Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Spanish America had witnessed the first rebellion against vice-regal authority in 1810: At Buenos Aires, capital of the extensive viceroyalty of La Plata, a junta had arrested and deported the viceroy. As the Buenos Aires republicans moved closer to a full declaration of independence, they struggled to unite the provinces of La Plata. An early loss to this cause was Paraguay, which had always resented the wealthy and politically powerful porteños, those who lived in the port city of Buenos Aires, one thousand miles down the Paraguay and Paraná rivers. Paraguay was declared an independent republic in 1812.

  Like the Paraguayans, the sixty thousand inhabitants of the Banda Oriental, led by José Gervasio Artigas, did not want to submit to Buenos Aires and agitated for a loose federation of the La Plata provinces. When, on July 9, 1816, the independent Republic of Argentina — a Latinization of the Spanish “Plata” — was born, José Artigas persisted in his refusal to accept the central authority of the porteños. It had seemed that the Banda Oriental would follow the example of Paraguay, but then Artigas made a fatal error: Bands of his gaucho cavalry violated Brazilian soil, infiltrating into Rio Grande do Sul in 1817.

  Dom João sent his forces against Artigas, contemplating a swift campaign to settle the ownership of the Banda Oriental. But bands of gaucho guerrillas continued to harass the Portuguese for three years. By 1820, however, they had been decimated, Artigas had taken refuge in Paraguay, and at last the way had been open for annexation of the Banda Oriental as the Cisplatine Province of Brazil.

  Dom João had made his conquest, but his satisfaction had been ruined by events in Portugal. Revolutionaries had convoked the Cortes, the Portuguese parliament, for the first time since its suppression in 1689 and demanded the return of the Braganças and the king’s adherence to a proposed constitution.

  Among those gathered to bid farewell to the king had been a handsome young man: Crown Prince Pedro. In his son, Dom João had seen hope of preserving intact the Braganças’ American estate. “You will maintain our family’s presence as my regent,” Dom João instructed Pedro. “But should Brazil decide to separate herself from Portugal, let it be under your leadership, my son, not that of an adventurer, since you are bound to respect me.”

  At the time of the Braganças’ flight to Brazil, Prince Pedro had been ten years old. Short and stocky, with a handsome face dominated by large brown eyes, Dom Pedro had thrived in his exotic place of exile. Generous and friendly, Pedro was also impulsive, emotional, and had shown a passion for lovemaking. Week after week, he would hasten from São Cristovão in search of new lovers from all classes and races.

  When Pedro was eighteen, Dom João had dispatched a mission to Europe charged with finding a wife for his son. At Vienna, the matchmakers had gained for Pedro the hand of the Archduchess Maria Leopoldina, daughter of Francis I of Austria and great-granddaughter of Maria Theresa. In 1817 the plain, flaxen-haired Leopoldina had sailed for Brazil where she married Pedro, two years her junior.

  Pedro had been awed by his wife’s superior intellect, particularly her abiding interest in botany and mineralogy. But neither marriage to Leopoldina nor the birth of his first child, Princess Maria da Glória in 1819, had distracted Pedro from his paramours.

  When King João sailed for Portugal, the twenty-two-year-old Pedro had been ill-prepared for his duties as prince regent of Brazil. But able advisers from among the Portuguese and mazombo aristocracy had surrounded him, and they guided him through a stormy eighteen months as his regency followed an increasingly divergent path from that sought for it by the Lisbon Cortes.

  With King João back on Portuguese soil, the Cortes had insisted — on the pretext that the heir to Lisbon’s throne should be given a sound European education — that Pedro and his family also return to Europe. But, at Rio de Janeiro, Prince Pedro had been presented with a petition signed by eight thousand citizens calling on him to resist the Cortes’ demand. “For the good of all and the general happiness of the nation, I am ready,” Pedro had announced. “I will stay!”

  Nine months passed during which Brazil had drifted further from the grasp of the Cortes. Dom Pedro had formed a new ministry, which included a distinguished Paulista intellectual, José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva, the first Brazilian to hold the key post of minister of the kingdom. And the prince had convened a constituent assembly, with representatives from the provinces, as the former captaincies were known.

