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Transition to Kingdom Status
With the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, some Portuguese officials
again raised the idea of moving the crown to the safety of Brazil.
Dom Luís da Cunha's prophetic suggestion in 1738 that Rio
de Janeiro was "safer and more convenient" made great
sense as the French army approached Lisbon in November 1807. The
British in 1801 had recommended transfer to Brazil in the event
of an invasion and had promised to provide protection for the voyage
and assistance in extending and consolidating Portuguese territory
in South America. In 1803 the Lisbon government, faced with the
increasingly deadly struggle between France and Britain, had reconsidered
the idea. The choice was between losing Portugal to the French and
having the British seize Brazil, or moving the crown to Brazil,
from which the struggle for Portugal could be resumed. In any case,
the royal government did not move until Portugal was actually invaded
in late 1807.
At the time, the monarch was Queen Maria I, but because of mental
illness triggered by her horror at the regicide in Paris, her son
Dom João ruled as regent. His wife was Dona Carlota Joaquina,
a Spanish princess and mother to their nine children, among whom
the most important for Brazilian history was Pedro de Alcântara
de Bragança e Bourbon. Dom João opened Brazilian ports
to world commerce, allowing British goods to stream in, and eliminating
the Portuguese middlemen. Rio de Janeiro substituted for Lisbon
in a centralized system that placed the various captaincies in subservient
positions to the new center. For the Brazilian elites, the transfer
of the court meant that they could have conservative political change
without social disorder. And best of all, depending on their proximity
to the court, they had the chance to obtain the titles and honors
that they felt their wealth had earned them. However, the pleasure
of the elites was mixed with some frustration because now the monarch
was close enough to keep an attentive watch on how they conducted
their affairs. And with the court in Rio de Janeiro, the demands
of international politics were more keenly felt.
Portugal and the Bragança dynasty were obligated deeply
to the British. The British not only saved the royal family and
some 15,000 courtiers but also lent US$3 million in 1809 to keep
the government functioning. The British also liberated Portugal
from the French and reorganized the Portuguese army. In addition,
one of their officers ruled as regent in Lisbon. The Portuguese
therefore had little with which to bargain when negotiating treaties.
In 1810 Dom João signed agreements not only giving the British
trade preferences and allowing them privileges of extraterritoriality
but also promising to abolish the African slave trade. The last
cut directly at the interests of the propertied classes, on whom
the crown depended.
The crown had to duplicate, mostly from scratch, the government
institutions it had left behind in Lisbon. It set up a Supreme Military
Council (Conselho Militar Superior); boards of treasury, trade,
agriculture, and industry; a Court of Appeals; a royal printing
press and official newspaper; and the Bank of Brazil (Banco do Brasil).
It created medical schools in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, a school
of fine arts, a museum of natural history, a public library, and
the Botanical Garden (Jardim Botânico) in Rio de Janeiro.
It also set up specialized courses of study in the Minas Gerais
towns of Ouro Prêto and Paracatu. Most of the fleet had been
transferred, but a new army was organized, naval and military academies
were established, and arsenals created. The crown built a powder
factory and an ironworks. It dealt with public safety by forming
the Royal Police Guard, which brutalized slaves, sailors, drunks,
gamblers, and prostitutes into submission. The crown also opened
Brazil to European travelers, naturalists, scientists, and artists,
who left a detailed picture of its life and landscape.
Curiously, by staying in Brazil after the British liberated Portugal
from the French in 1811, the crown was keeping British influence
under some control, because here it was removed both from Britain
and the British-commanded Portuguese army. In 1815 the crown, determined
to set its own course, raised Brazil to a kingdom equal with Portugal
and acclaimed João as king when his mother died in 1816.
The crown gained further maneuverability by arranging marriages
between the two princesses and the Spanish King Fernando VII and
his brother, and more important, between Crown Prince Pedro and
the daughter of Franz I of Austria, the Archduchess Leopoldina.
The Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil, 1815-21
Portuguese businessmen who invested locally in Brazil, nobles and
government officials who built expensive homes there, and those
who married into provincial wealth shared a common interest in remaining.
Indeed, what took shape was a new concept of a dual monarchy of
Brazil and Portugal, which even under the best of circumstances
would have been difficult to make work. It was an expedient idea
that would founder because of resistance by those in Portugal who
saw their status and that of the kingdom endangered; by the British,
who wanted the king back in Lisbon, where he was more vulnerable;
and by the unwillingness of Brazilians to suffer the indignity of
being returned to colonial rank.
The centralization of power in Rio de Janeiro met with violent
resistance in the Northeast. When Pernambuco raised the banner of
republican rebellion in 1817, it was followed by Paraíba
do Norte, Rio Grande do Norte, and the south of Ceará, each
of which acted to defend local interests without thought of federating.
They resented their loss of autonomy to Rio de Janeiro and the Portuguese
who had settled in the Northeast since 1808. Significantly, although
they sent envoys to secure recognition from Britain and the United
States and to spread the revolt to Bahia, they did not send agents
to central or southern Brazil. The revolt was crushed brutally.
