Luís Pires, a free Pardo of indeterminate age, left his home and went on the run early in March, 1799. He had been found guilty of helping to organize a rebellious conspiracy against Portuguese rule in the city of Salvador da Bahia and was wanted for questioning by the High Court. Yet he was also wanted for a second but no less significant charge of sedition. According to the Portuguese legal code, the Ordenações Filipinas, sedition was considered high treason and was defined as any attempt to publicly incite subjects to engage in acts of disloyalty to the Portuguese crown.Footnote ¹ Both charges dated back to August 12, 1798. On that morning, in market squares, public plazas, and in front of churches, handwritten demands for ending race discrimination and slavery, as well as increasing soldiers’ pay, accompanied the announcement of a coming rebellion. Death threats to the clergy were scrawled out on the walls and stoops of church facades. Punishments for such actions varied. Sometimes it was just a hanging. Other times the guilty were drawn and quartered by horses, or perhaps cudgeled and broken on wheels. Regardless of the scenario, a gauntlet of death was pursuing Pires, looming on his horizon.

Pires must have surely known this. No one who was interrogated admitted to having seen him leave. He could have been hiding nearby in the countryside or perhaps even somewhere in the city. Regardless of how he got away or where he went, the only thing that mattered, for both officials and for those he had planned a rebellion with, was that he could not be found. He was given a death sentence in absentia, an act that was intended to show how much control the crown had over the life and death of its subjects.Footnote ²

Pires was not the only man to run from prison and certain death. Pedro Leão, a white male with no profession of any sort, also ran away.Footnote ³ There was no telling where he was or whether he and Pires were together or separate. Neither of them would be located and brought in for questioning, conviction, or punishment before the investigation into the planned rebellion was concluded. In both cases, the men almost certainly got away with the help of allies, friends, and associates. It was more than common for people to seek this kind of help if they were eligible for military conscription or if they were trying to avoid slave catchers. People avoided being captured in part because of their web of relations, whether those relations were social, economic, or political in nature. In such cases, when the ability to avoid capture makes it impossible for us to know what ultimately happened to an individual, we can still ask questions about who they knew and how social networks helped transform such relations into insurgent movements. In between the covers of this book, I have written with an abiding concern for such relations. In many ways, then, one of the central questions of this book is simply this: What kind of social relations sustained or protected this one particular group of people, in this one particular place and time, who decided they wanted to fight against their government? Relatedly, how might this help us better understand individuals who did not engage in revolutionary meetings but participated in different ways, such as staying quiet about meetings or being conduits for sending messages? Engaging with questions of relations is to engage in questions of socialization. And to think through socialization as an active, never neutral process is to engage with the concept of the political in enslaved societies. This book attempts to do no less.

While Pires and Leão escaped, there were four other men connected to the same crimes who were not so fortunate. João de Deus do Nascimento was a formerly enslaved Pardo tailor. Lucas Dantas was a free Pardo and a soldier. Luís Gonzaga das Virgens e Veiga was a free Pardo soldier as well. Finally, there was Manuel Faustino dos Santos Lira, who was also a tailor.Footnote ⁴ They were all declared guilty of leading a seditious conspiracy against the crown, and they were all executed. After the hangings, their arms, legs, and heads were severed and displayed on pikes and poles in public locations across the city.

The Tailors’ Conspiracy, as it came to be known, was marked by a high degree of publicity. The executions took place in the city’s busiest plaza; the body parts were displayed on roads leading into city markets; even the effect that rotting flesh might have on public health was a matter of concern. Equally important, however, was the fact that the bulletins were posted in the most public places where anyone could see them. In other words, the conspiracy to rebel was not discovered by authorities, but was revealed through a series of pronouncements written by anonymous hands. It was not the intent to rebel that was kept secret, but the numbers and names of those who planned or supported rebellion. Perhaps this is why colonial officials and the High Court chose to refer to the events of 1798 according to two different legal designations. On the one hand, it met the criteria to be labeled a criminal conspiracy, a categorization that focused on the relation between illegality and secrecy – namely any intent to accomplish something legal through illegal and secret means.Footnote ⁵ On the other hand, the High Court and the governor of Bahia also classified the 1798 conspiracy as a case of sedition, a categorization that focused more on the relation between publicity and legality – namely any intent to accomplish something illegal through public and legal procedures.