  The final break with the Cortes — and Portugal — had come on September 7, 1822. Dom Pedro had traveled to São Paulo to unify resistance against the Cortes and was returning to that city after a brief visit to the port of Santos when court messengers from Rio de Janeiro overtook his party at a small stream called Ipiranga. They were carrying dispatches from Minister José Bonifácio, who submitted the Cortes’ latest decrees revoking the Brazilian assembly as a rebel body and calling for the dismissal of Dom Pedro’s ministers, whom they declared to be traitors.

  There was a letter, too, from Dom Pedro’s wife, Leopoldina: “Pedro, this is the most important moment of your life. Today, Brazil, which under your guidance will be a great country, wants you as her monarch.” Leopoldina and José Bonifácio urged Pedro to declare himself either king or emperor of Brazil.

  Dom Pedro had made his decision, beside the stream at Ipiranga: “I proclaim Brazil forever separated from Portugal! From this day hence, our motto is: Independence or Death!”

  Emperor Pedro was crowned in the cathedral at Rio de Janeiro on December 1, 1822, commencing a nine-year reign that had been agitated from the start. Even as he sat on his coronation throne, the northern provinces of Bahia, Maranhão, and Grão Pará were still controlled by forces loyal to the Cortes. To expel the Portuguese garrisons, Dom Pedro had sought the assistance of an Englishman, Admiral Thomas Cochrane. With Cochrane commanding a “fleet” of two battle-ready ships and with Brazilian patriots attacking them on land, the last Portuguese garrisons had surrendered by August 1823.

  Emperor Pedro had counseled the constituent assembly that the committee responsible for drafting a constitution must produce a document worthy of him and of Brazil. The assembly had considered it their right to present a constitution to which the Crown should adhere no matter what Dom Pedro thought of it. By the time a document was put before the assembly that September of 1823, the debate had grown so acrimonious that Dom Pedro dissolved the assembly and sent several members into exile, including the former minister José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva.

  Pedro and his Council of State collaborated on a new constitution for the Brazilians, which provided for a moderating power for the emperor: Among his rights were the appointment of one-third of the senators and the appointment and dismissal of ministers of state.

  At Pernambuco, following the constitutional crisis, four northeastern provinces declared their independence as the Confederation of the Equator. Six months later, the last republican stronghold had fallen: Fifteen ringleaders had been executed by a firing squad.

  Despite this success against the republicans of Pernambuco, Dom Pedro’s image had been steadily deteriorating among loyal Brazilians who found his partiality toward the Portuguese infuriating. Dom Pedro also suffered an irremediable blow to his esteem when trouble again arose in the far south, in what was now known as the Cisplatine Province: In 1825 a group of thirty-three guerrillas encouraged by the Buenos Aires government crossed into the territory from Argentina to liberate it from the Brazilians. Within three years, following a war between Brazil and the Argentine confederation, the conquests east of the Rio Uruguay had been lost.

  Throughout these years of controversy and conflict, Dom Pedro’s private life, too, had left much to be desired, especially among mazombos who were distressed to see the emperor engaged in scandalous pursuit of new loves.

  Pedro had taken as favorite concubine Domitila de Castro, a vivacious Paulista in her twenties, and had installed her in a mansion at Rio de Janeiro, where she had given birth to a succession of royal bastards. Domitila had been honor
ed by her lover, first with the title of Viscountess, then with Marchioness of Santos; the firstborn love child had been acknowledged by Dom Pedro and ennobled as the Duchess of Goiás.

  The erudite Empress Leopoldina had mostly suffered in silence, while bearing her unfaithful spouse’s many children. Besides their firstborn, Maria da Glória, there were three other princesses and three princes, two of whom died in infancy, the third, Pedro de Alcantara, born on December 2, 1825 — Just over a year later, Dona Leopoldina herself died after a miscarriage.

  A remorseful Dom Pedro set about reforming his ways. He sacrificed Domitila and sought a new bride. His emissaries succeeded in gaining for Pedro the hand of an enchanting Bavarian princess, Amélie of Leuchtenberg, granddaughter of Napoleon and Josephine Beauharnais.

