Ten years ago, the nerve trunks in the mulatto’s arms and legs had thickened; his nails had become hard and clawed; whole fingers and toes had dropped off, reducing his extremities to stumps. The same degenerative leprosy invading his limbs was now affecting the mulatto’s face, thickening and deadening the yellow skin and weakening his gums, so that several teeth had loosened and fallen out.
The mulatto and his slave made their way past the jail, slowly down a steep alley, and up again toward a small plaza that was fronted by the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. This building represented a radical departure from the rigid square Portuguese design: The well-proportioned projecting façade was framed by Ionic columns, and to the left and right of these pilasters were graceful cylindrical bell towers, which had no parallel in Christian church architecture. Above the solid wood doors were medallions, devices and whimsical figures, and an ornamentation depicting St. Francis, all of which were intricately carved in soft green soapstone.
The mulatto and his slave stood talking for some time in front of the church doors. Then, with planks, ropes, and ladders brought here the day before, the slave began to assemble a small scaffolding. When he was done, he helped the mulatto up onto the rickety platform, strapping a mallet and a chisel onto his left and right truncated forearms.
Aleijadinho, “The Little Cripple,” residents of Vila Rica had begun to call the mulatto since the onset of his affliction. His name was Antônio Francisco Lisboa, and he had designed and built this lovely Church of St. Francis and other churches at Vila Rica and elsewhere in Minas Gerais. His task this morning was to perfect a soapstone cherub above the doorway. Antônio Francisco’s leprosy was getting progressively worse, but even as he worked on the small angel with the implements bound to his forearms, his thoughts were on two mighty projects for the future: twelve gigantic Prophets, eight feet tall, sculpted in stone; and a depiction of the Passion of Christ with more than sixty wood-carved figures. “Oh, if God only wills it!” he said aloud.
Antônio Francisco’s was not the only original talent at Vila Rica and in the major towns of Minas Gerais. Other master builders, painters, and sculptors, no longer relying solely on Old World models but drawing inspiration from their surroundings, had produced masterpieces of religious art and architecture and had transformed the mining camps into picturesque towns. Vila Rica itself laid out on several steep hills and in the small valleys and gorges between them was a bustling capital with cobbled and stepped streets, an imposing governor’s palace and fine churches, and two-storied houses with harmonious white façades, wrought-iron balconies, and red-tiled roofs. There were graceful ornamented water fountains, terraced orchards and gardens, and, along the rua São José, the palatial residences of mining and tax-farming magnates.
The gold supply in general might be diminishing, but not to an extent that affected the eighty thousand people at Vila Rica, who continued to revel in their self-reliant, enterprising society. Keeping pace with the artists and architects, Mineiro musicians composed spontaneous, uncompromising works — there were at one time more symphony orchestras, ensembles, and bands at Vila Rica alone than in all Portugal.
There was also another group of men equally dedicated to developing the culture of Minas Gerais. Among them was Luis Fialho Soares, who was now fifty-eight years old, a prominent Vila Rica lawyer and man of letters. Luis Fialho had two sons, both of whom he had sent to Coimbra University, which the marquis of Pombal had radically reformed by modernizing its archaic curricula. Martinho Soares, thirty-one, taught at the seminary at Mariana six miles away from Vila Rica, where the sons of Mineiros received as good a preparatory education as anywhere in Brazil or Portugal; Fernandes, twenty-eight, was a medical student in France.
Luis Fialho often shared with his sons recollections of his own years at Coimbra and of the Lisbon earthquake. He knew that the friend who had rescued him from the dungeons of the Tower of Belém had died many years ago. Twice after his return to Minas Gerais, Luis Fialho had sent letters to Paulo Cavalcanti, without reply; then, in 1767, a Crown fiscal agent from Recife had been transferred to Vila Rica, and from him, Luis Fialho learned of Paulo’s murder.
Among the mementos Luis Fialho shared with his sons were the poems and ballads he had written and sung during his student days.