Due to the fact that no rebellion actually took place, one might be tempted, as some historians have, to argue that the violent repression of this movement was far out of proportion to what had occurred.Footnote ⁶ Yet what if the bulletins that were displayed on public structures for any and all to see, the very thing that made them “seditious,” appealed to more than just the enslaved and people of color? What is the significance of the fact that these papers publicized the creation of a radical party but kept the names of those who participated in the movement concealed? In short, how might we understand sedition and publicity alongside secrecy and conspiracy? These last questions are the point of departure for this study. In this book, I offer the first full monograph in English on this series of events that have occupied an important place in the historiography of Brazil. To be sure, it is not the first book in English to discuss the conspiracy; that honor belongs to historians of Brazilian independence.Footnote ⁷ Yet no study produced by American or British scholars has analyzed the 1798 conspiracy in its own right and explored what it may tell us about Afro–Brazilian politics during the so-called crisis of Portuguese imperialism during the Age of Revolution. This study thus represents a significant contribution to the historiographies of colonial Brazil and Afro–Latin American studies.

In the chapters that follow, I advance three interlocking arguments. First, I argue that by thinking about the Tailors’ Conspiracy as both conspiracy and sedition we get a better sense of why colonial elites and officials felt so threatened about a rebellion that never happened. They knew that they were not just facing a planned uprising but also a plot made by multiple groups of men, most of them free(d) or enslaved, who asked the people, directly and explicitly, to join their uprising. It was a public challenge to the crown, and we cannot underestimate the significance of either the public pasquins, as the handwritten bulletins were called, or the public audience whom the writers were trying to persuade. Second, I present the 1798 conspiracy within an empire-wide context that connects India, Angola, and Brazil into a pattern of insurgency. Between 1787 and 1798, Portuguese officials had to contend with a series of conspiracies and rebellions not only in Brazil but in India and West Central Africa as well. In other words, by the time the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia occurred, it was actually part of the tail end of a wave of insurrectionary activity that Portuguese officials dealt with at the end of the eighteenth century. Far from only being a story about Bahia or Brazil, the 1798 conspiracy was part of an empire-wide historical process. My third argument, and the core of this book, is that among those who took part in the conspiracy, the place of care and relationality within their project marked fresh conceptualizations of the political. This is an insight that emerges from a number of scholars who have demonstrated an orientation towards care for the other at the center of their work. Jessica Marie Johnson’s explorations of how African and African-descended women merchants “mothered spaces of care and celebration” helps rewrite the politics, social relations, and economic transactions of the slave trade.Footnote ⁸ Robin D. G. Kelley has also taken note of how people in such spaces often cultivated “a revolutionary culture of care that met all basic needs, that eliminated racism, patriarchy, and poverty, and that democratized knowledge and power.”Footnote ⁹ For people of African descent, this usually meant developing political consciousness behind the doors of slave cabins. As the historian Stephanie Camp argued gently but brilliantly, the “secret life of slave cabins offers glimpses of the practices and ideologies that lay behind the development of visible slave resistance.”Footnote ¹⁰ Black Feminist philosopher Joy James has observed that these practices included extending care beyond the blood ties that slavery routinely broke, like an enslaved woman adopting an enslaved child after having had her own children sold away.Footnote ¹¹ This was also seen in Malungos, shipmates during the middle passage who were sometimes able to reconnect with each other in the Americas, sometimes even when they were enslaved in different locations that were far apart.Footnote ¹² In other words, the political consciousness of enslaved people and their descendants was constantly changing, taking shape, and recalculating old patterns for new occasions. The challenge in episodes of resistance is to try and follow the different changes in peoples’ commitments to the conspiracy and their changing relations to each other, and to do it all with a source base that is overwrought with elisions, ignorance, defamations, improper recordings, distortions, and more. The court investigation into the 1798 conspiracies produced nearly 1,300 pages of transcript. Even with all of its flaws, it is rich with details on relationships of all sorts, relationships between the conspirators but also between “the people” of Bahia. We see a populace defined by relation as well as by rank, even though relation is seldom free from inequity. This resulted in a landscape full of “uneven diversities,” formations of people from different ranks who could protect or conceal one another without ever losing a sense of the unequal power dynamics between them.