  Dom Pedro celebrated the arrival of his seventeen-year-old bride by creating the Order of the Rose in her honor: Love and Fidelity was its motto.

  In the euphoric months after Princess Amélie’s arrival, Pedro had been encouraged to set up a moderate cabinet comprised for the first time of Brazilians, but reactionary Portuguese intimates had induced him to dismiss this ministry. Street battles broke out in Rio de Janeiro — “The Night of the Beer Bottles” — between Portuguese absolutists and Brazilians. Members of the assembly petitioned the emperor to reverse his decision. Again he appointed a Brazilian cabinet, without success: Within seventeen days, those ministers had been thrown out of office and a pro-Portuguese cabinet once more installed. On April 6, 1831, thousands of protestors took to the streets; by midnight, the emperor faced a full-blown revolution, with the Rio de Janeiro garrison joining the street mobs.

  Dom Pedro agreed to leave Brazil immediately for Europe, abdicating in favor of his son, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, who was then five years old.

  In September 1855 Pedro Segundo was twenty-nine, with manners and appearance the very image of imperial dignity. His Majesty was over six feet tall. His countenance was frank and open, aided in this effect by direct blue eyes; his hair and full beard were a light golden brown.

  Three years after the abdication, Pedro I died in Portugal. Thus, at the age of eight, Pedro Segundo had been orphaned, and to the regency that ruled Brazil during Pedro’s minority, and his governesses and tutors, was given a unique opportunity to instill in him those attributes of justice, wisdom, and honor they deemed most desirable in a benevolent monarch.

  As he grew older, the regents and ministers of state had broadened the boy emperor’s knowledge of his domain, which, during the nine years of the regency, had often seemed to be on the point of disintegration, through regional violence and sedition.

  The boy emperor had been instrumental in preventing the breakup of the empire, for he had been adopted with affection by the Brazilian people and served as a powerful symbol of national unity. In 1840, at a critical period of the regional conflicts and when the assembly itself was shaken by disunity, Pedro was only fourteen — four years short of his majority — but, in response to the wishes of the assembly, he agreed that he was ready to oversee the affairs of his subjects. The assembly proclaimed him sovereign of Brazil, and the following year, he was crowned as emperor.

  Dom Pedro, as his mentors had hoped, was adopting a benevolent and paternal attitude in his rule. For example, once a week he would receive members of his Brazilian family at court: exalted nobles, and humble Negroes, and representatives of the few remaining Tupi-Guarani clans.

  Yet, for all the respect and esteem shown him, the emperor was prone to a melancholy reflected even in his dress. For official ceremonies, he would appear in full court regalia, but by choice he wore a black suit with frock coat, black cravat, and tall black silk hat, like a man in mourning. His childhood loneliness had not been relieved when a bride was brought for him from Europe: Empress Theresa, whom he married in 1843. Short, slightly lame, brown-eyed, and the essence of plainness, Dona Theresa had been twenty-one when she arrived at Rio de Janeiro.

  There had been four children born between 1845 and 1848: Afonso, the firstborn, Pedro, Isabel, and Leopoldina. Within two years of their birth, both sons had died.

  Dom Pedro’s personal sorrows ran deep, but there was also another cause for his melancholy in the radiant tropical land he had been born to rule: He wore his crown reluctantly, yearning for the retreat of a contemplative and scholarly life and dreading the storms of statesmanship.

  “Were I not emperor, I should like to be a teacher,” he said on occasion. “What calling is greater or nobler than directing young minds?” Regularly, Pedro would visit schools and academies at the capital, personally inspecting their facilities and encouraging the pupils, for he was greatly distressed by the abysmal lack of education among his subjects, whose numbers had grown since his father’s time to some eight million.

  At the Corte, as the capital was known, Dom Pedro and his American aristocrats lived with a semblance of European elegance, scrupulously observing court etiquette, worshiping foreign ideas, and devotedly following the latest French fashions. Rio de Janeiro was slowly outgrowing its colonial jumble and squalor. Its bustling streets in the central district contained shops of French merchants and craftsmen who supplied the coveted finery; the countinghouses of English traders; the establishments of the ubiquitous Portuguese shopkeepers; and, of course, the enormous bureaucracy of imperial government, to which thousands swarmed for emoluments.

