Brazil
Page 20
On the night of 24 February 1684 the men under the command of the Beckman brothers mingled among the crowd gathered in the centre of São Luís for the festivities in honour of Our Lord of the Via Crucis.30 They then stormed the Monopoly Trade House, where the products the settlers were forced to sell to the Companhia do Comércio do Maranhão e Grão-Pará were stored. They proceeded to occupy the strategic points of the town, disarming the municipal guard and arresting the king’s representatives.
The following day they established a government junta, based at the Municipal Council Chamber. Here, as they aired their longstanding resentment of the Jesuits, their indignation erupted. With cries of ‘Kill! Kill the priests of the Society of Jesus’31 the rebels took to the streets, knocking on doors and exhorting the townspeople to attack the Colégio Nossa Senhora da Luz where the Jesuits were installed. The crowd invaded the internal patio of the college and surrounded the church and its tall stone tower. But they arrived too late – the twenty-seven priests had already fled into the interior of the captaincy.
The Beckman brothers’ revolt lasted a year, until a Portuguese fleet with a well-armed contingent of soldiers arrived with the new governor of the captaincy, Gomes Freire de Andrade, who retook the city and proceeded to arrest the rebels. He restored the privileges of the Companhia do Comércio and erected a gallows in the main square.32 Manuel Beckman and Jorge de Sampaio e Carvalho, the two main leaders of the rebellion, were summarily condemned to death and hanged. Tomás Beckman, who had been sent by the rebels as an emissary to Lisbon in an attempt to convince the authorities of the justice of their cause, was arrested and forbidden to return to Maranhão, while the other participants in the revolt were condemned to be whipped in public.
In 1711 there was yet another rebellion, this time in Salvador. The revolt was led by the baiano33 João de Figueiredo da Costa, nicknamed Maneta. He was a merchant as well as a smuggler, and astute enough to understand the workings of the political forces at the heart of the colony’s administration, and to use them in his favour. The Motins do Maneta (Maneta Uprisings), as the revolt was known, had no pretentions to seizing power. The crowds it attracted were essentially impulsive, but with two specific demands. The first was for a reduction in the price of salt, a staple, essential for the conservation of meat and fish. The second was for an end to the new taxes on imported goods and on slaves that had been imposed to finance the refurbishing of the Portuguese fleet, in an attempt to prevent the frequent corsair attacks into the Bay of Salvador. The revolt reflected the generalized frustration at the Crown’s establishment of yet another tax collection and inspection unit in Bahia, the Paço da Madeira, which taxed all seagoing vessels, as well as weapons, furniture, fruit, coal and cork.34
Excessive taxation was behind the Maneta revolt; but in reality, all sorts of people were inclined to rebel, including smugglers, tumbeiros (crews of smaller slave-trafficking vessels), slave traffickers, small tradesmen, open-air market tradesmen, innkeepers and clerks. As the taxes affected the lives of virtually all the inhabitants of Salvador, the indignation was general – it spread to the masses and even to the troops, where those of low military rank enthusiastically supported the rebellions. The only group that remained aloof from such movements were the powerful landowners and merchants of Bahia – men who possessed ‘grossa fortuna’ in the expression used at the time.
An uprising only really begins when an angry crowd has formed. In the case of Salvador, this was sparked off by alarming rumours about new taxes, and the crowd was summoned by the furious chiming of the bell installed at the top of the Municipal Council Chamber (by whom, it is not known). As the size of the throng increased the rebels gained confidence. They occupied the slopes that divide the Cidade Baixa from the Cidade Alta35 and advanced in the direction of the governor’s palace. They stopped twice along the way. The first stop was outside the luxurious villa that belonged to Manuel Dias Filgueiras, the largest tithe collector36 and salt contractor in the town. They invaded the house, threw the elegant furniture out of the windows, broke open the casks of imported wine and tipped the contents into the street, and then proceeded to destroy a deposit of salt they discovered behind the building. The second stop was outside the town house of Filguieras’s business partner, Manuel Gomes Lisboa. There, the furniture thrown from the windows included small chests with padlocked drawers, from which, to the delight of the crowd, gold dust spilled all over the slope that led up to the house in Largo de São Francisco.