His friend Cláudio Manuel da Costa, who was also a lawyer and the same age as Luis Fialho, had written Vila Rica, a heroic poem telling of the conquest of Minas Gerais. And there was Tomas Antônio Gonzaga, whose erotic and sentimental love poems were the finest in the Portuguese language. Gonzaga also sharpened his quill for political satire, and those close to him knew that under a pseudonym he had written Cartas Chilenas (“Letters from Chile”), an attack on His Excellency Cunha Meneses.
At Vila Rica and other Mineiro towns, the poets and intellectuals maintained respectable private libraries with the works of authors whose names were synonymous with the Enlightenment and the teachings of the French Encyclopedists. They had books and pamphlets, too, on the revolution in North America, and such names as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin were familiar to the Mineiro elite. They met often — Dr. Cláudio Manuel’s house at Vila Rica was a regular venue for their gatherings — to debate subjects as wide-ranging as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Declaration of Independence of the English American colonists, and the works of Abbé Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, particularly L’Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, which criticized the restrictive policies of Portugal.
The meetings at Cláudio Manuel’s house were attended by a cross section of influential Mineiros. The poets themselves were powerful men in the community. Cláudio Manuel had served several terms as secretary to the government of the captaincy and was a knight of the Order of Christ; Tomás Gonzaga had been Crown judge at Vila Rica. Judge Gonzaga had recently been appointed to the High Court at the Bahia. The poet Alvarenga Peixoto was a wealthy fazendeiro and colonel of the First Auxiliary Cavalry, with extensive lands and mining interests in the south of the captaincy.
The magnates who kept company with the poets included two men with the distinction of being the greatest Crown debtors in Minas Gerais. João Rodrigo de Macedo had held a royal contract for collecting duties at the customs posts and for the gathering of tithes. His payments to the treasury were now some 750,000 milreis in arrears — an equivalent of no less than 4,800 pounds of gold. The second great debtor, Joaquim Silvério dos Reis, a tax farmer notorious for suborning and bribing the queen’s officials, owed 220,000 milreis, or some 1,400 pounds of gold.
Several priests attended the meetings: Luis Vieira da Silva, a fiery and persuasive preacher who was openly admiring of the rebels of North America; Carlos Correia de Toledo e Melo, the wealthy vicar of São José d’El Rei in the south, who shared Vieira da Silva’s revolutionary sentiments; and José de Oliveira Rolim, an ecclesiastic preoccupied with legal and illicit diamond and slave deals and with moneylending.
Often after these gatherings, Luis Fialho would head back home long past midnight, with the veil of mist already descending the mountain slopes and the air chill and damp. But, preoccupied with his thoughts, he would not notice the cold. Why, for the love of God, did the Mineiros continue to live in subjection to the Portuguese Crown? Why should governors like Cunha Meneses and the lackeys around him plunder the riches of Minas Gerais, which had been conquered by their fathers and grandfathers? The poets spoke of the winds of freedom blowing between the crags of Minas Gerais and of the breaking of chains; the light of reason and justice dawning. But Luis Fialho sensed that this disparate group needed an inspired leader to give fire to their dreams and dissatisfactions and fan an insurrection against Her Majesty’s government at Minas Gerais.
In late 1788, such a man came forward. Many of them knew him personally, for with their gums aflame, they had called for his help: Joaquim José Silva Xavier, the Tooth-Puller.
Toward the end of Se
ptember 1788, six months after their trip to São Paulo, André Vaz da Silva and Joaquim José da Silva Xavier rode together from Vila Rica to the fazenda of André’s family seven miles northeast of the city. The smallholding was on the road to Cachoeira do Campo, where, six miles beyond the da Silva property, the governor had a country residence close to a barracks of the dragoons. Silva Xavier had reported back to his company a few weeks ago, but had not resumed his full duties and was accompanying André to conclude a business deal that he himself had initiated.
With them was José Álvares Maciel, a young man whom Silva Xavier had interested in buying some horses brought from São Paulo by André’s cousins, the muleteers. After inspecting the animals, Maciel chose a gray mare and three piebald Asturiones. Second-Lieutenant Silva Xavier, a keen judge of horses, was impressed with the Asturiones but warned: “Gentle like little girls. Obedient. But in a moment of bad humor . . . ai!”
