History Of Brazil III

The Sojourn of the Portuguese Court

The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) profoundly altered the course of Brazilian history. Early in November 1807, Napoleon dispatched an army across the Spanish frontier into Portugal. The Portuguese regent, Prince John, and most of his court embarked from Lisbon shortly before the arrival of the French army and sailed for Brazil (see John VI). Prince John made Rio de Janeiro the seat of the royal government of Portugal and decreed a series of reforms and improvements for Brazil, among them the removal of restrictions on commerce, the institution of measures beneficial to agriculture and industry, and the creation of schools of higher learning.

 Prince John inherited the Portuguese crown as John VI in March 1816. In the five-year period before his recall to Portugal, his regime steadily lost favor among the Brazilians. The royal government was corrupt and inefficient, and republican sentiment, widespread in the country following the French Revolution, had gained considerable momentum when the neighboring Spanish colonies declared their independence. In 1816 King John intervened, occupying Banda Oriental (Uruguay), then under the control of Spanish-American revolutionaries. He crushed a revolutionary uprising in Pernambuco the next year. Banda Oriental was annexed to Brazil in 1821 and renamed Cisplatine Province. Before departing for Portugal in 1821, John VI made his second son, Dom Pedro, regent of Brazil. Sharp antagonism to the king’s Brazilian reforms had developed meanwhile in Portugal; the Cortes, the Portuguese legislature, enacted legislation designed to return Brazil to its former status as a colony. Dom Pedro was ordered to return to Europe. In 1822, responding to the pleas of the indignant Brazilians, Dom Pedro announced his refusal to leave Brazil. He convoked a Constituent Assembly in June, and in September, when dispatches from Portugal disclosed that the Cortes would make no major concessions to Brazilian nationalism, he proclaimed the country’s independence. By vote of the upper house of the Constituent Assembly, he became emperor of Brazil in the same year. All Portuguese troops in Brazil had been forced to surrender by the end of 1823.

The Empire of Brazil

An autocratic ruler, Pedro I lost much of his popular support during the first year of his reign. Because of dissension within the Constituent Assembly, he dissolved it in 1823 and promulgated a constitution in March 1824. In 1825 Brazil, provoked by Argentina’s support of a rebellion in Cisplatine Province, became embroiled in war with that country. In 1827 the Brazilians were decisively defeated, and through British mediation Cisplatine Province won independence as Uruguay. Popular opposition to Pedro I mounted during the next few years. In April 1831 he abdicated in favor of Pedro II, the five-year-old heir apparent.

Regencies ruled Brazil for the following decade, a period of political turbulence marked by frequent provincial revolts and uprisings. Toward the end of the decade a movement to place the young emperor at the head of the government gained popular support, and in July 1840 the Brazilian Parliament proclaimed that Pedro II had attained his majority.

Pedro II proved to be one of the most able monarchs of his time. During his reign, which lasted nearly half a century, the population and economy expanded at unprecedented rates. National production increased by more than 900 percent. A network of railroads was constructed. In the realm of foreign affairs the imperial government was actively hostile to neighboring dictatorial regimes. It supported the successful revolutionary war against the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas from 1851 to 1852 and, allied with Argentina and Uruguay, fought a victorious war against Paraguay from 1865 to 1870.

The chief domestic political issue of the emperor’s reign grew out of a broad movement for the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Importation of African slaves was outlawed in 1853. An organized campaign for emancipation of the 2.5 million slaves already in Brazil was launched a few years later. The abolitionists won their first victory in 1871, when the national Parliament approved legislation freeing children born of slave mothers. For various reasons, including the sacrifices entailed by the Paraguayan war, a parallel movement for a republic developed at about this time. Liberalism became widespread during the next 15 years. Slaves more than 60 years of age were liberated in 1885. In May 1888 all remaining slaves were emancipated.

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