16.2. PRESIDENT MENA BARRETO'S FIRST TERM
III. The Road Building Project
Even if short on money, President Mena Barreto’s largest contribution during his two terms were undoubtedly the public projects that he conceived with his Cabinet of Ministers and with the supporting legislative faction in the Parliament of the Republic. A remarkable fact about Mena Barreto’s presidency is that in both his terms he could count on the support on a stable majority of the members of the parliament, notably those associated with the “Traditionalist Party”. In fact, with a few exceptions he usually did not met opposition by the Liberals, considering his genuine respect for the State’s rights and autonomy, and his attempts of composing a government with representatives of various States (and not only Southrons).
The most ambitious projects undertaken in his political lifetime were the construction of roads and communications system (with a novice postal service and toll stations with horses for messengers) along the Brazilian coast, from the southern border in the fort of Chuí to Rio de Janeiro, and then from there to Fortaleza in Ceará, with agencies established in the main coastal cities to oversee the regional pit-stops. At first, the system was conceived in favor of private enterprises, that would be allowed to exact pre-fixed prices from the customers, and supervised by federal agents.
Considering that the former Portuguese colony lacked useful roads, even between neighboring states, the most reliable paths were those created by the Indians,
Bandeirantes explorers and miners, and that the communications along the coast depended on a precarious and haphazard system of maritime trips, this project showed a lot of promise. Simultaneously conducted were minor enterprises to build three inland roads: one linking São Paulo to Matto Grosso, another connecting Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Goyáz, and a third one (the largest so far) joining the coast of Bahia directly to the coast of Piauhy.
The projects were designed mainly by British engineers as early as 1822, but various months were dedicated to surveying and calculating the projects, which were, due to its sheer size and investment, fractioned in various parts, roughly according to the distances it was supposed to cover inside each state.
Mena Barreto became frustrated by the conclusion that his dreamed project would have to be initially executed in a much inferior scale than his Cabinet of Ministers had conceived, due to lack of available funds and building resources: as an experimental project, only the breadths between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and Salvador da Bahia would be initiated during his first term. And it would be concluded… well, that would depend on the size of the investment.
The British designers began implementing the old-fashioned “English” (
John Metcalf’s method) and “French” (
Pierre Trésaguet’s method) methods of road-building, both of which were completely novel in the south hemisphere.
In the early XIX Century, British pioneers innovated in road building. The most remarkable development were the “macadamized roads”, named after the Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam. The picture above depicts the first macadamized road being constructed in the U.S.A., in the 1820s
The financing was done by emission of federal bonds to be paid in periods between five and ten years. They were mostly acquired by States directly interested in these projects – notably São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, whose wealth grew exponentially now that they owed nothing to the Crown of Portugal – with a small amount of private investors. In a rather peculiar example of cooperation between the federated polities, many State Governors, including those of regions unaffiliated to Mena Barreto’s policies, enthusiastically adhered to the construction projects. In fact, the wealthiest States, like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, had considerable surplus capital to invest in their own, urban and parochial road systems.
After some years, by suggestion of the Minister of Public Welfare, the Federal Union started to acquire some bonds issued by the more prolific States, and then exchanged these valuable titles with private investors to pay their own debts.
As an example, the road from São Paulo to the port of Santos would be inaugurated in 1828, and the one linking the capital to the Paraná River, three years later. These were mostly governmental enterprises. However, it would become a very common complaint that the Governors and their Secretariats were taking advantage of these investments to embezzle funds and redistribute them to their own partisans, and that the federal public authorities were expected to receive bribes to serve the interests of these regional robber barons. Another problem was that in very few States, like Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, there was enthusiasm by private enterprises to invest money in public works.
In the Capital State, some visionary entrepreneurs (associated with the informal merchant guilds that operated in the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Nictheroy) created in 1829 the
Sociedade Fluminense do Vale do Parahyba, perhaps the earliest “modern” shareholding enterprise in Brazil, clearly inspired in the British capitalist investment, and its main purpose was the building of roads to link the national capital to the coffee plantations of the Parahyba Valley (in the western fringe of the State of Rio de Janeiro). Due to the sheer disinterest of the population – or perhaps overall lack of understanding and inability to invest due to the absence of surplus capital –, the company was almost bankrupt by 1836, but was reinvigorated by reluctant investments of the wealthy coffee producers, and by the acquisition of many of its shares by the Government of Rio de Janeiro itself, as it became clear that the projects were increasing the productivity and efficiency of transport and communications.
In Minas Gerais, the concern of the landholding oligarchy was facilitating the flow of goods with São Paulo, as it was from the southwestern ranches that the Mineiros received necessary resources, and, with some delay, and investment of the regional government, a direct road through the wilderness between these two States would be concluded in the early 1830s.
