One Nation Under the Southern Cross - an alternate Brazil TL (updated 13/08)
- Thread starter Ricard (i.e. Rdffigueira)
- Start date
There will be more coming today or tomorrow. I'm writing some new stuff to keep ahead of the chapters I'm posting. Hope you keep enjoying, my friend.
I've just finished writing the parts related to independence, so your desire will be fulfilled. I'm endeavoring to continue it the far as I can towards the alternate 21th Century
10. "Independência para o Brasil!" (Pt. 3) (1817)
6. The Campaign in Santa Catarina
To this day, the Historians disagree to what might have been the cause that led Gen. José de Abreu Mena Barreto lead an emancipationist movement and proclaim a republic for his own compatriots. Probably a multitude of factors: the overall dissatisfaction with the colonial administration, the abusive taxes and demands of conscription, the yearning of preserving the autonomy that they benefitted in the previous years. Among the gaúchos, there was a widespread sentiment of disgust regarding what they interpreted as an ingratitude from the Portuguese metropolis: in all those years before they had almost alone fought wars to expand the Portuguese Empire, and against the Kingdom of Spain, and now they were rewarded with more oppression, instead of autonomy.
Gen. Mena Barreto, according to his own extant correspondence with his family and friends, was not, at first, a genuine supporter of republicanism, neither of independence, but saw himself as a defender of the safety and prosperity of his “brothers” Gaúchos, who had cried for him as their champion against the rapacious Portuguese monarchy. By the founding of the Republic of the Gaúchos, he had become convinced that emancipation from Portugal was a necessity, and his own followers, mostly soldiers, were enthusiastic about defending their own freedom on the battlefield. Anyway, it is clear that his original intent was not to liberate the whole of Portuguese America, but only the Captaincies of São Pedro do Rio Grande and Santa Catarina.
Gaúchos marching with a troop of mules
He captured Porto Alegre – the gubernatorial seat – and imprisoned the unpopular Portuguese Governor of São Pedro do Rio Grande. Considering that a few years earlier, he himself had been Governor of the Captaincy, and was still a very popular and endeared figure in the south, in a matter of weeks Gen. Mena Barreto had full control of the regional administration and the military. Realizing that its security could only come if he adopted an aggressive stance, the Gaúcho army immediately marched north.
In the meantime, he was contacted by the Spanish Governor of the Viceroyalty of La Plata, who clearly sought to benefit from the internal conflict in Portuguese America. Gen. Mena Barreto was no fool – even if he didn’t knew that the Crown of Spain was watching the developments of the war with keen interest, seeking to destroy Portuguese presence in South America once and for all – he was savvy enough to realize that an alliance with the Spaniards in the end would simply result in a change of masters. For now, he was content with the good-faith gifts given by the Governor of La Plata: shipments of weapons, horses and food to assist in his campaign against the Portuguese, but avoided prolonged diplomatic contact.
With alarming speed, the Gaúchos outmaneuvered the local militia of Santa Catarina and instigated a mutiny among the garrison of Laguna, the provincial seat. Before the end of April 1817, the whole province had been annexed to his newborn state.
Historians agree that Gen. Mena Barreto would have been content to stop right there: if the Portuguese Crown gave recognition to their claims of sovereignty, he would not have continued his march to the north. Knowing that without foreign support his cause might collapse, he immediately sent messengers to France, to the United Kingdom and to the United States of America, pleading assistance in the war effort.
He received no response from Lisboa, but the news came in May 1817 that Gen. Fragoso Mendes was already near the Paranaguá Bay, near the border between São Paulo and Santa Catarina.
In 21 May 1817, the Brazilians obtained their first great military victory in the war, on the shores of the River Cubatão do Sul, not far from the Atlantic coast. This engagement, notorious not only by the fact that it became a national commemoration, was the turning point of the war, and showed that the cause of independence was not lost, after all.
Non-contemporary representation of the "Battle of River Cubatão" (painted c. 1850), in which the Gaúchos are depicted in European-style uniforms. In reality, the Gaúchos had no uniform clothing, but rather wore distinctive ponchos, bandanas and hats
The Portuguese forces were physically exhausted by the forced march and emotionally tired of war and violence – after all, those were the same men that had fought against Spain and France in those previous years, who had gone from one battlefield to siege, and then to another battlefield, season after season. The Portuguese also were susceptible to the various tropical diseases that emerged during the southern summer – that went from December to March – and their files had been mercilessly decimated by malaria, yellow fever and smallpox. After all, the colony lacked hospitals and even basic hygiene. Their “replacements”, the loyalist Luso-Brazilians soldiers, had been increasingly alienated by the Portuguese aristocrats that commanded the army, and by the various atrocities committed against civilian populations.
Taking all these factors in account, one can understand how Mena Barreto’s outnumbered and poorly armed force succeeded in triumphing over a better armed and better trained opponent.
Most of the Gaúchos were placed atop a steep promontory, some groups barricaded into an abandoned stone church, to be safe from the artillery strikes. A fierce engagement between the cavalry forces resulted in a Brazilian victory, as the Gaúchos routed the disorganized Luso-Brazilian dragoons and hussars. Afterwards, the Portuguese were tricked into spreading their formation to attack what they supposed to be a vulnerable spot in the Gaúcho battle line – that had purposefully weakened by Gen. Mena Barreto to entice an attack. The Portuguese army gradually lost cohesion, and suffered heavy losses by trying to capture the hill with the church, while their exposed flanks were savagely harassed by the enemy cavalry. Their rearguard was surprised by a group of mercenary Indians, whose war cry terrified the Portuguese soldiers, and some cannons were captured.
Fighting ceased on that day, and furious Fragoso Mendes would have attempted another attack on the next day. However, in 22 May he was startled to discover that the Regimento da Guanabara – the Brazilian-born force that had been merged to his own Royalist army – stage a mutiny, led by the young Colonel Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar. Their soldiers and officers refused to fight against their "own blood brothers", and proclaimed that they would turn their weapons against the Lusitanians if Fragoso Mendes did not leave the battlefield immediately. Now commanding less than half the number of troops, Gen. Fragoso Mendes cursed the heavens and grudgingly firmed a truce with Gen. Mena Barreto. Then he reorganized his depleted forces and retreated all the way back to São Paulo, where his subordinate, Lt. Baltazar Célio Tavares, had established a headquarters.
Portrait of Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar, commander of the Guanabara Regiment (c. 1820)
If the Battle of River Cubatão was the strategic turning point of the war, the defection of the Regimento da Guanabara was the ideological turning point. Even if Gen. Mena Barreto could be personally content with securing the independence of the Gaúcho Republic, he was convinced of the necessity of uniting all the captaincies of Brazil in a sole war effort against the Kingdom of Portugal. Santa Catarina and São Pedro do Rio Grande couldn’t resist alone. No, they needed the support of São Paulo, at least. Only if the whole southern block of the colony was united could they hope to prevent a Portuguese reconquest.
In June 1817, Gen. Mena Barreto was still in Coritiba, on the southern part of the Captaincy of São Paulo, indecisive about the strategy to be adopted, but instigated by his own lieutenants and soldiers to waste no time and march north, and liberate the neighboring provinces, when he received a message from the Paulista leader Inácio Joaquim Monteiro, allied to the Mineiro Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho, congratulating him for his great triumph, and pleading him to join forces with the rebellion to liberate São Paulo and Minas Gerais.
Mena Barreto’s speech to the combined forces of the southern provinces and of Rio de Janeiro on 15 June 1817, the date he decided to march to São Paulo and join his forces with Inácio Joaquim Monteiro and Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho, has become almost legendary. This scene would later be immortalized in a painting placed inside the Historical Archive of the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro, by the French Romantic painter Jean-Baptiste Marmoutier. There, Gen. Mena Barreto is represented with a grizzled beard, fierce eyes and majestic gestures, speaking before an assembled grand army in an idyllic field. Truth is that, excepting the Regimento da Guanabara, his soldiers did not wear uniforms; many even marched barefoot, and instead of rifles, many went to battle with axes and spears.
Nevertheless, the date deserved to be preserved in History, and scholars even consider it the very birth of the “Brazilian nation”, founded on the ideals of freedom and personal merit. In his address to the troops, Gen. José de Abreu Mena Barreto defends that, after centuries of oppression, Brazil must, after all, be free of the greed and violence of the Kingdom of Portugal, and also that only by being able to choose their own rulers the people can fulfill its God-given destiny, and create their own great empire in the tropics.
In this very day, the Gaúchos and Cariocas marched along the northern road to meet the Paulistas and Mineiros rebels in the village of Itapeva.
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10. "Independência para o Brasil!" (Pt. 4) (1816-1817)
7. The Portuguese Campaign in Northeast Brazil
In early October 1816, the Exército Real de Viseu, led by Dom Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira, arrived in Natal, in the Captaincy of Rio Grande do Norte. He found the Northeastern Provinces of the colony in a state of grave turmoil and instability. The overall impoverishment of the local populations – especially those who had lost so much with the decline of the sugar trade – generated dissatisfaction among poor and rich men alike, all of whom shared the feeling of neglect regarding the metropolitan treatment of the region.
