Read an Excerpt
The Tribute of Blood
ARMY, HONOR, RACE, AND NATION IN BRAZIL, 1864-1945
By Peter M. Beattie DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2743-1
Chapter One
"Nabbing Time"
The Heritage of Portugal's Gunpowder Empire, 1549-1864
When "nabbing time" came they [Marcolino's forefathers] hid themselves in the wilderness until the impressment gangs moved on. Around here it was all wilderness.... Men would jump and dive under the water and then hide themselves. Later they [the government] began the lottery. I was called up twice, but I never went to serve.-Marcolino Alves, Periá-Humberto de Campos, Maranhão
The notion of the uniform had a devastating effect upon Leandro's spirit; to be a soldier was at that time-and perhaps still is today-the worst thing that could befall a man. He thus promised sincerely that he would change his ways and try to find a position where he would be protected from any police whim coming from the terrible major [Vidigal]. Nevertheless, finding a job for someone who had never given a thought to such a thing up to a certain age, and to do so right away, was not the easiest of tasks.-Manuel Antônio de Almeida, Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant (emphasis added)
Early modern armies performed seemingly contradictory functions by enforcing royal law while collecting, watchingover, and employing males considered criminal, menacing, or, at best, unproductive. Thus, some law breakers became law enforcement agents. The use of penal exiles, volunteers, and mercenaries to man Portugal's colonial army would influence the Brazilian army's development, and over the long term, an analysis of troop enlistment illustrates recruitment's connection to broader colonial and Brazilian national projects. When elderly rustic folk like Marcolino Alves reminisced about recruitment, they referred to it as "nabbing time" (tempo de pegação). This expression vividly reflects how the prey of manhunts often viewed it. When army, police, or national guard moved through the countryside or into urban shantytowns, they sometimes met with violence. More often they found that all save young boys and old men had fled before them to avoid possible impressment. Others, like the protagonist Leandro in the picaresque novel Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, sought out jobs that would provide them "protection" from impressment.
In Brazil's patriarchal society, status was defined by conceptions of honor, and client-patron ties protected status up and down the social scale. The inability to protect oneself from impersonal authority indicated a lack of status. The deceitful and violent tactics used to press men into the army's ranks resembled those used to capture slaves in Africa and the Americas. As many poor free men defined their manhood and honor against stereotypes of slave status and comportment, impressment evoked a powerful stigma. Even today, a private's rank carries the taint of humble origins. Perceptions of praça rank would change over time, but its association with humble status is rooted in a history of impressment, which is in turn linked to Portugal's penal transportation system and the hierarchies of Brazil's multi-racial slave society.
The Soldiers of Gunpowder Empires
When Portuguese caravels disgorged the first armed force of six hundred men on Brazil's shores in 1549, it included two hundred regular soldiers and four hundred degredados-individuals exiled for crimes ranging from blasphemy to murder. Manning colonial regiments with some of Portugal's most threatening subjects formed an integral part of the crown's colonization strategy.
Portugal readily adapted the technological innovations of sail and firearms to become one of the first and most successful "gunpowder empires." Technology revolutionized warfare, changed the social composition of militaries, and opened new fronts of European expansion. Gunpowder heralded the tactical ascendence of plebeian infantry over noble cavalrymen. These conquest- and trade-driven empires battled to keep security expenditures low by minimizing opportunity costs. Whenever possible they eschewed pressing productive members of society. Instead, most or much of their manpower came from the dangerous classes: vagrants, thieves, blasphemers, foreigners, debtors, drunks, orphans, migrants, tractable "savages," incautious adventurers, and hapless passersby.
Military superiority allowed Portugal to perfect techniques of coercive labor recruitment to defend and develop its imperial possessions. African and Amerindian slavery was the most lucrative of Portugal's coercive migratory labor strategies, but penal exile also played an important role. Colonial armies became destinations for penal transportation systems as men were sentenced to serve terms of exile abroad as praças.
