In 1840, a group headed by the Andrada brothers outmaneuvered the conservatives in power since the 1837 Regresso. They convinced young prince Pedro de Alcântara to claim the Crown earlier than his eighteenth birthday and against constitutional mandate. The fourteen-year-old’s gleaming acceptance tipped the scales of power to their favor. But what followed was a relentless partisan see-sawing for the rest of the decade. Less than a year after the golpe da maioridade (Majority coup) of 1840, liberals were replaced by a conservative cabinet with its own election tricks in store, which prompted liberal revolts in 1842 headed by the Vergueiros in São Paulo and Teófilo Ottoni in Minas Gerais. Liberals only returned to power after a general amnesty in 1844, which inaugurated a so-called liberal quinquennium (1844–1848) before the pendulum swung back to the conservatives. Hardening monikers attested to the mutual skewering that marked the decade: liberals became luzias, after Santa Luzia, the famed site of their defeat in 1842, and conservatives came to be known as saquaremas, in reference to a sugar town east of the Court where reactionaries battled attempts by one of their foes, Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho, to steal the elections of 1844.Footnote ¹

Despite searing partisan infighting, colonization not only flourished in the decade following Pedro II’s rise but even transformed itself into a hallmark of the imperial state. The new emperor himself was partly responsible for colonization’s ascendancy. His presence rekindled courtly dynamics important to colonization enterprises and strengthened state-led initiatives to oversee such pursuits. Indeed, requests for special privileges and subsidies to import foreign settlers and start new colonies surged with the return of monarchical patronage. Yet, more than the emperor himself, it was a loyal posse of palatial figures who worked in his shadow that plied those proposals into the imperial and diplomatic policies to support a new reason of state. Seeing how directed migrations and planned settlements spurred the economy, mollified pressures to end the slave trade, and personally benefited those involved, palace insiders known as áulicos ramped up governmental involvement in the business of colonization. Taken together, these áulicos render moot Holanda Cavalcanti’s famous dictum that “there is nothing more saquarema than a luzia in power.” Even if áulicos identified with factions or parties, their allegiance to the emperor’s moderating power remained their primal compass.

These palatial creatures blurred the lines between conservative and liberal tenets by welcoming schemes geared to produce fiscal revenues and personal gains, most of which were led by private enterprises under their regulatory oversight. Three individuals in particular defined this emergent market in private colonization and the regulatory tools to oversee it: Pedro de Araújo Lima, by then ennobled as visconde de Olinda; Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho; and Miguel Calmon, by then visconde de Abrantes. In their hands, colonization became a policy tool to strengthen imperial authority, which they understood as tied to Pedro II in profound and personal ways. Together, the three cut an odd group, as each possessed singular political sympathies, kinship networks, and distinct regional alliances. But a deeply seated commitment to the emperor, and an outstanding concern with colonization, united them over their differences.

This chapter details how these palace insiders defined colonization above and beyond factional clashes as quintessential to the most pressing policy pursuits of the early Second Reign (1840–1889). In doing so, they reprised regulatory measures and diplomatic overtures promoting private colonization schemes under enhanced government purview and to the benefit of Brazilian geopolitical aims. The chapter first follows Araújo Lima’s tenure in the reactivated Conselho de Estado as he championed procedural and administrative regulation over governmental giveaways to colonization cronies. Araújo Lima recognized the limitations of government patronage and paved the way for a consequential land bill in 1843 meant to streamline colonization procedures among other things. As the bill stalled in the Senate, the chapter continues, Aureliano and other áulicos like the emperor’s own valet, Paulo Barbosa, took it upon themselves to furnish a model colony in the emperor’s name. The chapter closes by examining how these efforts strengthened Miguel Calmon’s diplomatic mission to Europe on the heels of the Aberdeen Act crisis (1844–1846). Tasked with pressuring Britain to accept treaty renewal terms favorable to Brazil, Calmon did not succeed in his first remit. But then, for the most important segment of his mission, he used colonization as a tantalizing bargaining chip to court Prussia as a potential commercial partner.

Ultimately, by nestling itself in áulicos’ visions, colonization acquired prominence in diplomatic talks, land law debates, and piecemeal efforts to hold empresarios to account and thereby strengthen the Brazilian state. Moreover, Petrópolis and a later colony in the lands of Pedro II’s sister, princess Francisca, offered models worthy of emulation, crowning imperial patronage as the main locus of legitimacy for colonization endeavors. Near the end of the decade, new enterprises emerged thanks to áulicos’ efforts, including two helmed by liberal leaders like Vergueiro and Ottoni. Yet, however bold or famous, new endeavors remained derivative, indebted as they were to a palatial drive that transformed Rio de Janeiro into the epicenter of colonization earlier than Vergueiro’s ultimately more notorious experiments in São Paulo. Together, áulicos steadied the state’s hand and prepared government to adopt a more assertive role in guiding colonization to its own advantage.

The Conselho, the Belgians, and the Land Bill

Reinstated in 1842, the Conselho de Estado quickly became the main government body judging the merits of foreign colonization proposals and weighing the necessary policies to regulate them. However, the diverse nature of proposals challenged the Conselho’s capacity to process them on an individual basis, prompting the body to favor regularizing colonization concessions, contracts, and oversight. But how could an ostensibly neutral organ of the moderating power contribute to statutory law? The Conselho was first and foremost in charge of keeping the administrative machinery of the Empire oiled and running. As part of its functions, it assessed provincial legislation to correct constitutional discrepancies, especially after the Interpretive Law of the Additional Act of 1840 passed during Araújo Lima’s regency reined in provincial governments’ liberties. By issuing opinions on provincial laws, the Conselho effectively curbed liberal excesses while maintaining its role as neutral overseer of jurisdictional or substantive legal conflicts submitted in the form of consultas (consultations) by any government office. In addition, by creating regulatory protocols, the Conselho indirectly oversaw the execution of codified law. In principle, then, this was a privy council, a supplementary body to the emperor’s “moderating power” meant to counsel more than govern. But, in truth, the Conselho became both Pedro II’s personal brain trust and a political powerhouse in its own right.

