By September 1865, the
allies had driven the Paraguayans out of Rio Grande do Sul, and
they took the war into Paraguay when that country spurned their
peace overtures.
Fiercely defending their homeland, the Guaraní-speaking
Paraguayans defeated the allies at Curupaití in September
1866. The Argentine president, General Bartolomé Mitre (1861-68),
took the bulk of his troops home to quell opposition to his war
policy, leaving the Brazilians to soldier on. The famed General
Lima e Silva, Marquis and later Duke of Caxias, took command of
the allied forces and led them until the fall of Asunción
in early 1869. With stubborn determination, the Brazilians pursued
Solano López until they cornered and killed him. They then
occupied Paraguay until 1878.
The war dragged on for several reasons. First, the Paraguayans
were better prepared at the outset and conducted an effective offensive
into the territories of their adversaries, immediately handing them
defeats. Even later, when pushed back onto their own land, they
had the advantages of knowing the ground, of having prepared defenses,
and of fielding stubbornly loyal troops. Second, it took the Brazilians
considerable time to marshal their forces and considerable effort
and cost to keep them supplied. Third, the Argentines, hoping to
improve their postwar situation in relation to Brazil, delayed operations
partly to force the empire to weaken itself by expending its resources.
Fourth, this was the era of "unconditional surrender."
It was militarily fashionable to pursue Solano López to the
bitter end.
The war had important consequences for Brazil and the Río
de la Plata region. It left Brazil and Argentina facing each other
over a prostrate Paraguay and a dependent Uruguay, a situation that
would soon turn into a tense rivalry that repeatedly assumed warlike
postures. Historians debate the number of Paraguayan casualties,
some asserting that 50 percent of Paraguayans were killed, others
arguing that it was much less, possibly 8 to 9 percent of the prewar
population total. Nonetheless, the losses from battle, disease,
and starvation were severe and disrupted the development of the
republic. In Brazil the war contributed to the growth of manufacturing,
to the professionalization of the armed forces and their concentration
in Rio Grande do Sul, to the building of roads and the settling
of European immigrants in the southern provinces, and to the increased
power of the central government. Most important for the future,
the war brought the military firmly into the political arena. Military
officers were keenly aware that the war had exposed the military's
lack of equipment, training, and organization. Officers blamed these
shortcomings on civilian officials. In the next decades, reformist
officers seeking to modernize the army would criticize the Brazilian
political structure and its peculiar culture as obstacles to modernization.
The end of the war coincided with the resurgence of republicanism
as disenchanted liberals cast about for a new route to power. The
1867 collapse of the short-lived, French-sponsored Mexican monarchy
of Maximilian left Brazil as the hemisphere's only monarchial regime.
And because Argentina appeared to prosper in the 1870s and 1880s,
it served as a powerful advertisement for republican government.
The republican ideology spread in urban areas and in provinces,
such as São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, where the people
did not believe they benefited from imperial economic policies.
The republican manifesto of 1870 proclaimed that "We are in
America and we want to be Americans." Monarchy was, the writers
asserted, hostile to the interests of the American states and would
be a continuous source of conflict with Brazil's neighbors. The
republicans embraced the abolition of slavery to remove the stigma
of Brazil's being the only remaining slaveholding country (save
for Spanish Cuba) in the hemisphere. It was not so much that they
believed that slavery was wrong as that it gave the country an image
distasteful to Europeans. Abolition, which would come in 1888, did
not imply that liberals wanted deep social reform or desired a democratic
society. Indeed, their arguments against slavery were weighted toward
efficiency rather than morality. Once in power, the republicans
looked to discipline the legally free work force with various systems
of social control.
The Brazilian social system functioned through intertwined networks
of patronage, familial relationships, and friendships. The state,
capitalist economy, and institutions such as the church and the
army developed within what historian Emília Viotti da Costa
has called, "the web of patronage." Contacts and favor
rather than ability determined success in virtually all occupations.