Most "honorable" Portuguese peasants and artisans regarded enlisted service with scorn, in part because the army inducted vagrants and "criminals." The crown compounded this disdain with its consistent policy of paying a praça's meager wages tardily and then only in part. Portuguese ballads warned young maids that it would be better to die than to marry a private. Some men went to great lengths to escape the clutches of recruiters by mutilating themselves. Even so, others volunteered to escape penury or seek adventure. Agents had their greatest success in attracting volunteers when they could oil reluctant recruits with alcohol and make good on cash bounties for enlistment. With these incentives, they signed on men who desperately needed resources or who simply could not resist the temptation of a drinking spree. The lure of riches in India during the 1500s or a gold-rush in Brazil during the 1700s inspired reinóis (natives of Portugal) to volunteer for colonial duty. Economic downturns, family tragedies, or demographic pressures on the land could push poor reinóis to seek security in soldiering.
Frontier colonial garrisons, like Church mission towns, were important outposts for the dissemination of Portuguese culture and political domination. Some colonies, like Angola, did not attract voluntary migrants and depended on soldier-exiles to maintain a strategic Portuguese presence. The opportunities offered by a praça's career oscillated over time and varied from outpost to outpost. A few of the lucky and talented climbed the ranks and became officers.
Before further discussing impressment's role in colonization, it is helpful to make a brief digression to give the reader a more general sense of Brazil's regional diversity and to illuminate how geography, climate, politics, and economic production shaped differences in regional populations over a broad sweep of time. The northeast's lush coastal plains are ideal for sugar cane cultivation, and its coastline thrusts eastward, giving privileged access to European and African shipping lanes [see figure 1]. These features made the northeast the hub of early colonization and development. Sugar production demanded intensive labor which led the Portuguese to depend first on Indian slaving but ultimately on large numbers of imported African slaves to perform the heavy work of cultivating and processing sugar cane. From the sixteenth century forward, racial intermixing created a predominately brown population in the northeast. The region's dry mountainous interior was not appropriate for large-scale agriculture, but it was amenable to animal husbandry and small-scale crop raising. After the 1870s, however, cataclysmic droughts periodically choked the hinterlands, driving thousands of parched backlanders to the humid coast. This coincided with a steady decline in the value of Brazil's sugar exports during the nineteenth century which crippled the northeast's economy; the region's coastal economy could not employ migrants from the hinterland. This established a characteristic migration pattern that continues to this day; the exodus of northeasterners to other regions of Brazil.
The southeast had played a backseat role to the sugar-producing northeast until precious metals and stones were discovered in the mountains of Minas Gerais in the late 1600s by Indian slavers and explorers from São Paulo. To regulate better the taxing of profitable gold exports, the Portuguese moved Brazil's colonial capital from the northeast city of Salvador to Rio in 1763. By the 1800s, the mining boom had subsided, but then the expansion of coffee production began. As in the mines of Minas Gerais, large numbers of African slaves performed the arduous labor in coffee cultivation and processing. Coffee plantations rapidly spread across the region's high planes from the province of Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo and southern Minas Gerais. By 1900, coffee accounted for 50 percent of Brazil's export earnings. In the northeast, Africans, Indians, and Europeans formed a racially mixed society, but in contrast, the southeast absorbed heavy doses of mostly European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo's coffee frontier and urban centers absorbed waves of immigrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Japan along with smaller streams of Eastern Europeans and Syrio-Lebanese. In comparison, the region's other provinces received more modest numbers of European immigrants, but on the whole, the region came to have a far larger light-skinned population than did the northeast. The southeast's growing share of national population reflected its prosperity; it was by far the most populous region by the early 1900s.
Carved out of territory long disputed with Spain, the violent borderlands of the south had only been sparsely populated in the colonial era. In the late 1800s, homesteading incentives and State subsidized transportation attracted land-hungry and unemployed European immigrants. Germans, Italians, and Poles settled in isolated immigrant colonies where most preserved their native language and traditions. Internal migration, led by northeasterners (who had no access to the land grants available to some immigrants) added to the south's demographic growth. The mountains and grasslands of this fertile, temperate region produced timber, cattle, grain, rice, and wine. Its reliance on less labor-intensive forms of production required fewer African slaves, and its population was much more European than other regions by the early twentieth century.
