BRAZIL 223
with the greatest share of slaves—some 55 percent
of the population—this revolt began as a lower-
class protest against conscription and blossomed
into an insurgency that appealed to black slaves,
indigenous people, free people of color, and well-
established maroon communities. One maroon
leader, Cosme Bento das Chagas, recruited a slave
army of two thousand and forced local plantation
owners to free their slaves. According to historian
Matthias Röhrig Assunção, another mixed-race
leader, Raimundo Gomes, proclaimed “equal rights
for all people of colour, cabras(dark mulatto), and
caboclos.” Doubtlessly, the revolt’s increasingly
radical, egalitarian program refl ected the broad
cross-class, multiracial nature of its rebel army,
which government offi cials confi rmed. For example,
military commander Luis Alves de Lima described
Gomes as a rebel leader who “claimed that he did
not want to ally himself to the insurrected negroes,
but now, without resources and always persecuted,
tries to attract them.” This growing subaltern alli-
ance clearly threatened the monarchy, the plan-
tation oligarchs, and the private property rights
that secured them. To preserve their power and
privilege, these elites used the issue of race to divide
the rebels, promising amnesty to all free rebels in
exchange for their agreement to “hunt down” run-
away slaves. According to Lima, “in order to avoid
further insurrections,” his amnesty proposal aimed
“to excite the hate between slaves and free rebels.”Slavery in Brazil by Jean-Baptiste Debret depicts the cruelty that characterized Brazil-
ian slavery and produced the Balaiada Rebellion, named for the Afro-Brazilian basket
weaver Manuel Francisco dos Anjos Ferreira, who led thousands of Afro-Brazilians in a
movement to abolish slavery and establish an independent republic.
[Alamy]