Terrified, the newly appointed governor, Pedro de Vasconcelos e Souza, appealed to Archbishop Sebastião Monteiro da Vide for help. His holiness did not hesitate. He immediately summoned the priests and the cannons and friars from the fraternities who, invoking the wrath of God, berated the insurgents. The bishop organized a procession that descended the steep slopes of the town, solemnly displaying the sacred symbols of the Eucharist to the turbulent throng, exhorting them to calm themselves. But to no avail. The crowds showed great respect as the procession went by, laying aside their weapons, baring their heads and kneeling in contrition. But as soon as it had passed they picked up where they had left off: taking up their weapons, they surrounded the palace and forced the governor to surrender. Governor Pedro de Vasconcelos e Souza had no choice but to give in to all their demands: he suspended the new taxes, reduced the price of salt, and promised a pardon to all those involved.
Uprisings are sudden explosions. They are essentially impulsive forms of political expression, with no clear strategy or even a short-term plan for holding power. Their aggressive energy rapidly dissipates, as if the rioters are suddenly overcome by exhaustion and disband.37 No sooner had the crowd dispersed than Pedro de Vasconcelos, blithely abandoning his agreement with the rebels, had the leaders arrested and severely punished. But this was not the end of the story. Less than fifty days after the pact had been broken, furious crowds once again occupied the slopes of the city.
THE MINAS GERAIS REBELS
With the settlers’ anger and resentment towards Lisbon ever growing, the risk of rebellion was always present. These undercurrents of discontent were both dangerous and contagious, emboldening people throughout the colony to plan revolt. Anti-government feelings were at their strongest in Minas Gerais. The authorities there were hard pressed to maintain the rule of the king, to ensure the settlers respected imperial law and to thwart their desire for self-government. Well aware of the crimes in the captaincy and convinced of the ungovernability of its population, Governor Pedro Miguel de Almeida e Portugal, the Count of Assumar, was famed for his discipline. He solemnly declared the people of Minas Gerais predestined to be a thorn in the side of the Crown. This famous declaration forms the part of his Political and historical dissertation on the uprising in Minas that occurred in the year 1720, the most important of all the documents he sent to the authorities in Lisbon:
Of Minas and its inhabitants, sufficient be it to say […] that these are intractable people […] The earth appears to exude rebellion; the water to emanate tumult; the gold to provoke confrontation; the wind to disseminate revolt; insolence is vomited from the clouds; insurgencies are determined by the stars; the climate is a tomb for peace and a cradle of mutiny; nature is ill at ease with itself, replete with inner turmoil, as it is in hell.38
During the period in which he governed the captaincy (1717–21), Pedro Miguel de Almeida e Portugal became notorious for his implacable repression as he attempted to reaffirm the authority of the Crown. The Dissertation was written to the king by way of accounting for his ferocity in repressing the ‘Vila Rica Sedition’. This was the third insurrection he had been forced to confront. Between 1717 and 1718 the inhabitants of the town of Catas Altas had revolted, and there was a revolt by the townspeople of Nossa Senhora da Piedade de Pitangui, which lasted from 1717 to 1720.39
The ‘Vila Rica Sedition’ of 1720 was the most important revolt in the captaincy prior to the Minas conspiracy. Once again the motive was the invasive practices of the Royal Treasury officials. The conspir
ators planned to force the Crown to suspend the installation of further Forging Houses (where the gold was made into bars and the ‘one-fifth’ tax deducted).40 It was an audaciously open challenge to the Crown’s authority. Urgent discussions were held between the governor, the Vila Rica ouvidor,41 and representatives of the social and economic elite. Every evening a group of hooded men, armed to the teeth, would suddenly emerge from a hilltop behind the town42 and descend towards the centre of Vila Rica to the sound of the beating of drums and cries of ‘Long live the people and death to the emissaries of the king’. They would run through the streets, sacking and pillaging as they went. And the terrified inhabitants would in turn take cover in their homes. On one such occasion the town house of the Ouvidor-Geral was destroyed. Its owner, the most detested dignitary in the captaincy, barely escaped being lynched, and fled to Rio de Janeiro.