André’s only brother, Dionésio, who was twenty years older, lived at the fazenda but was away this day. When the sale was concluded, Dionésio’s wife offered the men a meal. It was intolerably hot in the airless mud-walled house, and when they had eaten, they went outside to sit in the shade of a row of jaboticaba trees studded with yellow-white flowers and berries.
José Álvares Maciel was twenty-seven, a year younger than André, the second of three sons of Captain-Major Álvares Maciel, a Vila Rica merchant and landowner. After receiving his doctorate in law, José Álvares Maciel had spent a year traveling in France and England before returning to Brazil this past August.
Silva Xavier knew the Maciel family — no relation to the butchers of Pará, the Parente Maciels — through his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Paula Freire de Andrade, who was married to a sister of Álvares Maciel’s.
“There’s much to be learned from the talk in the coffeehouses and clubs of London, but if you seek a true understanding of the changes taking place in England, you must get out of the capital and go north,” Álvares Maciel said. “Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool — I visited them all.” He paused for a moment before asking André, “When an English man-of-war is permitted to enter the bay at Rio de Janeiro, what goes through the minds of those who see the ship?”
André smiled. “Jesus! Maria! Thank God all those gunports are closed!”
“Ah, yes, the very symbol of British power — an invincible fleet. I saw another power, André Vaz. It’s going to be greater than anything commanded from the gundecks of George the Third’s warships.”
“The industries of England?”
“Exatamente! Industry and invention! Ironworks, cotton mills, factories for every kind of manufacture. Thousands of people are migrating from the farmlands to the centers of industry. Wherever I went, I was told that what I saw was only the beginning. Every month, the output of their coalmines and iron and steel works increases. Every month a new factory is built. Soon steam-driven engines will replace the water-powered mills. When this happens, no nation on earth will rival the manufactures of the British.”
Álvares Maciel spoke of his journeys through the Midlands and the northwest of England. At the works of Boulton and Watt in Birmingham, the Scottish engineer James Watt, whom Álvares Maciel had found humorous and modest, had personally demonstrated his steam engines. At Cromford in Derbyshire, Álvares Maciel had spent three days at the water-driven mill built by Richard Arkwright and his partners. At factories in Manchester and its district, he had seen the results of the trio of great spinning inventions — James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, with its multiple spindles; Richard Arkwright’s water frame, which produced yarn suitable for the warp; Samuel Crompton’s mule, which improved Arkwright’s invention by preventing the constant breaking of thread and producing a finer yarn.
“I saw hundreds of bales of cotton from Pernambuco and Maranhão,” Álvares Maciel said. “I examined samples of our product and the best cotton from India. There’s no difference!”
“Ah, yes, Dr. José saw the modern wonders of the world,” Silva Xavier said, breaking his silence. “And when he returned to Rio de Janeiro filled with enthusiasm for the progress of industry, another marvel awaited him.”
“What was this?” André asked.
“The viceroy’s agents were dismantling thirteen looms they had found. ‘You may be compensated,’ the owners were told, ‘if you go to Lisbon, where these illegal looms will be shipped and sold.’ What a marvel of Portuguese progress!”
Álvares Maciel had spoken with some of the owners. “Not one will sail to Portugal to beg payment for his property. But their losses serve a good purpose. Three months ago, they had no argument with Lisbon. Today, they’re thinking what splendid compensation it would be if His Excellency, the viceroy, and his officials were taking the same forced passage.”
Álvares Maciel’s generation of students at Coimbra University had been the first to benefit fully from the educational reforms instituted a decade ago by the marquis of Pombal. In the freethinking atmosphere, the belief that the captaincies could follow the example of America’s English colonies had led students like Álvares Maciel to vow to end Portugal’s rule in Brazil. While in England, he had bought every pamphlet and book he found concerning the revolution in North America, and he had openly discussed the idea of a free Brazil with many Englishmen.
“What did they say?” André asked.
“The Englishmen were surprised.”
