At the break of dawn on 2 March 1826, colonization inspector Miranda Malheiro received the news of the Anna Luiza’s arrival. Aboard the Hamburg galley came 38 men, 35 women, 111 children, and 4 newborns plus 157 soldiers and 22 officers of different ranks recruited by Pedro I, emperor of Brazil (1822–1831). The ship had arrived four days earlier, but miscommunications between the Colonization Directorate and the deputy director of Telegraphs delayed the announcement and kept the 367 colonos onboard. Once alerted, Miranda Malheiro activated the protocol. Indisposed due to age, he sent his secretary, a minor poet later employed by the Empire ministry, to welcome the passengers. At the Navy dock, the ship’s consignee and the Low Countries’ consul in Rio awaited. Some cabinet members joined as the passengers landed. At this point, the Colonization Inspector’s official translator, himself a Saxony native, offered a welcome message ending with a spirited declamation. “Long Live our Emperor! Long live our Empress!” One can almost hear the silence of the weary travelers.Footnote ¹

After 88 days at sea, their voyage was anything but over. The non-military colonos were rapidly transported to a warehouse at Praia Grande, where they were fed and housed until authorities determined their final destination (Figure 2.1). Though roughshod as an accommodation, these installations across the bay from Rio became the first migrant reception center with any institutional mooring, as the warehouse was repurposed into transitory housing for colonos only by the Colonization Directorate’s initiative. The mercenaries, in turn, would soon depart on a coasting vessel to the warfront in southern Brazil, where a secessionist conflict in the Cisplatina province had prompted Pedro I into a full-on war with Buenos Aires starting in 1825.

Figure 2.1 Roughshod novelty: Warehouse storage area in Praia Grande (present-day Niterói)

BNd-Iconografia C.I,4,10, Thomas Ender, “Armazém,” (detail, watercolor) in “Zeichnungen von Schiffen, Gräsern und Figuren” (c.1817).

Courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil.

The emperor reveled in these shipments. Word had it that he visited his foreign conscripts daily in the Praia Vermelha barracks next to the Pão de Açúcar boulder guarding the entry to Guanabara Bay. Only his German stallions elicited greater interest according to what empress Leopoldina told her confidante and Pedro I’s own purveyor of colonos and German warmbloods, Georg Anton von Schäffer. By Leopoldina’s own suggestion, Pedro I actually named Schäffer chargé d’affaires in the free Hanseatic cities and the lower Saxony with orders to recruit 2,000 soldiers.Footnote ² A beautiful thing to behold these uniformed soldiers were in Pedro’s eyes – so much so that in his visit to Salvador to rally for Cisplatina support, he ordered an additional contingent from Lower Saxony to discipline Bahia’s troubled ranks.Footnote ³

Anna Luiza’s landing, the ceremonials held for it, the personnel employed, and the military destination of most of its men all demonstrated the rapid gains in colonization management at the hand of the Brazilian executive. These features also evinced a growing specialization in migrant recruitment and reception. Overseas, Schäffer lured young conscripts under Pedro I’s direct orders, signed contracts, and shipped these and other colonos at cost to either imperial coffers or private individuals. In Rio, a special directorate with its own officials and translators greeted and funneled them to agricultural or military tasks.

These gains came at a price, however. After Brazilian independence, prince Pedro initially sanctioned a Constitutional Assembly in 1823 but arbitrarily shuttered it and exiled its leaders before its proceedings concluded. Then, he handpicked a posse of counselors to write what became the Brazilian Constitution of 1824. Under the constitutional monarchical system, Pedro I’s authority clashed continuously with a novice parliament possessing a heightened consciousness of its attributions.Footnote ⁴ In this scenario, colonization became a crucial battleground. Executive control of colonization put the emperor at odds with the fledgling legislative power by secretly carrying out unsanctioned military recruitments abroad, and monopolizing petitionary processes related to colonization, which widened the chasm between the two developing spheres of sovereign power. Colonization therefore came to embody a foundational constitutional impasse that only resolved itself when foreign troops inflamed nativist rallying calls against the emperor and gave disenchanted lawmakers necessary leverage to foreclose Pedro I’s options and force him to abdicate.

This chapter traces the successive political uses and meanings of colonization in the first decade of Brazilian independence. Colonization became a site of contention between the constituted executive and legislative powers precisely because legal frameworks to direct migrations and land distribution remained at large. In the absence of statutes, monarch and lawmakers competed fiercely for the jurisdiction of colonizing endeavors as well as for their meaning. Yet, far from a simple tug of war, this constitutional conflict was riven and swayed by multiple military conflicts, including the Cisplatina war (1825–1828) and the Portuguese Civil War sparked by the royal succession crisis (1828–1834), not to mention the colono riots that ransacked Rio in 1828. And, still, even after his abdication in 1831, Pedro, known thereafter as the duke of Bragança, continued to haunt Brazilian lawmakers’ attempts to repurpose colonization to their ends, as they feared rumors of a plan by the erstwhile emperor to “recolonize” Brazil with foreign mercenaries. The executive’s expedient application of colonization toward immediate political ends frustrated efforts to manage colonization proposals under a uniform legal framework during this period. Nonetheless, executive monopoly of colonization did establish the first recruitment and conveyance mechanisms that would make possible future colono transport and arrival policies. Hence, these mechanisms awoke Brazilian statesmen to the utility of colonizing endeavors in times of crisis and beyond.

Constituting Empire: Independence, Colonization and the Executive

The new prince regent Pedro swore to preserve the unity of the Crown as his father João VI rushed to the Lisbon Courts. But by 1822, Pedro adhered to the call for Brazilian independence. Initially hailed as a unifying force, newly minted emperor Pedro I soon instigated profound disagreements with a rising cadre of Brazilian statesmen about the mode and style of government most appropriate for the Brazilian Empire. Notably, colonization became a symptom, a lever, and a casualty of these differences. The emperor and Brazilian lawmakers understood the importation of foreigners, many of whom directly served Pedro I, in radically divergent ways. Their difference in perspective not only reflected opposing viewpoints about sovereign attributions but contributed directly to a deepening cleavage between the exective and the legislative that set back attempts to codify and regulate colonization for many years.