Conselheiros wielded enormous authority after all. Many served as ministers and held lifelong appointments in the Senate, and so perfectly understood work in the Conselho as a higher calling above nasty ministerial and legislative affronts. Notably, even though the Conselho sought to perfect governance impartially through administrative interventions, its consultas reserved space for disagreements. Its four specialized sections often produced split opinions depending on the matter at hand, especially if the outcome affected conselheiros’ home provinces or personal interests. Yet this new Conselho was generationally different from that of 1823, which was populated by aging Portuguese-born or Luso-Brazilian statesmen. After 1842, the typical conselheiro was best represented by a white, wealthy Brazilian educated at Coimbra, on average between 48 and 52 years old and prone to obtain a noble title.Footnote ²

Remarkably, colonization interests also united many of these functionaries. Among the seven longest-serving members of this new batch, several had significantly interacted with the SPC and CCB in the 1830s, including Limpo de Abreu, who went on to serve in the Conselho for 35 years, Araújo Lima (28 years), Calmon (22), and Holanda Cavalcanti (13). In all, over half of the first members of the new Conselho had purchased shares in private colonization ventures during the Regency. This background prepared conselheiros to deal with a caseload teeming with permit requests for colonization endeavors. Maria Martins estimated that consultas explicitly touching on colonization made up 7.3 percent of the total seen by the Empire section of the Conselho from 1847 to 1863, but if one adds other areas in which colonization played a part, colonization may have been present in up to 54.6 percent of the net total of consultas.Footnote ³ Also, other Conselho sections could see colonization-related consultas, including consular protests over the unlawful enlistment of foreigners routinely redirected to the Conselho from the Justice and Foreign ministries.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, even though the Justice ministry did keep track of missing migrants and managed foreign dignitaries’ queries on colonos’ fates in Brazil, only the Conselho could resolve jurisdictional conflicts in those queries, especially any involving colonos’ estates. In the process of handling such cases, the Conselho began to identify colonization issues in need of greater oversight.Footnote ⁵

A spate of Belgian proposals at the start of the Second Reign strengthened conselheiros’ resolve to remedy procedural issues clogging the advancement of colonization endeavors and establish stronger regulations. After independence from the Netherlands in 1830, Belgium had rapidly built railroads that traversed emigration-prone regions, which motivated Belgian colony prospecting across Latin America.Footnote ⁶ In 1840, Benoît Jules Mure, a medical graduate from Montpellier, requested and obtained lands for a settlement in the Saí peninsula in Santa Catarina, in addition to a government commitment to cover colono transport costs from Dunkirk. Initially, the Chamber of Deputies sent his request to a commission, but then a 64-conto subsidy for his project was sandwiched into the Empire ministry’s budget for 1842–1843, which fast-tracked his project. The first 84 colonos arrived in 1841, and another 79 left Le Havre in 1843 for the new colony.Footnote ⁷

However, even when granted extremely favorable terms, including a 30-conto loan for transports, Mure failed to make adequate preparations. Moreover, Mure’s ideological inclinations soon made the Empire minister uneasy. Mure referred to his colony as the phalanstère of Saí, revealing his alignment with the utopian teachings of Charles Fourier. His devotion to Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, further characterized him not only as a Socialist but also as a quack in the eyes of Brazilian statesmen. Soon, the Brazilian government began to withhold funds, sending Saí into an inevitable tailspin. In the years after the colony’s demise, nonetheless, Mure’s career continued to grow and to demand further interventions by the Conselho. By 1848, Mure had trained a number of Brazilians and even the first Belgian consul in Rio in homeopathy, which incited a medical establishment concerned over his cult-following to ask the Conselho to shut down his plans for a homeopathic school.Footnote ⁸

Successive Belgian projects continued to flag a need for a uniform set of incentives and procedures for the Conselho. Dr. Jules Parigot, a geology professor from Brussels and an old aide to king Leopold, came to Rio in 1841 with plans for a Belgian “Colonization Society” focused on mining, which quickly stalled due to deputies’ uncertainties about whether the Brazilian government should issue special privileges to companies and whether it should favor national over foreign ones.Footnote ⁹ Another Belgian, Joseph Ludgero Nelis, obtained a contract with the central government in June 1842 to establish the colony of Pedra Lisa in Campos, but he lost momentum despite the favors offered by Rio’s provincial government. Clearly, these projects required a consistent system of vigilance to see them through.Footnote ¹⁰

The lack of a system led to convoluted results even for proposals supported by the Conselho by allowing profiteers to take advantage of existing loopholes. This eventually prompted conselheiros to reflect on how their regulatory shortfalls generated undesired outcomes, as exemplified by the company drive of another Belgian empresario, Charles van Lede. Van Lede had worked for a mining firm in Mexico and in Chile before he set out to organize the Société Belge-Brésilienne de Colonisation with some help from Parigot, who became his emigration agent.Footnote ¹¹ Van Lede baited Brazilian officials with references to Java, Canada, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, and Algeria and tried to impress them by organizing an “emigration protecting council” manned by Belgian grandees. Van Lede soon obtained positive appraisals from Santa Catarina’s provincial assembly and by August 1842 an initial contract with the imperial government committing him to importing 100 families in exchange of per capita prizes.

A few months later, van Lede incorporated the company in Belgium as a société anonyme with a projected capitalization of 6 million francs (1.872:000$000) underwritten by professional, political, and commercial elites from Brussels and Antwerp. In 1844, king Leopold recognized its statutes.Footnote ¹² The Conselho recommended government purchase of one-quarter of available shares. Comparatively, Brazilian proponents encountered far less favor. For instance, the tireless Joaquim José de Sequeira requested an appointment as “chargé of foreign colonization for the northern provinces” in Paris or London, only to be rejected. Matheus Ramos, a trader of Chinese goods, proposed a company to furnish Asian colonos to the government, but his bid similarly failed. Yet, even if it wished to, the Conselho could not realize these plans. While it could vet laws, it could not legislate at will and was ultimately hamstrung when it wished to favor colonization enterprises due to the absence of clear procedures for weighing company merits and corresponding privileges.Footnote ¹³

What the Conselho could do was exercise its attribution to submit its own bills to the Chamber’s consideration. And in doing so, the Conselho prioritized colonization at Pedro II’s behest. In mid-1842, the emperor tasked Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and José Cesário de Miranda Ribeiro in the Conselho’s Empire section with drafting a bill on land grants and followed up a month later asking for another on foreign colonization. The conselheiros gathered old files from ministerial and legislative archives that documented colonization projects over two decades and set the tenor for the debates that followed. The papers included H. G. Schmidt’s plan of 1821, defended by Domingo Borges at the Lisbon Courts; a British company proposal to establish colonies in the Cisplatina in 1825; four different versions of the 1827 colonization bill drafted by Barbacena’s commission; two additional bills of 1838 and 1840 (Amaral’s and Souza Franco’s); a colonization project for Maranhão “undersigned by a great number of people”; and more recent proposals from two French subjects and from Georg Friedrich Schmidt, an employee at Brazil’s legation in Hamburg. The Conselho also wrote to the British consul to inquire about British emigration to Brazil and included his response among the papers.Footnote ¹⁴ This impromptu archive ended with the latest pamphlets on Australian and Canadian colonization sent by Brazilian diplomats, many of which celebrated the ideas of the radical political economist Edward Gibbon Wakefield regarding the necessity of land sales in lieu of land grants to ensure the success of colonization enterprises.Footnote ¹⁵

