|
The Empire of Brazil
The Empire, 1822-89
Emperor Pedro I, 1822-31
Dom Pedro meant to rule frugally and started by cutting his own
salary, centralizing scattered government offices, and selling off
most of the royal horses and mules. He issued decrees that eliminated
the royal salt tax to spur output of hides and dried beef, forbade
arbitrary seizure of private property, required a judge's warrant
for arrests of freemen, and banned secret trials, torture, and other
indignities. He also sent elected deputies to the Côrtes in
Portugal. However, slaves continued to be bought and sold and disciplined
with force, despite his assertion that their blood was the same
color as his. In September 1821, the Côrtes, with only a portion
of the Brazilian delegates present, voted to abolish the Kingdom
of Brazil and the royal agencies in Rio de Janeiro and to make all
the provinces subordinate directly to Lisbon. Portugal sent troops
to Brazil and placed all Brazilian units under Portuguese command.
In January 1822, tension between Portuguese troops and the Luso-Brazilians
(Brazilians born in Portugal) turned violent when Pedro accepted
petitions from Brazilian towns begging him to refuse the Côrtes's
order to return to Lisbon. Responding to their pressure and to the
argument that his departure and the dismantling of the central government
would trigger separatist movements, he vowed to stay. The Portuguese
"lead feet," as the Brazilians called the troops, rioted
before concentrating their forces on Cerro Castello, which was soon
surrounded by thousands of armed Brazilians. Dom Pedro "dismissed"
the Portuguese commanding general and ordered him to remove his
soldiers across the bay to Niteroi, where they awaited transport
to Portugal. Pedro formed a new government headed by José
Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva of São Paulo. This former
royal official and professor of science at Coimbra was crucial to
the subsequent direction of events and is regarded as one of the
formative figures of Brazilian nationalism, indeed, as the patriarch
of independence.
The atmosphere was so charged that Dom Pedro sought assurances
of asylum on a British ship in case he lost the looming confrontation;
he also sent his family to safety out of the city. In the following
days, the Portuguese commander delayed embarcation, hoping that
expected reinforcements would arrive. However, the reinforcements
that arrived off Rio de Janeiro on March 5, 1822, were not allowed
to land. Instead, they were given supplies for the voyage back to
Portugal. This round had been won without bloodshed.
Blood had been shed in Recife in the Province of Pernambuco, when
the Portuguese garrison there had been forced to depart in November
1821. In mid-February 1822, Bahians revolted against the Portuguese
forces there but were driven into the countryside, where they began
guerrilla operations, signaling that the struggle in the north would
not be without loss of life and property. To secure Minas Gerais
and São Paulo, where there were no Portuguese troops but
where there were doubts about independence, Dom Pedro engaged in
some royal populism.
Towns in Minas Gerais had expressed their loyalty at the time of
Pedro's vow to remain, save for the junta in Ouro Prêto, the
provincial capital. Pedro realized that unless Minas Gerais were
solidly with him, he would be unable to broaden his authority to
other provinces. With only a few companions and no ceremony or pomp,
Pedro plunged into Minas Gerais on horseback in late March 1822,
receiving enthusiastic welcomes and allegiances everywhere. Back
in Rio de Janeiro on May 13, he proclaimed himself the "perpetual
defender of Brazil" and shortly thereafter called a Constituent
Assembly (Assembléia Constituinte) for the next year. To
deepen his base of support, he joined the freemasons, who, led by
José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, were pressing for
parliamentary government and independence. More confident, in early
August he called on the Brazilian deputies in Lisbon to return,
decreed that Portuguese forces in Brazil should be treated as enemies,
and issued a manifesto to "friendly nations." The manifeso
read like a declaration of independence.