Both Pedro I and the Chamber of Deputies installed in 1826 agreed on peopling as a kind of panacea that could drive economic growth, protect sovereign territory, and address many other post-independence challenges. José Bonifácio set the bases for this view by orchestrating an executive scheme for importing colonos that would soon antagonize the Constitutional Assembly. In August 1822, he instructed Felisberto Caldeira Brant Pontes, Brazil’s new chargé in London, to hire several fully armed and equipped “Irish regiments … under the guise of colonos” in case Portugal invaded. As news that the Portuguese Cortes procured loans for a 4,000-strong army to storm Pará, Brant Pontes scrambled to gather sailors and navy supplies. He sent 170 sailors and 6 officers by early 1823, taking advantage of the high unemployment rate among British Navy officers. When he got wind of the Holy Alliance’s plan to withdraw diplomats from Madrid and restore absolutism in Spain, he hurriedly sent another 265 men and a dozen officers, focusing on conscripts who could be “employed as colonos upon the termination of their military service.”Footnote ⁵

But José Bonifácio also used colonization to leverage support from Europe’s conservative monarchies. In his instructions for a secret mission to Austria, Prussia, and the German states, he told Schäffer to gather intelligence on the Holy Alliance while recruiting soldiers to establish a military colony in Brazil “with more or less the same organization as that of the Cossacks on the Don and Ural rivers.” The reference to Russian military colonies betrayed a fascination with tsar Alexander I’s campaigns against religious sectarians in the Russian steppes. Even though Russians regarded Brazil as little more than a jocular moniker for Siberia, their “Russian Brazil,” for José Bonifácio Russia epitomized a resurgent monarchism.Footnote ⁶ Fashioning colonos into Cossacks, José Bonifácio sought to appeal to the Holy Alliance’s imagination but also its pecuniary interests. “Make European powers,” he instructed his minister in Vienna, “feel the importance of Brazil as similar to that of their Italian possessions, which could open with us an advantageous commerce….” However, in 1826 Austria’s prince Metternich rebuffed Brazilian efforts to convince Francis I, Pedro I’s father-in-law, to provide soldier-settlers for Brazil, citing Brazil’s lack of a “proper system” – a veiled way for an absolutist monarchist to criticize the inauguration of the Brazilian parliament. Luckily, José Bonifácio’s instructions to Schäffer also assimilated lessons from British colonies, indicating that soldiers with expired contracts would receive land in Minas Gerais or Bahia “on the same foot as the English colonization of New Holland and the Cape of Good Hope,” a reference that British dignitaries would understand as they brokered the recognition of Brazilian independence in 1824.Footnote ⁷

Colonization with mercenary soldiers strengthened Brazil’s defensive capabilities at the cost of political polarization. The new regiment of 2,532 mercenary soldiers and high officers easily resolved the dearth of recruits that drove the War minister to consider commuting sentences for prisoners who joined the navy and organizing artillery battalions with freedmen. But also, secretly hiring foreign conscripts under the emperor’s orders gave José Bonifácio an upper hand over adversaries, including those opposing these troops in the pages of radical liberal papers like Pernambuco’s Sentinella da Liberdade.Footnote ⁸

Moderates largely agreed on the need for a monarchical executive balanced by other powers, but controversies remained regarding the executive’s range of liberties within the other branches. Masonic lodges then consolidating under the umbrella of the Grande Oriente do Brasil fostered this debate, for which reason José Bonifácio tried to co-opt them and later eliminate them. After organizing a secret society known as the Apostolate, which envisioned a monarch with broad powers of intervention in other branches, he succeeded in becoming the Grande Oriente’s grão-mestre (headmaster). He then quickly pivoted against the lodge, instigating Pedro not only to banish his fellow Masons, whom he described as “Republicans assuming the guise of Monarchists,” but to proscribe all masonic activities. The move strengthened José Bonifácio’s hand in molding a strong executive from behind the scenes. Interestingly, some of those affected denounced his actions as a Holy Alliance scheme. Indeed, at the time, José Bonifácio also sought Vienna’s favor by secretly instructing his Austrian envoy to propose that Brazil could “gradually convert the republics in Spanish colonies back into monarchies,” a conceit that illustrated the magnitude of his plans.Footnote ⁹

A migrant crisis, however, brought colonization into discussion and obligated José Bonifácio to refer the matter to the Constitutional Assembly for it to oversee the very kind of migrant recruitments he had already started without its consent. In April 1823, the Germans from southern Bahia had allegedly walked back on their commitments to two recently arrived colono cohorts from Frankfurt totaling 259 individuals. District authorities in Ilhéus wrote to the government requesting emergency funds to feed and house the newcomers, who had arrived with the expectation of receiving land, shelter, and food rations for two years, as promised by German empresarios. The Assembly, whose delegates included José Bonifácio’s brothers, Martim Francisco and Antônio Carlos, appointed a special commission to oversee the petition and later recommended that colonos receive municipal lands as well as free agricultural tools and financial assistance for two years. The commission, whose majority hailed from Minas Gerais, also showed interest in alternative placements. “Because some colonos might be miners, weavers, tanners, etc., and as such could be adequately employed elsewhere,” it asked municipal officers to “send a list declaring their respective professions.”Footnote ¹⁰

In applying these recommendations, the Assembly walked a thin line between its mandate to draft the constituent bases of a new empire and to delimit the competent exercise of executive functions. The Andrada brothers did not oppose this as long as they were in power. They publicly defended equality among three prospective branches of government but privately preferred a strong executive that could keep lawmakers in check. Pedro I agreed. In his opening speech to the Constituent Assembly, he exhorted delegates to mold a constitution “in which the three powers are well divided so that none can self-arrogate rights that they are not entitled to, but instead are organized and harmonized in a way that makes it impossible for them to turn into each other’s enemy later in time.”Footnote ¹¹ With this outward appearance as faithful moderates and their opportunistic loosening of the bounds of executive authority, the Andradas successfully brought their political opponents to their knees. In clearing the way for a strong executive, the Andradas thus opened a road of no return for the young emperor’s ambitions and for the continuation of an unaccountable, confidential colonization project.