Conselheiros used Wakefield as a guidepost for their revisions of Vasconcelos’s and Miranda Ribeiro’s draft bill. These revisions stipulated strong executive powers to organize public land sales, demarcate land, prohibit sesmarias and informal squats (posses), and prevent colonos from purchasing land, renting plots, and owning businesses or peddling within three years of arrival, after which they could naturalize and buy land whose proceeds would be dedicated to importing more workers.Footnote ¹⁶ The revised bill also empowered district courts to oversee sales and contract feuds. It further authorized provincial presidents and the central government to handle appeals.Footnote ¹⁷ As it entered the Chamber in 1843, the bill incorporated a land tax and a registration fee for posses and pre-1822 sesmarias, established size limits for existing posses while prohibiting all future posses, and obligated landowners to survey and register their property within six months. In order to protect national territory, government preserved a right to grant public lands along Brazilian borders as needed, allowing some flexibility to the Wakefield principle of strictly replacing land grants with land sales.Footnote ¹⁸

The Conselho’s revised bill arrived at the Chamber for discussion as projeto no. 94. Historians have long understood that the ensuing debates hinged on the interests and stratagems of wealthy slaveholding coffee elites from the Brazilian southeast. But, with its emphasis in shaping a land market, the Conselho-crafted projeto no. 94 in fact accomplished three notable achivements that upend traditional explanations. First, far from cementing an exclusive class of land “barons” opposed to reform, the projeto no. 94 in fact facilitated cross-regional and inter-party alliances based on deputies’ agreement on the value of colonization. Expectedly, conservative Navy minister Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres, who introduced the bill, and Diogo Vasconcelos, brother of the conselheiro who had drafted the bill, adamantly supported projeto no. 94. But the most eloquent defender of the bill was a junior liberal deputy from Pará, Bernardo de Souza Franco, who had already advanced his own land bill stipulating significant corporate advantages in 1840 and openly invoked Wakefield’s ideas in his addresses as provincial president of Pará in 1841 at the tail end of the Cabanagem rebellion.

Secondly, the debates upheld the Conselho’s imperative by enshrining profit as the driving force of land reform and of colonization in particular. As Souza Franco asserted, “in this project the most essential thing is money …. Colonization is the end; money, the means.” The project’s conservative supporters agreed, with Diogo Vasconcelos positing that “raising land values is the first rule of colonization” and even a staunch conservative like Rodrigues Torres defending land re-sale and speculation as entirely legitimate. Lastly, these debates consecrated companies as some of the leading beneficiaries of the projected bill. Some deputies raised important concerns, with one warning that under the proposed law “nothing would be easier than a foreign company taking over a great portion of some important territory.”Footnote ¹⁹ The projeto no. 94 plowed through those worries and passed the Chamber. However, once in the Senate, it stalled in a special commission until 1847, when Miguel Calmon called for discussing it once again.

Olinda, the Reluctant Regulator

In the intervening years, some conselheiros refused to idly wait for a land law to materialize and decided to draft an exacting ordinance to facilitate migrations in the meantime. The ordinance followed up on the 1843–1844 budget law, which had already expanded anchorage duty exemptions for colono vessels by overriding a previously set minimum of 100 colonos and instead stipulating exemptions in proportion to any number of passengers. The conselheiros’ ordinance was undersigned by Araújo Lima, who was very likely its leading author as suggested by similarities with policies he adopted later in 1857–1858. Other undersigners included Calmon, José da Costa Carvalho (the president of the Santos colonization company, see Chapter 3), and the authors of the initial projeto no. 94 draft – a roster that promised pathbreaking innovations.

Indeed, the ordinance broke new ground by defining what types of migrants counted toward anchorage exemptions. And for the first time it mandated the collection of individual information from colonos including age, gender (to identify unaccompanied young women purposefully disqualified from exemptions), smallpox scars, employment history, and family status. It also defined consular officers’ responsibilities, which included abiding by contractually agreed colono quotas and producing quarterly tallies of incomers. In exchange, consuls were incentivized with money prizes for arriving colonos at a rate of 100$ for every ten. In all, this innovative and ambitious ordinance exemplified the Conselho’s capacity to extra-legally shape the means of policy implementation and offered a path forward for ongoing colonization proposals.Footnote ²⁰ The timing proved crucial as three important proposals made their way to the Conselho in 1844: one from Dr. Carl von Martius, another from a German empresario, Hermann Blumenau, and a third from Pedro II’s sister, dona Francisca, princess of Joinville, who wished celebrate her marriage by establishing a German colony with the help of a Hamburg-based emigration society.Footnote ²¹

Araújo Lima, visconde de Olinda, stood out among his peers in handling these proposals by embracing a nuanced regulatory ethos best exemplified in his opinion on von Martius’s proposal. Surely, he would have preferred that the Chamber possessed the necessary codes to process such requests, but, absent those, Olinda took on the role of a reluctant regulator, and one who tempered his more reactionary peers’ spirits vis à vis complex requests such as the one at hand. Dr. Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius, the veteran botanist from the Austrian Scientific Expedition of 1817, wanted to know if he could start a colony in Brazil and asked Brazil’s consul in London whether he could “form associations to promote emigration to the Empire.” Von Martius knew Brazil well and had long corresponded with Brazilian savants and diplomats like Bento da Silva Lisboa. More practically, he had also consulted the 1840 and 1843 land bills and had already found a patron in count Adalbert von der Recke, a famous literato who owned an establishment for poor children. He thus proposed his conditions for a colonization enterprise by requesting automatic naturalization of emigrants, local control of a district council and standing military corps, and the exclusion of Brazilians, who would require special license to live in his colony. As would be expected based on this last condition, the Conselho strenuously rejected the scheme. Vasconcelos and Miranda Ribeiro even equated any such concession to “ceding a portion of the Empire’s territory” to “an independent society” bent on exploiting Brazilians.Footnote ²²

Olinda, in turn, issued a separate, more subtle, opinion. Indeed, his assessment evinced impressive learning gains that allowed him to propose potential correctives to colonizing efforts to date by establishing a balance between private requests and government expectations. “The two companies formed in this city and in Bahia to promote [colonization],” he recalled, “are nonexistent: and the colonos they brought did not behave in a way that would make it desirable for others to come.” Olinda acknowledged that colonos were necessary to strengthen the country through their “agglomeration.” Discarding the United States and Canada as viable models for Brazilian colonization, he looked instead to Russia as a more suitable exemplar and to Australia, particularly the Swan river colony, where the government granted land to a company that in turn sold it to private individuals under certain obligations. In Olinda’s view, government had to provide concessions to continue “to excite private interests” while acknowledging that “establishing a colony entails enormous investment.” With these ideas in mind, Olinda interpreted many of von Martius’s ideas positively, agreeing with establishing German schools, Protestant churches, and a local district council elected by popular vote, but objecting to Brazilians’ exclusion and military exemptions if colonos naturalized.Footnote ²³

Olinda’s nuance did not preclude the Conselho’s stringent exercise of its gatekeeping attributions, both in this case and when van Lede’s speculations around the Société Belge-Brasilienne came to light. After the 1842 decree that authorized him to proceed with organizing a company, van Lede had tried to sell his rights to a third party and then incorporated the enterprise in Belgium without having done so in Brazil. In the new company statutes approved in Belgium, the company’s operating capital was one million francs lower than the amount approved in Brazil with the 1842 decree, allegedly because that was the quantity claimed by van Lede as compensation. In response to these irregularities, the Empire minister canceled obligations toward van Lede, arguing that the Chamber had rightfully authorized similar privileges to another proponent. Van Lede protested that he had incorporated the company in “good faith” and had already entered obligations to creditors and emigration agents. He also warned that this unilateral contractual withdrawal would cast a grave shadow over the “Imperial signature.”