In this book, relation is more than simply a mode of existence between blood kin or friends. It is a manner of seeking out sociability and community without demanding a synchronicity of thought between self and others. This amounts to building networks out of care and concern, rather than just from ideological foundations, and in the process making care and concern for community a central pillar of revolutionary organizing. In enslaved societies, resistance was based on relation because it first had to come into existence as a secret between one or more individuals. The notable exception to this pattern is flight from enslavement, which usually became relational if a fugitive hoped to stay free. Yet relation is more than just one catalyst among others that propels people into conflict. It is also a principle and a practice that sustains people in the midst of political struggle. What does practicing relation in a revolutionary moment entail, and how does it rise to the level of the political? The preceding question implicitly rejects “the life of the mind” as the proper organon of the political, or rather it rejects a split between the life of the mind and the life of the sensuous.Footnote ¹³ Providing care and concern for comrades, or giving protection and cover to fugitives, were calculated actions that drew on both psychic and emotional energies. If we pay closer attention to relation in rebellions or conspiracies, we see people full of conviction who know how to support, provide for, and nourish one another, physically and spiritually, better than the state. In other words, the life of the mind was only secured for them through attending to and caring for each other’s hurts, concerns, and celebrations. Thus, while the ideology of a movement may speak in terms of immediate redress regarding the basic necessities of life, what sustains that movement is a conception of politics in which mind and sensuality make a dual imprint on a political situation and on relationships.

However, there were also profound complications that came from the relational nature of resistance. The most obvious complication was the havoc that slavery and the slave trade created among Black kin networks. Separated by sales or premature deaths and debilitated by injury and humiliation, the very practice of having and living with relatives was a fight that often turned out to be futile. Closely connected to the damage that slavery did to families was how slavery’s assault on relations produced enormous difficulties for those who endeavored to resist enslavement and racism. First of all, time was never on the side of those who resisted. More often than not they did not own themselves or their own time, making every minute of their meetings and strategizing of paramount importance.Footnote ¹⁴ In this context, relations had to take forms in which leaders accepted followers as they came and figured out in the process how to make a movement out of people with very different intentions, interests, and constraints relative to their participation. The notion of an ideal project that moves in one direction is a luxury whose price was too steep and too privileged to entertain.

What gave the 1798 conspiracies a radical flavor, then, was not the ideological orientation of the conspirators and their plans; it was the manner in which they worked to hold themselves together in spite of the fact that so many people who were involved came from an array of different social ranks. They crafted their political purpose not only through friendships and blood relations but also through work associations, spiritual practices, and more. Their dialogues and actions framed their conflict as a question of who had the authority to decide on and administer the basic necessities of life. This was what Lucas Dantas, João de Deus, and others fought for: not just the life of mind and debate, but also the right to decide on the terms of their lives.

The social relations that tied men to each other, and that caused them to join and remain invested in their conspiracy, were also decisive in shaping how they organized and when they decided to make moves. One of the key moves that they made, one that distinguishes this from the typical conspiracy in an enslaved society, is the fact that they actually moved from conspiring to performing the seditious act of placing the bulletins around the city. In other words, they announced the conspiracy before they were captured and before even trying to rebel. They made no effort to catch colonial officials off guard. It showed a remarkable degree of confidence and dedication to the project. The events of 1798 must not only be studied as a conspiracy but also as a case of something that was both conspiratorial and seditious. It affords us the chance to look at what happened to the movement when the bulletins went up and what happened afterwards. It also allows us to gauge how the conspirators related to people in the city and how they related to one another.