Yet in the following months, the Andradas’ newspaper, O Tamoio, strained the spirit of collaboration with an increasingly defensive Pedro when it joined a Lusophobic protestation against Portuguese subjects in government and military positions. Invectives reached a high pitch in a public manifestation on 5 November, when Martim Francisco and Antônio Carlos turned a pharmacist allegedly beaten by two Portuguese officers into a standard-bearer against all Portuguese and prodded a raucous crowd to call for the officers’ deportation or hanging. A week later, the Assembly found itself surrounded on all sides by Pedro’s imperial guard in a daring display of executive force. By day’s end, the emperor had issued a decree dissolving it.Footnote ¹² The Andradas, along with many delegates, were escorted to exile.

To draft a new constitution, Pedro I activated a Conselho de Estado (Council of State), a consultative body for the executive. The Conselho served as a conduit for a “fourth power” defined as the “moderating power” by Benjamin Constant on the basis of Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s distinction between royal and executive authority. As part of the moderating power, the Conselho advised the monarch in the exercise of his veto power over the deliberative branches of government.Footnote ¹³ To fill this important body, Pedro I selected a Brazilian-born intelligentsia trained at the University of Coimbra that possessed a track record of service to the Braganças. João Severiano Maciel da Costa, for instance, served as governor of French Guiana from 1809 to 1817 and accompanied João VI in his return to Lisbon in 1821 as a “King’s favorite” (valido d’el Rei). Interestingly, Maciel had a proven interest in colonization, having described Rio Grande do Sul as a haven “calling out … for Colonies of European workers.”Footnote ¹⁴ Another member of the Conselho, José Feliciano Fernandes Pinheiro, the Arco do Cego disciple who authored a memória on Rio Grande do Sul in 1819, later grounded Pedro I’s vision of a militarized homesteading frontier by presiding over Rio Grande do Sul soon after 1824 and organizing the São Leopoldo colony, a settlement north of Porto Alegre meant to welcome the German colonos sent by Schäffer.Footnote ¹⁵

Colonization embodied and channeled conflicted constitutional expectations, as mercenary recruitments and the abandoned colonos in Ilhéus brought questions to the forefront regarding the form and function of the first post-independence Brazilian government. Those who backed a strong executive (one later enhanced by the moderating power) approved of Pedro I’s Prussian conscripts, while those who aspired for parliamentary ascendancy in a constitutional monarchy held hopes that the Ilhéus debacle would return that power to the legislature, paving the way for codifying colonization affairs. Pedro I resolved these disagreements by dissolving the Constitutional Assembly and preempting deputies averse to his unchecked exercise of power. But he also jettisoned José Bonifácio, the very mastermind of his secret recruitments. Yet, with the Conselho’s constitution, the new emperor surrounded himself with figures who would bolster his colonization campaigns and help him consolidate his own Preatorian vision of the state.

Developing the First Colonization Recruitment Network

Back in Europe, Schäffer remained hard at work under the orders originally delivered by José Bonifácio. In following them, always with characteristic cunning and a good measure of improvisation, Schäffer organized Brazil’s first colonization recruitment network, which became a kind of object lesson for innumerable colono-recruiting campaigns thereafter. Later campaigns, however, could only aspire to match Schäffer’s perseverance and sagacity. Despite a cold reception in Vienna, Schäffer stuck to his mission, and in many ways he remained the right man for the job. Growing up in Bavaria, he was familiar with the centuries-old Soldatenverkauf or Soldatenhandel (sale or trade in soldiers), which gradually disintegrated after 1815 due to changing societal codes and territorial boundaries.Footnote ¹⁶ As a Freemason, however, Schäffer displeased prince Metternich, who allegedly told him that “a people should never have free will” in reference to Brazilian independence. A better reception awaited him in Munich, where a cousin at the Court of Auditors paved the way for green-lighting his recruitments in the Palatinate.Footnote ¹⁷

Shäffer employed great savvy to shape what was, by most accounts, an underground operation. He did so because he was fully aware of the delicate and time-sensitive nature of his mission. Knowing that Metternich cautioned allies against him, Schäffer stealthily continued his activities in Hamburg, where local authorities spied on him and shared intelligence with Portuguese officials. Yet Hamburg authorities could not formally accuse Schäffer since the ships he chartered took on passengers beyond their jurisdiction farther along the Elbe, in Altona.Footnote ¹⁸ Much of his ingenious strategies stemmed from the politically urgent character of his instructions to respond to a growing need for overseas mercenaries loyal to the monarch and committed to Brazilian independence against the Portuguese. Indeed, at the time, Portuguese officials despaired for details on Pedro I’s military preparations precisely because they were also seeking Holy Alliance support to recolonize Brazil. In addition, a separatist republican rebellion in Pernambuco led to the declaration of the Confederation of the Equator in 1824 and brought to the fore the need for the emperor to possess a reliable line of internal defense.Footnote ¹⁹

With little aid and mostly at his own cost, Schäffer set up a recruitment network that tenaciously expanded Brazilian executive power by eluding both local and Brazilian statesmen’s surveillance. In Hamburg, he moved around continuously to avoid detection, settling eventually at a home in the Neustadt quarter close to the Elbe owned by a man whom Eduard Bösche, a conscript to Brazil, later identified as his secretary. Starting with this secretary, Schäffer also threaded a web of collaborators who crucially furnished credit after the Brazilian minister in London refused to reimburse his expenses with funds tied to Nathaniel Rothschild’s Brazilian loan of 1824.Footnote ²⁰