The reaction of the governor was ruthless. In three days he settled the score with the inhabitants of the captaincy who had not given him a moment’s peace during the four years of his government. He sealed off all the entries to Vila Rica, arrested the rebels and packed them off to Rio de Janeiro; he also authorized the population to exterminate their hooded attackers, and ordered the Portuguese dragoons – the elite military force of the captaincy – to set fire to all the properties of Pascoal da Silva Guimarães, the most important leader of the revolt. The terror of the town’s inhabitants had been so great that it still lives on in Minas Gerais mythology – legend has it that on dark nights the clatter of horses’ hooves can be heard cantering through the streets. Even so, the governor still was not finished. He gathered the town citizenry in the Largo da Câmara, the main square where the Council Chamber was located, and ordered the immediate execution of Felipe dos Santo who, although not a part of the leadership that planned the revolt, had incited the people to rebel on numerous occasions during the ‘Vila Rica Sedition’. The governor had spectacularly reaffirmed the power of the Crown and of the king’s justice.
About ten years after these events, the interim governor of Minas Gerais, Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e de Proença, found himself facing another uprising, this time in the northeast of the captaincy. In 1736 the population that lived along the banks of the Rio das Velhas and the São Francisco river gave vent to their anger in what became known as the ‘Revolts in the Backlands’. Once again, the cause was excessive taxation, particularly the requirement to pay the ‘one-fifth’ tax on all gold discovered, by any individual, including slaves, directly to the captaincy, which claimed ownership of all the land.43 At the height of the rebellion, with secret nightly meetings at cattle farms and groups of insurgents roaming the streets, looking for the tax collector in order to cut him to pieces, Martinho de Mendonça still refused to see the revolt as a serious threat. He considered the claims of the rebels to be ‘non-negotiable’ and put them down to the ‘poor quality’ of the inhabitants of the colony.44 But a few months later, with all the prisons overcrowded, he changed his mind and declared: ‘This conspiracy was larger than it appeared …’45
WHEN SUBJECTS PLOT AGAINST THEIR KING
Whatever form they took, in one aspect all the settlers’ revolts were remarkably similar: none of them questioned the authority of the Portuguese Crown.46 Quite to the contrary, the language used by the rebels expressed their unswerving loyalty to the monarch, reaffirming the king’s symbolic role, always ready to listen to the afflictions of his people. However, the slow pace of communication between the metropolis and the colony was a source of frustration and viewed as the reason for the mismanagement and excesses of His Majesty’s representatives overseas. There was only one exception to this general rule of support for the monarchy: the uprising in Pernambuco in 1710 when, for the first time, the insurgents openly questioned the Crown’s authority.47
The revolt of 1710, which nineteenth-century historians called the Guerra dos Mascates,48 took place within the wider context of a breakdown of colonial order.49 The trouble began when the sugar barons of Olinda (Pernambuco), who were regarded as conceited and decadent by the merchants in neighbouring Recife, reacted to pressure from the latter for the establishment of their own independent Municipal Council. Their anger was also directed at the crown authorities in the captaincy who controlled the production of sugar, still the colony’s principal source of revenue.
During the rebellion, which lasted for less than a year, ample use was made of the rural militias. These were made up of troops at the service of the sugar barons who came from the poorest classes of the free population. When they marched on Recife, provoking the inevitable flight of the governor to Bahia, a large part of the captaincy fell into the hands of the insurgents. Far more serious, however, was the intention of the rebels to declare the independence of Pernambuco. The majority of them wanted to form a republic. They discussed how to raise the resources for prolonged armed resistance and planned a possible extension of the rebellion to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. In the event of the conspiracy failing, they contemplated a French protectorate. ‘Pernambuco would be better off as a republic,’ suggested Bernardo Vieira, one of the leaders of the revolt. He went on to say: ‘If for any reason […] the war goes against us, it would be preferable to seek the support of the sophisticated French than to submit to the ill-mannered mascates.’50
The conspiracy ended in disaster for the sugar barons of Olinda. The following year the maligned mascates got even with a vengeance. They won back Recife, attacked the rebels in the interior of the captaincy, and received reinforcements from the Portuguese fleet, which arrived with a new governor, appointed by Lisbon to negotiate the terms of a royal pardon. The outcome of the conflict was the complete victory of Recife: the town was elevated to the status of ‘vila’, granted its own Municipal Council, and converted into the capital of the captaincy in the place of Olinda.
