Chapter 5 details how the High Court focused on soldiers when they attempted to discover the authors of the pasquins. It also examines how the first arrests that the court ordered triggered an attempt by the other leaders of the conspiracy to start the rebellion earlier than planned. In the final meetings, they were caught in the act of planning the rebellion by men whom they had invited to become part of the plot but who told everything to the authorities and then became spies for the regime. People of different ranks met and assessed each other for the first time at these gatherings and consequently made decisions about whether they would stay committed to the movement or not. The last days of the conspiracy were thus marked by a continuing commitment to rebellion but also by persecution, infiltration, and confusion about who was involved and what the web of relations were between the thirty plus men of African descent who were arrested and their relations with the few whites who were also interrogated.

The introduction describes the principal arguments of the book. The first argument is that the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy was defined by the Brazilian High Court as sedition, which was defined as public disloyalty to the monarch. Taking sedition seriously allows us to see how people made public spaces into sites where people strategized and studied revolution together. The second argument presented is that the Tailors’ Conspiracy was not isolated but was rather the coda to three prior resistance movements across the empire: one in India, one in Angola, and one in Brazil. The Tailors’ Conspiracy was thus part of an empire-wide development in which the Portuguese had to contend with groups of revolutionaries who were racially, ethnically, and financially different and who all wanted greater political recognition from the empire. The third argument is that relations between and among people from all ranks of society was the baseline of political action. Differences in rank between conspirators were apparent when men were outlining the goals of the conspiracy. The political culture that sustained them was thus based on relationality, not cohesive demands.