224 CHAPTER 10 RACE, NATION, AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM, 1821–1888
While the army tried to restore order on the
battlefi eld, moderate liberals, who favored con-
cessions to federalism, sought political accommo-
dation with a Conservative Party that preferred
to strengthen the central government. On such
essential issues as the monarchy, slavery, and the
maintenance of the status quo in general, these lib-
erals and conservatives saw eye to eye. They also
agreed on the need to suppress the Rio Grande re-
bellion and other regional revolts in the north. The
Rio Grande experiment in republican government
and its offer of freedom to all slaves who joined the
republic’s armed forces posed an especially serious
threat to monarchy and slavery. To strengthen
the central government in its war against these
subversive and separatist movements, liberals
and conservatives decided to call the young Pedro
to rule before his legal majority. In 1840 the two
legislative chambers orchestrated a parliamentary
coup d’état and proclaimed the fourteen-year-old
Dom Pedro emperor. He empowered a conserva-
tive government that dismantled the federalist
reforms in the Additional Act of 1834, sharply
curtailed the powers of provincial assemblies, and
stripped locally elected judges of their judicial and
police powers.
Thereafter, the government undertook to set-
tle scores with the rebels of Rio Grande. As a result
of internal squabbles and the cessation of aid from
friendly Uruguay after Argentina invaded it in Feb-
ruary 1843, the situation of the republic became
extremely diffi cult. Facing the prospect of military
defeat, the republican leaders accepted an offer
from Rio de Janeiro to negotiate a peace, which
was signed in February 1845. The peace treaty ex-
tended amnesty to all rebels but annulled all laws
of the republican regime. The cattle barons won
certain concessions, including the right to nomi-
nate their candidate for provincial governor and
retain their military titles.
The last large-scale revolt in the series that
shook Brazil in the 1830s and 1840s was the up-
rising of 1848 in Pernambuco. Centered in the
city of Recife, its causes included hostility toward
the Portuguese merchants who monopolized local
trade, the appointment of an unpopular governor
by the conservative government, and hatred for
the greatest landowners of the region, the powerful
Cavalcanti family. The rebel program called for the
removal from Recife of all Portuguese merchants,
expansion of provincial autonomy, work for the
unemployed, and division of the Cavalcanti lands.
Even this radical program, however, contained no
reference to the abolition of slavery. The movement
collapsed after imperial troops captured Recife in- Many captured leaders were condemned to
prison for life, but all were amnestied in 1852.
Underlying these rebellions and armed con-
fl icts of the 1830s and 1840s was economic stag-
nation caused by the weakness of foreign markets
for Brazil’s traditional exports. Coffee, already im-
portant in the 1830s but fl ourishing after 1850,
expanded into the center-south, which strength-
ened the hand of the central government with in-
creased revenues and laid the foundation for a new
era of cooperation between regional elites and the
national government. The new coffee prosperity,
confi rming the apparent viability and rationality
of the neocolonial emphasis on export agriculture,
also discouraged any thought of taking the more
durable but diffi cult path of Brazilian autonomous
development.
THE GAME OF POLITICS AND THE CRISIS OF SLAVERY
By 1850, Brazil seemed at peace. The emperor
presided over a pseudo-parliamentary regime, ex-
ercising his power in the interests of a tiny ruling
class. He paid his respects to parliamentary forms
by alternately appointing conservative and liberal
prime ministers at will; if the new ministry did not
command a majority in parliament, one was ob-
tained by holding rigged elections. Because the rul-
ing class was united on essential issues, the only
thing at stake in party struggles was patronage, the
spoils of offi ce. An admirer of Dom Pedro, Joaquim
Nabuco, described the operation of the system in
his book O abolicionismo:The representative system, then, is a graft of
parliamentary forms on a patriarchal govern-
ment, and senators and deputies only take