The Farrapos War was the longest provincial revolt faced by the Brazilian Empire. It originated with a dispute between two factions of regional elites vying for sources of power and wealth in a context marked by economic stagnation, institutional changes wrought by the Regency governments, and the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Rio de la Plata region. The rebels, known as farroupilhas or farrapos, overthrew the government of Rio Grande do Sul and established an independent republic.
The main farrapo leaders were military officers and estancieiros, the owners of large estates, enslaved people, and cattle in the region that bordered Uruguay and Argentina. Their goal was to achieve autonomy in order to distribute political offices, control the borders, and change the fiscal and commercial policy of the empire. Their opponents, known as legalists, were drawn mostly from sectors related to maritime trade, the production of charque (dried and salted beef), and the urban military and administrative bureaucracy. The soldiers of both sides were recruited among the lower classes. They were cowboys and peasants. The farrapos also organized a sizable army of enslaved people who had been confiscated from their opponents and who performed military service in exchange for their freedom.
The Republic of Rio Grande do Sul experienced a sharp decline beginning in 1842. The Battle of Porongos in November 1844 was the last major engagement of the war and resulted in the massacre of Black soldiers from the farroupilha forces. The campaign to bring the province back under government control, led by the Baron of Caxias, was carried out through the granting of amnesties, the payment of debts, and the incorporation of farroupilha officers into the Imperial Army. With the end of the Farrapos War, the Brazilian Empire ensured its internal consolidation and returned to an assertive foreign policy in the Río de la Plata region.
Article
The Farrapos War (Rio Grande do Sul, 1835–1845)
Gabriel Aladrén
Article
Paraguayan War and Brazil: Conflicts and Interest
Francisco Doratioto
In 1863 and 1864, historical and political contradictions in the River Plate region led to civil war in Uruguay, creating tensions with neighboring nations in the region. The Brazilian government intervened both politically and militarily in Uruguay to address the interests of ranchers in its province of Rio Grande do Sul, to distract the attention of the Brazilian citizens from domestic problems, and to preserve the political influence of the Empire of Brazil on Uruguay. This action by the Empire clashed with the new Paraguayan policy of political interference in the River Plate region and resulted in the declaration of war against Brazil by Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López. This conflict broadened into the Paraguayan War.
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The Paraguayan War and Brazilian National Identity
Wilma Peres Costa
The effort of searching the effects of the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay on the building up of Brazilian national identity challenges the historian with a paradox: why the military victory promotes the fall of the political regime instead of strengthening it. The article tries to deal with some dimensions of this paradox underlining the distinctive characteristics of this war in the ongoing warmongering in the Platine region—the huge numbers of conscripted soldiers (“the Total War”), the hybrid political character of the alliance (Brazilian monarchy and Argentinian Republic), the opposition of most of the conservative classes, and the unveiling of slavery as a strategic weakness for the country—are some of the themes treated in order to explain how the empire lost both the battle of worldwide moral support and the battle of legitimacy inside the country. The massive recruitment coming from all parts of the country could bring the empowerment of ordinary people in the postwar decades, but the monarchical elites took careful steps to ensure that these sectors were quickly demobilized and also not to receive medals and other military honors. The postwar era was one of unfolding of an endemic crisis leading to contest of monarchical institutions. They came from military sectors, but also from regional elites, besides bitter criticism from middle-class intellectuals. Racial arguments filled an outstanding part in this period, leading to the giving prestige of “scientific” racism and the negative diagnosis for the future of a modern nation founded in a racially mixed society.
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The Revolta da Chibata: Conscription, Corporal Punishment, and State Control of Free Afro-Brazilians
Zachary R. Morgan
On November 22, 1910, Rio de Janeiro was convulsed by the four-day Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Lash). Approximately half of the predominantly Afro-Brazilian sailors stationed in the nation’s capital—likely fifteen hundred to two thousand men—seized four modern battleships, removed their officers, and besieged the city. They complained of mistreatment, forced recruitment, low pay, and meager food, but their only demand in their first communication to the president was the cessation of corporal punishment in the Brazilian navy. Three of the four ships seized had been recently obtained by the Brazilian government from British shipyards; two were the first all-big-gun dreadnought-class battleships ever sold by the British to any foreign navy. Their 12-inch guns could near-simultaneously launch twelve 850-pound explosive shells at targets miles away, meaning that should they fire almost every part of the Brazilian capital city was under threat.
Their second communique to the president demanded an end to the “slavery as practiced in the Brazilian navy.” The institution’s nearly century-long traditions of forced conscription, systematic and ritualized lashing, long-term forced labor, and the conspicuous malnourishment of Afro-Brazilian men tempts comparison to the exploitation of the enslaved in preabolition Brazil, but other than a brief policy of purchase and subsequent freeing of enslaved men to serve in the armed forces during the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), naval service did not draw on the exploitation of the enslaved. Instead, it conscripted Brazil’s free Afro-descendant population; citizens who represented a 47 percent plurality of Brazil’s population, larger than either the free white or enslaved Black populations at the time of Brazil’s first national census in 1872.
The Brazilian navy was just one part in a series of institutions and legislative controls created and used to control Brazil’s free Afro-Brazilian population both before and after abolition in 1888. The freedom and citizenship of free Black men, women, and children was often ephemeral and regulated. Although Brazil lacked institutionalized racial segregation such as apartheid or Jim Crow, controls such as restriction on land ownership, police policies, military conscription, the manipulation of orphans, forced apprenticeship, and incarceration were implemented in such racialized ways that the overall outcome for Afro-Brazilians was similar. The navy’s acquisition of cutting-edge weapons of war created an opportunity for powerless Afro-descendant men to challenge the generally unacknowledged state systems of racial oppression and hierarchy.