Eventually, despite his great mettle, Schäffer lost importance in the eyes of a distracted Pedro I. Schäffer’s standing further waned with the death of Leopoldina in 1826.Footnote ²¹ Interestingly, however, in the face of this threatening demotion Schäffer revealed two crucial dimensions of his work: the extent and nature of his network and his expectation that colonization recruitment would yield personal gains, including for his circle of collaborators. Schäffer tried to cash in on his services as early as August 1825, as he wrote to announce that ships Caroline, Tritton, Wilhelmine, and Fortuna e Georg Friedrick had set sail with colonos. Concomitantly, he asked for authority to make consular and vice-consular appointments, including of his associate, businessman Louis Friederich Kalkmann, as consul to Bremen.Footnote ²² Later, in 1826, Schäffer furnished Pedro I with a list of individuals deserving favors for publicly supporting Brazilian recruitment efforts. The list included residents of the Hanse Cities and the German lowlands, three members of the Société Royale de Sciences de Paris, a lawyer from the Prussian shipyard of Rostock, and Schäffer’s own sister in Göttingen. Like Schäffer, several of these collaborators were confirmed Masons, and those residing in Hanover may have aided him when an arrest order was issued for a Schäffer aide recruiting in the Schwerin-Mecklenburg prisons.Footnote ²³

These return favors paled in comparison to Schäffer’s advocacy for himself. Surely, Schäffer had already received some important recognitions. He had been inducted into the Real Ordem do Cristo in 1822, for instance, and when Hamburg’s surveillance forced him to move to Lubeck and Bremen, he obtained a formal appointment to Lower Saxony. But Schäffer wanted more and was not timid about bringing it up. In an overview of his services since 1820, he reminded the emperor of his seizure of an 180-conto cargo of pau-brasil in 1824 sent by the Pernambuco rebels to the Portuguese consul.Footnote ²⁴ He had also written a massive and meticulous tract on the Brazilian Empire that gained ample readership but made him a target of Holy Alliance sympathizers. On account of his sacrifices, Schäffer requested Brazilian naturalization, a post as chargé at Hannover and the Hanse cities, the title of visconde de Frankental Jacarandá, and a pension payable to a business associate who was coincidentally billing the Empire ministry for a loan Schäffer had contracted in Bremen for colono transports.Footnote ²⁵

With his profit-minded jockeying for rewards, Schäffer raised the next generation of colonization promoters. Kalkmann, the consul at Bremen, quickly earned his stripes as a colonization agent by sending the ship Fortuna with 245 colonos to Brazil in 1828.Footnote ²⁶ Daniel Hilldebrand, a Schäffer-appointed commissioner on another such trip, became the director of the São Leopoldo colony established in 1824 and produced its first migrant arrival record and land registry.Footnote ²⁷ These petty entrepreneurs took up new roles in an expanding logistics of arrivals and settlement spurred by the estimated 1,891 soldiers and 665 colonos sent by Schäffer to Brazil from 1823 to 1828. In doing so, they helped to streamline reception measures so that so-called spontaneous migrants who had come by their own accord began to receive the welcome given to the Anna Luiza at the beginning of this chapter. In May 1826, for example, Miranda Malheiro greeted the 70 families of the Frederico Henrique with 293$333 in funds from “his own pocket,” as he later reminded Pedro I in the hopes of “receiving the graces” of a reimbursement.Footnote ²⁸ Later arrivals benefited from swift distribution protocols perfected due to the Cisplatina War as well as from the improvisations of new colonization officials hustling to give them a proper welcome in order to avoid them leaving for other destinations. When the Brazilian Navy in Montevideo captured the Dutch galley Company Patie, which was filled with Germans headed for Buenos Aires, it redirected the ship to Rio, where the Colonization Directorate quickly disembarked its passengers at Praia Grande. Some were then forwarded to Porto Alegre and others, not coincidentally, to southern Bahia, where they would settle next to their countrymen.Footnote ²⁹

Meanwhile, the Cisplatina forced Brazilian ministers to consider recruiting soldiers in the British isles in 1826–1827. Brant Pontes worked his way around the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, which forbade such conscription in the United Kingdom but not in Ireland, whose mercenaries had already appealed to other fledgling state-makers in Latin America in part because they were Catholic and in part because of their struggles for autonomy, which mirrored aspects of Latin American independence movements. “How hard is it for Brazil to follow that example?,” the London-based Correio Braziliense had questioned years before. Now convinced, Brazilian authorities sent William Cotter, an Irishman with long military experience in the Portuguese and the Brazilian armies, to fulfill a new recruitment drive. But, rather than prior Latin American drives, it was Schäffer’s recruitment playbook that served as the more immediate precedent.Footnote ³⁰

Shaping Colonization through Law

The Irish recruitment accompanied the rise of the first Brazilian legislature, which took its seat in 1826 with the Cisplatina War and mercenary recruitments in full throttle. At around this time, special British envoy Robert Gordon had arrived in Brazil to wrest a slave trade deal from Pedro I and his Conselho. The novice Chamber of Deputies saw multiple bills to end the slave trade gradually in terms ranging from six to fourteen years, but Pedro I rebuffed these efforts and approved a treaty without parliamentary consent, which the novel deputies saw as an attempt against their legitimacy.Footnote ³¹ As a recalcitrant Chamber indicted Pedro I’s actions and deepened debate about the slave trade, it solidified its own role as a deliberative branch. As it did so, the Chamber began to take steps to abolish executive monopoly over colonization.

Indeed, deputies bristled at the slave trade treaty as an affront to Brazilian sovereignty.Footnote ³² Yet, at the same time, they pivoted toward peopling dynamics and began considering other ways of exercising the Chamber’s attributions over colonization. Deputies exerted authority over colonization in three interrelated areas: budgeting, legal codification, and ad hoc reviews of company proposals. Regarding the first of these, the legislative branch did possess attributions that delimitated the scope of executive actions. The 1824 Constitution, for instance, authorized the Chamber to check the sovereign’s internal taxing and spending capabilities, which resulted in the relatively steady growth of the empire’s funded debt and by extension of its creditworthiness throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ³³

Pedro I and his cabinet fought back against deputies’ efforts to limit the monarch’s financial power by controlling the budget. They did so by devising more understated, even secretive, ways to fund the emperor’s undertakings. The 1826 budget, for example, barely earmarked colonization funds except to pay arrears to Nova Friburgo employees and issue a small loan to the Swiss colony. But the emperor could circumvent budgetary reporting obligations by downplaying or omitting incidental and personnel expenses related to his recruitment drives. As Finance minister Nogueira da Gama, visconde de Baependi (José Bonifácio’s secretary back in the 1800s), informed the Chamber in a much criticized report in 1826, funds destined to foreign colonization represented a mere quarter of the total expenses of the Foreign ministry.Footnote ³⁴ However, that quantity excluded budget items like Schäffer’s stipends and possible reimbursements. If the Chamber could slash funds for colonization or mercenary recruitments, the executive found ways to mitigate the impact on its drives.

