Brazil
Page 37
Dear beloved sister. I am taking the opportunity of the visit to Paris of the brother of our Tutor, Sr. Antônio Carlos d’Andrada, to send you this letter and to give you news. It has been a long time since we have received news from you or from our dear mother … Here we make every effort to follow your example: Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Drawing, French, English, Music and Dance divide our time; we work constantly to acquire knowledge and it is only these efforts that mitigate how sorely we miss you during our separation …5
Away from the family, all he had were studies, which, like the diligent heir that he was, he took very seriously.
FROM PROVISIONAL TO PERMANENT
The peaceful atmosphere did not extend beyond the palace walls. The provisional regency needed to take immediate action; simple decrees would no longer suffice. In Pernambuco, Bahia and Minas Gerais, Portuguese citizens were being attacked by Brazilian activists in a new wave of xenophobia. Elections for a new Assembly were held on 3 May 1831, with the objective of establishing the regency system. On 17 June the permanent triple regency was elected, made up of deputies José da Costa Carvalho, João Bráulio Muniz and Senator Francisco de Lima e Silva. José da Costa Carvalho was the Marquis of Monte Alegre. He had studied law at Coimbra and on his return had been elected deputy for the province of Bahia. He was also the founder of the journal O Farol Paulistano, the first periodical to be printed and published in São Paulo. João Bráulio Muniz was from Maranhão and had been a classmate of José da Costa Carvalho at Coimbra. They also worked together at the Farol Paulistano. Senator Francisco de Lima e Silva, Baron of Barra Grande, president of the province of Pernambuco between 1824 and 1825 and then senator of the empire, had fought in the brigade that suppressed the Confederation of the Equator.
This was a regency made up of moderate politicians, two of whom were from the Chamber of Deputies. They were members of the political elite in the service of the emperor; this was a government marked by its capacity for organizing the country’s political structure and controlling unrest through negotiation. As we have seen, the three members of the regency had all been well educated and had long track records of public service. For them, the strengthening of the state and national union fulfilled not only their political goals but also their concrete objectives.6 The composition of the regency was an attempt to centralize power and to balance opposing parties: members of the triumvirate represented states from the north (Maranhão), the northeast (Bahia) and the southwest (São Paulo).
Like its predecessor, the new regency had to act quickly. It started with less controversial measures, reforming the schools of medicine and surgery in Rio de Janeiro and in Salvador, converting them into universities and granting them greater autonomy. The prevalent spirit of nationalism led to broad support of this type of measure, since intellectual autonomy highlighted the country’s independence. Measures aiming at a similar effect were to follow: the reorganization of the Judiciary and the establishment of trial by jury. The reform of the Legislature, limiting the Moderating Power of the regency and giving more power to senators and deputies over the Executive, was perhaps the one that had the most effect.7
The triple regency had yet more surprises in store, among them the creation of a National Guard to suppress uprisings and demonstrations. The guards were recruited from the provinces and were under the authority of the Ministry of Justice. The new institution was based on the French model in which enlistment was compulsory. All citizens between twenty-one and sixty who had the right to vote – an annual income of over 200 mil-réis for city dwellers and over 100 mil-réis for voters in rural areas, excluding, obviously, slaves – were obliged to enlist. However, because it was made up of relatively privileged members of society, the National Guard, rather than being a citizens’ army, quickly became an instrument for maintaining order and suppressing local revolts. Furthermore, the political elites from the provinces chose the colonels and majors. The National Guard was so conservative and so active that it remained in service until the First Republic, mainly in rural areas of the country. Furthermore, because the National Guard was made of members of the elite, they did not mix with the general population as had occurred in the rebellions prior to independence and in the unrest in the provinces preceding the emperor’s abdication. The National Guard (rather than the military) was considered a reliable repressive force, largely because of the background of its members.
