Latin History

86 StanleyJ. Stein short, from eighteen to thirty years of age, and fazendeiros had never enjoyed what they considered an adequate labor force even during the busiest days of the slave trade. After r85o, the constant complaint of the fazendeiros concenffating more and more on coffee became the "lack of hands for fieldwork."

Stemming from the increasingly evident disappearance of virgin for- est and the diminishing supply of labor was the end of fazenda self- sufficiency. Before the early r85os, both large coffee fazendeiros and small agriculturists had grown foodstuffs for personal consumption, with the surplus going to the local markets. Attracted by high coffee prices in the early fifties, and alarmed by the diminishing labor pool now partially drained by the road-building and maintenance companies that sprangup after r85o, largefazendeiros had reduced foodstuffacreage and concentrated their labor force upon coffee. This concentration was naru- ral because planters'credit depended solely upon the arrobas ofcoffee shipped to the comisstiio (agent) in Rio, and because coffee alone left a handsome profit after paying costly transport by mule. Erroneously, fazendeiros believed that the previous abundance and low price of food- sruffs would endure. When they reduced their acreage in subsistence crops, however, even the slightest variation in their harvests forced them to fi.rrn to the formerly bountiful local market, which had been supplied in recent years principally by the small agriculturalists. These- sitiantes, arrendataios, and agregados-had been unable to compete with the big planters in producing coffee, which demanded abundant labor, land, and credit . . .

Despite the storm warnings, however, from the vantage point of the r86os, the Vassouras planter surveyed a half century of remarkable prog- ress. The establishment he had founded and supplied with an expensive labor force had grown phenomenally. Some luxury goods had arrived from abroad to soften the essentially primitive life of the sedes.lt seemed clear that a new generation, the sons of the founders, would take over the establishments that had sunk roots into the soil of the steep slopes. There was little doubt in the successful future of large-scale agriculture, "which is and will be for many years the principal source of public and private wealth, the most efficient auxiliary of our progress, cooperating in all the evolution that has brought us to the present state of civiliza- tion." On the momentum of this succcss, thc cconomy of Vassouras rollcd on t<lward trotrblecl tirncs.

The Paraguayan War Victory Parade

Peter M. Beattie

On July rc, 1870, Rio de Janeiro's English-language Anglo-Braziian Times announced Brazil's triumphal parode celebrating the nation's victory in the ParaguayanWar (t864-t87o) as "The OfuialRejoicing." Emperor Pedro Il and

the parliament commissioned special review stands and the celebration of a Te

Deum mass. Authoities distributed 8,ooo invitations to "respectable" citizens,

cowoking them to demonstrate their patriotism for this special occasion. Wlry then, when the emperor arived at the appointed time for the parade, did the review stands remain "utterly quiet"? W aiA Rio de Janeiro's "respectable" citizens "contemptuously abstain" from what, in most ndtiotls, would mark a moment of stiring nationdlism? Afier all, the increasing influence of soaal Danw'inism internationally led many to consider vtctory in war a clear demon'

strdtion of the superionty of a nation or, more specifically, a national "race."

Reportedly, only zoo ofthose invited ottended.

Public resentment toward the war sPrang from many sources. Somc complained of the debt Brazil mounted in foreign banks to fund the campaign and the consequent rise in taxes. Others pointed to govern- ment corruption and the windfall profits made by unscrupulous entre- preneurs who produced shoddy war goods-even the review stands built for the parade were so rickety that police and army inspectors found them to be dangerously unstable, and ordered them reinforced. Still others complained of the emperor's abuse ofhis political powers to wage

an unpopular war. But perhaps foremost among these sources of frustra-

tion was the coercive recruitment methods used to fiIl ranks on a distant

and insalubrious front. In peacetime, coercive recruitment or impress- ment targeted men who did not conform to elite ideals of "honorablc"

manhood. The police provided the army with most of its recruits, draw- ing mclstly fron, the "unprotected" poor: men who lackcd a national

88 Peter M. Beattie

guard post, a skilled occupation, a certifiable marriage, the capital to pay

for an exemption, or an influential patron to shield them from imper- sonal authoriry. Men who failed to maintain a fixed residence and reg- ular employment, or who violated social mores by abandoning a spouse

or deflowering a virgin (seducing a young woman with false marriage promises), were sometimes summarily sent to serve as enlisted men as punishment. Thus, authorities tended to press migrants, the un- and underemployed, rogues, orphans, and ex-slaves. Vulnerability to recruit-

ment marked a lack of starus that distinguished the unprotected poor from the "honorable" poor. While most ofifrcers came from more priv- ileged backgrounds, the bulk of enlisted men came largely from what their superiors considered the dregs of sociery.