Portrait of D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira, Commander of the Exército Real do Viseu (c. 1810)
Cotton had been introduced in the northeastern provinces in the middle 18th Century, and experienced a genuine growth, especially in Maranham and Ceará. Its main consumer was Great Britain, being the raw good necessary to feed the booming textile industry, but so far, Portugal had been the middleman that received crude cotton in Europe and resold it to the markets in London. In the early 19th Century, however, with the collapse of the Kingdom of Portugal, and the British intervention in Portuguese America, the British traders provided substantial investments in the fledgling cotton production, so much that in a span of barely a decade it overtook most of the Northeastern Captaincies, and created many rich producers in the twilight of sugar-cane commerce. This unexpected economic development led some to speculate that cotton would be a perfect substitute for sugar cane. In the long run, this prophecy would become true, but, for now, it seemed a tantalizing deception. As soon as the Napoleonic Wars ended and the Braganças were restored to power, one of their first measures was to reestablish the colonial pact and impose new tariffs upon the cotton exportation, which reduced the profits of the regional traders.
Coupled to this fact was the abrupt reduction of the Atlantic slave trade, mainly due to pressure of the United Kingdom. Considering that not only the cotton production, but rather the entire way of life of the Northeastern urban and rural white minorities were grounded upon slave workforce, it was no wonder that the lower influx of African captives caused a serious blow to the local economy. What the disgruntled elites failed to realize was that – at least in this unique circumstance – Portugal was not the author of their misfortunes.
In the Northeastern Theater of the Independence War we can witness a similar pattern to the events unfolded in the Southeast: localized revolts and conspiracies, whose most obvious and common complaint was the imposition of fiscal exactions and the loss of the rights of autonomy obtained in the previous years, but despite the fact that some of them – especially in Bahia and Pernambuco – espoused revolutionary convictions, none of them actually designed a project for the independence of the whole Portuguese America. In Bahia, the Baianos desired autonomy for their own province, and only in Pernambuco, there is extant evidence that a faction of revolutionaries intended to establish a republican government encompassing Pernambuco and Alagoas, and perhaps obtain the adhesion of the other provinces.
Like in other states, there were regionalist clashes between the oppressed Brazilian poor and middle classes (mostly agrarian groups and low-ranking military) against the Portuguese-born persons who were entitles to hold the highest political and military offices. In cities such as Salvador, Recife and Olinda, a common complaint was the grave corruption of the Portuguese administration, under the flimsy excuse that the “colony must provide for the restoration of its motherland, Portugal”.
In Olinda (Pernambuco), a revolutionary conspiracy was uncovered in May 1816 by Governor João Felipe Severo Almeida, after various pamphlets containing subversive ideas were spread during the night through the whole city. A masonic society was implicated, but the main culprit was found out to be a mulatto stagecoach named Daniel Borges, who was executed a couple days later, and much later canonized a martyr of the independence.
When D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira arrived, a large scale revolt was happening in the interior of Piauhy. The local Governor Rodrigo Alberto Santos e Rosa failed to repress it, arguing that he lacked military forces to do so. In reality, he had been thoroughly influenced by his religious wife, Dona Fátima Santos e Rosa, who claimed that he would suffer eternity in Hell if he shed the blood of his brothers in faith. Much later it was discovered that she had practically been brainwashed by Friar José Montes Calixto, who was secretly a revolutionary, and belonged to a liberal conspiracy operating inside the monastery of St. Theresa in the capital of Piauhy.
The Portuguese chief-of-arms only marched against the revolters in late November, and until then he spend his days in the gubernatorial palace in Natal, corresponding with the other regional Governors, and it seemed the whole Northeast was supportive of the Crown in Lisboa. Even if there were any animosity and revolutionary sentiments, they had diminished as soon as the large army of Portuguese soldiers and mercenaries arrived.
The French mercenary troops employed by the Portuguese were professional and veteran, but D. Vaz Pereira saw better use for them the destruction of the quilombos and recapture of slaves in the meantime, to obtain the favor of the local slave-holding elites.
Before December ended, however, their armed forces were already mopping up the isolated rebellious groups in the interior of Piauhy.
Only in February 1817, with the province of Piauhy pacified, the Exército Real de Viseu marched to Bahia, where it operated for several months, suppressing rebellious groups that had been sprouted due to the negligence of the local Governor, Julio Fernando Vidal. The then Governor of Bahia, despite being declaredly a loyalist, was known to be a sympathizer of the liberal factions, as he opposed the fiscal burdens imposed by the Crown in the provinces and supported more autonomy for the region. Due to his associations with “subversive” characters – including a personal friendship with Fausto Silva Ferreira, the leader of the Baiana Revolt of 1808 (at the time in a self-imposed exile in the United States of America) – Julio Fernando Vidal was accused by D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira of being a “Jacobin”, a libel that warranted his deposition from the gubernatorial office and immediate exile to Africa, a rather ironic fate, due to the fact that Fernando Vidal's family had for generations profited of the slave trade from the black continent.
The Bahian Theater of the Independence War was a bloody one, where small and agile groups of partisans operated a determined guerrilla warfare far from the urban centers, harassing the supply and communication lines of the Exército Real de Viseu with the other Northeastern Provinces.
In this context, History witnessed the appearance of Ana Angélica Firmino de Deus, the Brazilian heroine that fought against the Portuguese soldiers in the parish of Nossa Senhora do Rosário do Porto da Cachoeira [“Feira de Santana”]. After her husband – who was also a freedom fighter – was executed by the occupiers in April 1817, she led a band of armed ranchers in various raids between 1817 and 1820, becoming known for her defense of the countryside churches and the miserable farmers oppressed by the Portuguese authorities, the "Brazilian Joan of Arc".
Idealized depiction of Ana Angélica Firmino de Deus, the "Brazilian Joan of Arc", based on contemporary reports (painted c. 1850)
Depiction of the "Bahianos" freedom fighters, mostly farmers and ranchers who had been ruined by the effect and consequences of the Revilização Policy in the Northeast (painted c. 1850)
Nevertheless, much like in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, these guerrillas, despite their notoriety and dedication, had scant hope of winning against the Portuguese, once the local colonial elites were coerced into cooperation and the rebels were forced to hide in the arid wasteland far from the coast, known as “Sertão”. Despite the dedication to the cause and formidable attacks against the Portuguese, they were too disorganized and geographically isolated to present a united resistance bloc, like the one that had formed by the victory of the Gaúchos in the south.
The Portuguese troops of D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira were careful and patient, and village by village they rooted out the rebels and enforced the royal decrees, controlling the few overland roads and riverine bridges to isolate the insurgent groups. The local clergy was pressured and grudgingly worked to preserve peace in the region by convincing the poor folk of the uselessness of fighting the war.
By 1818, indeed, with but a few exhausted groups of outlaws fighting to raid the Portuguese outposts, Bahia had mostly been pacified, and for now there were few supporters of political emancipation in the region.
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It won't last too long, indeed, but I tried to depict more the overall socioeconomic context of the region that will lead - in a not too far future - to internal conflicts.
I'll try to post more tonight, so you won't wait too long
10. "Independência para o Brasil!" (Pt. 5) (1817)
8. The Siege of São Paulo
It was already in the month of July in 1817, a tropical winter with plenty of rainstorms, muddy terrain and misty mornings, when the forces of José de Abreu Mena Barreto and Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar joined with Inácio Joaquim Monteiro and Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho, in the agrarian hamlet of Itapeva, in the southwestern reaches of the province of São Paulo.
This was the first meeting between the so-called “Pais da Pátria” ("Fathers of the Homeland"). Each of these men would in the future play important political roles, and their own disciples and protégés would in turn form the next generation of politicians in the Brazilian public affairs. In July 1817, however, their meeting forged a very convenient alliance of different secessionist groups whose common goal was obtaining the capitulation from the Kingdom of Portugal. In that specific moment, they had no vision of a united Portuguese America as a single independent country. In fact, the farthest their imagination crafted was the dream of a single nation composed by the union between the Southern and Southeastern states, which indeed appeared to be a more “organic” or natural arrangement, due to the geographic, social and cultural proximity between the provinces, with São Paulo functioning as its point of contact, and Rio de Janeiro as the external point from whence they could dialogue with the international community.
It is clear that these “Liberators” had little knowledge about similar revolutionary trends in the Captaincies of the Northeast, and they apparently did not include the Northern Captaincies such as Grão-Pará and Rio Negro inside their national project. Of course, each one of these men until now had cared only about their own province, about what they envisaged as their own homeland. The ties created to bind those regions into a single polity would be merely artificial, not historical, and neither cultural. As we will see later, at this embrionary stage, the nation of Brazil was apparently salvaged from the collapsing Portuguese colonial administration only as a necessary mean to prevent another invasion by a European power, for the Luso-Brazilians themselves barely imagined themselves as “brothers” inside the same territory.
Interestingly, even if on a much smaller geographical scale (considering only the Captaincies of the South and the Southeast of Brazil), the Fathers of the Homeland already knew that only by the expediency of innovative political institutions they could forge, in a short term, a national unity between the regions. Their most favored ideas were the federalist system, inspired by the North American model, by which every constituent State would retain their autonomy, and the British parliamentary system, which created political cohesion in the Legislative and Executive branches. Even if the republic itself was not necessarily the most favored project – indeed, many of the contemporary intellectuals and scholars actually preferred a constitutional monarchy – they considered the federal model worth the try. After all, their greatest desire was reinstating regional autonomy, but they were frightened by the revolutionary prospect of allowing the masses to choose their own decision-makers. Only God might save Brazil if the discriminated ethnical groups were given any hope of enfranchisement!