Although the rebellion of 1710 was restricted to Pernambuco, the ideas behind it spread well beyond the borders of the captaincy. The sugar barons of Olinda were the first conspirators in Portuguese America to plan self-government and independence; the first to state their preference for a republic over the monarchy. Approximately sixty years later the term ‘self-government’ was in general use in political circles throughout the colony. This was certainly not a good sign for the empire.
During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a small group of Brazilians, especially in Minas Gerais and Bahia, definitively adopted the term Conjuração to refer to a new kind of revolt. Conjuração implied a particular kind of political conspiracy, in which the conspirators contested the power of the king and the authority of crown officials. Such conspirators were accused by Lisbon of inconfidência – a newly coined term for the crime of disloyalty to the monarch.
CONSPIRACIES AND DISLOYALTY: MINAS GERAIS, 1789
In December 1782 the poet Tomás Antônio Gonzaga arrived in Vila Rica, having been appointed to the post of ouvidor-geral. The journey on horseback from Rio de Janeiro had taken him fifteen days. His arrival completed the group of intellectuals51 that a few years later was to form an alliance with the economic and administrative elite of Minas Gerais to contest Brazil’s colonial status, plan an armed uprising against the Portuguese Crown, and disseminate the notion of a politically autonomous republic in Portuguese America.
It was an eclectic group. Its members included erudite priests, such as Luís Vieira da Silva, owner of an impressive bookstore and professor of philosophy at the seminary in Mariana. The group also included music-loving members of the clergy, such as Carlos Correia de Toledo, Vicar of São José del-Rei – today the town of Tiradentes – and three major poets: Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, Cláudio Manuel da Costa and Alvarenga Peixoto. Other intellectuals involved included the doctor and naturalist José Vieira Couto, the military engineer José Joaquim da Rocha, the philosopher, natural scientist and mineralogist José Álvares Maciel, and a young doctor recently graduated from Montpellier, Domingos Vidal de Barbosa Lage. There were also a number of commissioned officers
in the group – the highest-ranking among them was lieutenant-colonel Francisco de Paula Freire de Andrade, commander of the dragoons – and a considerable number of the captaincy’s economic elite: businessmen, farmers, merchants, money-lenders, contractors and powerful local magnates such as João Rodrigues de Macedo, owner of the magnificent town house in Vila Rica where the conspirators often met.52
The group had ties with the highest level of Minas Gerais society, whether through business, family or friendship, and were involved in a wide variety of activities connected to ‘local interests’ that were somewhat incommensurate with what the Portuguese authorities would have considered ideal for the colony and its obedient subjects. Padre José da Silva e Oliveira Rolim,53 for example, who was devoted to the conspirators’ cause, had spent much of his life defrauding the Crown. He produced counterfeit money, bribed the authorities – including ecclesiastical officials – lent money with interest, and diverted diamonds from the Tejuco mines from the official route to Lisbon to a clandestine one that ended in Amsterdam.
He was, without doubt, an extravagant and somewhat explosive mixture of smuggler, loan shark, wild adventurer and incorrigible seducer; a fascinating character who was, however, by no means alone in these transgressions. Most of the conspirators were involved in some way or other with the smuggling of gold and diamonds, duping the inspectors and cocking a snook at the government. They maintained close links with clandestine gold prospectors and the go-betweens54 who organized the illegal transport of precious stones to Europe. However, these conspirators also understood the diversity of the captaincy’s economy and the feasibility of its becoming self-sufficient.55
Despite all this, for the time being at least, no one seemed inclined to start a rebellion. What transformed a group of intellectuals and landed subjects of the king, completely integrated into this world of royal absolutism, into the leaders of a political revolt such as the Conjuração Mineira, without precedent in Portuguese America? It was a combination of resentment and the realization that the captaincy could be economically self-sufficient. As the ensign Joaquim José da Silva Xavier – better known as ‘Tiradentes’ – was to remind Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco de Andrade, Minas Gerais ‘was a country like no other; it contained every kind of wealth.’56