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Party Formation and State-Making: The Conservative Party and the Reconstruction of the Brazilian State, 1831-1840

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-2-259

1527-1900

Jeffrey D. Needell,

History of Colonial Brazil

In the nineteenth century Brazil was considered unique not only for its size and Portuguese heritage but also for its distinct social and political characteristics. Brazil was an established slave society that was maintained in peace and unity under a constitutional monarchy. Traditionally, historiography has separated these elements. Most recently, the social history dominant in the Brazilian and Anglo-American academies has given us rich studies of slave society, without sustained reference to Brazil’s political history. In the nineteenth century, and in the earlier political analyses of the twentieth century, the monarchy has either been abstracted away from socioeconomic analysis or reconstructed as an apologia for Brazilian essentialism and authoritarianism.1Since at least the 1970s, however, political analysis has addressed the relationship between state and society, but with debatable success. It has generally reduced the monarchy to an instrument of the ruling class, or reified it as an autonomous model for the military statism of 1964–85, or dismissed it as the convenient provider of stability and patronage for the socioeconomic elites. Few studies provide a detailed analysis of the political trends of the era, much less a discussion of their seemingly false or complicated ideological struggles. Although the works of José Murilo de Carvalho, Thomas Flory, Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, and Roderick J. Barman are exceptions to this rule, their contributions are necessarily limited by their particular foci. Each, whether studying the state and its cadre formation, the ideology and programs of the Liberals or the Conservatives, or the complex detail of the political narrative explaining national consolidation, tends to neglect the dialectic with socioeconomic conditions. In other words, they shed little light on the specificity of the linkages of that context to the political struggles and ideology of the era.2Party origins and organization provide telling ways to understand such matters. The Conservative party has traditionally been considered to be the dominant of the two parties of the Second Reign (1840–89), the era that has generally been taken as the basis for analysis of the monarchy. It was the Conservative party that defined and defended the mission of the monarchy as an authoritarian, centralized state, and it was the party most identified with the dominant planter-merchant elites who battened off African slavery and its export production. The present study, focusing on the crucial, formative period of 1831– 40, offers an analytical explanation of the early development of the Conservative party as an integral part of the evolution of the Brazilian monarchy by addressing some of the weaknesses in the canon noted above. This essay provides the socioeconomic context of political developments; offers a new synthesis and analysis of the political narrative; clarifies the ideological and organizational nature of party origins; and shows the specific linkages between state and society, party and province. It will also revise our understanding of the coffee planters’ role in the Conservative party and conclude by pointing to the essential dilemma presented by the contradiction between the monarchy’s architects and the monarch’s role.The able political analyses and narratives we have, while useful for many things, are inadequate to understand party formation. The latter requires a return to parliamentary annals and other contemporary sources for a more specific ideological and organizational analysis, as well as the integration of the political narrative with a synthesis of the more recent studies of socioeconomic development and elite formation. These strands, some old, some new, but all newly knit together here, will comprise the first part of this study. It forms the necessary context for the analysis to follow.Although its mission was national, the Conservative party was provincial by birth. Indeed, to the extent that the geographic origins or social ramifications of the party are noted at all, they are noted as fluminense—as having to do with the port and province named Rio de Janeiro.3 The colonial port and captaincy, which had also borne those names, were intimately linked to two distinct processes of economic development. From the seventeenth century, settlers of Portuguese descent had successfully applied the lessons of the Brazilian northeast. They had penetrated the hilly tropical lowlands and river-bottom land of the region that watered the Bay of Guanabara and the marshy lacustrine areas of the eastern coast stretching to the lower reaches of the Paraíba River. They had slain or enslaved the native peoples. They had brought in captives from the coastal slave ports of West Central Africa. They had made sugar and cane brandy. Fluminense sugars were less refined, made in smaller quantities than those of Bahia and Pernambuco, and the cane was planted by fewer captives on smaller plantations. However, by the late eighteenth century, fluminense sugar ranked second or third behind one or both of the two great northern captaincies and provided the basis for the captaincy’s greatest fortunes (those of the port merchants, particularly those dominating the trade in people) and most powerful local families (those of the port merchants and lowland planters which were often intermarrying by that time).4The second process of economic development derived from the mining region of Rio de Janeiro’s hinterland. As the gold and diamonds of Minas Gerais dwindled (after ca. 1750), merchants and miners maintained their fortunes and their slaveholding. They did so by gradually shifting to the supply of food for the established mining and administrative centers in the mineiro mountain ranges