But neither decrees nor new nominations could control the financial crises and uprisings threatening national unity. The three political parties confronted one another: the moderate party (or chimangos),8 the exalted party (or jurujubas9 and farroupilhas10) and the restoration party (or caramurus).11 The restoration party, led by José Bonifácio, advocated Dom Pedro I’s return from Portugal. During this time Padre Diogo Antônio Feijó – the man most associated with the regency period – began his political ascent. He was a deputy who had been nominated Minister of Justice, and was an arch-enemy of José Bonifácio and the caramurus. He accused them of trying to destabilize the regency in order to force Dom Pedro I’s return to Brazil. In the midst of these accusations a revolt broke out in Rio de Janeiro on 3 April 1832, which José Bonifácio was accused of instigating. With the support of the Senate he maintained his post, but José Bonifácio’s days were now numbered. He was accused of plotting against the regency, arrested, and sent to the island of Paquetá,12 where he was confined to his summerhouse. Although he was absolved, he never managed to recover his political position and was to die a few years later in Niterói.13
Padre Diogo Antônio Feijó emerged all the stronger after his confrontation with José Bonifácio, yet with a series of problems. He too ended up losing his post as Minister of Justice. Furthermore, the revolt, which had started in Rio de Janeiro, began spreading to the provinces. There were uprisings all over the country and the old fear of Portuguese America becoming divided came back to haunt the government.
In 1832 the cabanada revolt broke out in Pernambuco, a province with a long history of rebellion. The revolt brought together Indians, escaped slaves, squatters and landowners, all prepared to fight against the ‘Jacobins’ and in favour of Dom Pedro I’s return. The cabanos expressed very diverse interests and resisted bravely for four years: they formed a uniformed army and attacked to the sound of cornets, flutes and drums. By 1832 they were already considered masters of the woodlands in Pernambuco. They concentrated their efforts along the frontier with Alagoas. It was mainly the less well-off who expressed their bewilderment and dissatisfaction over Dom Pedro I’s abdication.
Once again the symbolic power of the monarchy was manifest. However, rather than a real monarchy, the longing was for a mythical one, very distant from day-to-day reality. The return of the emperor may well have been a utopian dream, given the situation, but for the rebels it had concrete significance. The cabanos came from a wide variety of groups, all of whose interests had been affected by the abdication: military officers who wanted to maintain their posts; rural landowners who wanted to increase their power; bureaucrats who needed to keep their jobs in order to make a living; and the elite of Alagoas who had had more autonomy under the Crown. Above all, though, they came from the scrublands and the poverty-stricken interior, enslaved Indians and Africans who felt threatened by the new government. For all of them, restoration meant hope for the future and a return to the recent past.
The revolt was ruthlessly supressed in 1835 by Manuel de Carvalho Pais de Andrade, the same man who had proclaimed the Confederation of the Equator and now presided over the province. But the cabanos still resisted. The president organized a political alliance with neighbouring provinces and implemented a scorched-earth policy. The region controlled by the rebels was demarcated and anyone within its borders was automatically considered an enemy. Between March and May of that year it is estimated that 1,072 cabanos were arrested and 2,326 were killed. Luck turned, as did the hand of the clock, marking the countdown to the revolts.
THE AMENDMENT ACT
OF 1834 AND THE FEIJó REGENCY
With uprisings occurring simultaneously in Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco and Maranhão, the government had no choice but to change the rules of the game, at least at the legislative level. An amendment to the constitution was passed in 1834, aimed at limiting the powers of the central government. As early as 1831 radical changes, such as eliminating the Moderating Power and establishing a federal monarchy, had been considered. The final text of the 1834 amendment was less ambitious. It was based on the North American model, although not quite as bold. In addition to establishing a single regency, the 1834 amendment to the constitution dissolved the Council of State, created Legislative Assemblies in the provinces, made the court a neutral municipality (separate from Rio de Janeiro province), and maintained the lifetime term of senators.