The Conselho issued a withering – and sobering – response. Approved statutes in Belgium, it clarified, did not extend to Brazil, and if van Lede made promises to any future shareholders he “would only fool them regarding the true state of affairs.” Conselheiros questioned the attempt to relay the privileges to third parties and the negligence involved in commencing an emigration drive without having demarcated lands or launched share subscriptions. These “preparatory acts to organize companies” fell on the Société’s agents, the Conselho concluded. Nevertheless, the Conselho agreed that the Société deserved governmental protection but only as long as van Lede submitted new statutes to both legislative houses for consideration.Footnote ²⁴

As an adamant regulatory watchdog, the Conselho de Estado compensated for the absence of codified colonization regulations by avidly identifying procedural problems and designing protocols to solve them. In doing so, it helped to refine the form and function of the government’s administrative powers. Still, its interest in streamlining petitionary and concessionary processes left many questions unanswered, even if it produced only tentative responses to the questions of how much decision-making the government should cede to company managers and shareholders abroad (very little) and what status overseas incorporations should enjoy in Brazil (none, unless sanctioned by imperial authorities). More importantly, however, in its engagement with colonization the Conselho demonstrated that it was not an extra-political entity designed exclusively to preserve conservative dominance, enhance monarchical power, and stubbornly block industrial and corporate development. Rather, as the regulatory body most closely linked to the monarch, the Conselho, and reluctant conselheiros like Olinda in particular, sought to modernize migrant-recruitment protocols and safeguard government interests from contractual breaches by companies incorporated elsewhere. Paradigmatically, Olinda’s efforts synthesized decades of political experience and business experiments into uniform policy responses.

Rio de Janeiro: Colonization Central

Rio de Janeiro stood to benefit disproportionately from the new anchorage rules as the busiest port region in the country, and it would do so thanks in large measure to Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho. Aureliano had served as judge, president of São Paulo, and minister. He was a popular public works advocate although he also tainted his reputation by allegedly orchestrating the Majority coup from the shadows, earning the moniker of the “Achilles of the majority movement.” Yet, from his years in the majority cabinet as well as the conservative ministry that followed, and through his long stint as Rio’s provincial president from 1844–1848, Aureliano devoted his energy to institutionalizing colonization activities in ways that strengthened and aggrandized the Crown. His closeness to the emperor incited further accusations in 1847 that he led a “palace faction” keeping Pedro II under thrall. In fact, the emperor and his close friend had much uniting them, including their commitment to colonization.Footnote ²⁵

Throughout the 1840s, Aureliano gave pride of place to colonization matters. With the help of his diplomatic officers and his brother Saturnino as the head of customs in Rio, he sought to repurpose government-directed colonization. When the chargé d’affaires in the Hanse Cities informed him of the exponential growth of emigrant exits from Bremen and of growing competition of Java coffee in Hamburg, Aureliano targeted Hamburg syndic Karl as a potential investor and patron of emigration to Brazil.Footnote ²⁶ As an emigration promoter, Sieveking believed that durable emigration flows required the receiving country to cover travel costs and sell land to emigrants, but rather than Brazil, he was then negotiating with the New Zealand Company to establish a German colony on Chatham island. His plans changed when the British prime minister prohibited the company from selling colonial lands to a foreign power and incorporated the islands to New Zealand territory.Footnote ²⁷ Brazil’s chargé took advantage of this and followed up on Sieveking’s earlier interest in acquiring land near São Paulo, Santa Catarina, or other ports, suggesting that Aureliano’s ministry was ready to compete with some of the top colonization companies of the time.

Aureliano also hired a colonization agent, Dr. Georg Friedrich Schmidt, who became a most productive paid employee of the Brazilian delegation. Where Schäffer and others had incited public flare-ups, Schmidt stamped out fires with his memórias and press releases. In mid-1842, he even publicly confronted the US consul in Bremen, an “improvised agent” of the New Zealand Company, over his attacks on Brazilian emigration drives.Footnote ²⁸ And he learned how to sell Brazil’s advantages. In 1844, he ordered Brazilian soil samples to study their properties and inform emigrants about potential crops and yields. Schmidt’s work even continued to regale Aureliano with prized information long after his ministry, including on the Texas German Colonization Society’s recruitment ploys in 1844.Footnote ²⁹

Aureliano indeed paid close attention to Bremen’s and Hamburg’s growing importance as emigrant exit ports. All the same, he eyed emergent industrial regions such as Belgium, where he authorized Charles van Lede’s appointment as vice-consul, paving the way for his company run, and issued instructions for the consul general to aid Parigot with migrant recruitment in Brussels.Footnote ³⁰ Aureliano’s ministerial exit interrupted and complicated this avid colonization advocacy. Yet, against his conservative foes’ wishes, Aureliano was still able to leverage the emperor’s favor. He not only kept his brother as top customs officer but also managed to obtain Rio’s presidency by the emperor’s direct indication.Footnote ³¹

At the head of Brazil’s top province, Aureliano continued to shepherd colonization, especially Belgian endeavors like the Pedra Lisa colony. He made good use of the provincial law of 30 May 1840 authorizing Rio’s president to contract companies for the establishment of agricultural colonies and inaugurated the Comissão Central Directora da Colonização (Central Commission for Directing Colonization). This organ aligned the provincial government with the Empire ministry after its 1843 reform, particularly with its new fourth section focusing on “agriculture, cattle-ranching, mining, colonization and indigenous civilization.” As provincial president, Aureliano directly managed the Comissão, setting it up for a relatively long institutional life, as it remained in operation as a stand-alone provincial bureau until 1876.Footnote ³²