and, more importantly, for the port population in Rio de Janeiro. Mule trains brought European manufactures and African captives from the port to mineiro farms and ranches, which, in turn, sent cattle, pigs, and farm goods to the butchers and shops in Rio de Janeiro. They used the same wretched mule trails cut through the rainforests that mantled the land of the narrow hilly coast and the series of ranges and rivers that rose immediately behind that coast and announced the highland plateau of the Brazilian interior.5In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Atlantic history added a peculiar political component to the socioeconomic processes sketched above. Under the dictatorship of the marquês de Pombal (1750–77), state intervention in the quickening, extraction, and taxation of Brazilian exports demanded the immigration of increased numbers of metropolitan agents and encouraged the immigration of increased numbers of merchants (or would-be merchants). This increase in the number of well-connected and wealthy Portuguese men was dramatically strengthened by the coming of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The study of the local elite families, who were either the merchants and planters of the lowlands and port sugar and slavery economy,The Province of Rio de Janeiro or the merchants and landholders profiting from the domestic economy of the Minas-Rio axis, shows that most of those important by the date of independence (1822) were descendants of one or more eighteenth-century Portuguese immigrants. These men (soldiers, administrators, or merchants for the most part) had come out, flourished, and married in the port or countryside after 1750. The most powerful Luso-Brazilian families were those combining the production of sugar, the purchase of people, and the access to state perquisites and favors.6Liberal theories, both economic and political, appealed to the Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian elites surrounding the court in Rio de Janeiro. The advantages to the free trade established by 1810 were manifest, as were the end of various restrictions on internal commerce and production, particularly to the wealthy Portuguese merchants and crown servants who married into local elite families or invested in local trade and planting. And, when the Oporto revolution of 1820 attempted to reimpose metropolitan economic and political hegemony over Brazil, many Portuguese, as well as the Luso-Brazilian elites, especially in Rio de Janeiro, overcame hesitations to join with more radical local political mobilization. They often supported separation with the revolutionary philosophies of popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, and representative government. The independent state was explicitly identified as a constitutional monarchy from its beginning.7Nonetheless, the nature of such vague terms provided the ideological and political battlefield of the First Reign (1822–31), and even split those who shared a common education and career experience. Not even all those who had university degrees and crown positions thought the same. Some leaned toward the first emperor’s increasingly autocratic interpretation of his role. Many Coimbra graduates sided with the radical, locally educated priests and technical school graduates to argue for more constitutional restraints on the monarch and greater local control over local revenue and policy. Few, however, were associated with the radical democracy of the republicans, who looked to the United States and a decentralizing federalism as models for Brazil’s future.8The socioeconomic divisions associated with the political ideological ones are noteworthy. The most powerful families associated with the court in exile and the new monarchy have been indicated earlier. They were a congeries of intermarrying families in which recent Portuguese descent or origin, court titles and functions, lowland sugar, and overseas trade (particularly with Africa) were commonplace, either in the very recent past or in the present. Men of these families tended to support the monarchy with great fervor. Along with men of similar backgrounds from Bahia and Pernambuco, they would side with Dom Pedro against Brazilians who lacked their established privileges and were thirsting for a more liberal arrangement of power. The most powerful of the latter were often associated with the mineiro merchant-landholder families dominating the Minas-Rio axis; however, they also had significant support among weaker planter families (such as those in Pernambuco’s newer plantation lands), other hinterland landholders involved in domestic market trade (such as those in São Paulo), and, for tactical reasons (or through heartfelt radicalization born of frustration) urban middle-sector radicals in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Belém, and various mineiro centers. All of these men were locked out of the charmed circle dominating the crown’s policies and patronage. The appeal of a more open power structure for personal advancement, a structure that restricted the arbitrary potential of the monarch and allowed for greater local freedom and control, all of these elements of liberal political theory had a dramatic appeal to them. They coalesced into the liberal opposition of 1826–31. They found their political instrument in the new Chamber of Deputies, which met in Rio de Janeiro, according to the recently drafted Constitution of 1824.9The new charter drew inspiration from the postrevolutionary theories of Benjamin Constant. It placed the emperor, advised by his appointed Council of State, in a position of oversight and intervention as the moderating power, superior to the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. The monarch chose the Council of Ministers, the cabinet. The monarch and his cabinet embodied the executive branch leadership, which, through appointment and oversight, dominated executive administration down through the provinces to the local judicial and police agents of the crown. Although the legislative