In the midst of this tense interplay, the emperor did offer an olive branch when, in 1825, minister Brant Pontes assembled a commission to draft “a general plan of Colonization that works uniformly for all the Provinces,” citing the need to “increase the population of this Empire as its great territorial extension requires.”Footnote ³⁵ The initiative was nothing short of a hook for deputies to begin codifying colonization, if with a bill crafted by Crown-picked drafters, who nonetheless made up a political balance. Commission members included Pedro I’s Colonization Inspector, Miranda Malheiro; former Santa Catarina president João Antonio Rodrigues de Carvalho; Finance Council officer Manuel José de Sousa França; and father Januário da Cunha Barbosa, one of the masons banished in 1823 who was later pardoned.Footnote ³⁶

Meanwhile, a flurry of colonization proposals, many of which propounded the utility of companies, reminded government officials of the necessity of a legal framework to handle heterogeneous colonization requests. In 1826, for instance, a memória published by a Coimbra-trained Bahian mathematician, José Eloy Pessoa, advocated for ending the slave trade and promoting colonization with European and African colonos.Footnote ³⁷ Eloy Pessoa, who enjoyed some respect for his service as an artillery lieutenant colonel in Bahia’s independence war, intriguingly referred to abolitionists Granville Sharp, Paul Cuffee, and John Clarkson, who were involved in the Sierra Leone Company and the St. George Company for the relocation of Black loyalists from Canada to Africa. These corporate abolitionists inspired Eloy Pessoa to propose a “Company of Capitalists” to import colonos from Africa by purchasing prisoners from African princes. The memória also suggested coordinating with the English Committee on Emigration to transport emigrants from Manchester but ultimately favored African colonization – prefiguring the pro-slavery stance of deputies like Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos.Footnote ³⁸

Eloy Pessoa was far from the only or even the first proponent to envision a profit-driven company as an ideal conduit for colonization. In 1824, Joaquim José de Sequeira, a naturalized Brazilian citizen and prominent Rio-based merchant who lost his monopoly on beef supply to the Court, proposed a colonizing Agronomic Association in Maranhão.Footnote ³⁹ Deputies considered this one case in 1826 because Sequeira had requested simply to serve as agent so that he could carry out his plan “without any cost to the Empire” – a petition amounting to a public employment request that, as such, fell “under the Legislative Power according to the Constitution,” in the opinion of the Tribunal da Junta do Comércio. In itself, however, an employment inquiry did not merit getting forwarded to the Chamber. But the “Company for Agriculture and Peopling” proposed by Sequeira reminded one of the tribunal’s members, José Antônio Lisboa, of Pombal’s charter companies of 1755 and 1759, which qualified it for further deliberations.Footnote ⁴⁰

Deputies clashed over their differing assessments of the historic function of commercial companies. As some cited the failure of old chartered companies like the Dutch East India Company, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos protested ad hoc concessions but averred that companies remained “great instruments of which a good government availed itself.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, as “powerful corporations within the state,” companies could also “bring the state to its ruin” if handled incautiously. According to Vasconcelos, Maranhão and Pará would only prosper when the old colonial company set up under Pombal finally dissolved (which only occurred with the sale of its final assets in 1840).Footnote ⁴² Other deputies focused on the usefulness of private enterprise to helm “peopling and agriculture” in lockstep with “indigenous civilization.”Footnote ⁴³ Romualdo Antônio de Seixas, future conde de Santa Cruz, underlined companies’ ability to operate “at no cost to the Public Treasury” and to employ foreigners to open communication routes as they had done in North America, England, Portugal, and across South America. Seixas then advanced a proposal to authorize tax-exempt companies to navigate Brazilian rivers.Footnote ⁴⁴

The subsequent trajectory of Sequeira’s project and Seixa’s proposal laid bare the long process involved in streamlining corporate colonization concessions. Both were sent to the Chamber’s commerce commission, which eventually merged both proposals. As presented, Sequeira’s “Agronomic Company” would rise out of a start-up fund of 600:000$000 divided into 1,200 shares. The company would care for transporting, sheltering, and sustaining Catholic craftsmen (colonos artífices) along several rivers in Maranhão, where these would work 10-hour days, 4 days a week, and spend their leisure time in subsistence farming in free plots. Gradually, colonos would contribute to population growth around new river-linked feitorias (in this case, trading posts). As the commission weighed these minutiae, Lisboa and the others at the Tribunal da Junta do Comércio directly consulted Maranhão’s president, who appointed a seven-person commission that added new conditions, including company efforts to settle wild Indians, freedom of religion for colonos, corporate obedience of the empire’s laws, a 10-year exemption from the dízimo, full military support from the government, and the extension of equal benefits to other proposed enterprises in the region. Two weeks later, deputies continued to discuss the complex details of Sequeira’s plan, particularly its peopling component.Footnote ⁴⁵

These debates delayed any decision on Sequeira’s proposal, confirming the need for a colonization law to outline concessionary processes. Deputies questioned the very nature of companies as they also pitted them against more pressing Brazilian realities. “What will happen,” asked Raimundo da Cunha Mattos, “if we establish this Company, whose ends appear so complicated and whose interest is turned mostly to the advantage of its associates?” For Cunha Mattos, indigenous civilization came before the “interesse próprio” (self-interest) embodied by these companies. Vasconcelos also harped on the Indian question, considering that regions like his home province, Minas Gerais, were occupied by gentios. How was it, he wondered, that the members of this company would avoid war with the Indians? A contemporary proposal for a colony of 750 Swiss settlers in Pernambuco called Cova da Onça and later rechristened as Santa Amélia may have offered a response with its pledge to go after “all fugitive Blacks and Vagabonds,” including “all who took refuge in the woods.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Sequeira did not adopt such a violent justification, his project fell short of concrete measures to integrate or manage indigenous peoples living in the area where his company would operate.

