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.