In these projects, the construction itself ended up being the least complicated part, as the enterprise employed mainly
slave labor – by then, the government itself had its own slaves, some acquired directly from slave markets, but most were indentured servants and prisoners – not only Afro-descendants, but also Indians from “uncivilized” tribes (i.e. those claimed to be pagans). Centuries of Jesuit preaching in favor of the Indians and against the barbarous colonists did little to protect the aboriginal tribes from the brutality of the self-proclaimed “civilized” authorities. Between 1822 and 1828, and then from many other periods, the Brazilian Army conducted a series of hit-and-run operations with the alleged purpose of “bringing civilization” to the “barbarians”, targeting numerous tribes of Indians and
Quilombos of refugees accused of being pagans, cannibals or somehow hostile to the rural populations of the frontier. It is estimated that between 2.000 and 4.000 natives were forced into captivity by the official federal government apparatus with the purpose of obtaining work force to conduct their public ventures only in during the first decade after Independence.
An old anecdote says that various monks of São Paulo appeared in Rio de Janeiro to present a formal protest before the Minister of Public Welfare – to whom the direction and coordination of the public works was assigned – arguing that enslavement of Indians violated the Holy Scripture, as well as the ancient Papal bulls on the matter. To this, he had infamously answered: “
The last time I checked the Code of Law, it was perfectly legal to employ detainees and prisoners. Go complain to the Pope if you disagree!”.
Painting of a chain gang of African slaves brought from Angola (c. 1830)
Among the free persons, the vast majority of workers would be comprised by indebted laborers lent by their creditors (to whom the government would pay directly to solve the debts), or marginalized individuals (usually mulattos and ex-slaves) who sold their work force for miserable wages, and worked in inhuman conditions.
Even if the contemporaries might have known that the future generations would be scandalized and disgusted by this systematic oppression, perhaps they would not have be too concerned, as the ends seemed to justify the means: the very cheap labor and disregard for the physical preservation of the employees allowed for a relatively quick execution of such an arduous undertaking.
It helped that the British advisors were eager to experiment were very innovative methods being studied and executed for road building in the home island, notably in Scotland, such as that studied by the Scottish gentleman
Thomas Telford barely ten years before. Indeed, road building as a discipline of engineering was only recently being revived in Europe, since the times of the Roman Empire. Only in the late XVIII Century did the French began to employ innovative techniques, inspired in the Roman roads, to improve road building in continental Europe.
Fulfilling the most optimist predictions, indeed, by the end of 1824, the building of the first significant stretches of road – a single circuit going from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro and from there to Bahia – was concluded, and in the State of São Paulo the toll and postal systems were being prepared to be initiated in the next year. Throughout the next years, President Mena Barreto and his successors would endeavor to finish these projects, which, to a country that had for so many centuries depended on mules, could finally employ more “modern” means of travel and communication, was a fundamental development. This preoccupation with improving and solidifying contact between the States, namely those of the littoral, would haunt many heads of state in the decades to come, and, in the popular consciousness would rapidly assume a symbolic relevance: the artificial and arduous construction of a union between disparate regions; first with roads and bridges, and then with customs, laws and sentiments. Mena Barreto’s pioneering approach to public works would be emulated by many of his successors, and would explain the alacrity by which the railroad age was to be sponsored in Brazil in the second half of the XIX Century.
IV. Military Restructuring and Reforms
During the colonial period, Portuguese America had no proper “army”, but a rather confusing system of:
(1) provincial militias (very poorly armed, it was extremely rare to see them using firearms);
(2) official “
ordenanças” (mostly Luso-Brazilians, responsible for patrolling the provincial inlands) led by sergeants or ensigns; and
(3) Portuguese or Luso-Brazilian standing platoons of soldiers of the line, numerically a minority in the whole colonial armed forces, and usually employed in the personal guard of the Governors and urban policing.
Most of the War of Independence had been fought between the loyalist Portuguese standing army and the regional
ordenanças and militias, as well as volunteers, until the desertion of the modernly trained
Regimento da Guanabara during the middle phase of the conflict.
Knowing that this “Brazilian Army” was mostly an agglomeration of irregulars, with but a few groups of career soldiers and officers, one of President Mena Barreto’s first acts in the office was reorganizing and reforming this confusing system into a coherent and modernized hierarchy. By the Federal Law nº 12/1820, he instituted and organized the Brazilian Armed Forces, composed by the Army and the Navy. On paper, it was a fine standing military, projected to have roughly 20.000 effective troops and some 30.000 reserves, but on reality, the global military forces commanded by the Federal Government hardly reached 10.000 men.
Yet again frustratingly recognizing that the Brazilians were too backwards, President Mena Barreto spared no efforts nor the dabs of cash available to hire foreign advisors. Again, due to the increasing influence of the British in the tropics, but also because they had one of the finest military forces in the Napoleonic Wars, Mena Barreto preferred to employ British officers. In the infantry, he employed Lt.-Gen. William Stuart and in the artillery, Cpt. Charles Sandham (a man suggested by the Duke of Wellington himself). In the later years, other notorious arrivals would be the French cavalry Col. Michél Armand St. Denis, and the Prussian veteran Georg Friedich von Harzfeld.
