Meanwhile, Pedro II, encouraged by the successful resolution of the Christie Affair, headed for Brazil’s southern border on 7 July 1865. He was to be ‘the army’s first volunteer’. The march ended in Uruguaiana, the city on the eastern bank of the Uruguay river,9 where the emperor met with the Brazilian military chiefs and his allies in the war: President Mitre of Argentina and President Flores of Uruguay. He was soon to learn that, although it is relatively easy to enter a war, it is much harder to withdraw, or to calculate the consequences. In addition, the complexity of a conflict with so many contenders would inevitably lead to altercations even among the allies. There was even disagreement within Brazil as to the origin of the war. On the one hand, some blamed President Solano’s aggressive expansionism and his authoritarian style. Pedro II had a particular dislike of his fraudulent politics and the fact that he had set himself up as a dictator. On the other hand, some saw the war as a result of Great Britain’s imperialist policy. In order to maintain financial influence in the area, the country had allegedly played a double game, setting one party against the other. According to this interpretation, Francisco Solano López was an anti-imperialist hero, the defender of South American independence and victim of an international conspiracy. There is a third interpretation based on analyses of the domestic situations of the countries involved. Brazil had to maintain access to the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, which were the western province of Mato Grosso’s crucial routes to the rest of the country. Furthermore, Brazil wanted to control the flow of commerce in the River Plate basin. As for Argentina, whose expansionist aspirations had been temporarily checked, they still wanted to annex neighbouring territories and generally increase their influence in the area. As far as President Solano was concerned, once Paraguayan autonomy had been secured and Argentina’s attempts at expansionism checked, disputes with his neighbours over the navigation of the rivers and the negotiation of frontiers became the major issue. These South American Republics that had cast off imperial repression also eyed the vast Brazilian Empire and its slavery system with considerable suspicion. Thus, even without the intermittent provocations by one party or the other, the region was at best like a massive simmering cauldron, ready to boil over at any time.
On 1 May 1865, in Buenos Aires, the secret Treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The treaty determined that peace would only be negotiated once President Solano had been deposed. New frontiers were established for the countries involved in the dispute and it was agreed that Paraguay, the aggressor, would be forced to pay reparations for the war. The arrogance of these terms reflected the allies’ confidence and their belief – entirely mistaken as it turned out – that the war would soon be over due to their obvious military advantage. The three countries combined had a total of 11 million inhabitants (of which 9.1 million were Brazilian), while Paraguay had just 318,144 soldiers at its disposal. The annual exports of the three allies totalled £36 million, whereas those of Paraguay were worth less than half a million.10 Paraguay thus entered the war at a great disadvantage, especially since it had lost its previous allies: the Argentinean President Atanasio Aguirre had been defeated and in Uruguay General Flores had been elected. Furthermore, President Solano’s invasion of Argentina had alienated the governors of Corrientes and Entre Rios.
It should be borne in mind that, until the outbreak of the war, the Brazilian Empire had a small, poorly trained army. The most significant military-type body was the National Guard (created in 1831 and reorganized in 1850), basically made up of (and depending on) the owners of large estates. This was the first time the country had formed a professional army, with compulsory conscription. After the first year of the war, when joining the army had been seen as an act of patriotism, there were too few volunteers to make up the army.11 At the beginning of the war a wide variety of motives led young men to join the war effort. In his novel Iaiá Garcia, Machado de Assis tells the story of Jorge, ‘one of the leading dandies of the Rua do Ouvidor’, who signed up to impress Estela. In the eyes of Machado de Assis’s character, the war was nothing more than a pretext for making a romantic declaration of love, and upon his departure Jorge’s main concern was ‘the crease on his uniform trousers and the shine on his boots’.12 At court, fervent patriotism prevailed and every victory was celebrated. Another of Machado de Assis’s characters, Fulano Beltrão (the one who displayed his wife’s mausoleum in the Rua do Ouvidor), celebrated Brazil’s victory at the Battle of Riachuelo13 with a sumptuous ball, where he displayed ‘naval weapons and flags in a Hall of Honour, in front of a picture of the Emperor’.14
Brazil’s growing military strength was cause for optimism. The navy was re-equipped, with its number of warships increasing from forty-five in 1865 to ninety-four by the end of the war in 1870. In 1865, Argentina meanwhile had six thousand well-trained soldiers and Uruguay had four thousand. The enthusiasm in Buenos Aires was such that General Mitre declared the alliance’s troops would control ‘the barracks in 24 hours, Corrientes in three weeks, and, in three months, Asunción’. However, contrary to everyone’s hopes, after Uruguaiana surrendered, ending the first phase of the war, the conflict continued. It turned into a five-year war, with terrible sacrifices and loss of life, which threatened the unity of the alliance and became increasingly unpopular at home.
