Numerous colonization enterprises launched or consolidated their operations in the 1850s. Two among them stood out due to the sheer ambition of their efforts to recruit, transport, and settle foreign migrants: the Mucury Company, originally established in 1847, and the Associação Central de Colonização (Central Colonization Association, hereafter ACC), founded in 1854. Both shared an interest in wide-ranging peopling projects and in record-shattering profits. Both also depended on government subsidies as their financial lifeline. They even shared members across their rosters, which signaled a growing enthusiasm for corporate colonization that transcended political inclinations. Yet the commonalities stopped where these companies’distinct ends began. As a private corporation bankrolled by the central government and captained by a trusted apparatchik of the imperial bureaucracy, the ACC sought to define itself as the leading colono supplier of the day with its base of operations in Rio. Mucury, in turn, was the brainchild of a liberal firebrand from Minas Gerais, Teófilo Ottoni, who sought to people and economically jumpstart a politically strategic corner of his home province by opening river access to the Atlantic. To enact their programs, both companies confronted logistical and political barriers that the new cabinet organized at the emperor’s behest in 1857 tried to remediate in numerous if often questionable ways.

All the while, patrons’ abuses and colono mutinies fed into growing denunciations of a “white slavery” that imperiled the integrity of these and other companies’ operations. Despite scandals, however, company favor requests continued to stream onto the desk of the new prime minister, Pedro de Araújo Lima, known as the marquês de Olinda after obtaining his highest noble title in 1854. As the two most prominent company drives at the time, the ACC and Mucury hauled in problems with a high level of public exposure that compromised the Brazilian government due to its direct aid to both enterprises. The situation thus forced the new cabinet to a reckoning with its own possibilities and limitations in responding to an urgent and multifaceted conundrum. Indeed, Olinda found himself at multiple crossroads at once. One of the dilemmas arising from this scenario obligated him to choose which companies to favor and to what extent. Another involved deciding whether to give in to international recriminations against these companies’ colono recruitments or to defend them against accusations of malfeasance, fraud, and egregious mistreatment of colonos.

In the background, a more familiar quandary lurked: as the unwitting heir to the marquês de Paraná and the cabinet he led from 1853 to his death in 1856, Olinda was expected to continue with the improvements expected by the emperor but also with a politics of conciliação (conciliation) that laid to rest the partisan animosities of the previous decade.Footnote ¹ Paraná had sternly overseen a political turn toward decreased partisanship against the wishes of his fellow saquaremas. No less conservative, Olinda inherited the mantle of conciliation and its calling to preserve a tenuous peace but also a host of divisive questions left unresolved by Paraná, including whether the state should intervene directly in economic and development affairs rather than promote them from a distance. This question indicted the prior cabinet’s twin pillars of improvement and conciliation, and now colonization companies’ travails inevitably foisted it upon Olinda. Olinda’s ministry remains a historiographical lacuna in many respects – relatively brief at one year and seven months, it was overshadowed both by the conciliação and by the magnitude of other events, including the Panic of 1857 and the Paraguayan War (1864–1870). Olinda’s attitudes and actions also resist easy categorization. Even though in 1837 he had commanded the reactionaries’ Regresso, he now spearheaded a heterogeneous cabinet that even included a liberal in the Finance portfolio.

Colonization illuminates the blind spots surrounding Olinda’s premiership, as bourgeoning company drives forced colonization to the top of his agenda. Moreover, by design as well as accident, colonization transformed Olinda into the quintessential regulator and consolidated the Brazilian government’s oversight attributions over colonization companies. As such, Olinda betrays an important paradigm shift in the development of the Brazilian state. If, as an áulico in the 1840s he had traced the lineaments of a robust regulatory state in relation to colonization, the ACC, Mucury, and their tribulations only strengthened his regulatory veer. Yet they also opened the door to a more opportunistic state, as Olinda understood official backing as a tool to cut losses as much as to preempt political challenges.