Conspiracy, Sedition, and Simultaneity

In the field of Caribbean and Latin American history, studies of slave conspiracies have recently been undergoing thorough reevaluations. For example, a number of scholars have revisited rebellions and conspiracies against slavery with a renewed interest in the intellectual and artistic production of Black and Pardo subjects.Footnote ¹⁵ Others have presented new frameworks for studying slavery itself as a state of protracted, physical, and psychological warfare.Footnote ¹⁶

As these recent historiographical trends indicate, we are writing more robust intellectual histories of the Black Atlantic during the Age of Revolution. When it comes to writing about conspiracies, however, the problem of “veracity” remains central to the inquiry. This way of conceptualizing Black political action is framed as a question of intent, namely whether the accused individuals were actually intending to start a rebellion or were simply the unfortunate scapegoats in a drama of white paranoia. To arrive at an answer to this question, qualifying questions are posed. For instance, did the suspected conspirators have access to guns? Can we identify a chain of command or a set of leaders? Were they seeking some type of foreign aid? Yet these are not zero-sum questions that can be solved with a singular metric of veracity. For instance, as several scholars have demonstrated, linking the realness of a conspiracy to the presence of or access to firearms discounts other weapons and styles of warfare that dispossessed groups of people make use of. Thus, fire, building tools, sticks, cudgels, and poisons are characterized as premodern, ineffective, and not worth serious consideration.Footnote ¹⁷

If identifying the veracity of a conspiracy is a process of stacking up affirmative responses to qualifying questions, when the answer to more than one question is negative we move one step in the opposite direction towards discounting that anything revolutionary took place. For some historians, this is an invitation to characterize the event as little more than “loose talk” that was exploited by paranoid officials.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the central problem in this idea is not that historians raise doubts about the sincerity of historical actors to follow through on their words. Indeed, the sincerity of the claims is not what is at stake. The real dilemma that engulfs the notion of “loose talk” is that the sincerity of speech takes precedence over the operation of speech in a setting where slavery is legal and prevalent. There was no concept of free speech as we know it in the Portuguese empire of the late eighteenth century. Slanderous and seditious words often led to court cases and death, and both imperial subjects and enslaved people knew this.Footnote ¹⁹

The concern that some historians show towards distinguishing “loose talk” from actual conspiracy stems from the widest held assumption about the concept of Black political life in colonial slave regimes: that persons of African descent could plan and organize only in secret, a vision of politics that forecloses the possibility of seeing seditious enslaved and free(d) peoples at war with the state.Footnote ²⁰ But in the Portuguese empire of the late eighteenth century, seditious subjects could be and were identified across all ranks and classes of society. For example, a plot to assassinate the king of Portugal in 1758 resulted in the charge of sedition and execution of one family of nobles and their Jesuit confessor. Their crime was not simply attacking the king’s coach in broad daylight but also publicly questioning his rule.Footnote ²¹ Later, in 1787, a seditious conspiracy to end racial discrimination and Portuguese rule was discovered in Goa. It was orchestrated by a group of “Brahmin Priests,” who were upset at being passed over for promotions to two vacant archbishoprics in Portuguese India. Two years later, in 1789, a conspiracy for independence known as the Inconfidência Mineira was revealed in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Finally, there was the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia that was also classified as a case of sedition. In these cases, their crimes were not only plotting to rebel but also publicly spreading their disloyalty to others. In calling for this attention to the importance of sedition, I am not arguing that there was no conspiracy in 1798. I am, however, advancing the idea that the court’s categorization of the event as seditious presents a chance to think newly about how Bahian officials understood the actions of the men who were arrested and, more importantly, how these men related to, helped, and worked with one another as their plans progressed from being conspiratorial to being released to the public. What can we learn about the relations between them based on the fact that someone in the group posted their agenda in public places around the city? And, more broadly, how might their relations with one another help us reconsider some questions that have been of foremost importance for the historiography of the Tailors’ Conspiracy?