Deputies also raised financial concerns. Cunha Mattos himself wondered how a company could amass its initial capital if the domestic debt had yet to be formally structured, while others insisted that companies pay for themselves “without cost to the Treasury.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In this regard, mining companies had instructive value. The five British gold firms established in the first few years after independence were bankrolled by foreign capital and obtained special concessions that benefited their agents – as was the case of Edward Oxenford of the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association (est. 1824), George Such of the St. John del Rey Mining Company (1828), and even George Vincent Duval of the General Mining Association (1825), who later attempted an emigration scheme from England.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like these agents, Sequeira doggedly searched for personal gain. By 1827, he managed to become “viador” (a messenger or valet) for the emperor at São Cristovão and also currency authenticator for the royal mint. Later, he sought funding in England, hoping for support among São Luís’s British cotton merchants and their creditors in Liverpool. By no fault of his own, Sequeira saw his ambitions dashed by the long wait for a colonization code.Footnote ⁴⁹

In February 1827, Barbacena’s commission finally issued its report, which broke new ground as the first land bill project in post-independence Brazil while evincing a deep resemblance to H. G. Schmidt’s and Domingos Borges’s plans at the Lisbon Courts. The majority in the commission–with the exception of Miranda Malheiro, who submitted a separate plan–sent a “General plan for uniform colonization in all provinces of the Empire” to minister José Fernandes Pinheiro, now known as visconde de São Leopoldo thanks to his loyal service to Pedro I. This plan called for an expansive but efficient system of colonization. It tasked provincial legislatures with distributing measured land plots and provincial presidents with appointing three-member colonization commissions, each with a treasurer, all of which would fall under the purview of a central directory in Rio appointed by the emperor, while in Europe new agents would recruit colonos. A version of the plan arrived at the Senate under the title of “Statute for the Central Directorate and Colonial Commissions to supplement the Law of Colonization and Foreigners,” undersigned by three notables who alluded to old peopling tropes when they stated their objective as fixing “the waning of people.” The Senate then redirected the bill to the Commission on Indigenous Catechism, Statistics and Colonization for closer consideration, where the project languished until the end of the legislative session.Footnote ⁵⁰

The bill was never taken up again. Shortly after the Senate reconvened in 1828, the Irish regiments at the Court rose in arms protesting pay backlogs and corporal punishment by high officers.Footnote ⁵¹ With a regiment setting out from the Campo da Aclamação in the Court’s outskirts and another from Praia Vermelha, at the tip of the western entrance to Guanabara Bay, the foreign troops caused mayhem across the city during four consecutive days.Footnote ⁵² The press had already raised concerns before the riot. In early 1828, for example, the Aurora Fluminense suggested that the Government “stimulate Capitalists to form associations to carry out [colonization] speculation” rather than bring in “northern Mamluks” to threaten Brazilians’ liberties. A month after the revolts, an anonymous correspondent in O Farol Paulistano recalled that “Rio de Janeiro saw colonos crowned as soldiers, but as the people kept silent, everyone kept talking about colonos,” who ultimately revealed themselves as “demagogues, republicans, sans-culottes, men with nothing to lose who wish to destroy rather than to build.”Footnote ⁵³ The 1828 revolts galvanized public opinion against mercenaries and made manifest the shortcomings of executive-run colonization while efforts to enact colonization laws fizzled.

Laying Down the Arms? Countering the Threat of Restoration

Pedro I’s grand plans for a foreign mercenary army to strengthen his stead began to unravel in the court of public opinion as well as in the Chamber of Deputies. With declining levels of support, the emperor started offloading colonization-related needs to lawmakers in a measured retreat meant to dodge the accumulating evidence of his schemes’ consequences. But also, after 1828, the emperor found himself pulled into the Portuguese dynastic saga unfolding since his father’s death in 1826. When xenophobic pressures and colono-related scandals piled on political discontent, Pedro I gave up his crown and set off to war against his brother Miguel’s claim to João VI’s succession. Back in Brazil, however, statesmen feared Pedro’s return, precisely because he continued to engage in recruitment practices to marshal a new army against his brother, which he could then in principle redirect toward his erstwhile empire.

Indeed, by 1828, public opinion turned increasingly against the emperor due to the loss of the Cisplatina, while the riots in Rio compounded negative views of his colonos. Pedro I and his advisors tried to contain the damage by recourse to peopling, more specifically by promoting homesteading as exemplified in the São Leopoldo colony and redirecting colonos initially hired as mercenaries toward other occupations. Even before the riots, the emperor had sent some of the Irish mercenaries to settle in Ilhéus in Bahia and German soldiers to Rio Grande do Sul.Footnote ⁵⁴ Later in the year, Pedro I stepped up these efforts with a law on public works that required specialized labor and crafts of the kind many colonos could furnish.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his last falas do trono (the opening speeches he delivered to inaugurate each elected legislature) in 1829 and 1830, Pedro I also called for measures on land distribution, naturalization, and work contracting in order to incentivize immigration.Footnote ⁵⁶ Lawmakers abided with the first Brazilian contract work law (lei de prestação de serviços), which regulated contracts signed within Brazil and abroad. Nevertheless, deputies refrained from giving the emperor free rein on colonization matters by explicitly abolishing all funds for foreign colonization in the budget law they approved at the end of 1830, a sign of their unstinting resolve to take over colonization matters.Footnote ⁵⁷