Hence, this chapter examines the launch of two dashing new colonization companies, the innovations in their midst, and the political predicaments – and calculations – they gave rise to. Mucury and the ACC possessed a new edge in terms of the nature and scale of their endeavors as much as in their internal organization and operations, which renovated politicians’ and businessmen’s expectations regarding the promises of colonization companies.Footnote ² Looking past their excited emergence quickly uncovers the innumerable complications these companies dregdged up. Their political underpinnings and their respective relationships to government reveal the tensions between company runs and cabinet imperatives, and shed light on how these companies’ future and Olinda’s politics were mutually constitutive. The ACC’s and Mucury’s trajectories demonstrate that political concerns were never too far from the surface of colonization company activities, which inevitably brought myriad diplomatic troubles in their wake. Yet those seemingly faulty tendencies played a crucial role in stoking government action, ultimately compelling Olinda to embody a forceful, if later politically opportunistic, regulatory swerve.

The Mucury Company, or Colonization as a Political Gamble

The notorious exaltado deputy Teófilo Ottoni stepped back from politics at the tail end of the so-called Liberal quinquennium (1844–1848), tired of the reformist timidity of successive liberal-moderate cabinets.Footnote ³ Ottoni had not become a radical overnight. As the first of eleven children, and a third-generation descendant of a Genoese exile who settled in Minas in the 1720s, Teófilo came of age in the Vila do Príncipe, where he and his brothers learned Latin and read the hallmarks of classical republicanism. In 1828, he graduated at the top of his class from the Navy Academy in Rio, while living with his uncle, a Romantic poet and veteran deputy of the Lisbon Courts, and mingling with journalist Evaristo da Veiga and then-moderate Vasconcelos. Then, as an official vote counter in the 1828 elections, Ottoni had the gall to fine the War minister for an apparent breach. In retribution, he received orders to station in Africa or the Amazon but opted instead to abandon the Navy and return to his hometown, where in 1832 he set up the Sentinella do Serro, a newspaper guided by republican and democratic principles, and a political association, the Sociedade Promotora do Bem Público. Elected to the new provincial assembly in 1835, and to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Ottoni joined a secret society organized by Antônio Carlos de Andrada and went on to spearhead the liberal uprising of 1842 in Minas.Footnote ⁴ He was soon imprisoned and condemned for insurrection, but his sentence was commuted by the general amnesty of 1844. Ottoni then rushed back into the Chamber as part of a liberal comeback but by 1847 became deeply disillusioned.Footnote ⁵

Ottoni may have sensed conservatives’ impending return when he poured his energies into the Mucury Navigation and Colonization Company, and so his turn to colonization did not represent a political capitulation but rather a voyage deeper into politics. The new company primarily aimed to open river access to the northern regions of Minas Gerais, but colonization soon became its principal remit. The company’s peopling activities could have important electoral repercussions. The districts where Mucury operated already contained a large population hovering around 411,309, most of it free according to Ottoni. A demographic uptick by means of “a great number of emigrants and colonos” could potentially deliver new voters, particularly after the 1846 electoral reform established property qualifications of as little as 200$ for votantes, or first-round voters (those who voted for “second-round” electors but could still vote for councilmen and local judges), which meant that colonos could qualify once they naturalized.Footnote ⁶ This voter increase would technically help Ottoni carve out a new province in northern Minas and improve his chances for representation at the Court.Footnote ⁷ Ultimately, Ottoni aimed at a landslide victory over conservative provincial antagonists to upset the balance of representation in the imperial legislature.