Nevertheless, it was the very first time we witnessed a combined force of Luso-Brazilians, Indians and blacks united into a single military contingent. The Gaúchos were by far the most numerous of the lot, and this meant that Gen. Mena Barreto would be the overall military leader – besides, he was the most experienced and senior in rank – but the real strength of the army lay upon the Regimento da Guanabara led by Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar, which, despite serious casualties by disease, hardships and battles, was still the only military group with proper training, rigid hierarchy and decent equipment. The Paulistas and Mineiros bolstered their numbers, but their forces were mostly comprised of barefoot irregulars, volunteer militiamen, mercenary aboriginals and freed slaves. Among the Mineiros, only a cadre of about 200 men of Teixeira Coelho’s retinue knew how to use firearms, and by now, they lacked equipment, fighting with lances and swords. The Paulistas had no military training, and actually fought like the Indians. Even amounting between 4.000 and 5.000 men – a massive force by colonial standards – the whole army was short on weapons, ammunition and resources, and lacked artillery and heavy cavalry support. None of the troops received regular salary, and marched solely by the charisma and will of their respective leaders.
To these marginalized pariahs, “republic” and “federation” were meaningless… but they were attracted by the idea of gaining riches, paying less tributes and exacting revenge on the despised Portuguese oppressors.
Another tactical victory was obtained in that month of July, when they ambushed and routed a Loyalist force commanded by Lt. Baltazar Célio Tavares, who had been nominated ad hoc Governor of the Captaincy of São Paulo by Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes. The Portuguese were surprised in a night attack, and their lack of cavalry and artillery accelerated the defeat, as the disorganized infantry disintegrated by the relentless assault of the Gaúcho equestrians. The disaster resulted in the capture of almost 600 Portuguese prisoners, approximately half of the force deployed in the battlefield.
When the Primeiro Exército do Brasil [1st Army of Brazil] met with the Exército Real do Alentejo in the next week, however, it was already barricaded inside the abandoned buildings of the bucolic town of São Paulo, their victory was by no means guaranteed, not even by the numerical superiority.
Painting of the City of São Paulo in 1810
The city had been fortified by Lt. Baltazar Célio Tavares – who had been charged by Gen. Fragoso Mendes with the defense of the captaincy – with improvised wooden stockades and earthwork to preserve the defenders inside their trenches and cannons over built mounds. Most houses had been garrisoned by units of line infantry. His army had been reinforced by bands of conscripted militia youths and royalist groups, but they were still demoralized by the forced marches and wrecked by yellow fever.
The numerous Luso-Brazilian army couldn’t encircle the whole perimeter of the municipium without spreading their forces too thinly, so Gen. Mena Barreto fragmented the army in three great divisions, considering that the city had a vague triangular layout: the Mineiros in the southwest side, the Paulistas in the northwest side, and his own larger contingent along the wider eastern wall, built along the course of the Tamanduateí river. Even if they did not hope to besiege the whole circuit of walls, they could impede the access to the riverine water around the city. Gen. Mena Barreto’s intent was to starve the garrison into surrender, instead of wasting his men on attacks against their fortified positions and artillery bombardments.
For six days, they camped outside São Paulo, waiting for the supplies inside it dwindle. The defenders’ morale suffered a heavy blow when a relieving Royalist unit of 500 Luso-Brazilian marines coming from the port of Santos was routed by the Gaúchos. The Portuguese troops of Fragoso Mendes even tried a desperate sortie to join with the relief force and overwhelm the patriots, but they were repelled, and many of their dead were carried by the river.
In the very first day of August, a severe storm fell upon São Paulo, and after days of consecutive rain both the patriots and royalists feared they were witnessing another divine flood, like that witnessed by the biblical Noah. The Brazilians on the eastern side were forced to move from their position, as the course of the Tamanduateí completely flooded in a raging deluge of water, mud and trees. Mena Barreto divided his own force in two halves, and each one of them joined the Mineiros and Paulistas divisions. In the second day of August, upon the insistence of Col. Nogueira Gaspar and of the Mineiros and Paulistas, Gen. Mena Barreto directed an attack against the northwestern side of the city, whose wooden palisade had collapsed in the tempest.
Their offensive was barely successful: they managed to penetrate the city, and overcome the first defensive lines, but found another circuit of barricades in the main streets. The patriots occupied a stone church located in the very northern tip of the town, but did not try to advance in the next day.
Only in August 3, the rain stopped and the besiegers advanced, realizing that the downpour had destroyed the defensive earthworks, and flooded the trenches of the enemy musketeers into dirt ditches. This day witnessed the Luso-Brazilian greatest victory, but the Portuguese fought savagely, with grim determination, as if protecting their own motherland. The effectivity of firearms had been diminished by the tempest, and forced the soldiers of both sides into man-to-man with bayonets, swords, axes, knives and even their own fists, slaughtering each other like wild creatures in the first ages of mankind. In that day, hundreds of Martyrs of the Independence were sent to the Heavens.
Even then, Gen. Fragoso Mendes’ force was not completely destroyed. The battered and terrified royalist survivors were allowed to retreat back to Rio de Janeiro, from whence he would sail back to Europe. In compensation, the colonial troops finally replenished necessary supplies, weapons and ammunitions, and captured 12 cannons and mortars. Lt. Baltazar Célio Tavares was formally deposed from the governorship after his departure with his hierarchical superior, Gen. Fragoso Mendes, and Inácio Joaquim Monteiro was installed as provisory governor.
Painting of the last stand of the Portuguese regiments in the Siege of São Paulo (c. 1840)
All men born in Portugal – the Reinóis – were purged from the regional bureaucracy, the top-most offices of the provincial military and even the church, and only those born in Brazilian territory were appointed as substitutes by Governor Inácio Joaquim Monteiro.
Gen. Mena Barreto, as a representative of the patriot coalition, sent messengers to Pedro Henrique Jardim Vasconcelos, Governor of the Captaincy of Matto Grosso, boldly proclaiming that their provinces were free from the tyranny of the Kingdom of Portugal, and demanded that he join his forces with the Gaúchos in alliance with Lisboa. When Gov. Jardim Vasconcelos’ answer arrived in letter in São Paulo (a month later), Mena Barreto had already departed, but Inácio Joaquim Monteiro received the correspondence, which announced that they were nothing above traitors and scoundrels, usurpers of the legitimate and God-given right of the Braganças, and that he would be loyal to the Crown until his last breath. Indeed, until the closure of the war, Matto Grosso and Goyaz remained loyalist provinces.
The truth is that, despite the sound defeat of the Exército Real do Alentejo, the patriots’ standing was still precarious: their military force could easily be disintegrated, and their main base comprised but three of the whole number of territories of Portuguese America. So far, they had no contact with external powers, excepting the Kingdom of Spain, and all the Liberators agreed that they could not afford to allow a Spanish intervention, lest they gain, in the future, an even worse enemy than feeble Portugal.
Besides, inside the colonies there were still factions that did not believe emancipation was the best solution for their own interests. Many of the plantation owners, slave traffickers and clergymen feared that Mena Barreto and the other Liberators would attempt to abolish slavery, extinguish their own private militias or curtail their privileges, all of which were despicable scenarios. On the other side of the political spectrum, there lay those who supported independence, but disagreed with the Liberators’ political program. Again, the only topic in which the pro-emancipationist groups seemed to reach a vague agreement was the need of a federal regime to respect regional autonomy.
Inácio Joaquim Monteiro cunningly transformed some of his rivals into useful allies by appointing them to important administrative and military functions inside the province. The introduction of Brazilians in the bishoprics quickly produced the desired effect: the grateful bishops and abbots made an effort to support the cause of the Liberators, thus impressing upon it some sort of legitimacy, as the common folk was still easily influenced by the clergy. Finally, the plantation owners and traders were convinced to join the cause upon having their privileges confirmed.
A show of force was necessary to impose Inácio Joaquim Monteiro’s regime upon the citizens of Santos, the most important port of the Captaincy of São Paulo, under control of a Brazilian-born prefect loyal to the Crown of Portugal, and garrisoned by a unit of 400 Luso-Brazilian soldiers.
The patriot army, led by Teixeira Coelho and Mena Barreto besieged Santos in September 1817, but after a week of artillery bombardment, they gave up the siege. The fortified city was nested inside an island in the estuary of the Santos River, and was being supplied by a Portuguese fleet, so it could not be starved into surrender. When the ships finally departed from the port of Santos, already in October, informed that Fragoso Mendes was in Rio de Janeiro, the patriot army had also departed. Inácio Joaquim Monteiro did not miss the opportunity, and sent a force of 800 soldiers under his nephew José Eugênio Queiroz to besieged it and demand its surrender. The local prefect, confident of the fortifications, refused to capitulate, and the siege would drag for various months before the patriot forces seized it by storm.
9. The Liberation of Rio de Janeiro
In the last week of September, in 1817, after Inácio Joaquim Monteiro consolidated his hold over the strategically important Captaincy of São Paulo, obtaining the cooperation of the local clergy and agrarian elites, Gen. Mena Barreto decided it was the time to march directly on Rio de Janeiro.
It was the very capital of Portuguese America, one of its most populous and developed cities. Not only its capture would wrestle from Portugal the administrative center of the colony, but it would also grant to the patriots one of the most relevant and busiest ports south of the Equator. Even if Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho vehemently insisted that the patriot army march directly along the northern flank of the Serra do Mar to reach the center of Minas Gerais, Mena Barreto and Nogueira Gaspar had the deciding vote on the matter, and it was decided that the 1st Brazilian Army would first go to Rio de Janeiro, and only after it could they think about Minas Gerais.