Depiction of a military parade of the Federal 1st Brazilian Corps in the beach of Rio de Janeiro (1828). Many infantry units wore red-colored uniforms, acquired from the British Foot Soldiers, while the officers were required to wear dark-blue uniforms
Mena Barreto was less concerned with the Navy. Even if he promoted the training of sailors and marines, the Brazilian Navy had but a few frigates and no ships of the line, and the government lacked money to build them. The first ship of the line, the NRB (
Navio da República Brasileira)
Cruzeiro do Sul, would only be purchased from the Netherlands in 1824.
Regarding artillery, until the arrival of the
Exércitos Reais do Alentejo and
do Viseu during the Independence War, there were almost no guns in Portuguese America. After the war, some of these pieces had been looted from the defeated Portuguese armies, but, nevertheless, there was a need of creating firearms and guns factories in Brazil. With this in mind, three federally-owned gunpowder and artillery factories were built in Iguassú (an inland parish in Rio de Janeiro State), in Campo dos Bugres (a town located between Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) and in Feira de Sant’Anna (a town located in the
Recôncavo Baiano, not far from Salvador da Bahia). There was a strategic purpose: the cities couldn’t be ports, to prevent easy seizing by a maritime invaders, but, nevertheless, they couldn’t be far from the sea, because so far most of the raw inputs to produce gunpowder (like saltpeter), weapons and ammunition, had to be imported, normally from the British colonies in Africa and Asia.
In 1823, by another federal act passed on the Parliament, four
military academies were created in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), São Luís (Maranham) and Recife (Pernambuco). They were designed to prepare recruits and officers to perform infantry, artillery and naval services. Another federal charter in 1833 would sanction the creation of State academies in Minas Gerais and Ceará. The officers of the Federal Army were expected to conclude their respective courses, as the promotion to the top-ranks of the force depended on their military education.
Recruitment was based in the British models: each regional rural parish and urban district was supposed to provide a pre-fixed number of recruits, proportional to their own population, so that a quantity of recruits would be generically assigned to the “available pool”, and then divided between the regional State Guard and the Federal Army (whose forces were distributed in “Corps”, each assigned to a Federal Department or Territory under direction of Minister of the Army).
By the end of Mena Barreto’s second term, in 1829, the global effective forces of the Brazilian Army, including State Guards and the Federal Army, had grown to 23.000 standing troops and 50.000 reserves, including artillery, cavalry and specialist units.
V. First Hospitals and Medicine Institutions
Until the Independence, Brazil had a scarcity of professionals of the medical sciences. As late as the middle 19th Century, there would be plenty of herbalists, apothecaries, informal pharmacists and dentists (it was not uncommon for barbers to be also “specialists” in teeth extraction)… this among the most “qualified” professionals, because on the other side of the spectrum of health “experts” we would find a number of faith-healers and quacks with a predilection for miraculous crocodilian oils. It was also a time when laudanum and syrups were becoming popular in South America, exported by the British merchants, creating a demand for cheap “remedies”. A whole market of outlandish cures would quickly grow in the former colony. This can be explained, of course, by the precarious public and private health customs and attitudes.
Hygiene had yet to be integrated to the collective consciousness, especially in the largest cities, such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, where the cramped roadways, lack of sanitation systems, and absolute disregard for healthy public spaces transformed whole streets, rivers and bays into medieval cesspools. Among free persons, regular bathing was a common necessity, but even more in the rural areas than in urban spaces, where rivers were usually polluted. Slaves, on the other hand, excepting the domestic servants, lived a lifetime of filth, toiling miserably in the fields under the sun, and were, for obvious reasons, much more susceptible to infectious diseases.
Speaking of which, epidemics were very common, even more in the cities, where the unhygienic customs of the town-dwellers served to contribute for proliferation of infectious diseases common in the tropics, notably malaria, smallpox and yellow fever. Later, the miserable Brazilian race would be acquainted with cholera and typhus. Epidemics were usually treated by primitive methods such as quarantine, much like the isolation of lepers. In the case of slaves and indigents, they were commonly murdered and cremated. The very few health treatment institutions were churches, most notably the nun convents.
Having been for so many years in the camp, President Mena Barreto, like many of his colleagues in the armed forces, was painfully aware that the frightening majority of war casualties owed more to diseases and poor health conditions than to bullets or bayonets. It is no stretch to imagine that when he devised a proposal for the creation of the first official hospitals and medical facilities in Brazil, Mena Barreto was thinking firstly about his comrades whose lives had been claimed by the invisible and malign miasmas than the citizens themselves.
There were actually very few public hospitals, as the legal measures promulgated by the President sought to sponsor and subside private corporations dedicated to the treatment of diseases. It would take many years before a genuine scientific medical tradition became developed in the nation, with doctors and teachers coming from Europe to advance their own studies in epidemics, popularizing preventive research, and creating a preoccupation with public hygiene and sanitization, a phenomenon described as the “Sanitary Revolution”.
. In fact, I sketched an idea for the whole North of Brazil + the Guianas to remain with Portugal. It wouldn't be exactly like Canada, but that's an interesting concept. This might result in future wars or territorial purchases... but in the end I decided to go with the uber-Brazil scenario to allow for a more interesting relationship between us and our neighbors in Colombia. Possibly in another occasion I might open a "sub-TL" to explore this Portuguese Grão-Pará vs. Brazil.