branch was dominated by a Chamber of Deputies (elected to four-year terms by property-qualified voters through local electors voting in colleges provincewide), the Chamber could be dissolved by the monarch and was checked by a Senate made up of members appointed for life by the crown (albeit from a list of three elected by the same process noted for deputies). Every decree and every law passed by the parliament was signed by the appropriate minister, and had to be approved by the monarch. Every policy decision taken by the cabinet also had to pass under the emperor’s hand, and he could dismiss cabinets as he liked.10It is no wonder, then, that many deputies of 1826 quickly formed a liberal opposition to Dom Pedro I. Although the constitution was drafted under the eye of the monarch, it had liberal provisions and rights derived from the Anglo-French liberal tradition, which the liberal deputies adapted to their own purposes. Aside from the obvious concession of a representative chamber and parliamentary legislation, it allowed for their fashioning a place in policymaking and review through ministerial interpellation. They would use all of these instruments to challenge Dom Pedro’s alleged inclination towards absolutist, arbitrary rule. They steadily hemmed him in and obstructed his decisions, while artfully mobilizing public opinion in the press and in the streets. Their hope was to compel the emperor to accede to the practice of a representative, constitutional monarchy, in which he would rule in partnership with a cabinet appointed from among those who had the majority in the Chamber. Only a minority hoped to push the ensuing crisis toward a republican denouement.11In the end, Dom Pedro I, indisposed to accept any imposition by the Chamber and faced with a violent uprising in Rio de Janeiro, abdicated his throne in favor of his son and namesake, a child of five years, on 7 April 1831. Taking the ancestral title of duque de Bragança, he returned to Europe to defend his daughter’s rights to the Portuguese throne.12It is plain that the abdication represented a shock to traditional authority. In institutional terms, for example, it was now the Chamber that dominated. The Chamber elected the three regents and, thence, it effectively governed selection of the cabinet ministers—the executive power—whom the regents appointed. Thus, issues of authority quickly came to fore. The charismatic presence of a legitimate monarch, a child, remained, but was effectively inert. He became an instrument, to be grasped and used, along with the constitution, as the two symbols of legitimacy. Their manipulation would provide the great political theater of the next decade. For most voters, and even for the urban street fighters of the era, either symbol could be used (and was) for mobilization; the majority in the Chamber had leaders who were most successful at this. The republicans were quickly marginalized (as treacherous anarchists), as were the restorationists (Dom Pedro’s loyalists, perceived and portrayed as traitors calling for the return of a Portuguese despot). The leaders and majority of the liberal opposition took to calling themselves moderates (moderados) to distinguish themselves from the zealots (exaltados), the more radical, even republican liberals. Moderados quickly conflated the political crisis leading to the abdication, their assumption of power through the Chamber, and the state and nation they thus controlled. They construed them all as one nationalist, revolutionary enterprise legitimately seeking reform in accord with liberty while defending itself from its foreign and subaltern enemies.13The reasons for the initial break with the exaltados, as well as for the moderados’ increasing stress on the state and the constitution, has two obvious origins. First, the colonial political culture of hierarchy and enlightened crown intervention, and, second, the fragility of the nation-state in the era 1831–34. This fragility must be underscored. The abdication of 1831 was part of a national, relatively democratic, and fervently nationalist political mobilization. It fed on its own victory over the alleged tyranny of the Portuguese-born emperor to articulate the need for decentralizing, democratic reforms and Lusophobic restrictions. The political debates of the first three years, especially the first session of the Chamber in 1831, make these tendencies and tactics clear—the political record makes their results clearer still. Nearly all speakers made rhetorical gestures of a demagogic sort. Calls for the exile, restriction, and harassment of the Portuguese were common, and the need for radical, decentralizing reform was bruited about as a revolutionary commonplace which had to be accommodated.14 Thus, the first moderado cabinet had to demonstrate nationalist, democratic credentials while defending what remained of state authority. It maintained social order in the capital and provinces, and used the symbol of the monarch and the issue of constitutional reforms as ways to cultivate national unity and undercut a feared provincial secessionism. These constitutional reforms were of exaltado origin, identified with the political mobilization that had led to abdication and beholden to the ideology of Atlantic liberalism (particularly that of the United States). They became the touchstone of political legitimacy, while institutions and individuals associated with the hated Portuguese monarch were tainted as either treacherous or absolutist, or both. The reforms emphasized devolution of power from the crown and its ministers to the local and provincial elites and governments (for example, elected provincial assemblies, relative provincial autonomy in legislation and revenue gathering and allocation, locally elected juries and magistrates, the dissolution of the moderating power and its associated Council of State, and the dissolution of the Senate). They also called for the national election of a single regent, clearly modeled on the U.S. president.15 These measures, most of which were passed in the Additional