The unexpected news that the Portuguese Viceroy D. Miguel Pereira Forjaz was conscripting men to join his army alarmed the patriots when they advanced along the valley of the Parahyba River, on the border between the Captaincies of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
It was almost November when their marching army – comprising roughly 4.000 soldiers and horsemen, with 17 pieces of artillery – already on the road connecting Barra Mansa to the colonial capital, when they discovered that Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes had broken his agreement. Instead of returning with the Exército Real do Alentejo to Portugal, he merged the remnants of his forces to the city garrison levied by Dom Pereira Forjaz. They established a defensive position inside Rio de Janeiro, and refused to return to Portugal, proclaiming that the rebellion must end, lest they are all executed like criminals. Even worse, the Loyalists expected maritime support from the flotilla of five frigates coming from the port of Santos.
The wrecked remnant of the Exército Real do Alentejo left a trail of devastation and ruin on their return to Rio de Janeiro, so that the road between São Paulo and the capital on the Guanabara Bay failed to provide food and resources to the Liberators. The harvests and cattle had been stolen and destroyed, many farmers were slain or forced to move to Rio de Janeiro and contribute to the city’s defense, and slaves were released to wreak havoc in the countryside.
The city of Rio de Janeiro was nested on the western peninsula that marked the entrance of the Guanabara Bay. The Patriots arrived in late October 1817, following the course of the Comprido River, a few kilometers north of the capital, and then camped near the northern suburbs, a land of arcadian orchards and winds bringing the salt of the ocean.
Their first attack occurred in 26th October 1817, and the patriots successfully broke through a barricade mounted by Lt. Baltazar Célio Tavares in the urban district of Santana. He was shot dead by a sniper and his garrison quickly dispersed, thus opening the path along the largest avenue of the city, which connected the northern suburbs with the southern coast, where the gubernatorial seat was located.
Differently from São Paulo, however, the urban landscape of Rio de Janeiro allowed an outnumbered military force to defend against an invader, as its roads and alleys were too small and cramped. The skirmishes to overcome the barricades resulted in higher casualties than Mena Barreto desired, and their exasperation against the determined resistance of the Royalists only strengthened their resolve to annihilate the Europeans. Each day that passed the conflict became bloodier.
Map of the City of Rio de Janeiro, with the places where the Patriot and Royalist forces clashed during the Siege of 1817
In October 28, the small fort upon the Mt. Santo Antônio was captured by storm by the Brazilians. By now, the city had mostly been evacuated by Mena Barreto’s orders, as he abhorred civilian casualties. In the previous day, the Portuguese flotilla, realizing they had few hopes of maintaining control, bombarded the port district until their ammunition depleted, leaving half the city ruined in wreckage. All the foreigners inside Brazil – mostly British and Portuguese – had already left, horrified by the conflict.
Fragoso Mendes and D. Pereira Forjaz’s last stand occurred in the fort of the Mt. Castelo, in the very southern district of the city. By November 1st, he commanded barely 1.200 men, his forces having been diminished by disease, desertion, starvation and death on the battlefield. Most of his men had been slain in a failed night sortie in the previous day.
The officers were surprised during the night by a generalized mutiny of the troops, Portuguese soldiers and foreign mercenaries alike, and they sent representatives to negotiate surrender with Gen. Mena Barreto. D. Miguel Pereira Forjaz, finally recognizing defeat, decided it was time to sail away from Rio de Janeiro. In exchange, he was forced to surrender Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes as a prisoner to the Brazilians, as he was deemed the author of their misfortunes.
In the next day, as the relieved citizens were invited back to their homes, and the Europeans sailed to the Atlantic Ocean, the proud officer Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes was flogged and hanged, despite his desperate protests that his decorations warranted a better execution.
In 2nd November 1817, José de Abreu Mena Barreto was acclaimed by his soldiers, and he proudly announced himself as the liberator of the oppressed peoples of Brazil from the Lusitanian yoke, and the herald of a new age of freedom and justice for the nation. In his address, the Gaúcho general expressly mentioned the project for the construction of a single nation constituted by states joined for mutual security and prosperity, but respecting of each other’s regional cultures and laws, and where the free men are able to choose their own leaders according to their merits and virtues. His speech – much likely written by Paulo de Tarso Albertino Góes, his most trusted secretary, who would in the future become Minister of Foreign Affairs – would be immediately immortalized as a verbal declaration of independence from Portugal. Indeed, many of its phrases would a few years later be incorporated into the text of the treaty by which the Kingdom of Portugal recognized the sovereignty of the Brazilian Federation.
To this day, there is no consensus among Historians regarding the correct interpretation of the “2nd November discourse”. Until that moment, there are no surviving records that point out that Gen. Mena Barreto was a supporter of the republican regime. Indeed, the letters he exchanged with his wife, his relatives and others seemed to indicate that he favored monarchism, as it was his conviction that a strong, but virtuous ruler, was needed to create order in a violent and unjust world, and expressly mentioned Kings Saul and David, biblical princes of Israel. Perhaps he had been misinterpreted in this regard, or maybe he could accept a republican regime with a stronger head of state, or possibly he had, in those months before the arrival in Rio de Janeiro, been influenced by ardent republicans such as Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho. Of course, some questions simply cannot be answered, even now, so many generations after his death, but the point is that Gen. Mena Barreto henceforward became a serious supporter of the republican cause, as did Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar.
Coincidence or not, most republicans at the time were from military background; possibly they were more impressed about the promise of a meritocratic regime than an aristocratic one, but we’ll in a later chapter see the political repercussions of the armed forces’ championing of the republican ideology.
Gen. Mena Barreto restored the Parliament of Rio de Janeiro, which had been previously dissolved by D. Miguel Pereira Forjaz, and, like it had happened in the southern provinces and in São Paulo, conducted a great purge of Portuguese persons on the administration, on the judiciary and the military, due to allegations of corruption and treason. No trials or procedures were conducted, but those who held significant properties in Brazil were unfortunate enough to lose their estates and wealth, “as a means to contribute to the war effort against the Lusitanian tyranny”. In some cases, the public offices were informally auctioned to the highest bidders among the urban elite, as none of the Liberators were, right now, concerned with the seriousness, competence or even virtuousness of the bureaucrats, but rather with refilling the state’s emptied coffers and paying the stipend of the troops.
To no one’s surprise, José de Abreu Mena Barreto was unanimously acclaimed by the deputies of the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro – whose members for now only had representatives from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, a handful of Minas Gerais (like Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho), and from Santa Catarina and São Pedro do Rio Grande – by the vague appellation of “Defender of the Free State of Brazil” [Defensor da Nação Livre do Brazil]. Gen. Mena Barreto, seeing no use in continuing to adopt the official denomination as head of state of the provisory “Republic of the Gaúchos”, eagerly accepted the honorific, as it granted some legitimacy to his powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and even allowed him to enact decrees with the force of law. Usually Mena Barreto refrained to do so, with a few exceptions, and proclaimed in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies that he trusted that august assembly to preserve the rights and liberties of the fortunate people of Brazil.
One important exception was his very first act – National Decree nº 1/1817 – by which he effectively reorganized the state structure of the colony and convened a National Assembly to draft a Constitution for the Free State of Brazil in the next year. By this act he also:
- Declared extinct every debts the native Brazilians had to the Crown of Portugal;
- Denominated the combined provincial armies and district militias as the one “Army of the Free State of Brazil”;
- Declared that the ports of Brazil were open to every country to whom the Nation is at peace;
- Reassured the liberties and interests of each of the former captaincies of Portuguese America – henceforward to be called “states” – and proclaimed they were joined by mutual interest into a single “Federation”;
- Reassured the property rights, including that of slave-owners;
- Reassured the rights of the Roman Catholic Church;
For the first time, thus, the idea of a single nation called Brazil was placed in an official document, which was, in fact, wholly accepted by the representatives of the Parliament of Rio de Janeiro. After all, the measures catered to the conservative interests of the provincial oligarchies and urban elites, especially regarding laissez-faire trade and slavery, and the main topic was “federalism”, rather than “republic”, which would only be brought forward in the next few years.
Diplomatic representatives were sent to London, Paris and even to Vienna, to convince one of the great powers of Europe to intervene in the behalf of the Brazilian nation, as well as to Washington in North America. Portugal, despite its great empire, was on its sunset, and the intervention of another country to assist the Brazilians could well terminate the war and ensure international recognition of the fledgling nation.
For now, they had more immediate concerns: the “Exército Real do Viseu”, led by Marshal D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira, that had completely pacified the Northeastern Provinces in the previous months, was now marching upon Rio de Janeiro to destroy the rebellion once and for all, and to avenge Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes. He commanded a force of roughly 4.000 soldiers from Europe – Portuguese and French mercenaries – and conscripted royalist factions from Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará, as well as 22 cannons and was supported by the Portuguese Atlantic flotilla, with a total of 9 ships.
They had been marching straight from Salvador in Bahia, and by now had already crossed the River Itabapoana, which formed the northern border of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and would arrive in the next week.
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The southrons are on a lucky streak... or Portugal is suffering from a really detrimental case of bad luck... we'll see the outcome in the next chapter.
Hanging Fragoso Mendes certainly had a barbarian-like feel, and that was the intention. Despite his extreme and violent methods of subjugation of the conquered areas, he was still a condecorated officer and a war hero who fought to save his own homeland from the French. Of course, the international community will hardly care, but Portugal itself might not forget this so soon.