With the new Commissão at hand, soon into his presidency Aureliano mobilized plans for a grand model colony. If, as Vasconcelos famously said, “Aureliano sculpted his name on the foundations of our monarchy” due to his inside influence, to repay the favor Aureliano sought to sculpt the emperor’s name on the fluminense palisade. Petrópolis, or “Pedro’s city,” as the projected royal colony was christened, would become Pedro II’s summer retreat and a model colony for Brazilian and foreign entrepreneurs. Its altitude and distance from the Court provided a sanitary respite from the fevers that periodically beset Rio. It was also close enough that, while staying there, the emperor could quickly return to the Court to attend to emergencies. Petrópolis also gave visibility to multiple road construction projects beyond the Estrela road and well into Minas.Footnote ³³ Its layout was the work of Julius Friedrich Koeler, the German engineer supervising the Estrela road, who designed a seigneurial city with a bucolic touch – long mainstreets surrounded by German-named districts, each traversed by canals or streams feeding well-demarcated smallholds (Figure 4.1).Footnote ³⁴

Figure 4.1 Projected land plots and canal works in Petrópolis (1846)

AMI, Cartografia-RJ-PT-1846, “Planta de Petrópolis do ano de 1846, mandada levantar pelo então presidente da província do Rio de Janeiro, Aureliano de Souza e Oliveira Coutinho” (1846).

Image courtesy of the Arquivo do Museu Imperial.

Koeler’s contributions to prop up Petrópolis put in evidence important continuities with prior colonization efforts and underlined the role of private initiative. Koeler had already interacted closely with the SPC when, years prior, he took in the German colonos from the Sydney-bound Justine for the Estrela road works (see Chapter 3). At that time, he found out about Córrego Seco, one of the emperor’s properties up in the mountains, and petitioned the central government for permission to start his own colonization business. As his partner for the proposed venture, Koeler chose colonization agent Louis Friedrich Kalkmann, one of Schäffer’s protégés (see Chapter 2).Footnote ³⁵ The Conselho responded with a cold reminder that such a petition “should be regulated with a general law, and not through favors.” But Olinda figured among the conselheiros overseeing this request and as a devout monarchist may have sympathized with the plans already voiced by mordomo (chamberlain) Paulo Barbosa, the undeclared patron of Petrópolis as an imperial colony. Koeler did not receive a company charter but did obtain an appointment as director of the colony, which he held until his suspicious death in 1847.Footnote ³⁶

For years following its founding in 1845, foreigners marveled at Petrópolis. Fleeing the yellow fever at the port, Argentinian exile Domingo Faustino Sarmiento spent several weeks there in 1852, meeting frequently with Pedro II. On his return to Rio, he discussed immigration with minister Carneiro Leão and reported being “enchanted” by Petrópolis. He included glowing remarks on the colony in his famous recollection of the war against Rosas published in Brazil, even if he later published unflattering opinions about Brazilian migration policy.Footnote ³⁷ By then, the colony had grown considerably to a population of 2,959 individuals, of whom almost half were Prussian, 45 percent minors (1,336), and only 24 percent Brazilian (715).Footnote ³⁸ With time, Petrópolis facilitated colono settlement along road projects into Minas, as recounted by a student of von Martius who visited Brazil in 1865. Telling of how the trip from Petrópolis to Juiz de Fora could be completed in 10 or 12 hours along a macadam road, Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz spoke of the rest stops along the way, all styled like Swiss chalets and marking numerous German colonies. Like many Brazilians at the time, Agassiz remarked that “colonization schemes assumed a more definite and settled character” only after the abolition of the slave trade in 1850, when in fact plans for Petrópolis had already laid the groundwork in 1845–1846, as had a special diplomatic mission to Europe that tasked Miguel Calmon with exploring potential partnerships beyond the United Kingdom, for which he used colonization as a powerful intermediary.Footnote ³⁹

Colonization’s Diplomacy

Calmon’s long ministerial record prepared him for a mission to expand Brazil’s fledgling “economic diplomacy” and maneuver around British pressures as the Anglo-Brazilian treaty of 1827 and the commercial treaty of 1831 expired.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the United Kingdom jockeyed for treaty renewals to include a slave trade ban, Brazilian ministers weighed approaching Prussia, then at the head of the German customs union known as the Zollverein, as a potential partner to counterbalance British influence. In response, British ministers calculated a more forceful approach. As Anglo-Brazilian relations deteriorated, Calmon set out on a mission with multiple remits, including lobbying in Britain for the abolition of differential duties, obtaining British and French support against Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and producing a new commercial treaty with Prussia. Calmon set out as a seasoned statesman and, importantly, as one conversant in the art of colonization, a powerful lever in the negotiations ahead.Footnote ⁴¹

From the outset, the British government appeared unswayable. A mounting free trade movement worried British ministers about how to preserve a competitive edge for colonial products, especially sugar, if protectionist barriers fell.Footnote ⁴² Yet Brazilian markets remained important to British commerce, as a Liverpool shipping lobby reminded the prime minister Robert Peel by pleading for a treaty renewal as British preferential duties expired. To oppose restrictions on Brazilian sugar and coffee in new negotiations, Liverpudlian merchants highlighted that slave imports were already illegal and that US cotton was imported at a nominal duty despite being produced by slaves.Footnote ⁴³ Other Brazil-related British industries piled on this pressure. The English manager of the Imperial Mining Association, George Vincent Duval, foresaw that higher import duties could apply to the company in the United Kingdom because of its dependence on slavery and concocted a British government–subsidized emigration plan to whitewash the company’s reliance on slavery and avoid higher duties. Imperial Mining was already plagued by reports on the conditions of its enslaved laborers, the children of whom Duval once suggested placing on treadmills to power machinery.Footnote ⁴⁴ If his ruse worked, the company would have likely avoided higher duties. At the opposite end of these pressures and proposals, Lord Ripon, the Board of Trade secretary, championed a tougher stance to replace Brazil altogether. Ripon coaxed Peel to look for alternatives to Brazilian commodities. In his view, lifting Java sugar prohibitions in India would channel the surplus to Britain at affordable prices, and Java would consequently displace Brazil as a market for British manufactures.Footnote ⁴⁵

Preferential rights or differential duties, depending on how the question was posed or by whom, were at the root of these considerations and of international commercial accords more generally at the time of Calmon’s mission. Yet his instructions encompassed strategic aims that transcended tariffs and duties. One of his prime goals was to secure British and French support for a joint intervention in the southern confines of Brazil and Uruguay, then under threat of invasion by Juan Manuel de Rosas. As soon as Calmon arrived in London in mid-October 1844, he sought out Lord Aberdeen, only to be kept waiting for weeks. Meetings did not produce the expected outcomes, as Calmon failed to secure military commitments from the British and later from the French, with the former dead set on the slavery question and the latter still harboring resentments over border skirmishes between Pará and Cayenne.