The amendment, which was the result of protracted negotiations, was contradictory in that it concentrated power in the hands of a single regent, elected for a four-year mandate, while giving greater autonomy to the provinces through the new Assemblies. It also conceded greater powers to the presidents of the provinces, who were appointed by the regent on behalf of the emperor without a fixed term of office. In fact, they could be replaced at any time. The amendment was a faithful reflection of the state of the government, supporting neither side with conviction.
This was the situation when the first election for a single regent took place. Padre Diogo Antônio Feijó was elected. He was from São Paulo and a member of the moderate party. His regency began on 12 October 1835, and he was to remain in the post until 19 September 1837. Considering the fragile political situation, it was a reasonable term of office. Regent Feijó faced innumerable challenges. He had many political enemies, including the Church, because he did not support celibacy among the clergy. It was said at the time that few ministers could put up with his bad temper for long and there were constant changes of Cabinet. Instability seemed to have become the system of government, with the regent moving a small group of ministers from one post to another. But what really marked the first single regency was the outbreak of two serious conflicts in extreme parts of the country – the cabanagem in Pará and the farroupilha revolution in Rio Grande do Sul.
REVOLTS ON ALL SIDES: CABANOS IN THE DISTANT PROVINCE OF GRÃO-PARÁ
There can be no analysis of the regencies without discussing the series of rebellions that marked the period. Historians used to see them as ‘nativist’ – isolated events that reflected local discontent – but they have since come to be seen as a national phenomenon reflecting the deep divisions between the union and federalist parties. Anger at the centralization of power in Rio de Janeiro had been the cause of much of the political turbulence during the First Reign and had been responsible for Pedro I’s abdication.
There were many minor uprisings of short duration, but there were a few with far more serious impact, creating panic among the regency elite barricaded in Rio de Janeiro. The first of these major rebellions was the Cabanagem in the distant northern province of Grão-Pará. The province had been one of the last to approve the declaration of independence, only doing so on 15 August 1823, and even then only under pressure.
The whole history of Grão-Pará was one of independence from the rest of the country. The region was first occupied at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Dutch and English settlers seeking spices, particularly urucum,14 guaraná15 and pepper seeds. The Portuguese only arrived in 1616, when they erected the Forte do Presépio, the first building in the city of Belém, at the time known as Santa Maria do Belém do Grão-Pará. In 1621 the captaincy of Grão-Pará and Maranhão (with the capital in São Luís do Maranhão) was created as a response to confrontations between the different European groups settled in the region and their difficulties in getting along with the local indigenous people. The government of the new captaincy was independent from the Brazilian state. The new captaincy was founded in order to create a direct link between the region and Portugal, which was interested in medicinal plants and the cultivation of sugarcane, cotton and cocoa.
In 1755 the powerful Portuguese statesman Marquis of Pombal founded the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Grão-Pará e Maranhão. It was created to develop and control commercial activity, including trade in African slaves, given the prohibition of enslaving the indigenous peoples of the region. Among other privileges the company was granted a monopoly of the slave trade and of the naval transport of all merchandise to the region for a period of twenty years. The company employees were officially considered to be in his majesty’s service and were answerable directly to Lisbon. An additional advantage for the government was that its control of the company gave it the means to suppress the widespread practice of smuggling and tax evasion.