The Paraguayan War mobilized four times more troops than any pre- vious Brazilian campaign. The demand for soldiers fell heavily on the shoulders of the unprotected poor, but it also affected the protected poor, eroding traditional thresholds of starus. For instance, the state called up national guardsmen (protected from recruitment in peacetime

and never mobilized for war on so grand a scale) as first-line troops, and recruitment dragnets nabbed many poor freemen who, in peacetime, probably would have been able to exempt themselves from service. The phrase "club-and-rope recruit" became commonplace, describing the crude methods used to raise troops. Parliament also established a special corps, the Volunteers of the Fatherland, promising those who signed on a number of benefits, including land grants, on demobilization-what would be an unprecedented government effiort at homesteading for na- tive Brazilians. Still, these efforts failed to produce adequate recruits. Although many men did volunteer in fits of patriotic fervor, most were pressured or physically coerced into service. To expedite mobilization, the state purchased and urged the donation of hundreds of slaves manu-

mitted on the condition that they serve at the front, and officials pressed

scores of convicts. Unlike the United States, where even the Union army

only hesitantly incorporated black soldiers and then segregated them from white ones, in Brazil, the low status of soldiering impeded the use of a color bar. There were many white and black soldiers in military regiments, but most army soldiers were of mixed race.

Impressment and the pressure on elites to cooperate with war mobili- zation were particularly fierce in the nation's capital. Ri<l deJaneiro was thc scat ofthc army and navy's largcst garrisons, which provic'lccl support

The Paraguayan War Victory Parade 8g

for police in conducting impressment. The capital district contributed one ofevery eight troops fsoldiers] mobilized even though its population represented less than one in thirry-three Brazilians. It also logged the highest total of slaves donated for military service, indicating that elites in Rio de Janeiro were under more pressure to contribute to the war effcrt. One Rio de Janeiro newspaper lampooned this "patriotism" by depicting a slave owner with African features donating two slaves for the war. The slave owner sarcastically addressed an Afro-Brazilian veteran who had lost an arm in the campaign: "You want to be decorated only because you lost an arm? Then what can I say who will lose no less than four," Arlequint reported. These mobilization practices were far from the ideals of universal male conscription and the citizen-soldier that were taking hold in Europe and North America, and formed part of increas- ingly strident militarist and nationalist ideologies. Impressment upset the lives of common and privileged caiocas (fuo residents) by causing men to take to the hills during collection sweeps. A cartoon in S5o Paulo's O Cabndo showed the ciry full of wild beasts, displaced by men hiding from recruitment agents in the wilderness. These disruptive tac- tics affected the work forces of merchants, artisans, and businesses in Rio deJaneiro, fueling resentment to the emperor's war policy.

Thus, more-elite caioca.s snubbed the emperor's patriotic fest for a variery of reasons, but it is likely rhat many found distasteful the idea of honoring the services of enlisted men with such lowly social origins. Instead, it was the ciry's poor, many of whom likely had relatives or friends in the enlisted ranks on parade, that partially filled the vacant stands. While foreigners found the spectacle laughable and clucked that Pedro II was a poor organizer of patriotic events, but an excellent Car- nival director, a small portion of Paraguayan War veterans had the brief satisfaction of marching in a commemorative parade.