To begin, Ottoni rekindled provincial ties long cultivated by his family in a region adrift from influential mineiros at the Court. Close relatives hopped into action. While his brother Cristiano ran for the Chamber to keep a political lifeline, cousin Honório Esteves provided practical intelligence as director of Indians in the Mucuri region and as provincial commissioner appointed to study river navigation in 1846. Another cousin who was a councilman in Minas Novas connected Ottoni to a regional elite vying for the creation of a new province. When Ottoni opened the first subscriptions, his family snatched 577 of 1,000 available shares, that is, 58 percent of the Company’s initial public offering, with regional elites taking the rest together with prestigious backers like the liberal tycoon visconde de Mauá, the second largest subscriber after Ottoni.Footnote ⁸ With its start-up capital secured, the Mucury Company obtained imperial and provincial contracts on May and August 1847. Ottoni then launched expeditions on the Mucuri river to render a clear idea of rapids and unnavigable portions in its course, discovering that steamships could only reach up to the very first waterfall. This transfer point, Santa Clara, was 22 leagues distant from Minas Novas but still offered a better option than the 160–180 leagues of mule-pack trails separating Minas Novas from the Court. Indeed, investors remained enthusiastic about making the Mucuri “rich and populated.” Within weeks, speculators and planters from across the province hastily and informally claimed lands by posse, grabbing the most profitable locations along the projected commercial thoroughfare after the press trumpeted “the immense profits” that awaited the Mucury Company.Footnote ⁹

Ottoni thrived amid recurrent challenges. Despite the new conservative ministry of 1848 (which, nonetheless, included colonization-friendly figures like Monte Alegre and Olinda) and the fraudulent 1849 elections abetted by the central government, Ottoni secured a two-year extension to meet some of his contractual obligations from a lame-duck provincial assembly. But in 1850, the incoming president tried to sabotage him, authorizing the province to become the leading shareholder by purchasing 1,000 shares. In 1854, the provincial assembly finally authorized the credit necessary for Minas to purchase shares and effectively become the new majority shareholder. As such, the provincial government demanded a drastic increase in the maximum votes allowed for any single shareholder, changing the ceiling from the prior limit of 6–40 votes in what amounted to a corporate takeover.

Yet the change freed Ottoni to focus on his management role and continue attending to the trouble-plagued roadworks from Santa Clara to the Mucuri tributary of Todos os Santos. The first Portuguese workers brought from Rio either deserted or fell ill, and the Polish engineer and recruiter hired by Ottoni was killed. Ottoni carried on, pressing his brother on surveying activities and accelerating transport between Rio and the São José port on the Mucuri delta, a 30-hour trip that could be delayed by up to 30 days by stopovers in nearby Caravelas. When the imperial government offered an 18-conto subsidy for a navigation line to Espírito Santo, Ottoni sat on the Praça do Comércio’s special commission examining bids and successfully offered his own, aiming for the subvention even if his ships would have to stop in Vitória before docking at São José. With the help of ex-minister Monte Alegre, Ottoni obtained the contract and purchased the 70-contos-worth Mucury steamer, showing his ability to surmount logistical challenges and rally conservatives to his cause.Footnote ¹⁰

Ottoni’s brio found its complement in relatively equitable, transparent, and accountable corporate practices, which helped the company stand out among other enterprises. Mucury’s original rules allowed a gradual increment of shareholder voting power at the rate of one vote for every five shares bought but capped the maximum votes at six, thus limiting the power of the largest shareholders. As early as 1852, an independent audit commission of shareholders that included Ottoni’s friend Mauá concluded that “one must admire what the director has accomplished and at such little expense,” forecasting that its “conspicuous administration … could soon place the Mucury Company as one of the most useful, prosperous and brilliant associations of the Empire.” By 1854, the Company enjoyed a respectable position among public companies at the Court, yielding a yearly dividend of 10$618 for every 300$ share, which made it the third most lucrative company, even ahead of Mauá’s Amazon Company, and allowed Ottoni to boast that no other enterprise “offered so many and such secure guarantees of prosperity.”Footnote ¹¹

Regarding settlement, however, the 1852 commission struck a somber note. Even Ottoni admitted that the Company had “dragged its feet in colonization matters.”Footnote ¹² Mucury contractually agreed with the Minas government that two-thirds of its labor would be free and preferably foreign and promised the imperial government to populate its land grant with 60 colono couples per square league within a decade. The auditors recommended eliminating obstacles to smooth colonization operations, including internal passport taxes for colonos instituted by an 1842 ordinance.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, Ottoni sought to cut losses by addressing indigenous depredations on his colony, christened Filadelfia in accordance to his democratic creed. To do so, he employed “pacification” strategies including gift exchanges and Indian língoas (translators) to establish a regional diplomacy with itinerant indigenous groups, one of whose ultimate intentions was to turn indigenous peoples to seasonal agricultural work to supply foodstuffs for incoming colonos. Yet Ottoni’s “pacification” lost to his concern with the security of property. When some Indians attacked a company expedition, Ottoni welcomed plans for a military colony in the area and periodically continued to ask the president for reinforcements.Footnote ¹⁴