Seeking to duplicate his triumph in Minas Gerais, Pedro rode to
São Paulo in August to assure himself of support there and
began a disastrous affair with Domitila de Castro that would later
weaken his government. Returning from an excursion to Santos, Pedro
received messages from his wife and from Andrada e Silva that the
Côrtes considered his government traitorous and was dispatching
more troops. In a famous scene at Ipiranga on September 7, 1822,
he had to choose between returning to Portugal in disgrace or opting
for independence. He tore the Portuguese blue and white insignia
from his uniform, drew his sword, and swore: "By my blood,
by my honor, and by God: I will make Brazil free." Their motto,
he said, would be "Independence or Death!"
Pedro's government employed Admiral Thomas Alexander Cochrane,
one of Britain's most successful naval commanders in the Napoleonic
Wars and recently commander of the Chilean naval forces against
Spain. Pedro's government also hired a number of Admiral Cochrane's
officers and French General Pierre Labatut, who had fought in Colombia.
These men were to lead the fight to drive the Portuguese out of
Bahia, Maranhão, and Pará, and to force those areas
to replace Lisbon's rule with that of Rio de Janeiro. Money from
customs at Rio de Janeiro's port and local donations outfitted the
army and the nine-vessel fleet. The use of foreign mercenaries brought
needed military skills. The much-feared Cochrane secured Maranhão
with a single warship, despite the Portuguese military's attempt
to disrupt the economy and society with a scorched-earth campaign
and with promises of freedom for the slaves. By mid-1823 the contending
forces numbered between 10,000 and 20,000 Portuguese, some of whom
were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, versus 12,000 to 14,000 Brazilians,
mostly in militia units from the Northeast.
Some historians have erred in supporting historian Manuel de Oliveira
Lima's contention that independence came without bloodshed. In fact,
although both sides avoided massive set battles, they did engage
in guerrilla tactics, demonstrations, and countermoves. There is
little information on casualties, but the fighting provided a female
martyr in Mother Joana Angélica, who was bayoneted to death
by Portuguese troops invading her convent in Bahia; and an example
of female grit in Maria Quitéria de Jesus, who, masquerading
as a man, joined the imperial army and achieved distinction in several
battles.
Britain and Portugal recognized Brazilian independence by signing
a treaty on August 29, 1825. Until then, the Brazilians feared that
Portugal would resume its attack. Portuguese retribution, however,
came in a financial form. Secret codicils of the treaty with Portugal
required that Brazil assume payment of 1.4 million pounds sterling
owed to Britain and indemnify Dom João VI and other Portuguese
for losses totaling 600,000 pounds sterling. Brazil also renounced
future annexation of Portuguese African colonies, and in a side
treaty with Britain promised to end the slave trade. Neither of
these measures pleased the slave-holding planters.
Organizing the new government quickly brought the differences between
the emperor and his leading subjects to the fore. In 1824 Pedro
closed the Constituent Assembly that he had convened because he
believed that body was endangering liberty. As assembly members,
his advisers, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva and
Dom Pedro's brothers, had written a draft constitution that would
have limited the monarch by making him equal to the legislature
and judiciary, similar to the president of the United States. They
wanted the emperor to push the draft through without discussion,
which Pedro refused to do. Troops surrounded the assembly as he
ordered it dissolved. He then produced a constitution modeled on
that of Portugal (1822) and France (1814). It specified indirect
elections and created the usual three branches of government but
also added a fourth, the moderating power, to be held by the emperor.
The moderating power would give the emperor authority to name senators
and judges and to break deadlocks by summoning and dismissing parliaments
and cabinets. He also had treaty-making and treaty-ratifying power.
Pedro's constitution was more liberal than the assembly's in its
religious toleration and definition of individual and property rights,
but less so in its concentration of power in the emperor.
The constitution was more acceptable in the flourishing, coffee-driven
Southeastern provinces than in the Northeastern sugar and cotton
areas, where low export prices and the high cost of imported slaves
were blamed on the coffee-oriented government. In mid-1824, with
Pernambuco and Ceará leading, five Northeastern provinces
declared independence as the Confederation of the Equator, but by
year's end the short-lived separation had been crushed by Admiral
Cochrane. With the Northeast pacified, violence now imperiled the
South.