10. "Independência para o Brasil!" (Pt. 6) (1817)
10. The Battle of Macaé
Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho, now a deputy of the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro, had anxiously returned to Minas Gerais to free his own homeland from the Portuguese tyranny, as the province was still under the thumb of Colonel Fernando Henrique Fernandes do Faro. A veteran officer of the Napoleonic Wars, he had come to South America with the Exército Real do Alentejo, and had been placed by Carlos José Silva Fragoso Mendes as a provisory governor of the strategic captaincy, and commanded the largest Royalist contingent in Brazil excepting the Exército Real de Viseu, numbering about 900 Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian soldiers and militia.
The leader of the Mineiro faction marched from Rio de Janeiro along the Estrada Real do Ouro ["Royal Road of Gold"] that crossed a range of rainforest-covered mountains into Minas Gerais with roughly 1.200 men, including one unit of the Regimento da Guanabara, and various volunteers from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. He was supposed to jumpstart the revolution again inside Minas Gerais, and recruit more men to expel the Portuguese.
When Gen. Mena Barreto left the capital to face the fast advancing Exército Real do Viseu, led by D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira, he had some 4.000 men from the army that came with him all the way from the South – mainly Gaúchos and Paulistas, but also the remnants of the Regimento da Guanabara under Col. Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar. Immediately he summoned volunteers and conscripted young men from all the races in the nearby parishes.
When the day of the battle arrived – 21 November 1817 – his forces had been bolstered to a staggering 5.100 men, but, again, most of them had few to no military training. This time, however, most of them were at least equipped with proper weapons, wore uniforms, and even carried flags. In addition, there was a significant number of artillery pieces, which would give a significant edge in battle.
Again, Gen. Mena Barreto trusted the terrain to give him tactical advantage. His intelligence informed that the Portuguese were marching close to the Atlantic coast, so he established a fortified camp near the main bridge upon the River Macaé, on the southeastern region of the State of Rio de Janeiro. This region was a stretch of swampy and sandy land strangled between wooded mountains and the sea, and the Portuguese column would have necessarily to pass by that bridge on their way to Rio de Janeiro.
The government in Lisboa still did not think that the war against Brazil would result in defeat. The news of the destruction of the Exército Real do Alentejo in Rio de Janeiro had yet to arrive in Portugal. If the Exército Real do Viseu succeeded in defeating Mena Barreto, the largest organized military force of the colony would be annihilated, and afterwards the Portuguese could again invest in the conquest of each one of the self-proclaimed independent regions of the “Free State of Brazil”. It would be an arduous conflict, but it could still be won. The Liberators, despite their herculean effort, had yet to forge a substantial unity between the all the factions and races of Portuguese America. In fact, even if they could assert their sovereignty in the Southern and Southeastern former provinces of the colony, Portugal could remain in control of the rest: the Central, the Northeastern and the Northern Captaincies, a vast expanse from Bahia to the border with Perú, and from the Guyanas – which had been awarded to the Kingdom of Portugal after the Napoleonic Wars by the Congress of London (1814) – to Pernambuco.
Only a triumph against the Exército Real do Viseu on the battlefield would destroy the Portuguese hopes of recolonization, for the last time. After losing thousands of their young men, so few years after the most catastrophic decade of Portugal’s existence, they would not have neither the resources nor the ambition to attempt the recolonization again.
The 21st day of November, in 1817, witnessed this accomplishment by the Brazilians. A narrow victory but a victory nonetheless.
The Brazilian Army under Mena Barreto preparing for battle
D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira was attracted to the shores of Macaé River by insistent harassment of the light cavalry of the Gaúchos. The loyalist forces paid their price in blood for crossing the bridge upon the river, as the culverins and mortars captured from the Exército Real do Alentejo performed their thunderous orchestra. Immediately thereafter, in impeccable order, the Portuguese battalions invested against the line of battle of the Brazilian patriots, protected by a series of trenches and ditches and improved wooden palisades. Even despite these serious setbacks, the Portuguese almost won the day, as they overcame the trenches and defensive ditches, and stroke in the weakest point of the stockades, forcing Mena Barreto to employ his reserves, wholly composed by conscripts and poorly trained volunteers.
The better-disciplined and equipped Europeans gained advantage, and their aggressiveness – especially after they succeeded in mounting the grapeshot cannons on the field – made the defending troops to almost break in panic. The Regimento da Guanabara maintained cohesive formation, however, even as the world was blasted in hellfire and blood around them, allowing their desperate officers to reorganize the conscripts and launch a counterattack. Again, the day was saved by the indomitable vigor of the Gaúchos, whose cavalry dominated the battlefield, and performed flanking maneuvers and wreaking havoc in the Portuguese line of battle.
As the sun set in the mountains of the west, the carnage had already been interrupted. The defending troops grimly prepared for another day of battle… but to their joyful celebration, Marshal D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira decided to lift his own camp and retreat back to Bahia, as his forces suffered irreplaceable casualties. He would eventually be persecuted by the Liberators, but for now, Mena Barreto decided to give his exhausted men the deserved rest.
11. The Liberation of Minas Gerais
Even today, Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho is reputed as Minas Gerais’ greatest hero. Until the War of Independence, he had seen almost no battle, excepting punitive expeditions against bandits and escaped slaves that infested the mountainous regions of eastern Minas Gerais, and his military office owing to his father’s influence, as the late Col. Antônio Francisco Oliveira Lopes had been one of the leaders of the failed Mineira Revolt, and later Governor of the Captaincy by popular acclaim. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature about Teixeira Coelho is that he, from early age to the end of his life, was one the most dedicated and straightforward champion of republicanism in Brazil. Influenced by his own family, and by his compatriots inside Minas Gerais, he believed that only the republic could save a nation from despotism and oppression.
In early November 1817, when he departed through the road by which thousands of adventurers and fortune seekers in the previous centuries had migrated in search of precious metals, he saw himself as a harbinger of freedom to deliver his own nation – Minas Gerais, his nation – from the tyranny of a rotten and corrupt empire.
Conscious about the fond memory that the Mineiros still harbored towards the Mineira Revolution, as he marched north he ordered his messengers to spread the news of his arrival, claiming that the time had come for the Mineiros to rise against their oppressors again, for the last time, and to earn their freedom on the field of battle.
His base of operations before he mustered strength to march on the provincial capital was the village of Santo Antônio do Paraibuna [“Juiz de Fora”], from where he could maintain direct contact the Patriot government in Rio de Janeiro, and there dozens of volunteers came day after day to join his expedition.
When he resumed his path to the north, Teixeira Coelho was already informed that Gen. Mena Barreto had marched to meet the Exército Real do Viseu, and even considered returning back to Rio de Janeiro, but decided that the time to release Minas Gerais was now, lest his own men could desert him.
Along his way, he discovered that the few Portuguese units in the major cities – in Piedade da Borda do Campo [“Barbacena”] and in Queluz [“Conselheiro Lafaiete”] – had been recalled by Col. Fernando Henrique Fernandes do Faro to his gubernatorial seat in Vila Rica.
For some reason that the military scholars debate to this day, Col. Fernandes do Faro decided to abandon Vila Rica when he heard about the rebels’ approach, and moved to the mountainous region in the outskirts of Ouro Branco, some kilometers southwest of Vila Rica. In that spot, the Estrada Real had been carved in a deep valley surrounded by tall cliffs of black rock, and one could find the ruins of a stone church built by the Jesuits more than a hundred years before.
In 28th November the armies clashed, and the day was won by the loyalists. Fernandes do Faro proved to be a cautious commander, and patiently awaited for the numerically superior Mineiros to tire and disorganize themselves by reaching the top of the mountains. The advantage of numbers was useless: despite a hard fought battle, the Mineiros were forced to retreat after suffering a massacre.
Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho returned to Ouro Branco, a mining town that had received him with open arms. Even this defeat did not tarnish his prestige: he was still seen as the hero destined to deliver Minas Gerais from the invaders, and various volunteers flocked to the city, replenishing his losses.
This explains why, despite the tactical victory, Col. Fernandes do Faro decided to accept Teixeira Coelho’s offer to capitulate and receive a free passage back to Portugal, in early December. The Portuguese, despite the triumph, were irremediably demoralized by the news of the expulsion of the Viceroy D. Miguel Pereira Forjaz and appalled by the execution of their former commander, Gen. Fragoso Mendes. The Brazilian-born loyalists had deserted en masse after November, leaving the European soldiers isolated inside a hostile country. The last straw was the notice that various cities in the region rebelled and pledged their support to Teixeira Coelho, proclaimed to be their savior. Thus, despite his victory, in the end Col. Fernandes do Faro was defeated, and, seeing no use in fighting for a lost cause, his battalion marched back to Rio de Janeiro under supervision of the Mineira militia. As the Portuguese ships had already departed with D. Miguel Pereira Forjaz, his evacuation was conducted by three Dutch merchant vessels.
By parading his troops along the cities of the Estrada Real, Cpt. Teixeira Coelho reassured the Mineiros about their triumph over Portugal – a late triumph, indeed, from a war that, in their perspective, had begun in the previous generation, with the "Republic of Vila Rica"!
Painting of Vila Rica d’Ouro Preto, the capital of the State of Minas Gerais (c. 1830)
Presiding an assembly in the reopened Chamber of Vila Rica, in 18 December of 1817, he overcame the minoritarian opposing voices against his own nomination to the province’s governorship, and convinced the most influential men of the province – the top bureaucrats and military officers, the clergymen, the plantation owners and the burghers – about the necessity of joining their province into a union with the nation of Brazil. The elites had been convinced that the proposals of the Chamber of Rio de Janeiro that preserved their regional rights would be in their own best interest. After all, Minas Gerais depended on the symbiotic relationship with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to survive.