The Mucury Company rapidly turned to peopling as its principal activity, maximizing any available opportunity to obtain and retain foreign settlers. The new Urucú military colony provided a haven for the first cohorts. Aware that a fungal blight devastated vineyards in Madeira, Ottoni recruited 153 colonos from the island who made it to Urucú in 1855 and were “swimming in abundance” by the time 162 Belgians and Dutch joined them in 1858. In addition to the slaves employed by Ottoni and the indigenous groups around Filadelfia and Santa Clara, Portuguese islanders, German speakers, and Chinese colonos diversified Company rosters. Similarly, Ottoni varied his catchment strategies but always relied on trusted employees rather than “ordinary colonization agents who obtain a prize for every colono they hire.” Robert Schlobach – the new head engineer – siphoned colonos through Hamburg. Another agent, a Prussian by the name of Moritz Horn, set out to Potsdam to hire colonos with the aid of his father, a local politician. Ottoni himself hired a hundred Chinese colonos from the imperial government’s contract with Sampson & Tappan, later claiming that he never considered the Chinese as colonos but as ideal wage laborers, or “machines to substitute slave workers.”Footnote ¹⁵

Ottoni also sought to benefit from a resurgent Portuguese colono trade that entailed familiar complications. He contracted Antônio Martins Lage, the shipping magnate who refused the SPC presidency back in 1837 and who owned the Ilha das Enxadas, a lucrative shipyard and charcoal station in Guanabara Bay. Lage cleared the 1,000-ton, copper-lined Brazilian galleon Palmyra with the Navy Auditor, as required, and tried to acquit his captain from a scandal in 1856 concerning a colono voyage overcrowded with minors and passportless emigrants.Footnote ¹⁶ In São Miguel, the Palmyra offered travel advances and free passage to Mucuri, free room and board for ten months in Santa Clara, some wardrobe, a modest stipend, and the possibility of buying or leasing land from the Company. But the 224 colonos who arrived in Rio on January 1858 refused to continue on to Mucuri. Rather than obligate them, Ottoni rescinded their contracts without charge and tried to recoup losses by luring colonos from other enterprises. When 70 Portuguese workers landed from Porto for the ACC and a larger load of 232 colonos from Prussia, Hesse, Holstein for the União e Indústria Company, Ottoni published an advertisement addressed “to the colonos recently arrived from Europe” offering free travel to Mucuri and land on credit.Footnote ¹⁷

For the colonos who took him at his word, Ottoni made good on his promises and showed care for their health. At Santa Clara, he relied on Dr. Manoel Esteves Ottoni and on two “well known medics” from Rio to tend to the sickly. When a bout of typhoid hit, he allowed Dr. Robert Avé-Lallemant to take colonos for more medical care at the Court. Later, he also got in touch with the marquês de Abrantes, then president of the Casa da Misericórdia, to keep track of 86 colonos he had sent for treatment due to “ulcers in their feet,” fevers, and gastro-intestinal conditions. Foreign observers attested to Ottoni’s concerns for colono well-being in this epidemiologically challenging environment, with some emphasizing colonos’ ability to send remittances to their families and even grow their own food within 8 or 10 months of arrival.Footnote ¹⁸

Yet Ottoni’s concern for colonos was not entirely selfless. His relatives and associates benefited considerably from their presence once they acquired the first available plots in Filadelfia and offered them to colonos through aforamento, a type of long-term land lease.Footnote ¹⁹ Teófilo’s brothers Augusto and Ernesto also bought lands along Todos os Santos to establish chácaras (farmsteads) for local provisioning. Ernesto, cousin Tristão Vieira, Minas Novas notables, and even Robert Schlobach’s brother set up earthenware, hardware, and wholesale shops starting in 1857. Ottoni’s circle, then, built land and commercial markets on the backs of arriving foreigners and the thousand or so Brazilian squatters living around Santa Clara and Filadelfia.Footnote ²⁰