To make matters worse, there were also internal disagreements within the Brazilian armed forces. Admiral Tamandaré,15 commander of the naval forces, was nearly sixty years old and past his prime. General Caxias, on the other hand, who was now a senator for the Conservative Party, was held in high esteem for his suppression of the rebellions during the regencies. His entry into the war marked a turning point: as the second phase of the conflict began he undertook a thorough reorganization of the army. When he arrived in Paraguay, in November 1866, he found an army short on troops and low in morale. The region was insalubrious and the troops, completely ill-prepared and ill-equipped. Furthermore, by this time, the government had begun to resort to compulsory conscription. Public opinion had turned against the war, with the Correio Mercantil of 9 November 1866 referring to it as the ‘Paraguayan slaughterhouse’.
Many Brazilian slave-owners began sending their slaves to fight in their place, to exempt themselves from ‘the punishment of war’. In the 1866 Council of State meetings opinions were divided: some favoured slave conscription, whereas others objected to the presence of freed slaves in the ranks of the army. Deputy Pimenta Bueno,16 who was in favour of giving slaves their freedom (with no compensation for their owners) in return for fighting in the war, argued that it was ‘preferable to spare the more civilized, moral class, rather than the other, which is less civilized and potentially dangerous. It behoves us to choose the lesser of two evils.’ Senator Nabuco de Araújo,17 on the other hand, thought the practice would create problems for the future, and said that it should only be continued if ‘after fighting as soldiers, [the African Brazilians were] returned to slavery’. But he also thought there was a possibility that if ‘the slaves were freed and became citizens before becoming soldiers, they would make disciplined soldiers because they were accustomed to obeying orders’.18 However, Counsellor José Maria da Silva Paranhos, the future Viscount of Rio Branco,19 warned that ‘a large army of freed slaves […] would be a danger, because their recruitment could lead the slaves within the empire to revolt, not only of their own volition, but also through incitement by secret groups’.20 Even General Caxias himself complained that ‘the introduction of slaves into the ranks is already producing detrimental results due to the immoral example and lack of discipline of these men who do not understand the meaning of country, society or family’.21 In Brazil, whenever any subject under discussion touched on abolition, there was widespread disagreement. The change in the ‘colour’ of the Brazilian Army did not go unnoticed by the Paraguayan press, who began to refer to the country’s soldiers as los macaquitos (‘little monkeys’). The Cabichuí, a periodical directly linked to President Sol
ano, produced a series of cartoons depicting the Brazilian troops, as well as the emperor and empress, as monkeys.
In the meantime, in Rio de Janeiro the government tried to play down the gravity of the war by discouraging the propagation of detailed accounts. But luck was against them. In 1867, precisely when the city was fighting a cholera epidemic, the battles on the country’s southern borders had become veritable slaughters. With so much going wrong, the public began to blame the government for the prolonged war and for the blind determination of the army’s high command to keep fighting until President Solano was deposed. In 1868, when the empire achieved its greatest victories at the battles of Itororó,22 Avaí,23 Lomas Valentinas24 and Humaitá,25 even General Caxias proposed a cessation of hostilities. It was only the following year, however, that the Brazilian troops finally took Asunción – with no resistance. With the occupation of the Paraguayan capital, Caxias considered the war over and withdrew from the conflict, despite the emperor’s protests. When he arrived back from the battlefields, the general was not greeted with the celebrations he had expected. Even so, he was awarded the Grão-Colar da Ordem de Dom Pedro I – the first person to receive the honour since its creation at the beginning of the empire – along with the title of Duke.
However, there was another returning general who was acclaimed as a popular hero: General Osório.26 Whereas General Caxias was known as a great military strategist, General Osório became a kind of national icon for bravery. His courageous feats impressed both the allies and their Paraguayan foes; among the troops he had become a mythical figure. People would say he had o corpo fechado27 and that, after battles, he would ‘shake his poncho and the bullets would fall out’.28 Even without the generals Caxias and Osório, the pursuit of President Solano continued, this time under the command of Princess Isabel’s husband, the Count of Eu, who took command of the troops on 22 March 1869. Ignoring the appeals of his wife, who wanted to see her husband safe in the palace, he now found himself in charge of 26,000 exhausted men, most of whom were desperate to desert. But on 12 August, 700 Paraguayans were killed and 1,100 men taken prisoner. On 16 August, 2,000 Paraguayan soldiers died and 2,300 were taken prisoner at the Battle of Campo Grande.29 The pursuit of President Solano only came to an end when he was surrounded by Brazilian troops at Cerro-Corá and was killed along with his adolescent son. The consequences of the war for Paraguay not only included the removal of the head of state, but the destruction of the state itself. There is disagreement over the number of Paraguayan lives lost: estimates vary between 800,000 and 1.3 million.
There are similar discrepancies in Brazil’s statistics, starting with the number of men who were sent, which ranges between 100,000 and 140,000. The official numbers released by the imperial government in 1870 were 4,332 killed, 18,597 wounded and 988 missing, making a total of 23,917.30 Brazil’s victory was overshadowed by the numbers of deaths and the emergence of the details of the horrors of the war. The emperor’s image suffered greatly. From a peace-loving monarch and supporter of the arts with little interest in politics, he had become the leader of a terrible war.