Historiography and the Conspiracy

The first modern historical studies of the 1798 conspiracy worked to position it as a legitimate revolution. It had been derided and dismissed by both the state and by historians, both of whom recognized the 1789 Inconfidência Mineira as foundational for the formation of Brazil. It was the Bahian historian Braz do Amaral who offered one of the first analyses of the Tailors’ Conspiracy that moved beyond the denigration of the “lower orders.”Footnote ²² He stressed the idea of “cooperation” between and across classes and projected the formation of Brazilian independence through a critical reading of Bahian politics at the end of the eighteenth century. Most studies of the conspiracies that followed his work continued to be invested in the formation of the nation. The Brazilian historian Affonso Ruy called the collective acts of 1798 the first “social revolution in Brazil.” He positioned the white elites as a vanguard class whose ideas seeped down to a group of pardo men.Footnote ²³ The most important theoretical insight on the subject came from the Brazilian historian Fernando A. Novais’s thesis that the conspiracies of the late eighteenth century were a consequence of a political “crisis in the old regime.” Novais argued that the late eighteenth-century reforms initiated by Portugal’s prime minister, the marquis of Pombal, led to an accumulation of more financial and political power for planters and merchants in Brazil. This generated a conflictual situation between Brazil and Portugal, and the struggle for national independence was a process that grew out of these irreconcilable tensions.Footnote ²⁴ The influence of Novais’s thesis is apparent in studies that followed. István Jancsó more or less adhered to Novais’s “crisis” thesis as well as his search for the roots of independence in the era of the Pombaline reforms. Yet Jancsó also took Novais’s concept of the crisis and applied it to the events of 1798. He argued that any lasting articulation between the objectives of the lower orders and the objectives of their white cohorts was an impossibility. The gulf between them was structural, and it reflected the contradictions of an enslaved society.Footnote ²⁵ The historian Carlos Guilherme Mota held a similar view of the conspiracy but emphasized the centrality of land to elites who sought a way to include the masses while keeping them out of politics. For him, it was another example of how the contradictions and incompatibilities of the “crisis” led to the failure of the conspiracy.Footnote ²⁶ Luís Henrique Dias Tavares gave more time and care to studying the Tailors’ Conspiracy than any other historian. Over the course of fifty years, his work revealed the rich possibilities that could come from studying resistance movements through identifying the social networks that tied some conspirators to one another. Like other historians of the Tailors’ Conspiracy, I am profoundly indebted to his work, to both his abiding dedication to rereading the investigation record many times over and his willingness to return to the same questions and show revisions of his thought in writing. This is no small feat for a judicial investigation of nearly 1,300 pages.Footnote ²⁷

Recently, it has been argued that the crisis as described by Novais comes up short. Historian Patrícia Valim argues that merchants and elites in Portugal and Brazil were less divided than historians have previously contended. This was the case in Bahia, where merchants, officials, and enslavers were closely linked to both each other and to merchant corporations in Lisbon. Thus, many of the elite participants of the 1798 conspiracy pushed for reform rather than rupture with the empire. Only the lower orders pushed for complete social change, and this was a contradiction that could not be resolved.Footnote ²⁸ Meanwhile, Marco Morel has brought a fresh perspective to studying the impact of the French Revolution on the conspiracies. Recently, he, along with István Jancsó, brought to light documents from a French naval captain who hoped to invade Brazil and free it from Portugal. While scholars before him could only suggest such a possibility, he has shifted the tone of the debate with fresh evidence and the possibility of new insights about French politics in Brazil during the Age of Revolution.Footnote ²⁹