In the next week, a refuge of escaped slaves was torched in western Minas Gerais, and the Mineiro Army, now numbering above 3.000 soldiers, seized the frontier settlements of Uberlândia and Senhora do Patrocínio, in the very edge of civilization. Those towns were small and young, having been founded by the Bandeirantes decades earlier, and its populations were of mixed European and aboriginal descent. Before the year ended, Gov. Teixeira Coelho contemplated a campaign to conquer Vila Boa de Goyaz, the capital (and only settlement) of the Captaincy of Goyaz, still controlled by a loyalist Governor.
In late December, however, Teixeira Coelho received the news that Gen. Mena Barreto was already marching with the 1º Exército Brazileiro to capture Salvador, and thus deny another port in the Americas to the Kingdom of Portugal. The Mineiros were urged to march in Mena Barreto’s assistance.
Another assembly occurred in the Chamber of Vila Rica, in the last day of 1817. The Mineiro officers mounted a bold plan to spread the revolution through the Northeastern Provinces of Portuguese America: instead of returning to Rio de Janeiro and from there following the Atlantic coast all the way to Salvador, they could follow another path through the Sertão – the semi-arid outback of Brazil – and follow a northern journey directly to the coastal region of Pernambuco, like the Bandeirantes used to do, centuries before.
To accomplish this feat, the army of the Mineiros – now called Exército das Minas Gerais – would follow the course of the great River São Francisco, born in the very heart of Minas Gerais until its watershed in the distant Captaincy of Alagoas, a feat that History would elevate to legendary status by the romantic name of “Marcha do Sertão” [“March of the Sertão”].
In the next week, a refuge of escaped slaves was torched in western Minas Gerais, and the Mineiro Army, now numbering above 3.000 soldiers, seized the frontier settlements of Uberlândia and Senhora do Patrocínio, in the very edge of civilization. Those towns were small and young, having been founded by the Bandeirantes decades earlier, and its populations were of mixed European and aboriginal descent. Before the year ended, Gov. Teixeira Coelho contemplated a campaign to conquer Vila Boa de Goyaz, the capital (and only settlement) of the Captaincy of Goyaz, still controlled by a loyalist Governor.
In late December, however, Teixeira Coelho received the news that Gen. Mena Barreto was already marching with the 1º Exército Brazileiro to capture Salvador, and thus deny another port in the Americas to the Kingdom of Portugal. The Mineiros were urged to march in Mena Barreto’s assistance.
Another assembly occurred in the Chamber of Vila Rica, in the last day of 1817. The Mineiro officers mounted a bold plan to spread the revolution through the Northeastern Provinces of Portuguese America: instead of returning to Rio de Janeiro and from there following the Atlantic coast all the way to Salvador, they could follow another path through the Sertão – the semi-arid outback of Brazil – and follow a northern journey directly to the coastal region of Pernambuco, like the Bandeirantes used to do, centuries before.
To accomplish this feat, the army of the Mineiros – now called Exército das Minas Gerais – would follow the course of the great River São Francisco, born in the very heart of Minas Gerais until its watershed in the distant Captaincy of Alagoas, a feat that History would elevate to legendary status by the romantic name of “Marcha do Sertão” [“March of the Sertão”].
Map of the Basin of the River São Francisco in the interior of Brazil
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Thanks! I must say I really appreciate the support you've been giving me to push forward this work. I am enjoying it so far.
"Crazy enough to work" is the phrase that represents a LOT of episodes of OTL-Brazil, I must say. An alt-TL about this country couldn't be short of "this can't be possible, for god's sake!"
Nevertheless, I'm making an effort to avoid a full-fledged Brazil-wank. I want Brazil to be less like the USA or Sweden as the story comes to its close, and more like Australia or the Czech Republic. Not places that you see too often in the world news... but that seem to be very nice places to live on
10. "Independência para o Brasil!" (Pt. 7) (1818)
12. The March of the Sertão
The legendary march of the Mineiros through the Sertão of Minas Gerais and Pernambuco inaugurated the last phase of the War of Independence against the Kingdom of Portugal. By now, the main Portuguese armies had been destroyed or expelled in the Southern states, but they still held military presence and political influence in the Northeast. The Portuguese governors in Bahia, Pernambuco, Parahyba, Rio Grande do Norte and Ceará would refuse any attempts by the Brazilian commander-in-chief, José de Abreu Mena Barreto, of peacefully annexing these regions to the Free State of Brazil. No, they would have to be incorporated by force.
The union would have to be enforced due to a grand strategic imperative: Portugal had to be denied its main ports in Portuguese America, which were Rio de Janeiro, Salvador in Bahia and Recife in Pernambuco. If the Free State wanted to survive without fearing another Portuguese invasion in future decades – or even an invasion by another European power –, it would have to enforce its regime upon the Northeastern Captaincies. Besides, if Portugal lost all of its commercial harbors south of the Equator, its trading partners, notably Great Britain, would have no more interest in supporting the Portuguese interests. After all, the capitalists in London did not care about which country controlled the ports of Brazil… they only cared about the goods they could import from it. Mena Barreto decided about it when he was marching to reach Salvador, and defeated the disorganized remnants of the Exército Real do Viseu commanded by D. Marcos Vaz Nunes Pereira.
Gen. Mena Barreto was already in the middle littoral of Bahia, in late January 1818, when a messenger came from Rio de Janeiro, bringing him the news that the army of Cpt. Teixeira Coelho had initiated the march through the Sertão, along the valley of the River São Francisco. The news at first exasperated him: not only due to the disobedience to his orders, but also due to the fact that it left two disunited armies to operate independently in a hostile territory, increasing the chances of a disaster. Sometime later, however, he came to understand the advantage of this approach: the Mineiros would arrive in the Northeast much quickly than if they had returned to Rio de Janeiro and from there followed his path to Bahia. Indeed, there would be months of delay, and they had no time to lose. Besides the Portuguese remnants in the Northeast would expect and attack from the south, but not by the west.
Mena Barreto sent messages directly to Vila Rica in Minas Gerais, and from there the messengers were to find the column of the Mineiros, following their same path, so as to give his letters to Cpt. Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho as soon as possible. Fortunately, some of this correspondence survived to our day, and they indeed confirm that the grand strategic vision of José de Abreu Mena Barreto and Antônio Francisco Teixeira Coelho was to liberate all the Captaincies of the Northeastern Region of Portuguese America, and include them inside the newborn Free State of Brazil.
This would be the last communication between the Liberators before they met again in the next season, already in the Atlantic coast, due to the immense distance between their marching paths.
The Mineiros were effectively on their own. Despite the scorching summer heat, the morale of the troops was good, due to the charismatic presence of Cpt. Teixeira Coelho, regarded as a hero by his men. The 1.200 soldiers had little military training – the elite unit was comprised by Teixeira Coelho’s veteran companions, but the rest were volunteer militiamen and former city guards – and the only battlefield equipment were their own muskets, spear and sabers, as they lacked cannons. A sizeable force of light cavalry performed reconnaissance functions, finding their way to cross the various tributaries of the River São Francisco, and the best paths through the patches of forests, tributary rivers and cliffs.
The river basin at the time pertained to an administrative district called Comarca de São Francisco, integrated into the Captaincy of Pernambuco. In reality, however, it was completely isolated from the Portuguese Governor’s seat in Recife. Its villages were too small and remote, and they hardly cared about to whose province they belonged.
Territories of the Captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco in 1818
Due to the size of the expedition, they could not navigate through its whole watercourse, but they marched close by the shores of the river, so as to never lack water, and to make easier the capture of fish and birds. That very path in the 18th Century had been used by groups of smugglers to bring gold and diamonds from mines to the ports of the Atlantic without having to pass by the Portuguese authorities positioned in the road connecting Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro. When the Crown found out, of course, they placed some watchtowers and tollbooths in the course of the River São Francisco to capture smugglers and bandits, but the local overseers were easily bribed, and the precious metals continued escaping from the greedy metropolis.
Only in the middle of February the Mineiros were sure they had crossed into the territory of Bahia. From the lush rainforests and rocky crags that characterized northeastern Minas Gerais, they saw themselves walking through a vast expanse of grassed savannah – called Cerrado in Portuguese – with twisted black trees and patches of thin woodlands. Distant plateaus rise from the earth that seemed they had been sawed apart by giants millennia ago. The sky seemed bluer than it ever, and strong gusts came from the east, making the grass whisper.
Brazilian Cerrado, a savannah-like ecoregion in the very heart of the country
These grasslands were roamed by herds of bison, cows, bulls and goats as the inhabitants depended more on cattle herding than on agriculture when away from the São Francisco basin.
The Mineiros were generally received with astonishment and applause by the inhabitants, a folk so simple and isolated that their language was barely comprehensible, and they weren’t even aware about the war against Portugal. In some remote towns, the townspeople still thought that Queen Maria was alive and was yet the ruler in a golden palace in Lisboa! In other villages, fortune seekers – mainly fishermen, prostitutes and cattle-herders – found it convenient to abandon their miserable lives, pick up whatever weapons they could find and join Cpt. Teixeira Coelho’s column in a quest for plunder and adventure.