From 1828 to 1830, an uneasy Chamber of Deputies withheld support for Pedro I’s particular brand of colonization rather than for colonization as a commercial pursuit more broadly. Similar attitudes prevailed in the press. The Aurora Fluminense, for instance, criticized that colonos had come “at great cost” and armed with bayonets rather than sickle and hoes. But, the Diário Fluminense suggested, Brazil should heed what the English political economist William Godwin observed in New York and Philadelphia, where “Companies have been spontaneously established to attract European emigration,” and “ship captains of different Nations … have turned this into an object of speculation.” The key was to focus on administrative and procedural issues that could unlock the gates of industriousness by luring emigrants from Europe with a flexible naturalization law. In all, many of the moderate liberal Brazilian journals understood the need for a “judicious and national administration” but one that would in the main support enterprises such as the “colonization association with which the patriot Serqueira [sic] pretends to gift Maranhão.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In themselves, these positive assessments did not suffice to restore public, much less lawmakers’, confidence in colonization under Pedro I. From the start, breaches of social norms and contractual expectations compromised colonization’s image and public trust in the government’s capacity to remedy these issues. In 1824, for instance, a shop owner in Rio hired an 11-year-old German boy as his caixeiro (assistant), a common practice at the time. Then, three soldiers from the foreign battalion came to his house at night and spirited the boy away. As authorities looked into it, they discovered the boy’s contract was “so arbitrary” as to be illegal, for which the emperor ordered the colonization inspector to assume custody of the boy. Nevertheless, a month after the incident, the child remained at large.Footnote ⁵⁹

At the same time, colono misbehavior unrelated to the riots had taken hold in the public imagination and fed a growing xenophobia. By 1830, one paper in Rio alleged that “assaults continue every night” by “gangs of foreign tramps, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, French, Germans,” and that a robber recently killed while breaking into a house was a former captain of Pedro I’s foreign troops.Footnote ⁶⁰ It did not help that many of the colonos established in São Leopoldo after 1828 were Mecklemburg convicts hired to serve as soldiers in the Cisplatina War.Footnote ⁶¹

These incidents indicted Schäffer’s recruitment practices, which came under attack by German colonos who had served or considered serving in Brazil’s foreign battalions. In a 1829 chronicle of his time in Brazil, Carl Schlichthorst, who was almost recruited by Schäffer in 1825, decried the level of royal protection enjoyed by this “trafficker of human flesh,” claiming that Leopoldina had once excused Schäffer’s frauds by asking, “What would you have Schäffer do? Sometimes he must lie to recruit people for us.” Still, in 1835, Carl Siedler, a voluntary recruit, condemned Schäffer for selling “the blood of his countrymen in exchange of a mound of gold and a cane field.”Footnote ⁶²

No sooner had the monarch’s mercenaries put down their arms and retreated to their new homesteads in an effort to buck critiques, the outbreak of the Portuguese Civil War raised the specter of a new recruitment drive – one that potentially compromised Brazilian sovereignty. As Pedro I appeared to solve the Portuguese succession crisis in favor of his daughter Maria da Glória, his brother, Miguel, who was supposed to marry Maria and who arrived in Lisbon from his exile earlier than her, claimed the crown for himself. The usurpation sparked a war between conservative miguelistas and constitutionalists defending the charter that Pedro I had provided to Portugal in 1826, which was based on a revised copy of the Brazilian constitution and was meant to resolve the succession crisis. Immediately after the Cisplatina War, the Civil War absorbed the emperor’s attention as detailed reports trickled in from the constitutionalist bastion in the Azores.Footnote ⁶³

Running an empire and managing the politics of his old motherland was a tall order for Pedro I, and his attempts to do both weakened executive colonization in 1828 and unsettled Brazilian statesmen. When London papers broke news of Pedro I organizing an army of emigrados from the Civil War, Brazilian statesmen grew alarmed as they suspected that the emperor’s involvement in Bragança family intrigues threatened a possible reunification of Brazil and Portugal. The term recolonziation popped up in exaltado journals such as O Repúblico, which leveled acerbic attacks against a “recolonizing party” close to Pedro.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rumor had it that armed foreigners would subdue Brazilians if Pedro decided to claim the Portuguese Crown, which seemed increasingly likely given the emperor’s support for Portuguese aristocrats and administrators fleeing Portugal. These emigrados urgently needed financial help and safe haven, especially when those in England were threatened with extradition to Portugal if Britain recognized Miguel as king.Footnote ⁶⁵

It was true that, even as Pedro I’s popularity plummeted, a number of Brazilian politicians abetted a military build-up to help Maria da Glória reclaim the Portuguese throne. And it did not quell alarms when they sought to downplay their activities. For instance, in 1830, Miguel Calmon du Pin e Almeida, a young Coimbra graduate from Bahia and Constitutional Assembly veteran who was then Finance minister, tried to mollify his peers about Pedro I’s support for the emigrados. The emperor, he told deputies, had helped the Portuguese exiles for purely philanthropic reasons, further providing Maria da Glória with Portuguese soldiers to accompany her in her transatlantic voyage simply because she required such protection as a Brazilian subject. Pedro I, he claimed, had acted no differently than Great Britain, France, and other nations aiding her cause.Footnote ⁶⁶ In parallel, however, Calmon was also making secret plans to promote monarchies throughout Brazil’s Spanish American neighbors. Taking advantage of European support for a new independent monarchy in Greece, Calmon authorized the marquês de Santo Amaro, special envoy to Europe, to speak to France, England, and Russia about Brazil’s willingness to help pacify the Spanish American republics and replace them with monarchical regimes.Footnote ⁶⁷ By defending Pedro I’s support for emigrados and advocating for European intervention in the Americas, the emperor and his supporters readied themselves for throwing their full weight behind Maria da Glória’s claim to the crown.

However, these plans disintegrated as Pedro’s blunders caught up with him at the end of 1830 and rapidly narrowed his options. To begin with, the emperor had a very public falling out with one of his leading supporters, Brant Pontes, by then ennobled as marquês de Barbacena. As the official guardian of Maria da Glória on her voyage to claim the Portuguese crown from the “usurper,” Barbacena returned in 1829 also with a new wife for Pedro I and an appointment to the Finance portfolio. Yet, having been tasked with overseeing emigrados’ affairs in London, Barbacena was accused of mishandling and even appropriating emigrado funds.Footnote ⁶⁸ Barbacena defended himself, but the public accusations opened an unsalvageable rift between him and Pedro I. In October 1830, the emperor asked Barbacena for his resignation without foreseeing that other Brazilian statesmen would understand the dismissal as inimical to the national cause and favorable to the Portuguese.Footnote ⁶⁹

Other scandals piled on, one of which bore direct connection to Pedro I’s colonization schemes. In November, the assassination of Giovanni Battista Libero Badaró, the Liberal Italian editor of the Observador Constitucional, by German colonos allegedly sent by Pedro I further narrowed the emperor’s political future.Footnote ⁷⁰ On 13 March 1831, as the Portuguese party prepared to celebrate Pedro I, a bloody revolt targeting Portuguese people broke out at the Court that later became famously known as the “noite das garrafadas,” the night of bottle-breakings.Footnote ⁷¹ Abandoned by his ministers some weeks later, on 7 April 1831, Pedro I abdicated the Brazilian throne, leaving a Regency in place as stipulated by the constitution, and sailing for the Azores to take part in the Portuguese war.