Berlin, however, held higher hopes. For years, Sturz had recommended Prussia as a potential partner based on his close assessments of the rapidly expanding Zollverein customs union. In addition, the Brazilian Empire already possessed commercial ties with the Hanse cities and had considered proposals for reciprocal navigation rights from the German kingdoms of Oldenburg and Hanover. Calmon arrived in Berlin in the middle of winter in 1845, with the British government and Ripon himself following his every move out of concern that Brazil would secure a partner that did not distinguish between slave- and free-grown sugar.Footnote ⁴⁶

Negotiations in Prussia moved slowly at first but were greatly aided by the topic of emigration. Abrantes speculated that the foreign minister, baron Heinrich von Bülow, purposely delayed his dealings to obtain rights beyond mere reciprocity. Bülow recriminated Brazil’s failure to seek an earlier accord, considering its statesmen knew that Prussia possessed no colonies of its own. He lowballed initial offers: in exchange for improved differential rights, Prussia would turn a blind eye to emigration to Brazil, a concession both symbolic and unnecessary. Indeed, at the time, Petrópolis had restored some prestige to Brazil as a destination, thanks in part to promoters like Günther Fröbel, a printer who opened a Brazil-focused emigration agency in Rudolstadt (Thuringia) in 1845 and started a promotional newspaper, the Allgemeine Auswanderung-Zeitung.Footnote ⁴⁷ And in 1844–1845, as Abrantes noted, at least thirty “patriotic associations” dedicated to emigration were active in German territories. The one remaining concern for Abrantes was the continuing reports of abuses by emigration agents and the endless allusions to “white slavery.” In response to these, the Great Duchy of Hesse, Bavaria, Prussia, and Württemberg began demanding pre-approved contracts and proof of solvency on the part of emigrants – Bülow could certainly help to roll these back. Gradually, the two statesmen found common ground under the assumption that any treaty would depend on emigration “to establish the closest relationships between the two countries and increase the consumption of German products.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet, as if by a fit of jealousy, exactly as Prussian negotiations moved forward, the British Parliament passed the Aberdeen Act on 8 August 1845. Long seen as an aggressive ultimatium against Brazilian slave contraband, the new law disincentivized Prussian interest in a Brazilian treaty by implicitly calling the German kingdom to its own treaty obligations against the slave trade. Further diminishing Abrantes’s prospects, Bülow’s deteriorating health led to his replacement with baron Karl Ernst von Canitz, a veteran envoy to Istanbul and Vienna whose primary interests were to reconstitute a German Confederacy with Austria and treat all countries trading with the Zollverein on an equal footing.Footnote ⁴⁹ Abrantes adapted by returning to negotiations with smaller states like Oldenburg, Hanover, and Belgium, while offering new incentives to von Canitz, including access to Paraguayan markets. But all this was to little effect. A new Sugar Duties Act approved in London in 1846 repealed the British Corn Laws and opened the way for phasing out sugar duties, including slave-grown, which also took the wind out of the Abrantes mission.

Geopolitical and commercial calculations shifted tremendously during Abrantes’s travels, but colonization remained a bedrock concern whatever the outcome of the mission. In 1846, Abrantes published Memória sobre meios de promover a colonização in Berlin, a propagandist exposé peddling Brazil as a safe destination and borrowing ideas from the Frankfurt Geographical Society, regional gazettes, and European diplomats. This memória marked an important shift from Calmon’s earlier focus on a single private company. Rather than rave about company-led colonization, even as the CCB’s ex-president, Abrantes now advocated for government oversight, believing that companies could expedite government aims but required judicious oversight given their dysfunctional tendencies. Providing “free land concessions and other favors to Companies” was fine. But Abrantes cautioned against the “many catastrophes” of prior efforts, singling out “the spirit of speculation and profit, the waste of funds, patronage, and the conflicts and discords among Agents” as “vices inseparable from companies.” Far from a mea culpa, the memória mentioned van Lede’s Société as an example of a company employing “tricks and intrigues” that justified a more concerted “public protection and direction for emigrations.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Abrantes also referred to a disastrous recruitment drive that gave his mission one last but very meaningful objective, namely, to restore public trust in emigration to Brazil.

This disastrous drive, which I refer to as the Delrue affair, began on 17 June 1844 when Aureliano’s provincial government commissioned an emigrant drive to the merchant house of Charles Delrue, Brazil’s vice-consul in Dunkirk and the Paris agent for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. Within months, the firm recruited 1,823 Germans and shipped them to Brazil via Ostende in 13 different voyages billed at 134:531$000 – almost two-and-a-half times the special loan obtained by the province to supply its annual budget for colonization and the Estrella roadworks.Footnote ⁵¹

Irregularities immediately arose that revealed attempts by Delrue and his men to maximize their earnings. Delrue’s agent Carlos [Charles] Haack reportedly paid the dues owed by one widowed colono who had helped his children escape from the depot at Estrela.Footnote ⁵² Haack also solicited a 5– to 6–league property under provincial law no. 226 of 30 May 1840, which authorized the president to grant lands, and asked for permission to transport colonos directly to the port nearest to his lands. He demanded exemptions from imports and land sale taxes and a property title to facilitate leasing parcels to colonos. These indiscretions paled in comparison to colonos’ and officials’ reports that Delrue’s agents were double-billing by obtaining reimbursements from Rio’s provincial government and charging colonos up to 60 francs before embarkation.Footnote ⁵³ Doing this allowed Delrue to cut losses in the event of an unforeseen accident as befell one of the vessels, the Marie, which hit an Atlantic storm on its way to Rio but whose repairs Delrue’s insurers refused to cover, alleging that their cost exceeded those needed to revamp the brig to its previous state (Delrue sued and won).Footnote ⁵⁴

Delrue’s profiteering was germane to colonization, but Brazilian statesmen would not tolerate it this time. They suspended further contracts with Delrue and instructed Sturz to attack him as a scammer in the press. In a Cologne gazette, Sturz claimed Delrue had lured 700 emigrants to Dunkirk only to overcharge them. In response, Delrue cited lack of witnesses and dismissed Sturz as a jealous competitor and a failed emigration promoter. But a colono writing to the same newspaper later blamed Delrue for false promises and lamented the impact his schemes had on Petrópolis.Footnote ⁵⁵ In truth, however, Petrópolis also fostered fraudulent practices, as major Koeler himself had appropriated lands titled to a colono in order to benefit a close friend.Footnote ⁵⁶ Colono discontent against false promises and abuses manifested in growing unrest. Some housed in the Police quarters at Estrela inflicted “damages [to] the farm plots and crofts close to the city” and were swiftly shipped to the southern provinces. And, as jobs began to run short in Petrópolis, rivalries arose between German and Portuguese dayworkers in 1847.Footnote ⁵⁷