Already in the month of March, the legion arrived in the spot where the Rio Grande joined with the River São Francisco, and it gently turns from its course to the north, and begins to run following the east direction, allured by the distant Atlantic Ocean. In the village of Barra do Rio Grande, situated exactly on the confluence between the watercourses, the Portuguese judge that ruled the city in the name of the Crown immediately fled when he heard about the revolutionaries’ approach, and they were welcomed with a great commemoration by the residers, conducted by the local priest in a joyful procession.
A season of providential rains renovated the vigor and morale of the tired soldiers, and only by the friendship of the local colonists they survived to march day after day. After their resources brought from Minas Gerais had depleted, they had been subsisting on a diet of bovine and ovine meat and cheese – as there were more cattle herders than farmers on the region –, fish, birds and cachaça.
In the point where the São Francisco River turned eastwards, on the long border between Bahia and Pernambuco, it penetrated an arid plain scorched by the sun and wandering dust clouds, called Caatinga. There, in the driest seasons, the earth became naked of grass and forests, and only thorny shrubs and cacti survived, alone in a vastness of windswept spires. In those months, however, the landscape had been regenerated by rains between January and February, with greener oases of moist bushes and glades sprouting in the midst of the sandy grounds.
The drylands of the Caatinga near the São Francisco basin
On the other hand, the soldiers suffered through days of extreme heat and dryness. Even drinking the water from the nearby rapids, they felt a permanent sensation of thirst. As bread, deer meat and fishes became rarer, they had to sustain themselves on frogs, snakes, armadillos and even skunks, lest starvation consumed their ranks.
In the very middle of Pernambuco, the São Francisco River carved deep canyons inside the rocky earth, and the sun-stricken and tired Mineiros welcomed a greener scenario of pastures and forests when the cursed month of March finally ended.
The local villages were small, with barely a hundred inhabitants in each of them, usually centered around a parish church, whose priests, fearful that the unexpected army could bring destruction and violence to these peaceful settlements eagerly furnished food, beverages, clothing and even horses for the troops.
Cpt. Teixeira Coelho’s autobiography, written in his elder years, contain excerpts of his campaign journals, and it’s interesting to point out that he had a mix of utter pity, in some cases even abhorrence and some sort of admiration for these peoples – the “nordestinos”. If on one hand, he described their backward customs, their blind trust on the clergy, and their overall ignorance as being so primitive they would be compared to the uncivilized Indian tribes, on the other hand he seemed genuinely impressed by their hardiness and will to survive in the unforgiving landscape, and concluded by the observation they could be forged into obedient and reliable soldiers. It is clear, by his assessment, that at the time neither he nor the other Mineiros considered these peoples of the northeastern provinces to be their own “compatriots”. They were seem as genuine foreigners, due to their different customs, accent and way of life. Even their homeland, with such extraordinary panoramas, seemed to belong to another country… or another world, perhaps. That perception was shared by Mena Barreto and others from the south: Portuguese America, despite being united into a single colony in the perspective of Lisboa, was in fact fractured in various nations and cultures. In any event, the March through the Sertão certainly transformed Teixeira Coelho’s worldview, who, for the first time in his career, considered that the distant captaincies of the northeast had to be included in the grand scheme of Brazilian independence, and its peoples assimilated into the newborn republic. Yes… perhaps the whole of Portuguese America could be joined into one single country! At the time, it seemed such an outlandish proposal, and almost no one even fathomed it, nor in the south, nor in the northeast.
Coming from the dry and savage wilderness, the Mineiros arrived in the outskirts of the civilization in the Northeast Region when they reached the village of Propriá by late April, on the shores of the São Francisco River. On that region, everything south of the great river pertained to the administrative district of Sergipe, inside the Captaincy of Bahia. Propriá had been founded by the Jesuits centuries ago to catechize the native Amerindians, and to this day, the buildings seemed to orbit the marble-colored stone churches in the main square.
From there, the Army of Minas Gerais went to the southeast, following a trade route that led to São Cristóvão, the district governmental center. The littoral was completely overtaken by the sugar-cane plantations – indeed, it produced a large fraction of Bahia’s sugar – and some of the estates seemed unending, spread through hundreds of kilometers in a green sea. Countless slaves born in Africa or born from Africans labored in the fields scorched by the unforgiving sun and preyed by bugs and vermin. Black women and children of sullen faces walked along the dirt roads, carrying heavy bags of merchandise upon their heads and shoulders, as in some markets slaves were cheaper than mules. “Hell was not made of hellfire and brimstone, but rather of sugarcane fields and bloodied whips, and the devils were the white men”, Cpt. Antônio Teixeira Coelho wrote in his memoirs, depicting the local population. At the time, the Army of Minas Gerais had many creoles and mulatto soldiers who had been freed from captivity to fight in the battlefields, and the local black slaves and white masters were startled to witness these dark-skinned men wearing European-style uniforms and hats, armed with bayonets and sometimes mounting horses.
In the parochial community of Laranjeiras, Teixeira Coelho found out that Mena Barreto had finally defeated the Exército Real do Viseu in the previous month, as they had desperately retreated to Salvador in poor shape, and D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira had sailed back to Portugal with his battered remnants. He himself, like many of his own soldiers, had been afflicted with yellow fever during the summer, and was barely alive when he took the decision to finally surrender. The colonial rule collapsed almost instantly after the departure of the Portuguese garrison, but a revolutionary junta composed by moderate liberals was formed in Salvador da Bahia. Despite their effort, however, the moderates failed to prevent the break-down of order in the now-independent province, as the cities and villages not aligned with the interests of the Bahian Junta of Salvador became de facto independent, and the lack of a patrolling military contingent provoked a sudden rise in banditry, as the rapacious bands of outlaws that so far had been waging a desperate guerrilla conflict with the Portuguese decided it was time to abandon their hideouts and prey upon undefended settlements. On the other hand, the regional plantation and cattle owners, as well as parochial clergymen, many of whom commanded their own private militia bands, initiated a series of genuine feudal wars to subjugate one other. Overall, the insurrections were completely disorganized, usually devolving in mobs of peasants and escaped slaves refusing to pay taxes and wreaking havoc in the countryside.
In early March 1818, Gen. Mena Barreto had arrived in Salvador, and joined forces with the Bahian Junta, led by Bishop Alberto Maciel, a conservative leader associated with the landowners and urban elites of the Recôncavo Baiano. Together, they suppressed the mob violence in the Recôncavo Baiano that had spiraled out of control, and thus restored a semblance of order in the region near the former colonial capital.
Non-contemporary portrait of Bishop Alberto Maciel (c. 1840), painted after he had already been consecrated Archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia, in 1839
As the Mineiros marched themselves upon São Cristóvão, in the southern coast of Pernambuco, they found out that the combined forces of Mena Barreto and Alberto Maciel’s revolutionary faction were suppressing other opposing groups – such as the radicals led by the former slave Rogério Brites who tried to install a full-fledged democratic and abolitionist regime in the city of Cruz das Almas, inside the Recôncavo Baiano, but was suppressed by the Patriots – as well as the depredations of the bandits and oligarchs.
In São Cristóvão, Teixeira Coelho faced little opposition. There was a diminutive Luso-Brazilian garrison, admittedly Loyalist, but when the Army of Minas Gerais announced itself as a revolutionary force – so far they were thought to be another reinforcement army from Europe – the defending garrison panicked and, after a few days of siege, decided to surrender the small citadel.
In that city, he established his first base of operations in the Northeast, and communicated Gen. Mena Barreto of his timely arrival.
It was almost June in 1818 when the immense province of Bahia was pacified. The splintered groups of revolutionaries, rebels, bandits and former slaves that created a brief state of chaos were quickly suppressed, due to the small size of their bands. Bishop Alberto Maciel formed an ideological coalition with the conservative groups in the Recôncavo Baiano – all of them terrified by the violent display of revolutionary enthusiasm of the urban mob in the previous months – and made a daunting effort to channel the energy of the masses to provide for their own interests. The bishop associated himself with the lawyer Jorge Silva Freixo and the plantation oligarch Flávio Borges, both of whom were notorious demagogues in Salvador, and favored by the population, and together they formed the provisory junta that governed Bahia in those years. In this capacity, all of them convinced the deputies of the restored Chamber of Salvador to formalize an “alliance” with the Free State of Brazil against the Kingdom of Portugal, and from this date onwards, the Historians consider that Bahia effectively joined the nation of Brazil.
In June 1818, the 1º Exército Brasileiro arrived in São Cristóvão, together with hundreds of volunteers from Bahia, led by Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar (former commander of the Regimento da Guanabara), who had been promoted to Brigadier by Mena Barreto. The Defender of the Free State of Brazil himself had sailed back from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, as there were reports about the arrival of a Portuguese diplomatic mission in the capital to initiate peace talks. Besides, a constituent assembly had been formed in Rio de Janeiro to draft the first republican constitution.
The military forces of three different provinces combined into a single contingent, and their orders, according to Bgd. Nogueira Gaspar, were to capture the capitals of the Northeastern Provinces, by force, if necessary, as some of them were still loyalist, and thus take Portugal out of the war once and for all.
13. The Liberation of the Northeastern Provinces
Every territory to the south of the River São Francisco was secure in the Patriots’ control, thus including the whole of Bahia.
The next target was Vila de Alagoas, a coastal city in southern Pernambuco. The region was irrigated by various rivers and extremely fertile. Nonetheless, near the coast there were some flooded plains infested by malaria and yellow fever that the commercial road avoided, by diverging into the hinterland before turning back to the beaches. Even in autumn, there were still mosquitos and other pests, but the Liberator Army marched in good order, suffering few casualties, as the resources were easily replenished. In Pernambuco, the low class of peasants, laborers and fishermen and middle class of burghers and artisans had little interest in the revolutionary proposals forwarded by the 1º Exército Brazileiro, excepting the rich landowners and traders, who desired less interference of the Portuguese Crown in their own affairs.