In accumulating so many privileges, the company also created resentment among the local elites, which was ignored by the Marquis of Pombal who wanted to protect his financial interests in the region. With all of the company’s activities, trade with Portugal, previously minimal, began to flourish. Ships of the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Grão-Pará e Maranhão left Belém weighed down with rice, cotton, cocoa, ginger, wood and medicinal plants; and this without including the slave-trafficking. Whereas in 1755 it was estimated that there were 3,000 African slaves in the region, between 1755 and 1777 the population of African slaves grew to 12,000, all of whom had been bought with company funds. They had been taken from their homes in Cacheu, Bissau and Angola.16
With the death of the King of Portugal, Dom José,17 and the fall of his powerful minister the Marquis of Pombal, the period known as the ‘turnabout’ – a Viradeira – began. Dom José’s daughter, Dona Maria I,18 was opposed to all of the Marquis of Pombal’s policies. In 1778 the queen not only cancelled the monopoly but closed the company itself. Grão Pará had already been separated from Maranhão four years earlier in 1774. Nevertheless, despite a few crises, trade between the region and Portugal continued to flourish from 1800 to 1817. Between 1796 and 1799, Pará and Maranhão combined were responsible for 13.6 per cent of the products exported to Portugal from all the regions that make up present-day Brazil. Between 1804 and 1807 this percentage rose to 19 per cent with the two captaincies occupying fourth place in the volume of exports.19 In contrast to the areas of the country dominated by monoculture, the northern region offered an exotic variety of products to the European market including cocoa, coffee, rice, cotton, leather, cloves, cinnamon, sarsaparilla, puxiri,20 indigo,21 urucum, Brazil nuts and every imaginable variety of wood.22
During the independence period, as we have seen, the region Grão-Pará had a very different history from the rest of Brazil and was not inclined to accept the new political regime. A network of powerful families working in business and agriculture dominated the region. Furthermore, there was a large concentration of foreign immigrants and migrants from other parts of Brazil, creating a mixture of people, languages and cultures.23 And, finally, the direct trade links to Portugal continued and there was little motivation to demonstrate loyalty to a government that had until then ruled a separate country. There was a great deal of resentment in Grão-Pará over its political exclusion from the decisions of the central government, which nevertheless imposed heavy taxes on the region’s medicinal produce.
Like the revolt of 1832 in Pernambuco, the Cabanagem in Grão-Pará brought together distinct social groups, each of which had their own demands. The names of the two uprisings – Cabanada in Pernambuco and Cabanagem in Pará – both stem from the word cabana, the mud-and-wattle shacks that served as homes for the indigenous peoples, mestizos and Africans. But, unlike what had occurred in Pernambuco, in Pará these groups confronted the local elites directly.
The revolt began with a bang. On 7 January 1835, under the leadership of Antônio Vinagre, the rebels – who included groups of cabanos, tapuios,24 indigenous peoples and Africans – attacked the army barracks and the governor’s palace in Belém, assassinating the governor of the province and seizing a large amount of weaponry. They then appo
inted a new governor – Félix Antônio Clemente Malcher – who at the time was a political prisoner because of his stance against the regime. But he was not to last long in the post. With the increasing radicalization of the revolt, Malcher, a sugar plantation owner, ended up betraying his allies, ordering them to lay down their arms, return to work, and swear allegiance to the regency. He was deposed on 19 February the same year. After this, tempers gradually cooled off and the cabanos retreated, leaving Belém in July.
But there was another outbreak in August when Mariana de Almeida, a Portuguese woman, was murdered. She was the seventy-year-old widow of a Portuguese merchant. It was said that her body was dragged through the streets and exposed to public abuse over her loyalty to Pedro I. The revolt was one of the most violent in Brazilian history. The leaders were accused of being insubordinate, evil anarchists. It cannot be denied that the cabanos committed some extreme acts. Slaves tied their former masters to tree trunks and whipped them; Indians who had been press-ganged killed their commanding officers and took their military ranks (they were all lieutenant-colonels) and then proceeded to destroy the district of Nazaré.
As the movement became more radical, the Africans and indigenous peoples acquired greater autonomy and the role of the African leaders increased. The slaves made all the difference during the Cabanagem. Their participation led to the cabanos being referred to as ‘evil’, and also to the recurrent fear that an event similar to the Haitian revolution could occur in Brazil. There was nothing ‘naturally evil’ about the cabanos; in fact, they were fighting against what they saw as a lack of religion on the part of the Portuguese usurpers of Belém, whom they accused of following orders from the court in Rio de Janeiro. They also saw the president of the province as a foreigner and accused him of being a Mason.