Brazilian society was, and still is, one in which a person could
not advance without friends and family; hence, the continued importance
of kinship networks (parentelas ), godfathers (compadres ) and godmothers
(comadres ), and military school classes (turmas ). Such a social
system did not lend itself to reform.
The 1870s and 1880s saw a crisis in each of the three pillars of
the imperial regime--the church, the military, and the slaveholding
system. Together, these crises represented the failure of the regime
to adapt without alienating its base. In the 1870s, Rome pressured
Brazil's Roman Catholic Church to conform to the conservative reforms
of Vatican Council I, which strengthened the power of the pontiff
by declaring him infallible in matters of faith and morals. This
effort by Rome to unify doctrine and practice worldwide conflicted
with royal control of the church in Brazil. The crown had inherited
the padroado , or right of ecclesiastical patronage, from its Portuguese
predecessor. This right gave the crown control over the church,
which imperial authorities treated as an arm of the state. Although
some clerics had displayed republican sentiments earlier in the
century, a church-state crisis exploded in the mid-1870s over efforts
to Europeanize the church.
The importance of the military crisis is clearer because it removed
the armed prop of the regime. After the Paraguayan War (1864-70),
the monarchy was indifferent to the army, which the civilian elite
did not perceive as a threat. The fiscal problems of the 1870s slowed
promotions to a crawl, salaries were frozen, and officers complained
about having to contribute to a widows' fund from their meager salaries.
Moreover, the soldiers in the ranks were considered the dregs of
society, discipline was based on the lash, and training seemed pointless.
The gulf between the military and the civilian oligarchies broadened.
The political parties were as indifferent as the government to demands
for military reform, for obligatory military service, for better
armament, and for higher pay and status. During the 1870s, the discontent
was checked by the National Guard's reduced role; by an unsuccessful
but welcomed attempt to improve the recruitment system; and, especially,
by the cabinet service of war heroes, including the Duke of Caxias
as prime minister (1875-78) and Marshal Manuel Luís Osório,
the Marquis of Herval, as minister of war (1878). But the latter
died in 1879 and Caxias the year after, leaving leadership to officers
less committed to the throne. The junior officer ranks were filled
with men from the middle sectors who had entered the army to obtain
an education rather than to follow a military career. They were
more concerned than their predecessors with social changes that
would open opportunities to the lower middle class.
The officer corps was split into three generations. The oldest
group had helped suppress the regional revolts of the 1830s and
1840s, had fought in Argentina in 1852, and had survived the Paraguayan
War. The numerous mid-level officers were better schooled than their
seniors and had been tested in combat in Paraguay. The junior officers
had missed the war but had the most education of the three groups
and had experienced the empire only when its defects had become
clearly apparent. They were the least attached to the old regime
and the most frustrated by the lack of advancement in a peacetime
army cluttered with veterans of the great war.
Brazilian political tradition permitted officers to hold political
office and to serve as cabinet ministers, thereby blurring the civil-military
roles. As parliamentary deputies and senators, officers could criticize
the government, including their military superiors, with impunity.
In the 1880s, officers participated in provincial politics, debated
in the press, and spoke in public forums. In 1884 a civilian minister
of war attempted to impose order by forbidding officers to write
or speak publicly about governmental matters. The subsequent punishments
of offending officers led Field Marshal Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca
and General José Antônio Correia de Câmara (Visconde
de Pelotas) to head protests that eventually forced the minister
to resign in February 1887 and the cabinet to fall in March 1888.
Even as the church and military crises were unfolding, the slavery
issue shook the support of the landed elite. Members of the Liberal
and Conservative Parties came from the same social groups: plantation
owners (fazendeiros ) made up half of both, and the rest were bureaucrats
and professionals. The ideological differences between the parties
were trivial, but factional and personal rivalries within them made
it difficult for the parties to adjust to changing social and economic
circumstances. As a result, the last decade of the empire was marked
by considerable political instability. Between 1880 and 1889, there
were ten cabinets (seven in the first five years) and three parliamentary
elections, with no Parliament able to complete its term. The repeated
use of the moderating power provoked alienation, even among traditional
monarchists.