The fates of most enlisted veterans, however, was not enviable. Few ever laid hands on the promised land grants. Because these military colo- nies were situated on distant and often unfavorable sites, most titlehold- ing veterans preferred to sell them to land speculators for a fraction of their worth. Only veterans with a powerful patron who could grease the wheels of the bureaucracy could hope to enjoy the promised benefits and pensions. Some veterans disabled by the war were accepted into rcgiments known as the "lnvalids of the Fatherland." Rio de Janeiro's invalicl rcgirncnt was cvcntually symbolically housed near the city's gar-

90 Peter M. Beattie

bage dump on the island of BomJesus in Guanabara Bay. On the fiftieth anniversary of Brazil's martial triumph, one journalist scorned the treat- ment of aged Paraguayan War veterans at Bom Jesus whose pensions and meals were so parsimonious that most were forced to beg or seek employment on the mainland to sustain themselves and their families. Even after this embarrassing expos6, little changed for these veterans. Indeed, decades later, the government forced disabled veterans out of their lodgings on Bom Jesus to make space for political prisoners from more privileged backgrounds.

The government's disregard for war veterans was possible largely be- cause of their lowly social origins. Widespread impressment allowed officials to dismiss the services of veterans, even though many volun- teered, by emphasizing the tradition of the "club-and-rope recruits." This contrasts starkly with the treatment of Civil War veterans in the United States. Government pensions for veterans and their families be- came America's first experiment with social welfare programs, and the Republic Party used these benefits as an effective instrument of political patronage and voter mobilization. However, restrictive voting rights in Brazil and the relatively smaller size of its wartime mobilization pre- vented Paraguayan W'ar veterans from becoming an effective political force. Even though similar kinds of veteran benefit legislation was de- bated, the Brazilian government never implemented any. Thus, as during the r87o parade, most of the more privileged preferred to ignore the services of veterans. As Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Commu- nities, nationalism requires a certain imagined homogenization and lev- eling of a populace to take hold. As the r87o victory parade indicates, it was difficult to sustain such imaginings for many Brazilians. Brazilian nationalist sentiment could be srymied by the inequalities of slavery, the

racial prejudice undergirded by the empirical bigotry of social Darwin- ism, military impressment, restrictive voting rights, and traditional con- cepts of honor and stafus. An imperfect implementation of leveling bu- reaucratic practices in Brazil, Iike universal male military conscription, that emphasized the obligation of all able-bodied male citizens-rich or poor, black or white-to serve for national defense, would come only after the demise of slavery and challenges to the biological determinism that labeled Brazrl's African and indigenous populations a hindrance to national progress, and with the massivc internati<-rnal rnobilizati<)ns rc- quired by thc world wars.

A Vanishing Way of Life

Gilbcrto Freyre

Soon afier returningfrom the United States in the early ryzos, Gilberto Frryre embarked on a lifelong campaign to populaize his view that because the tradi-

tional slave masters had enjoyed sexual relations with slave women, the institu-

tion of slavery in Brazil was therefore more benign than elsewhere. Born to dn elite sugar family in Pernambuco, Freyre broke with tradition by auending Baptist schools in Recife, then at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and finally at Columbia University, where he studied anthropologt andhistory. His inter-

pretation is not widely accepted today because careful social science research has

found many of his arguments faulty, but before his death in ry8o, Freyre's thesis Irad successfully contibuted to the more orless ofi,cialinterpretation of Brazil's

pdst. This selection makes Freyrc's case for the world of the small sugar mill, which he believed was kinder and more humane than the industial sugar

foctories that replaced them duingthe Late-nineteenth century.

Whoever knows Pernambuco, Alagoas, the south of Paraiba . . . who knows this region of Brazll not superficially but in intimacy, knows the enormous distance that separates the old senhor de engenho fsugar pro- ducerl from the modern usineiro [sugar industrialist]. Not that I want to depict the old senhores de engenho as saints. But there is no doubt that under the patriarchal system employed in the old sugar mills, more help was given to the labor force than is the case at the great majoriry of sugar factories today. There was, no one can deny, harshness and even brutality in the ways that the whites from the Big House treated their slaves, But the slave owner usually helped the blacks in the slave shacks more than t"he usineiro today helps his employees; he would keep on, for examplc, old or sick blacks, supporting them. In the majority of the old engenhos, lif'c was swcctcr and nrore humanc than it is t<lday in the sugar fhctorics. 'l'hc fbstivitics--saintJohn's Day, thc pastoral days, at thc lolklorc cclc