Although unsuccessful, the 1817 "Pernambuccan revolution"
shook the monarchy's foundations because it had pushed aside authority
and tarnished the crown's aura of invincibility. In desperation,
the monarchy responded by banning all secret societies and by garrisoning
Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife with fresh troops from Portugal.
Meanwhile, the monarchy was waging war in the Río de la
Plata. King João regarded the East Bank of the Río
de la Plata (present-day Uruguay) as the proper and true boundary
of Brazil. Over British objections, he brought veteran troops from
Portugal to seize Montevideo and to wage a wearing campaign (1816-20)
against the forces of independence-minded José Gervasio Artigas,
the father of Uruguay. The region was incorporated into the United
Kingdom as the Cisplatine Province in 1821. Nonetheless, even as
it was expanding, the United Kingdom, as the Rio de Janeiro royalists
termed it, was suffering from pressures in Portugal itself.
The Pernambuccan revolution in 1817 encouraged army officers in
Portugal to conspire against the regency of British Marshal William
Carr Beresford. Twelve of the conspirators, including a general
officer, were tried secretly and hanged. Anti-British sentiment
deepened. In 1820, when a military revolt in Spain forced the revived
absolutist regime of Fer-nando VII (1784-1833) to restore the liberal
constitution of 1812, the Portuguese military followed suit by expelling
the British officers and forming revolutionary juntas. The military
petitioned the king's return and summoned a Côrtes (the Portuguese
Parliament), the first since 1697 when the crown had dispensed with
such bodies.
Unable to do more, João pardoned the juntas' usurpation
of his prerogative to summon a Côrtes and acknowledged that
a Côrtes could be useful in making proposals to him on how
best to govern the United Kingdom. Then, in January 1821, Portuguese
officers and troops, as well as Brazilian liberals, took over provincial
governments in Bahia and Belém, and in late February, troops
in Rio de Janeiro threw in with the movement and forced the king
to take an oath to accept any constitution the Côrtes might
write. In effect, Brazil was again being ruled from Portugal. A
few days later, a royal decree announced that the king would return
to Lisbon, leaving his twenty-four-year-old son Dom Pedro as regent
in Brazil.
On April 25, 1821, twelve ships carrying the king and queen, 4,000
officials, diplomats, and families, as well as purloined funds and
jewels from the Bank of Brazil, set course for Lisbon. The city
and country that they left behind no longer constituted the closed
colony of thirteen years before. Thanks to the surveys, expeditions,
and studies that João had encouraged, Brazil's resources
would be exploited at a steadily increasing pace, but in a fashion
that tied the country more closely to the rapidly expanding industrial
capitalism of the North Atlantic. Nonetheless, João VI and
Queen Carlota exemplified the fading absolutist regime; their son
Pedro would seek to be more modern by embracing the new ideas of
liberal constitutionalism.
During the thirteen years that João resided in Rio de Janeiro,
international trade expanded as reflected by the growing number
of foreign ships anchoring in the bay: from ninety in 1808 to 354
in 1820. By 1820 Rio de Janeiro had more than 3,000 foreigners among
its 113,000 inhabitants.
Rio de Janeiro also had coffee houses serving the product that
would become the backbone of the economy. Expanding from seedlings
nurtured in the Jardim Botânico, coffee cultivation spread
from the Rio de Janeiro area over the Serra do Mar into the fertile
upland valley, through which the Rio Paraíba flows from São
Paulo easterly to the sea, dividing the provinces of Minas Gerais
and Rio de Janeiro. On both sides of the river, the tropical forests
were cut to make way for the coffee groves. Mule trains that once
brought gold from Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro now carried coffee
in quantities that swelled from 2,304 kilos in 1792 to 7,761,600
kilos in 1820, and would reach 82,178,395 kilos in 1850.
São Paulo's entry into the coffee age lay in the future,
but in 1821 it was providing herds of mules and horses for the coffee
pack trains. The Cisplatine and Rio Grande do Sul were shipping
abroad hides, tallow, and dried meat. In contrast, the Northeast
and North were in decline because an 1815 treaty between Brazil
and Britain forbade the African slave trade north of the equator,
thereby reducing the demand for Bahian molasses-soaked rolled tobacco,
and because Cuban competition slashed deeply into the Northeast's
sugar market in the United States and Europe. Even cotton, which
a few years before seemed a secure export for Maranhão, was
overwhelmed by the post-War of 1812 expansion in the southern United
States. The world demand for Amazonian nuts, cocoa, skins, herbs,
spices, and rubber was still weak in 1821. Finally, in the Brazilian
west (Mato Grosso and Goiás) gold mining had all but ended,
and subsistence farming and livestock raising were predominant.
Throughout the country, but more so from Bahia through Minas Gerais
to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the labor force was made
up of African or locally born black slaves. The native heritage
lived on in the substantial number of Tupí-speaking races
and mixtures that lived in the tropical forest region.
Data as of April 1997
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