  The city’s oil lamps were being replaced by gaslights; unhealthy marshes on the outskirts of the Corte were being filled and drained; and across the bay, from the small port of Mauá, A Baronesa! — the first locomotive in Brazil — shrieked and roared along ten miles of track to the foothills of the Serra da Estrela and the road to Petropolis thirty miles away, the summer retreat of the emperor and his family.

  The city was spreading north toward the district of the emperor’s palace and south into the shadows of Corcovado and Tijuca. At the small bay of Botafago, with the Sugar Loaf to one side, between thick groves of large-leafed banana trees and stately palms, stood the sparkling white mansions of viscounts, barons, generals. Tropical plants and trees flourished, dense and deeply green, and gaudy blossoms of scarlet, lilac, and blue mixed with the rose and other European imports. In the open valleys behind the city, there was often heard the baying of hounds and bugle blasts as sturdy, pink-cheeked Englishmen thundered after their quarry. In the city itself, at the waterfront public gardens, the scene was more placid, the afternoon sun often slanting down upon a sea of bobbing lace and parasols and gently wafted fans, and high silk hats of black and gray.

  But the court, the aristocrats and foreign merchants, the wealthy coffee growers — all these formed only a small upper class at the capital. Much more numerous were the free commoners and droves of wary-eyed provincials come from the sertão to behold the wonders of the Corte.

  Half the city’s population were black and mulatto slaves: The narrow streets teemed with half-naked men fulfilling the age-old promise that homens bons be spared the curse of manual toil in Brazil. The sun that shone on a sea of bobbing parasols at the Passeio Público elsewhere fell upon 130-pound bags of coffee borne by human transport chains whose leaders shook rattles to keep up an energetic pace; upon grand pianos lifted high and trotted through the streets by sweating Africans; upon water carriers thronging at the fountains to draw from what was still a hopelessly inadequate supply; and upon slaves for hire selling their master’s fruit, fish, and poultry or bending over braziers with pots of spicy stew or waiting patiently outside their owner’s establishment for those who would come to buy their labor.

  Dom Pedro disliked slavery, as much from his moral upbringing as from the offense given by a horde in bondage at a capital that sought to be the Paris of America. The emperor had liberated the slaves he had inherited but dared not exceed this personal magnanimity: Talk of the emancipation of slaves stirred up the wrath of senhores de engenho and fazendeiros, whose plantations provided the empire’s greatest wealth. Sugar, cotton, tobacco — all continued to
yield good profits, but today’s El Dorado was coffea arabica.

  The coffee groves from those first seeds brought from French Guiana to Pará in 1726 and experimented with elsewhere in the north by growers like Padre Leandro at the aldeia of Nossa Senhora do Rosário had provided seedlings sent to the south before the turn of the century. Today, in the valleys behind Rio de Janeiro and spreading west to the province of São Paulo were tens of millions of coffee trees providing a bountiful export and firmly establishing in the south the same latifundia as existed in the north. And like the independent lavradores who had lost their cane fields to the big engenhos, southern smallholders in the path of coffee’s advance were pushed out or absorbed as agregados by the fazendeiros.

  From the Corte, Dom Pedro Segundo looked upon the poor and landless, who were the majority of his Brazilian family, with paternal and Christian concern. In a sense, the emperor was the erudite and aloof senhor de engenho of the great estate of Terra de Santa Cruz, with his capital as Casa Grande and an educated and landowning minority there to help him develop his vast plantation. And spread throughout his holdings were millions of vassals who lived as had their ancestors in positions of servility and with little opportunity to possess the smallest part of the patrimony of Senhor Dom Pedro. They had experienced few changes in the years since their country had taken its place among independent nations, and for some of them, things would seem to have grown worse — like the child Antônio Paciência of Fazenda da Jurema, who was torn from his mother and taken a thousand miles and more through the sertão; Antônio Paciência, who had only the vaguest knowledge of this grand patrão and none at all of the freedoms protected by His Majesty.