Recife and Olinda, two neighboring cities in the coast of Pernambuco, were among the largest and most populous cities of the colony, and its populations, differently from Bahia and Minas Gerais, had little enthusiasm for the revolutionary proposals, fearing that an unsuccessful break up with the Portuguese Empire could in future spell doom for their regional interests, or, even worse, reproduce a catastrophic takeover by the slaves as it happened in Haiti. They still suspected about the intentions of these southern revolutionaries, and were reluctant to join exchange one distant master in Lisboa for another in Rio de Janeiro. To them, republic would mean enslavement of the privileged elites, but the promises of regional autonomy, proudly announced by Bgd. Nogueira Gaspar, were received positively.
Painting of Recife, capital of Pernambuco (c. 1800)
A provisory governing junta was created in late July 1818, after the Patriots were welcomed in Recife, but an agreement could only be reached in August, notably by the efforts of Bishop Alberto Maciel. Only then, the Pernambucanos officially joined the emancipationist alliance of the Southern States and Bahia, and eagerly promised to send their own representatives to the debates of the constitutional assembly, which was then postponed to the year of 1819. In exchange, the cities of Recife and Olinda would receive pre-fixed fiscal privileges; sugar-cane production in the region would receive federal subsidies; and the states would retain its right to levy its own regional militias (which, in practice, confirmed the authority of the local agrarian oligarchs against whatever republican government to be established in the former colonial province). The first proposal threatened to alienate Bahia, which demanded a more privileged treatment, but Alberto Maciel and his colleagues in the Bahian Junta convinced the deputies of the Chamber of Salvador about the necessity of this kind of arrangement.
With Pernambuco inside the Free State of Brazil, the balance of power inside Portuguese America had finally turned in favor of the emancipationist faction.
As the 1º Exército Brazileiro marched along the coast, determined to annex each one of the provinces of the Northeast to the newborn nation, they were received by a delegation of the Portuguese Governor of Parahyba, D. Armando Frederico Camargo d’Évora. A corrupt and opportunist character, he came to the obvious realization that he had two choices: either return to Portugal with empty hands, where his family was bankrupt, or try to take some advantage from the collapse of colonial order. D. Camargo de Évora happily proclaimed his interest in joining the “revolution”, even contributing with troops and needed resources such as weapons and ammunition. Being a nobleman, he could even speak on the behalf of the Luso-Brazilians in the peace talks with the Crown of Portugal. In exchange, he had a very simple and straightforward demand: he desired to be confirmed as the Governor of Parahyba in this new revolutionary order, and wanted the entire neighboring Captaincy of Rio Grande do Norte to be given to him as a personal fief, able to be inherited by his family. If the locals of Rio Grande do Norte somehow opposed it, they could be suppressed by the necessary means. The proposal disgusted Cpt. Antônio Francisco Teixeira, whose republican conviction impeded him to admit a Portuguese fidalgo with such medieval privileges, but it was seen as a very convenient arrangement by Bgd. Nogueira Gaspar and Bishop Alberto Maciel. They accepted it and the Brazilian forces quickly marched peacefully through these former provinces after D. Armando Camargo d’Évora was ceremoniously vested in their merged governorship.
In Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte, the army was welcomed by the local bishop, as the Portuguese Governor had fled back to Portugal in a merchant British ship in the previous week, taking with him the city treasury, and thus the troops loyal to D. Armando Camargo d’Évora occupied the city.
The last resistance by a Portuguese-led military force in the War of Independence occurred in Fortaleza, the capital of the Captaincy of Ceará, in September 1818, where 300 Portuguese soldiers detached from the vanquished Exército Real do Viseu had been cantoned by D. Marcos Nunes Vaz Pereira several months earlier, together with some 500 colonial conscripts pressed into service by Governor Dom Miguel do Porto Bastos. The siege lasted less than three days, and the citadel had its walls breached by an artillery barrage, and the garrison decided to surrender. The Governor and his secretariat were deposed and exiled back to Europe, and the Liberator army installed a Junta of local authorities who supported their cause. Again, the members of the provisory government were conservatives associated with the local oligarchy, who opposed the radical suggestions such as ending the slave trafficking or even abolishing slavery.
In that same month of September, when the news were spread about the capture of Fortaleza in Ceará and the collapse of the Portuguese administration, frenzied mobs of peasants and urban workers rioted in the neighboring Captaincy of Piauhy against the corrupt Portuguese Governor seated in Therezina, due to the fact that he was universally despised by the local population. What had almost happened in Bahia became the reality in Piauhy: a state of anarchy, in which every strongmen with their own private bands of thugs tried to impose their own order, and destroy each other, with only the parochial communities dominated by priests functioning as safe havens for the weakest elements of society. Banditry and pillaging, practiced by armed bands of former cowboys and slaves experienced an exponential growth. The capital itself, Therezina, also became a sanctuary for the hapless population of the province, safe from the savage hinterland, after the terrified governor abandoned the city and sailed back to Europe.
The breakdown of colonial order would spread, but with less intensity, to the interior of Ceará, whose coast and gubernatorial seat remained occupied as the general quarters of the 1º Exército Brazileiro, but whose interior saw no military action.
Similar to what had happened in Rio de Janeiro, Cpt. Antônio Teixeira Coelho, Bgd. Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar and Bishop Alberto Maciel decided it was best to convene an assembly of representatives of the local groups of power, to forge another united front against the Europeans, and to ensure their annexation into the Free State of Brazil.
The city chosen to host it was Recife, in Pernambuco, due to its central location in relation to the states of the Northeast, but the meeting only actually happened in the middle of November 1818. It was presided by Bgd. Nogueira Gaspar, due to the fact that he was an outsider, so there was an expectation that he could be impartial in relation to the regional interests, as well as an official representative of the “Free State of Brazil” – which until that moment was de jure considered a separate political entity in regard to the united provinces of the northeast. A truly bizarre situation: the former provinces of Bahia, Pernambuco, Parahyba and Ceará considered themselves independent, from Portugal, but also from the Free State of Brazil centered on Rio de Janeiro, and also from one another. A collection of emancipated provinces, left to their own designs, a dangerous arrangement that could facilitate an attempted conquest by a foreign power. Even if Portugal’s fortune had waned, the Brazilians feared the might of Spain, whose military forces were active in South America to suppress a massive wave of revolutionary movements occurring in these previous years, or even of Great Britain, which had already demonstrated the willingness to intervene in the continent.
In this context, Nogueira Gaspar and Alberto Maciel successfully proclaimed the need for a genuine and permanent union between the former provinces of Portuguese America. The text of the Decree nº 1, signed by José de Abreu Mena Barreto, was presented by them to the assembly as an insistent proof that the republic would be constituted like an alliance – a confederation, in fact, between the former captaincies – but their own interests, and rights would be respected, and every state would have a say in the matters of the nation. The Chamber of Rio de Janeiro would be like the Cortes of Portugal, or the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and every state would be represented in a just agreement.
The Assembly of Recife (1818), presided by Bgd. Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar
Thus, for the first time since the beginning of the war against Portugal – no, for the first time since the colonization of the tropics by the Iberians – the concept of a national pact uniting the isolated and fractured provinces of the colony was brought forward.
“Like brothers, we must join together into one national alliance, just as our peoples are united by language and by faith!” Proclaimed Tomás Afonso Nogueira Gaspar in his legendary speech to the assembly.
In the end, the representatives of Bahia, Pernambuco, Parahyba and Ceará formalized their promise to join the union created by the Free State of Brazil as one nation emancipated from the Portuguese Empire, and to take part in the Constituent Assembly ocurring in Rio de Janeiro. Their own conditions were written down in the same document – the "Declaration of Recife"– by which the cities of Salvador, Recife and Fortaleza would receive special status as free municipalities, with fiscal privileges of their own.
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Viva Brasil livre!
And so we have a constitutional convention. I side with Teixeira -- those concessions to the free cities and Camargo are positively medieval, and the fact that there is cultural regionalism does not bode well. At least most of the country is united on slavery, so any abolition won't be as starkly regional as that of America...
Hope they go parliamentary, because presidentialism outside of America is a recipe for disaster.
And so we have a constitutional convention. I side with Teixeira -- those concessions to the free cities and Camargo are positively medieval, and the fact that there is cultural regionalism does not bode well. At least most of the country is united on slavery, so any abolition won't be as starkly regional as that of America...
Hope they go parliamentary, because presidentialism outside of America is a recipe for disaster.
I don't intend to go in minute details when we get to the constitutional convention, but the overall picture I'll try to paint is that the First Constitution of Brazil will be a political arrangement convenient to the agrarian/slave-owning aristocracy - not unlike the original text of the Constitution of the USA before the amendments. Thus, in many aspects will be a "product of its epoch", that is, the recognition of "citizen rights" is actually awarded to some privileged castes of society, and the organization of the government follows the Liberal concepts of "minimum State intervention".
Teixeira Coelho is surely a man whose ideas are more advanced than his own society would be confortable with. Fortunately for his society, he will still have an important role to play in the "modernization" (including in the ideological aspect) of his nation.
Regarding the government system and regime, you are absolutely right that it's a recipe for disaster... and there will be disaster, this I can promise you without spoilering anything. And only then parliamentarism will be seen by Brazilians as the golden goose. Wait for it!