With the Delrue affair at least, the authorities made haste to contain the emergency. Aureliano’s brother Saturnino personally housed many colonos. Provincial vice-president Cândido Baptista de Oliveira tried to find accommodations for them, housing some at the Police station, employing others in waterworks around the Court, and pushing the rest toward Petrópolis. He also repurposed the SPC’s old depot in Rio, opened a new one in Niterói and in the Estrela port, and vigorously subcontracted for services for these locales, beginning with clean water providers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Migrants drove some changes by actively demanding better conditions. Those still unemployed after a few months requested allowances to rent their own living quarters, as their debt grew daily as long as they stayed in government-run facilities. They also suggested payment plans by monthly installments, rather than on sight upon exit.Footnote ⁵⁹

Remarkably, other provinces reached for a Delrue contract even after the scandal. A São Paulo law in 1846 authorized the provincial president to contract Delrue directly, but the Conselho struck it down eight months later. Nonetheless, the incident gave the Vergueiros of São Paulo enough of a head start to enter negotiations with Hamburg senator Christian Mathias Schröder, who eventually became their colono recruiter. By March 1847, Schröder had readied 190 colonos to send to Santos, jumpstarting the Vergueiros’ colono-provisioning emporium, which centered in São Paulo but – contrary to the accepted narrative – had derived directly from Rio’s colonization dealings and more specifically from the fallout of the Delrue affair.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Abrantes mission to London, Paris, and Berlin did not attain its objectives in part due to the difficulty inherent to negotiations, in part due to active British attempts to sabotage them. Nevertheless, Abrantes succeeded in spurring emigration at a key juncture before the 1848 revolutions. This propagandist push did come at a high price, as one of the resulting migrant conveyance schemes quickly devolved into a scam. The Delrue affair forced some Brazilian statesmen into an emergency response but at the same time inspired others to seek contracts with the same commercial house or other similar ones. In many ways, then, Abrantes and his pro-emigration campaigning propitiated a renewed colonization proposal rush by the end of the decade, which in turn exerted the necessary pressure for a Land Law approval at last.

Palatial Ripples in the Business of Colonization

When the projeto no. 94 resurfaced in the Senate in 1847, Bernardo de Vasconcelos poked fun at Nicolau Vergueiro’s change of opinion since 1826. “Quantum mutatus ab illo! [how much (he) has changed],” he exclaimed, in reference to Vergueiro’s recent support for “that city, or whatever they call it, of Petrópolis.” But Vergueiro in fact had little sympathy for recent Rio-centered colonization initiatives. He claimed the province was “set on transporting as many miserable Germans as exist in Europe” to the detriment of private colonization pursuits.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet, in reality, Vergueiro was deeply indebted to the palatial drive for colonization, out of whose vestiges his own family fortunes rose steeply in 1847.

Disgruntled liberals were not the only ones opposing a palatial brand of colonization. Conservatives Rodrigues Torres, Araújo Viana, and Miranda Ribeiro tried to cut down on such efforts by motioning for the indefinite deferral of any colonization bill involving negotiations with companies until a land demarcation system was established.Footnote ⁶² Their success would have indeed constituted a “veto of the barons,” as José Murilo de Carvalho referred to coffee planters’ sabotaging of the eventual Land Law of 1850. But, by then, áulicos had succeeded in turning the tide in favor of colonization, spurring new plans that obligated remaining holdouts to finally approve a law gridlocked for a quarter century.

As Petrópolis began construction and Calmon finalized his mission, a trove of domestic proposals streamed in. In 1845, Joaquim José de Sequeira yet again advanced a proposal, this time for a Colonization Bank for Maranhão’s cotton growers.Footnote ⁶³ The following year, Eduardo Racine and Pedro Affonso de Carvalho floated a new company to establish a colony named after the prince Affonso Pedro, born in 1845. Affonsiada would house 6,000 German-speaking colonos while espousing recruitment practices opposed to “the most sordid and soulless avarice of certain commercial houses and ship captains.” The Conselho turned down Affonsiada almost exactly as Pedro II’s firstborn died, but similar enterprises carried on, including one led by the brothers Ottoni in Minas.Footnote ⁶⁴ Concurrently, Brazilian intellectuals of different ages took to the pages of the AIN, with a younger generation of Auguste Comte readers like Frederico Leopoldo César Burlamaque and followers of traditional political economy like Carlos Augusto Taunay mulling how to “transition” from slave to free labor. Foreign minister Limpo de Abreu ordered his second-in-command, Joaquim Nascentes de Azambuja, to translate parts of Wakfield’s England and America and distribute a thousand copies.Footnote ⁶⁵ The “art of colonization,” as its opening read, thus became an obligatory subject of reflection for skeptical politicians. The pressure increased when they heard that the foreign companies that ran afoul in Brazil simply moved to more promising colonization settings: van Lede’s Société had apparently decamped for Texas, and Delrue began shipping emigrants from Ostende to Oran while pursuing a contract with the Venezuelan government.Footnote ⁶⁶

The rise of the Hamburger Colonisations-Vereins (Hamburg Colonization Society, hereafter HCV) consequentially vindicated áulicos’ activities and forcefully obligated their critics to fall in line. Emerging at a politically opportune moment of increasing emigration from Europe, the company’s involvement with the royal household preempted opposition. The company emerged also unexpectedly and accidentally from áulicos’ schemes and because it also implicated Vergueiro, it forced him to moderate his views. As mentioned above, with the collapse of the Delrue contract and São Paulo province’s effort to take it over, Vergueiro hired Christian Mathias Schröder, a liberal banking scion who succeeded his father in the senate of the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg in 1821 and who approached Abrantes during his mission with a plan for an Association for the Protection of German Emigrants to Brazil.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Vergueiro’s agent, Schröder acquired necessary experience and ingratiated himself to palatial figures like Bento da Silva Lisboa and Saturnino in the successive cabinets of 1846–1847, which also briefly included Vergueiro.Footnote ⁶⁸

Meanwhile, Schröder found opportunity in the emigrations spurred by the political and military upheavals of 1848. The First Schleswig-Holstein War between Denmark and Prussia displaced a great number of people while the February Revolution that toppled Louis-Philippe in France swept in from Paris and across German territories, propping up the liberal order of the new Frankfurt-based German Confederation. From 1848 onward, artisans began flocking from Silesia, Württemberg, the Grand Duchy of Posen, and other Prussian kingdoms to Texas, Guatemala, Chile, the United States, and New Holland. As numbers picked up, Dr. Schmidt publicized Brazil as a destination, sharing one colono’s testimony in the free-trade weekly Deutscher Freihafen. Writing to relatives in Hesse-Darmstadt, the colono recounted the warm reception and light workload in Vergueiro’s Limoeira plantation.Footnote ⁶⁹

This messaging instigating German emigrants prodded Hamburg’s free-traders to imagine a robust commercial feedback loop powered by migration and Brazilian coffee. As Brazil’s consul in Berlin, Sturz had already set the stage by drafting a prospectus for a Hamburg-Brazilian steamship line that was later taken up by leading Hamburg merchant and member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, Ernst von Merck. Furthermore, when Frankfurt eased taxes, it removed internal transport costs hobbling emigration; and when in 1848 it issued the “Fundamental Rights of the German People,” a charter stipulating that “the liberty of emigrating cannot be limited by the state,” the Assembly further propelled emigration, with entire guilds – from miners to weavers – weighing new destinations. The Brazilian chargé, Schmidt, called his superiors’ attention to Hamburg’s ascendancy as an outgoing port for migrations to Brazil and cautioned them regarding existing competition by flagging one “association of artisans” torn between Adelaide and São Leopoldo.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, hopes for a robust emigration from Hamburg came crashing down when a reactionary wave overtook the 1848 revolutions and shuttered the Frankfurt Assembly.