“That we should think of independence here at Minas Gerais?”
“No — that we have waited this long to begin our struggle for liberty.”
Silva Xavier gripped the young man’s arm. “Your English friends spoke the truth, Dr. José. The struggle begins late, but the result will be the same. Freedom for our rich and beautiful land and all her sons.”
Silva Xavier’s remarks were inflamed by a personal failure during four months he had been at Rio de Janeiro, after this trip to São Paulo with André. In addition to dentistry, Silva Xavier was also interested in civil engineering. In the past, on visits to the city, Silva Xavier had observed that the water supply for the fifty thousand inhabitants was inadequate. He had come up with a scheme for a canal that would be of particular benefit to the city’s water-driven grinding mills.
“How many times I petitioned the viceroy and his officials to support my canal! Nothing! ‘Go, Tiradentes! Draw teeth! Forget your waterworks!’ they said. And how soon, my friends, will a contractor from Portugal be told to build my canal?” Silva Xavier had been striving for years to improve his position, and this latest failure was a bitter disappointment.
“The Portuguese think themselves superior to us in every way,” he continued. “Colonel Francisco knows my record.” He glanced at Álvares Maciel. “Yet all these years I’ve remained alferes. Had I been born in Portugal or come from a family with influence . . .” His cold blue eyes narrowed. “Those thirteen whose looms were taken are not the only men to feel anger and impatience. Many others wait only for a signal from Vila Rica. Break the chains that hold the richest captaincy a captive of Portugal and all Brazil can be freed.”
“When the first shot is fired here, all Portugal will take up arms against us,” André said. “The nobles and merchants of Lisbon will move heaven and earth to crush a rebellion. If they lose Minas Gerais, they lose everything.”
“I agree,” Silva Xavier said. “Everything. But by the time they can float their few ships down the Tagus with men and equipment, Minas Gerais can be ours.”
“It will take a year for them to prepare a fleet,” Álvares Maciel agreed. “That’s time enough for a revolt to spread to Rio de Janeiro. By God’s grace, a Portuguese fleet riding into Guanabara Bay — the guns of every fort will be primed by men loyal to our cause.” He saw André’s skeptical look. “Bold words, yes. But if the patriots of North America had been fainthearted, they would still be taking orders from the minions of George the Third.”
“Remember the direct cause of that conflagration, And
ré,” Silva Xavier added. “Taxation. It will be the same here in Minas Gerais when the derrama is imposed.”
For a while, they spoke of events since July, when the visconde de Barbacena, Dom Luis Antônio Furtado de Mendonça, had taken up his post as governor of Minas Gerais. The ambitious thirty-four-year-old visconde was determined to carry out to the letter the voluminous instructions that had been given to him at Lisbon. At a meeting with local officials a week after arriving at Vila Rica, he had fiercely reprimanded those responsible for the huge sums owed to the royal treasury. He had read them the law of 1750, which provided for the capitation tax, and by September it was generally accepted that he would impose the derrama in February 1789.
The visconde accepted Lisbon’s view that the diminishing gold supply was due largely to smuggling and embezzlement. He would help the miners by reducing import taxes on their equipment, but he expected them to cease immediately their thievery, which was robbing the royal purse of its full quota of one hundred arrôbas a year. “And when the captaincy can meet its present obligations to the Crown, I will seek ways of collecting the debts owed on the royal fifth and by the tax contractors whose ill-gotten harvests have deprived the exchequer of millions of reis,” he had promised.
Álvares Maciel’s father had been treasurer of three tax contracts, an administrative position that made him accountable for monies due to the Crown by the contractor. The tax farmer he represented was heavily in arrears, and as a consequence, the Crown was threatening the Álvares Maciel family with confiscation of its assets.
“We’ll be ruined,” Álvares Maciel said. “I’ll be a poor man.”
“It won’t happen,” Silva Xavier assured him. “Let the visconde de Barbacena threaten Rodrigo de Macedo and others for payment of their great debts. Let him impose the derrama. Every Mineiro, rich or poor, will see only one way to rid himself of these oppressive burdens: independence.”
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