Attitudes toward slavery had shifted gradually. Pedro II favored
abolition, and during the Paraguayan War slaves serving in the military
were emancipated. In 1871 the Rio Branco cabinet approved a law
freeing newborns and requiring masters to care for them until age
eight, at which time they would either be turned over to the government
for compensation or the owner would have use of their labor until
age twenty-one. In 1884 a law freed slaves over sixty years of age.
By the 1880s, the geography of slavery had also changed, and the
economy was less dependent on it. Because of manumissions (many
on condition of remaining on the plantations) and the massive flight
of slaves, the overall numbers declined from 1,240,806 in 1884 to
723,419 in 1887, with most slaves having shifted from the sugar
plantations in the Northeast to the south-central coffee groves.
But even planters in São Paulo, where the slave percentage
of the total population had fallen from 28.2 percent in 1854 to
8.7 percent in 1886, understood that to continue expansion they
needed a different labor system. The provincial government therefore
actively began subsidizing and recruiting immigrants. Between 1875
and 1887, about 156,000 arrived in São Paulo. Meanwhile,
the demand for cheap sugarcane workers in the Northeast was satisfied
by sertanejos (inhabitants of the sertão ) fleeing the devastating
droughts of the 1870s in the sertão .
The economic picture was also changing. Slavery immobilized capital
invested in the purchase and maintenance of slaves. By turning to
free labor, planter capital was freed for investment in railroads,
streetcar lines, and shipping and manufacturing enterprises. To
some extent, these investments offered a degree of protection from
the caprices of agriculture.
Meanwhile, slaves left the plantations in great numbers, and an
active underground supported runaways. Army officers petitioned
the Regent Princess Isabel to relieve them of the duty of pursuing
runaway slaves. Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, commander in Rio
Grande do Sul, declared in early 1887 that the military "had
the obligation to be abolitionist." The São Paulo assembly
petitioned the Parliament for immediate abolition. The agitation
reached such a pitch that to foreign travelers, Brazil appeared
on the verge of social revolution. The system was coming apart,
and even planters realized that abolition was the way to prevent
chaos.
The so-called Golden Law of May 13, 1888, which ended slavery,
was not an act of great bravery but a recognition that slavery was
no longer viable. The economy revived rapidly after a few lost harvests,
and only a small number of planters went bankrupt. Slavery ended,
but the plantation survived and so did the basic attitudes of a
class society. The abolitionists quickly abandoned those they had
struggled to free. Many former slaves stayed on the plantations
in the same quarters, receiving paltry wages. They were joined by
waves of immigrants, who often found conditions so unbearable that
they soon moved to the cities or returned to Europe. No freedmen's
bureaus or schools were established to improve the lives of the
former slaves; they were left at the bottom of the socioeconomic
scale, where their descendants remain in the 1990s. New prisons
built after 1888 were soon filled with former slaves as society
imposed other forms of social control, in part by redefining crime.
In the end, the empire fell because the elites did not need it
to protect their interests. Indeed, imperial centralization ran
counter to their desires for local autonomy. The republicans embraced
federalism, which some saw as a way to counter the oligarchies,
which used patronage and clientage to stay in power. In the early
republic, however, they would find that the oligarchies adapted
easily and used their accumulated power and skills to control the
new governmental system. Taking advantage of cabinet crises in 1888
and 1889 and of rising frustration among military officers, republicans
favoring change by revolution rather than by evolution drew military
officers, led by Field Marshal Fonseca, into a conspiracy to replace
the cabinet in November 1889. What started as an armed demonstration
demanding replacement of a cabinet turned within hours into a coup
d'état deposing Emperor Pedro II.
Data as of April 1997
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