Act of 1834, undermined the already weakened authority of the state and the charismatic legitimacy of the monarch. Critics early on characterized them as a short path to political destabilization, social disorder, and national dismemberment.16It is useful to recall the context for such fears among the Brazilian elites. The Empire of Brazil, roughly half of South America, included some five million subjects by 1830; if we extrapolate from the figures for 1823 and 1850, nearly one-third of these people were captives, mostly African-born (that is, born out of slavery). Of the free population, most were of mixed African and European or entirely African descent, with some native stock mixed in in increasing proportions as one moved away from the South Atlantic coast and towards Amazonia. Only about six percent of the population was in the four most populous cities. Most of the captives were concentrated in the most populated, export-oriented provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco, and in Minas Gerais, which raised crops and herds oriented to sustain the population of Rio de Janeiro. In most of the plantation areas, captives were the clear majority; in all areas, the very poor and people of color were the overwhelming majority.17 In a phrase, the potential threat to the nation’s integrity and its racial, social, and political order were manifest and, with the history of Haiti and the ongoing example of Spanish America, easy to imagine. Indeed, imagination was not required. Both the era of uncertain authority and the new arenas for political competition at the local and the national level soon led to violence between elite factions (both in Rio de Janeiro and in the provinces), between urban radicals and Portuguese, and between subaltern groups and local or national established authorities. There were exaltado urban revolts in Recife in May, September, and November of 1831; there was a restorationist backlands rebellion that spread from Ceará in 1831 throughout the hinterlands of the northeastern provinces. Indeed, a 1832 restorationist backlands rebellion in Pernambuco, linked to that of Ceará, broke out and smoldered until 1835. In Rio de Janeiro itself, there were failed coup attempts, two in April 1832 and one in December 1833. There was a restorationist uprising in Minas in 1833, a slave revolt in Salvador in 1835, a secessionist revolt in Rio Grande in 1835 (lasting ten years), and, most destructive, a civil and then social war in Pará beginning in Belém and extending up the Amazon from 1835 to 1841. The decade limped out its time with an exaltado rising in Salvador in 1837–38 and a social revolt in Maranhão in 1838– 41.From the start, under the ministry of 1831–32, led by the reformist priest, Diogo Antônio Feijó (1784–1843), the combined threat of social and national disorder posed by decentralizing democratic liberalism, on the one hand, and the restoration movement, on the other, pulled the moderados in two different directions. Feijó and the moderado majority supporting him wished to realize liberal reforms, yet they could not do so unless they commanded the state and unless that state retained both power and authority. Indeed, both words and deeds demonstrate that even the most influential moderado reformists, such as Feijó and Evaristo Fereira da Veiga (1799–1837), were also deeply concerned about the issue of ebbing state authority.18 While the Feijó ministry and its Chamber majority defended the regime through state institutions, Evaristo did so not only as the regime’s most eloquent Chamber orator, but by effective propaganda in his influential newspaper, Aurora Fluminense, and through a network of political clubs (Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independência Nacional, founded on 19 May 1831). These clubs served to mobilize moderado support outside of the Chamber in Rio de Janeiro and various key cities throughout the empire. They formed the unarmed partner to the National Guard Feijó had organized among regime partisans in 1831.19By 1832 Feijó’s desires to both protect the regime and reform the state led him to attempt a coup against the constitution. Frustrated by the obstruction of the restorationist-ridden Senate and concerned with the rumors and realities of restorationist conspiracy, he and the moderado leadership conspired themselves to create a political crisis. They intended to use this to justify a Chamber vote reconstituting the Chamber as a national constituent assembly in order to write a new constitution embodying the reforms for which they hungered.20It has been argued that the origins of the Conservative party lie with the response and aftermath to this attempted coup.21 The moderado leadership in the Chamber met to discuss their tactics just before the crucial debate that was planned to call for the assembly. One of the leaders, Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão (1801–56),22 broke with his friends over the coup. For him, the issue of violating constitutional procedures was beyond the pale; it was the first step towards revolutionary anarchy. He made a speech to that effect during the crucial debate; brief and pointed, it galvanized enough support in the Chamber to foil the conspiracy.23 Indeed, Honório’s 1832 position, that the constitution, in and of itself, had a sacrosanct quality which could not be tainted if one were to preserve the state and society, would become fundamental to the Conservative party. Reform was entirely acceptable, but only if carried out through the careful series of scrutinies, elections, and debates required by the charter.24Yet this key Conservative position cannot be extrapolated backwards historically. In 1832 there were no Conservative positions and no Conservative party. In 1832 the fetishization of the constitution was as much a fundamental moderado position (hence the support Honório had been able to mobilize) as it was a restorationist totem (restorationists argued against any reform of the 1824 charter as essentially dangerous and unnecessary).25 Nonetheless, the