Throughout the text, I pull alongside and push up against these scholars as I attend to certain threads in the story that remain under-considered, threads that connect freed and enslaved people, market vendors and soldiers, officers and soldiers, deserters and runaways, and elite whites and Pardos. This was a messy event that took place during a messy time in the Atlantic world. Nothing about the story was neat, not the planning, the arrests, nor the punishments. This book represents an effort to deal with this messiness with all of the uneven relations and confusing alliances that gave a thick texture to what sometimes seemed like rudderless, indecisive behavior.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Imperial Warfare,” covers the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Chapter 1, “Avoiding War,” focuses on the experiences and relations that Black and Pardo soldiers had with each other, with white soldiers and officers, with enslaved people, and with civilians during the War of the Debatable Lands between Spain and Portugal. To make up for the low number of voluntary enlistees, from 1762 to 1777 the viceroy often instructed military officers to find deserters and impress men into service. They also attempted to reward potential enlistees with honors and to eradicate racial barriers for military promotions for non-white soldiers. Neither tactic produced a steady source of bodies for the war. Soldiers continued to desert and run from military impressment in high numbers. They were protected by, or in relation with, certain military officers, market vendors, enslaved people, and quilombolas (maroons). It was an ensemble of people who were often linked through uneven relations, people who existed together in a society of diverse unevenness. Those who deserted, hid from, or fought back against military recruiters demonstrated that despite their differences they trusted themselves to take better care of one another than the army could. While the military tried to rob them of their labor and of their surplus crops, many of them relied on their relations, whether equal or unequal relations, to stay free and have their needs met through each other rather than through a war-embattled state.

Chapter 2, “Insurgency and the Empire,” moves from inter-imperial warfare to a consideration of conspiracies in India and Brazil and one rebellion in West Central Africa. Each plot was a serious threat to Portuguese rule, yet they have not been examined together in an analysis of the empire in the Age of Revolution. They show the arc of insurgency within the empire, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, an arc that was, like the war in the Debatable Lands, shaped indelibly by the reforms of the marquis of Pombal. In India, priests of Brahmin origins began to organize a conspiracy when they were passed over for new archbishoprics in the Portuguese colony of Goa, blaming racism in the Catholic Church as the reason for their actions. In West Central Africa, the marquis of the Kingdom of Musulu, a tribute state of the larger Kingdom of Kongo, rebelled against Kongo and attacked Portuguese troops along the coast of Angola. Finally, in Brazil, a group of elites and poor to middling whites organized a rebellion in Minas Gerais against a new tax that would have affected their wealth and standing. In one way or another, the slave trade and race relations in the Portuguese empire were crucial motivators for the men who took part in each of these campaigns. Thus, they each help us see in their own unique ways the continued significance of Fernado A. Novais’s insight that the slave trade was the central nerve of the empire in both a financial sense and across the different efforts to overthrow Portuguese rule. In other words, before the Portuguese even had to deal with the Tailors’ Conspiracy, a pattern was emerging in which the question of slavery and the slave trade was carried out by people who themselves were not enslaved. And, between the War for the Debatable Lands and these resistance efforts, the Portuguese also had decades of experience with insurgents dedicated to reforming, and then rebelling against, racially prohibitive laws.