The ‘triple disgrace’ as the alliance became known had erred gravely in its calculations. A war they thought would be over in a few months lasted for five years, taking on vast proportions. With the end of the war, the status of the empire was radically altered, both within and beyond its borders. Perhaps most importantly the war had consolidated the army as an institution. Whereas in 1865 there were no more than 18,000 men in the army, only a year later this number fluctuated between 38,000 and 78,000. By the end of the war a new army had been formed, separate from the National Guard. After the army’s victory a military career became a means of bettering oneself. The institution of the military assumed an important role in society, something that had previously been unimaginable. An elite was formed within the army that was both socially and intellectually antagonistic to the civilian elite, dissatisfied with the situation of the country and with their position in the hierarchy of power. After fighting side by side with black soldiers, the army also began to reject its former role of pursuing escaped slaves. Thus it became a source of discontent within the empire and from amid its ranks republicans and abolitionists began to emerge.
It is important to understand that there are no such things as slave soldiers. When the former owners decided to send them to the army, in order to avoid sending their own sons, the slaves were immediately considered free. This meant that when the hostilities were over they were in a strong position to negotiate a permanent end to slavery. According to The Times newspaper of 23 June 1869, 7,979 freed slaves had served in the Brazilian Army.31 Thus military conscription and the thorny question of abolition became intrinsically linked, creating one of the most serious political crises of Pedro II’s reign. Whereas the generals Osório and Caxias returned from the war as heroes – immortalized in public monuments and articles in the press – the black soldiers, although they had been freed, were confronted with the system of slavery that still prevailed. Many of them could still be forced to return to work as slaves because their newly won freedom could easily be revoked. Angelo Agostini – a declared abolitionist – drew a cartoon entitled ‘Return from Paraguay’, which was published in 1870.32 The drawing shows a black soldier, with military decorations on his chest, returning from the war to find his mother being whipped at the pillory. The caption read: ‘Full of glory, covered with laurels, after having spilled his blood in the defence of his country and freed a people from being enslaved, the volunteer returns home to find his mother tied to the pillory! Hideous reality …’
Brazil had spent 600,000 contos de réis on the war, making the country even more financially dependent on Britain; thousands of soldiers had been lost in battle and the image of Brazil as a peace-loving nation had been destroyed. On the other hand, for the first time the notion of a fatherland began to spread, most notably at the beginning of the war, when there had been victorious battles and huge numbers of volunteers. The national flag was hoisted on a regular basis, the emperor became the leader of the nation, responsible for mediating between the two political parties, and new national heroes were created: the Duke of Caxias, General Osório and Admiral Barroso.33
In addition, artists such as Pedro Américo34 and Victor Meirelles produced grandiose canvases depicting battle scenes and glorifying the fatherland. Victor Meirelles painted the Battle of Guararapes in the 1640s,35 linking the Paraguayan War with the creation of a fatherland. Pedro Américo depicted the carnage of the Battle of Avaí as the struggle of civilization (Brazilians) against barbarianism (Paraguayans). The North American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk36 composed a virtuoso work for piano, the ‘Grand Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem’, which he played before an enthusiastic audience in Rio de Janeiro, and the Romantic poet Bernardo Guimarães37 wrote ‘The Volunteer’s Farewell’.38 But the internal wounds were hard to heal. There were no facilities for returning veterans, with most of the former combatants, above all those of African descent, being left to their own resources. Freedom in Brazil was a kind of trophy, difficult to win and nearly impossible to keep.39
THE ABOLITIONIST CAMPAIGN: FREEDOM MUST BE GRADUAL
With the end of the Paraguayan War the campaigns for a republic and the abolition of slavery came to the forefront once again. At the beginning of the 1870s the Republican Party, the Society for Freedom and the Society for the Emancipation of Slavery were founded in Rio de Janeiro. On 28 September 1871 the Lei do Ventre Livre (Law of Free Birth) was passed. This law freed the offspring of all slaves born after the date of its promulgation, but not their mothers. It stipulated that the children would remain with their mothers until the age of eight, at which time their owners could choose between receiving compensation (60,000 réis) or continuing to use their services until they were twenty-one. Despite its limitations and gradual approach, it was at least a step towards abolition. But in such a heated political climate, the opposition saw it merely as a cynical governmen
t manoeuvre to placate them. It also earned the suspicion of the slave-owners, who began to mistrust the monarch.
Although the law was moderate, it sparked all kinds of reactions. Regional differences account in part for the discrepancies in response to the law. The provinces of the northeast accepted it far more readily than those of the southeast. The figures of the 1872 census go a long way towards explaining this: in the northeast 37 per cent of the population were slaves, whereas in the four coffee-producing provinces of the southeast (including Rio de Janeiro) this figure was 59 per cent, and in the other provinces (in the south and the midwest) just 7.3 per cent.40 These differing positions created conflict between the coalition of landowners in the northeast and the coffee planters of the southeast, which called the government’s legitimacy into question. As Joaquim Nabuco – who was becoming a symbol of the abolitionist movement – commented at the time, the situation expressed the ‘dialectic of ambiguity’: while the state was the cornerstone of slavery, it was also the only entity that could eliminate it.
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