In 1825 war flared again over the Cisplatine Province, this time
with Buenos Aires determined to annex the East Bank. The empire
could little afford the troops, some of whom were recruited in Ireland
and Germany, or the sixty warships needed to blockade the Río
de la Plata. A loan from London bankers was expended by 1826, and
Pedro had to call the General Assembly to finance the war. The blockade
raised objections from the United States and Britain, and reverses
on land in 1827 made it necessary to negotiate an end to the US$30
million Cisplatine War. The war at least left Uruguay independent
instead of an Argentine province. In June 1828, harsh discipline
and xenophobia provoked a mutiny of mercenary troops in Rio de Janeiro;
the Irish were shipped home and the Germans sent to the South. The
army was reduced to 15,000 members, and the antislavery Pedro, now
without military muscle, faced a Parliament controlled by slaveowners
and their allies.
As coffee exports rose steadily, so did the numbers of imported
slaves; in Rio de Janeiro alone they soared from 26,254 in 1825
to 43,555 in 1828. In 1822 about 30 percent, or 1 million, of Brazil's
population were African-born or -descended slaves. Slavery was so
pervasive that beggars had slaves, and naval volunteers took theirs
aboard ship.
Pedro had written that slavery was a "cancer that is gnawing
away at Brazil" and that no one had the right to enslave another.
He wanted to abolish slavery, but his own liberal constitution gave
the law-making authority to the slavocrat-controlled Parliament.
In Brazil liberal principles and political formulas were given special
meaning. The language of social contract, popular sovereignty, supremacy
of law, universal rights, division of powers, and representative
government was stripped of its revolutionary content and applied
only to a select, privileged minority.
After 1826 the slavocrat agenda was to control the court system;
to provide harsh punishments for slave rebellion but mild ones for
white revolt; to reduce the armed forces, cleansing them of foreigners
unsympathetic to slavery; to keep tariffs low and eliminate the
Bank of Brazil in order to deny the central government the ability
to stimulate a rival, finance-based industrial capitalism; and to
shape immigration policy in such a way as to encourage servile labor
instead of independent farmers or craftsmen. Led by Bernardo Pereira
de Vasconcelos of Minas Gerais in the assembly, slavocrats argued
that slavery was not demoralizing, that foreign capital and technology
would not help Brazil, and that railroads would only rust. Others,
such as Nicolau de Campos Vergueiro of São Paulo, argued
in favor of replacing slavery with free European immigrants. In
the end, the Parliament established a contract system that was little
better than slavery. There would be no liberal empire. Laws and
decrees unacceptable to the slavocrats simply would not take effect,
such as the order in 1829 forbidding slave ships to sail for Africa.
These items of the slavocrat agenda were the roots of the regional
rebellions of the nineteenth century.
After Dom João's death in 1826, despite Pedro's renunciation
of his right to the Portuguese throne in favor of his daughter,
Brazilian nativist radicals falsely accused the emperor of plotting
to overthrow the constitution and to proclaim himself the ruler
of a reunited Brazil and Portugal. They raised tensions by provoking
street violence against the Portuguese of Rio de Janeiro and agitated
for a federalist monarchy that would give the provinces self-government
and administrative autonomy. Brazil's fate was in the hands of a
few people concentrated in the capital who spread false stories
and undermined discipline in the army and police. It would not be
the last time that events in Rio de Janeiro would shape the future.
When Pedro dismissed his cabinet in April 1831, street and military
demonstrators demanded its reinstatement in violation of his constitutional
prerogatives. He refused, saying: "I will do anything for the
people but nothing [forced] by the people." With military units
assembled on the Campo Santana, an assembly ground in Rio de Janeiro,
and people in the streets shouting "death to the tyrant,"
he backed down. Failing to form a new cabinet, he abdicated in favor
of his five-year-old son Pedro II, boarded a British warship, and
left Brazil as he had arrived, under the Union Jack.
Data as of April 1997
|
|