Part II of the book, “The Plot,” tells the story of the conspiracy from the phases of recruiting and organization to the appearance of the seditious pasquins on August 12, 1798. Chapter 3, “Seditious Spaces,” examines the pasquins in detail. The places they were attached to were strategically located in places where soldiers spent significant time. They were also aimed at and artisans. The author of the papers remains up for debate (see Chapter 5), and so does the question of how and why they were posted in the places they were. Tantalizing evidence suggests that at least one avenue for spreading information about the conspiracy might have come via quitandeiras (market women). The only bulletin that was recovered from a personal piece of property, rather than from a church wall or plaza, was found on the stall of a market woman. This, as well as evidence that Black and Pardo women had already fought with the governor over market space in early 1798, makes it likely that quitandeiras played a role in supporting and promoting the conspiracy. While this does not indicate that Black women were present for any conspiratorial meetings, it does indicate that they were politically engaged in their own struggles and that they were in fact part of the insurgent activity in Bahia during the 1790s. There is much to learn from critically studying the content of the bulletins as well as what they tell us about reading and communication in an enslaved society. However, if we also start to attend more to how such bulletins were posted and who might be responsible for spreading the seditious papers around the city, it gives us even more access to the relational lives that soldiers developed with artisans, market vendors, and, by extension, the remainder of the city.

Chapter 4, “Coming Together,” delves into how men met up with each other and began to form conspiratorial rings. One ring developed around the soldier Lucas Dantas, whose vision of revolution included the liberation of all Black and Pardo people. Another circle grew around João de Deus at his tailoring shop. He himself was pulled between the activity he was coordinating around his shop and promises from a friend that there were white men who were interested in joining with the rebellion. These white men represented a third ring unto itself. Two of them were implicated in the conspiracy, but the courts never found or pursued them. Otherwise, they remained at a distance, and were only referred to as “great men” when they were invoked by João de Deus or other conspirators. In other words, these groups were not mutually dependent upon one another, and in most instances did not even meet. At this point the question arises of whether this was in fact one conspiracy or if the picture was much more complex and disparate. Ultimately, building the plot through relation has the advantage of intimacy, or a type of care and concern for the other that comes from personal investments in one another. The drawback is that as a movement grows and personal relation is no longer a feasible method for growing a rebellion the only way forward is through the ability to articulate multiple streams or circles of political action to one another. The challenge for everyone who was wrapped up in the conspiracies of 1798 was precisely how to articulate and make political connections across groups. In other words, it is exactly at the point where the intimacy becomes replaced with abstraction that we must interrogate the efficacy of what I have previously termed diverse unevenness.

Part III of the book, “Conspiracy Arrested,” narrates the dissolution of the plot by following the arrests and interrogation procedures of the High Court. Chapter 5, “The Arrests Begin,” follows the conspirators through their arrests. After an investigation that included two different Pardo soldiers, Luís Gonzaga, who was a three-time deserter and thus had a delinquent record, was arrested and charged with writing the bulletins. The following day João de Deus and Lucas Dantas decided to rush the rebellion and frantically tried to invite people to come to a meeting at a bar by the city dam. From there, everything unraveled. João de Deus did not know, but he had two spies in his ring who were working for colonial officials. They placed their faith in the empire and led their superiors to the final meeting that João de Deus held. The principal reason that these men could effectively sneak into the conspiracy and become spies is because by the time of the meeting near the dam it was no longer possible to tell who knew whom. This hasty attempt to bring different groups together in a public location was a response to the fact that the night before the meeting the court had arrested the man whom they blamed for writing the bulletins. But it also signified that João de Deus, Lucas Dantas, and others believed that they would get enough support from the people in the city or that they had become more confident, through some other source, in their ability to start a revolution. Either way, the move from secrecy to publicity was made without the bonds of social or political relations that had held them together while they slowly grew. This was not simply a question of an absent relation between white conspirators and Pardos but also between and among the Blacks and Pardos who were nominally part of the same movement.