event was a watershed in the history of the moderados. After the events of 1832, Feijó and his cabinet fell, two weak cabinets followed (1832–35), and the moderado leadership began a slow process of deterioration because of the personal and ideological conflicts involved. Indeed, Feijó’s 1835 election as the first sole regent was a close-run affair, won largely through Evaristo’s influence.26The emerging estrangement of most moderados with Feijó and with the 1834 Additional Act’s alleged failures with which his regime was identified are used to explain Feijó’s parliamentary opposition in the years of his regency (1835–37). Traditionally, this opposition has been assigned the role of matrix to the Conservative party.27 The key figure in the opposition is known to be Feijó’s erstwhile cabinet colleague, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos (1795– 1850).28 What the historiography does not state is that Honório and Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres (1802–71),29 a respected former moderado minister and very popular deputy, were already in opposition to the Additional Act for reasons similar to those of Vasconcelos. Indeed, they had opposed the reforms early on, in the 1834 debates and vote.30Such powerful and respected leaders’ defection from the moderado leadership, of course, brought with it increased deterioration of the moderado party in the Chamber. This erosion of the Chamber majority party corresponded directly to the organization of disgruntled deputies into an explicit party of opposition to Feijó and the reforms by 1835. This emergent party, under Vasconcelos, Honório, and Rodrigues Torres, was the factual basis for what the traditional historiography has anachronistically called the Conservative party of 1837. Feijó, successfully obstructed in the legislation and policies his ministers repeatedly defended, ceded to the majority that year. He brought in one of its new, restorationist allies, a former minister of the First Reign, Pedro de Araújo Lima (1797–1870),31 to be his minister of empire; then Feijó resigned. Araújo Lima, by the rule of constitutional succession, thus became provisional regent. As such, he accepted the resignation of Feijó’s cabinet and selected (19 September 1837) a cabinet from among the opposition majority’s chiefs. This was the so-called Cabinet of the Capable, dominated by Vasconcelos, with Honório remaining in the Chamber to maintain and direct the former opposition as the new ministerial majority.32Yet, the narrative just set out, although improved a bit over the traditional one by research, still raises many questions about the origins and status of the party that triumphed in 1837. First, the name. As stated, references to a Conservative party in 1837 are anachronistic. As Barman points out, contemporaries do not refer to a Conservative party in the 1830s. As we shall see, the party’s identification would initially reflect its Chamber origins and ideology and its association with the cabinet of 1837—it chieftains spoke of the party of the parliamentary majority or the party of 19 September. Why was this so? How did the new party perceive itself and its role? Second, it is apparent that little of what occurred in the Chamber would be defined as what we would call party formation today. What was a party, and what was its relationship to the larger society? This is a larger, complicated set of issues. After all, what we have glimpsed above was elite parliamentary manoeuver and, through speeches and polemical journalism, the appeal for future electoral support. For, having been elected in 1833 for the term of 1834–37, the deputies and leaders involved in the Chamber’s new opposition had to look to the electorate for support of their reaction against the reforms. Moreover, the historiography says little about this—about how the new partisan faction attracted and organized support outside of the Chamber. Particularly, we know precious little about the articulation between the Chamber’s majority opposition to Feijó’s regime and the majority of voters who had supported the moderados in 1833. For all of these complicated questions, raised by the narrative, we have only commonplaces in the canon. We are told that the opposition to Feijó, led by Vasconcelos and Honório, brought forth the Reaction (o Regresso) and the Conservative party in 1837, and that the latter was supported by, and associated with, the planters and merchants, especially those concerned with the rise of the great coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley.33As we shall see, all of this explains too little and some of it is just inaccurate. We must now take these matters and processes apart, by searching behind the narrative surface. We have introduced the socioeconomic and political context of the First Reign and set the scene at the level of a more accurate political narrative of the party’s emergence in the years that followed. Now we turn to the ideological and partisan consciousness of the party and its supporters and the way in which the party was related to the broader provincial society.Let us begin just behind the narrative, exploring the political scene backstage. As noted, the events of 1832 point to the beginnings of serious divisions between the moderado leaders and their followers in the Chamber and the literate male public. Yet, initially, Honório took great pains to minimize divisions among the moderados despite his break with Feijó and his policies.34 There was really no other practical choice. Honório was a moderado leader and the other two political factions in the Chamber were publicly anathema to him— factions he and other moderados had defined as unpatriotic, antinational restorationists and demagogic anarchists. These perceptions, clear in his published speeches and actions, point to the fact that between 1831 and 1834 the moderados had successfully marginalized the two other political factions beyond the pale of acceptable political participation. In the Chamber and the dominant political periodicals, they perceived