By then, however, the prince of Joinville, whose father Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans was the leading target of the ‘48 revolutionaries, had placed his sights on Brazil. Married in 1842 to Pedro II’s youngest sister, princess Francisca, the French prince had become co-proprietor of 25 square leagues in Santa Catarina as part of his wife’s dowry. The Joinvilles saw Schröder’s plans in particular as an appealing proposal to make use of those lands, and so they chose Léonce Aubé, the French vice-consul in Santa Catarina, to lead negotiations on their behalf. In their view, Aubé’s credentials as a graduate of the École Polytechinque, a Saint-Simonian hotbed responsible for renovating colonial policy in Algeria, qualified him perfectly for the task at hand.Footnote ⁷¹ On 16 March 1849, at the Château de Claremont in Surrey, where Louis Philippe and his family had exiled themselves, Aubé finalized a contract with Schröder in absentia, ceding eight square leagues to the company in addition to other rights unimaginable for enterprises with less prestigious patrons, including permission for vessels to disembark directly at the port of São Francisco close to the colony. Nonetheless, the contract heaped greater responsibilities on Schröder than on the Joinvilles, who could void it at will and would only respond to any feud through arbitration.Footnote ⁷²

Because the contract involved a member of the Brazilian royal household, the Conselho de Estado had to vet it. By the end of 1849, the Conselho’s Empire and Treasury sections heard a request from the Joinvilles for special favors for the projected colony, including anchorage and consumption tax exemptions; naturalization of colonos per the Decree of 7 September 1846, which conferred citizenship immediately on a voluntary basis; exemption of military duties for a decade; funds for a Catholic and a Protestant priest; guarantees on freedom of cult; authorization to prohibit slavery and to validate colono contracts; freedom for its customs house to engage directly with foreign ports; and municipal institutions such as those found in Petrópolis. Olinda, Abrantes, and one other conselheiro sanctioned requests regarding duties and resolved other issues by reference to existing legislation – foreigners were already barred from serving in the military and the 1837 lei de locação de serviços applied to contracts. The conselheiros, however, took issue with the proposed “burgomasters” and the “extraordinary novelty” of requesting funds for a Protestant pastor.Footnote ⁷³

In a separate opinion, Vasconcelos rebuked his colleagues’ support for the company and underlined the futility of colonization by referring to Cuba’s booming sugar industry, which depended on the continuing slave trade rather than a robust Canary-island colono trade. By “caressing” such companies, Vasconcelos claimed, the Conselho made Brazilians inferior to foreigners, especially given the proponents’ scandalous requests, which amounted to a desire to live in a country of their own. Chastising the HCV as a profit-seeking enterprise, he concluded that a company like this was exclusively concerned with “its pecuniary interest,” hitting the target of the company’s true raison d’être.Footnote ⁷⁴

Notwithstanding Vasconcelos’s scathing (if accurate) remarks, the HCV cleared the Conselho and obtained the Chamber’s and the emperor’s approval in early 1850, forcing even Vasconcelos to moderate his view. As if capitulating, he declared, “let in as many colonos as can come to Brazil” – though never, he added, at the treasury’s expense.Footnote ⁷⁵ A decree officializing the contract in May pressured Brazilian lawmakers to hasten discussion on the land and colonization bill, and by the time Abrantes rose to defend it, hardly any of his colleagues would have dared defy the royal household’s colonization designs.Footnote ⁷⁶

Brazilian lawmakers buckled under an imperial authority expanded and channeled by palatial statesmen and finally passed the Land Law in September 1850. Shortly after, Schröder arranged his first shipment of about 118 Swiss and German colonos who departed aboard the Colon for Santa Catarina. In 1851, these were joined at the colony by an expedition of Norwegian Gold Rushers who had financed their own voyage to California but got stuck in Brazil when their ship arrived in unseaworthy conditions. Schröder welcomed them with a banquet where Norwegians, Swiss, and Germans intoned victorious war songs like “Schleswig-Holstein” into the night.Footnote ⁷⁷

* * *

In the years ahead, the Dona Francisca colony grew substantially. The HCV board requested further favors, including permission for colono vessels to load with salt, coal, and lumber to be sold in other Brazilian ports before returning to Hamburg with Brazilian goods. The Conselho refused. But by 1853, a collective calling itself the “Communal Council” of Dona Francisca asked the provincial president to recognize the colony as a Commune and allow local elections. When the consultation reached the Conselho, Olinda and two other conselheiros relented, suggesting that perhaps a district council that translated all its laws to French would be feasible.Footnote ⁷⁸ By then, the HCV had settled 1,100 of the 1,500 projected colonos. After successfully renewing its contract and obtaining repeated deferrals for its colono quotas, by 1888 the company brought 17,408 settlers to Santa Catarina.Footnote ⁷⁹ This outcome reflected the favors enjoyed by the HCV, which had been sanctioned by the Conselho but were regularized and institutionalized by the Land Law of 1850 and the company-friendly ordinance for its execution in 1854. But the Land Law was not simply a precedent that made this royal colony possible. Rather, it too was the result of the activities of busy palatial figures who previously carried colonization to the center of imperial policymaking and set out the conditions for the company to come into existence in the first place.

The fate of colonization as a business sphere overseen closely by government was decided by 1845 more than with the Land Law of 1850. Indeed, by 1845, Olinda began to perfect his views in the Conselho and then advanced a pathbreaking ordinance to aid emigration. Aureliano brought Petrópolis to life. Calmon negotiated with Prussia and contributed to new emigration waves to Brazil. Surely, none of these endeavors worked to perfection, as each attempted to respond to often intractable diplomatic and political conditions. Yet, in the midst of the violent back-and-forths between liberal and conservative administrations that characterized the first decade of Pedro II’s reign, áulicos charted a different path, relying on colonization to confer uniformity upon the Empire’s laws and to orchestrate state-sponsored efforts meant to model the possibilities of colonization endeavors, which were seen as abetting a bold new Brazilian diplomacy. Áulicos skillfully and consequentially outlined the vision for a private but regulated colonization that ultimately crystalized in the law. And companies helped them forge that vision.