Chapter 6, “In the Segredos,” covers the interrogation and the final punishments. Soldiers, artisans, freed people, and enslaved people made up the bulk of those who were imprisoned and questioned. Most of their testimonies and replies to the judges focused on the ties that bound soldiers and artisans both before the conspiracy and while under interrogations. The title of the chapter comes from the fact that some of the men were held in prison cells called segredos while waiting to be questioned by the High Court. These were secret cells where prisoners were hidden from public view. This affected how they answered the judges’ questions, how they talked to each other from their cells, and how they maintained or lost some semblance of sanity. Relatedly, the chapter also directs more critical energy towards the existence of a secret conspiracy by white elites that was never brought to trial and on the men who were enslaved to them. Each of the enslaved people was invited to the conspiracy by one of the principal organizers, and they represented a potential link that could have clarified if there were any existing political ties between their enslavers and men like João de Deus. In some cases, their enslavers took extreme measures to keep them quiet, including a likely murder of one enslaved man. This was the act of making a Pardo conspiracy. Traces of other groups were removed, and a struggle for racial equality was reframed as a violent assault on the empire, perpetrated by one homogenous group. Thus, in this chapter I push forward with a claim I work towards throughout this book, namely that this was not one plot that was split into two phases, one led by whites and a second one that was defined by pardo participation. Instead, this was a post-event categorization that excised white elites from suspicion of treason and shut the door to understanding the events of 1798 as anything more than a singular, cohesive crime. Multiplicity was forsaken and replaced by isolation.Footnote ³⁰

The Conclusion reconsiders the historiography of the Tailors’ Conspiracy. The scholarship on the topic has moved from a dismissal of the conspiracies in the nineteenth century to an embrace of them as part of the story of the nation in the twentieth century. Along that arc of scholarship, historians have gone from understanding the Tailors’ Conspiracy as the first social revolution in Brazil, complete with a white vanguard class and a distant and propagandized class of Pardos, to an appreciation of the contributions of non-white conspirators to the formation of the nation. Due in part to this work, scholars have now taken the study of the Tailors’ Conspiracy along paths of inquiry that branch out from the question of the nation and towards new understandings of political economy, slavery, race relations, and diplomatic history in the making of the conspiracy and in the operations of the Portuguese empire at the end of the eighteenth century.

On Terminology

One point that has been consistent about the Tailors’ Conspiracy from the moment that the court investigation ended is that it became understood as a conspiracy of Pardos, a word that translates to “brown.” In English this is sometimes translated or understood as equivalent to “Mulatto.” Here, when I write Pardo, I mean the literal translation of the term, “Brown,” and not biological origin or blood quantum. In the documents related to this case, there is no uniformity, consensus, or even approximations of sameness in the use of the term Pardo when the courts recorded someone’s stated racial designation. In some cases, people whom the court defined as Pardo escuro (dark Pardo) might see themselves simply as Pardo. Or the courts themselves might switch from calling someone a Pardo escuro in one interrogation and then Pardo in another session. It indicates that Pardo was a socialized category of belonging. Other than the fact that it was a category of reference for any number of permutations of blackness or of brown skin, there was no explicit elaboration of a clearly defined rubric for what made one a Pardo. Hence, when I write Pardo, I refer to the perception of one’s skin color or skin shade. I also use the term free(d) throughout the book to emphasize the fact that those who were born free and those who were freed from slavery by purchase were not as separated socially from one another as they were in legal status. They worked together, served in the military together, ate together, and more. Furthermore, they often experienced racial discrimination and punishments of the same sort. The parentheses underscore the legal difference between the two while maintaining a recognition that their lives, loves, and labors were inseparably linked in everyday society.

Whenever I use the term “the people,” I refer to the audience that the writers of the pasquins intended to reach. Given the fact that the population of African-descended people was three times the size of the whites and that almost the entire small strata of elite society would have been white, “the people” would have been free(d) and enslaved people in the majority. Thus, while “the people” does not designate Black and Pardo exclusivity, the bulk of the masses were people of African descent. Except for the Tailors’ Conspiracy (A Conspiração dos Alfaiates), I have left Portuguese words in the original rather than translate them. I also spell the names of the people in this story as they are spelled in the interrogations. Many words when translated can only be rendered in awkward and not quite precise wording. For example, in the narrative of the conspiracy, there was a group of shadowy whites described as Enteados (Stepchildren) to the crown. I have left the word as Enteados rather than Stepchildren.