Two unwieldy frontier states made up the central west region that, though sparsely populated in colonial times, demonstrated slow but steady growth after Independence. The fertile wetlands of Mato Grosso are traversed by navigable rivers, but moving to the east wetlands give way to the dry mountainous high plains that dominate Goiás before dipping into the Amazon basin to the north. Cattle raising, scattered mining, and the collection of mate tea leaves were the region's most important economic activities. The North comprises the larger part of the Amazon River basin. Fortunately for administrators, this region is crisscrossed with navigable waterways. A boom in rubber and cocoa stimulated population growth in the North during the late 1800s. The late-developing frontier regions of the North and the Central West received comparatively limited African and direct European immigration compared to other regions. The local Indian populations contributed more visibly to the culture and racial composition of these gargantuan frontier regions. Even so, they remained sparsely populated compared to other regions. From colonial times to the present, most of Brazil's population clung to the coast. Army praças served as an integral part of frontier settlement in all regions as well as in the defense and development of coastal urban centers.
Regional differences shaped the character of recruitment which also fluctuated between peace and wartime. War altered the norms governing recruitment, exposing parts of the "protected" poor population usually shielded from it. Duing its colonial rule in Brazil (1500-1822), Portugal often experienced shortages of volunteers. When the crown required men, it issued recruitment quotas to local Portuguese officials, who, backed by royal law, sought to protect married men from recruitment. A certifiable marriage was a mark of "honorable" status that the state used to classify plebeian subjects. Even without the benefit of modern statistics, authorities knew that single young men were the main perpetrators of crime and public disturbances. Married men were responsible for protecting and supporting their wives and children. By recruiting married men, the crown could be accused of exposing married women to ill repute by removing their natural male protectors from the household.
The number of pressed men and volunteers often failed to satisfy the crown's need for troops in the colonies. To resolve this shortage, the crown tapped into Portugal's convict populations. Accordingly, Portuguese courts came to prefer sentences of temporary or permanent exile in the 1500s, although judges reserved such sentences for serious civil and religious crimes: homicide, theft, kidnapping, blasphemy, sodomy, bigamy, Judaizing, and witchcraft. Portugal initiated penal exile or transportation systems to settle sparsely populated colonies, a practice France, England, Spain, and others would later imitate.
Sentences of banishment reveal the importance attached to place in early modern Portugal. The ties of family, patronage, and status were often anchored in one's locality. Exile deprived an offender of the local social bonds developed over a lifetime or even generations. The importance of the hearth served as an obstacle to periodic imperial demands for a more mobile population, and sentences of penal exile proved an effective means of countering the ties of home. This is not to say that populations were not geographically mobile and that voluntary mobility did not offer advantages to the poor who were willing to take risks. Crown officials also worked to keep honorable subjects in place to facilitate order, production, and tax collection.
The crown relied heavily on sentences of penal exile as a frugal remedy to the court's mounting problems with crime at home. According to their crimes and the crown's needs, judges sentenced exiles to specific destinations. Circular letters from the crown instructed district officials weeks before the biannual fleet embarkation for India to "not only arrest such persons as live to the prejudice and scandal of the common weal by committing crimes, but also those who live in idleness." Timothy Coates estimates that from 1550 to 1720 Tribunals of Inquisition and royal courts deported more than seventeen thousand degredados from Portugal to Asia, Africa, and Brazil.
Judges often specified that male offenders serve sentences of exile in colonial battalions. Exiles without specific instructions could legally work where they liked and move about freely within the designated jurisdiction. Royal decrees show that in practice these rights were not always respected. A 1692 royal missive informed the Viceroy of India that degregados who had completed their sentence of exile should be denied passage home "only when there is a need for more soldiers there." Royal defense took priority over juridical principles. Since a scarcity of labor characterized the colonies, colonial officers could not make rigid distinctions between volunteers and exiles in the ranks. Criminals and volunteers were lumped together, tainting all with the stigma of criminal exile.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tribute of Blood by Peter M. Beattie Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