Meanwhile, exaltados and moderados celebrating the abdication as a “real independence” quickly awoke to the threat of a Portuguese recolonization, as Pedro, now officially known as the duke of Bragança, found himself at the head of an army that could eventually retake Brazil. Indeed, rumors at the Court about the existence of a partido restaurador planning Pedro’s welcome gave credence to a possible invasion. Then, in June 1833, a series of documents sent by Brazilian diplomats in Europe appeared to confirm takeover plans by the duke. In the Chamber, an appointed commission studied the documents but chose to speedily produce a report rather than directly share the original documents.Footnote ⁷² The commission report described the alleged proofs of an impending re-invasion, beginning with a European news article arguing that an invasion would prove easy and that the legislature would quickly comply with the emperor’s return. The proofs also included a recruitment contract for Portuguese and other foreign soldiers, and a colono contract stating a preference for military personnel. And there was yet more evidence: an article from a gazette speculating over the destination of presently active troops in the duke of Bragança’s constitutional army, anecdotal accounts of promises of land in Brazil made to recruits in Porto, as well as an opinion piece on how the diaspora of Polish mercenaries expelled by the anti-Russian Polish uprising of 1831 disliked Portugal and would not remain there after service. The written opinion of the Brazilian consul himself, who confirmed suspicions about a possible coup, closed this litany of proofs.

Despite the growing evidence, the majority of the six-person commission, including Miguel Calmon and rising conservative Pedro de Araújo Lima, light-heartedly dismissed concerns over these documents and judged an invasion improbable. Only the sixth member of the commission demurred, underlining the suspicious clauses in the duke of Bragança’s contracts with the French, German, and Polish mercenaries Pedro was in fact recruiting. According to the agreement he signed with an old Polish officer in May 1833, his drive sought up to 3,200 men.Footnote ⁷³ As the commission’s dissenter saw it, foreign troops were hired for a three-year service “within or beyond Portugal” – and Brazil was the only tenable destination for Pedro’s forces after Portugal. Moreover, the documents proved that an association set up in England under Pedro’s name had hired colonos for Brazil – including decommissioned army and navy personnel.

The alleged restorationist plot continued to creep into legislative debates. Barbacena spoke of Bonaparte, Murat, and Iturbide to illustrate that abdication did not preclude fateful returns, especially when no legal measure prohibited Pedro from claiming a regency over his son. By the end of June, as the Senate weighed an amnesty for conservatives who rose up in the Revolta da Fumaça in Ouro Preto, lawmakers debated the possibility of an invasion. Blaming the previous ministries for the emergence of a restorationist party, a deputy from Minas proffered that a “restoration cannot be accomplished without an invasion of Brasil.” The following day, senator José Ignácio Borges insisted on the existence of a restorationist party and mentioned that the alleged colonization society in London sought “colonos in the military class,” in other words, mercenaries. Powerful conservative figures kept offering reassurances, claiming that to speak of a possible invasion was not only premature, but an outright provocation.Footnote ⁷⁴

* * *

The duke of Bragança won the war, but his rapid deterioration and subsequent death from tuberculosis in 1834 dashed the possibility of a return to his old homestead, Brazil. Nonetheless, the very possibility that he could have staged a comeback remained significant. Any such plan would have been the product of recruitment and settlement ploys perfected through Brazilian independence, the Cisplatina War, and the cause of Portuguese constitutionalists. Colonization, in other words, had nestled itself deep in Brazil’s constitutive processes as an independent empire but could also be turned on its head and imperil Brazilian independence, forged as it was by executive caveat.

Pedro I had inherited from his father a multipurpose form of colonization hinging on royal patronage and, in line with it, he continued to sponsor the colonies started under João VI, especially Nova Friburgo and Leopoldina. But if, by the end of his Brazilian stay, João VI had begun to see colonization as a kind of hobby horse that required little more than his royal graces, for Pedro colonization quickly became a martial expedient to secure Brazilian sovereignty and then also strengthen royal authority vis à vis a rising legislature. Indeed, colonization became the fulcrum of the conflicting aspirations of a fledgling parliament and the imperial executive. As the emperor and his ministers freely and rampantly recruited and later settled mercenaries, lawmakers struggled with such unchecked use of executive power and similar initiatives proposed by private individuals such as Sequeira. As this process unfolded, ideas about proper colonization came into greater relief, with commercially oriented schemes acquiring the sheen of legitimacy lost by the emperor’s colonization drives.

In the long process of Brazilian independence and government-making, colonization therefore became the site of an escalating constitutional conflict. Yet, despite partisan bickering and differing opinions about Pedro’s mercenary drives, colonization began to command a growing interest among Brazilian politicians and businessmen. In the years ahead, many of these – including those who dismissed concerns about the duke of Bragança’s return – in fact became colonization boosters. During the Regency that followed Pedro I’s abdication, Calmon and Araújo Lima in particular cemented their political fortunes as presidents of the first homegrown colonization companies and later enjoyed prodigal political ascents. Colonization thus afforded erstwhile monarchists the chance to restore their political standing after their potentially damaging public support for the duke of Bragança’s stratagems. Because colonization projects increasingly portrayed the pursuit of a “public good,” statesmen who patronized them would go on to earn social and political respect. As they did, they also came to understand how colonization could continue to channel the objectives of a government in the process of formation.