The Mucury Company fell behind its contractual obligations notwithsatnding its bustling activities. In late 1855, the imperial government allotted more lands to the Company and land sales proceeded apace, but colono importation rates lagged behind. Up to 1858, Ottoni imported 1,113 foreigners, with a real net total of 1,091. This put the Company behind its commitment to import 1,000 colonos per year between 1857 and 1859 in exchange for a 300-conto interest-free government loan to be disbursed gradually as Ottoni fulfilled migrant quotas. But costs were already prohibitive. Colono recruitment and transport to Rio, and then to Mucuri, exhausted the Company’s accounts, which Ottoni dented further by forgiving colono contracts or debts. From 1857 to 1859, colonization-related expenses more than doubled from 5.88 percent to 12.8 percent of the total operating budget.Footnote ²¹

During that time, other companies outsmarted or outshone Mucury. The Amazon Company imported 963 Portuguese colonos directly to Pará within three years of incorporation but abandoned colono drives in 1857 after contemplating their huge expenses.Footnote ²² The Companhia União e Indústria incorporated in 1854 by Mariano Procópio Ferreira Lage for macadamized roadwork between Petrópolis and Juíz de Fora struck an almost identical deal as Mucury’s by committing to 2,000 foreign workers within three years in return for an interest-free 200-conto loan from the imperial government (disbursable in five installments versus Mucury’s three). After a failed recruitment drive in Schleswig-Holstein in 1858, Procópio’s recruiter in Hamburg reported immense difficulties in finding emigrants willing to head to the projected colony of Pedro II, just beyond the União e Indústria’s endpoint in Minas. Yet Procópio sought Dr. Schmidt’s help, and before the end of the year, 1,170 colonos arrived from Hamburg – 370 more than he requested. By the end of the decade, 1,112 colonos had permanently settled in Pedro II as the road inched toward Petrópolis.Footnote ²³

In vain, Ottoni sought help from the ACC instead, which ceded only some colonos to make up for the Palmyra’s Azoreans even though, Ottoni noted, “the hostel at the Ilha do Bom Jesus was full to the brim.” Besides this “provocation,” these colonos allegedly included “proven harlots, ex-sailors and veterans” from the “taverns and public squares of Europe.” Ottoni also got the cold shoulder from ACC president Manuel Vieira Tosta, barão de Muritiba, when he requested a credit to help colonos defray land clearance costs. The ACC was then striving to become the leading colono purveyor for individuals and firms alike and as such became Mucury’s top competitor in recruitment activities. Ottoni complained to Olinda that his company could barely meet colono quotas “due to the ruinous competition carried out by ACC agents against [Mucury’s] correspondents in Europe.” Only an advance of Mucury’s government loan could offset the deleterious effects of the ACC recruitments. But no funds would be forthcoming. Olinda had too much at stake to walk back on his support for the ACC, especially amid the tenuous balance of forces he sought to maintain in the post-conciliation.Footnote ²⁴

The Acme of Government-Run Peopling

The ACC was the brainchild of Bernardo Augusto Nascentes de Azambuja, who made a name for himself as municipal judge at the Court and ascended to important district judge seats as a result of overseeing a case against senator José Martiniano de Alencar (Sr.) for alleged involvement in the liberal uprisings of 1842. By the early 1850s, Azambuja sat as 1 of the 10 deputies for Rio in the Chamber. As in Ottoni’s case, family ties were central to Azambuja, whose entry into politics and his stability as a middling bureaucrat owed much to a coterie of brothers in similarly middling positions in the Imperial Chamber, Rio’s police, and the administrative backbenches of various ministries.Footnote ²⁵

With his siblings as a weatherglass, Azambuja articulated the ACC’s principles in a string of articles at the start of 1853. He began with a call for the “rightful execution” of the 1850 Land Law and for the “wealthiest planters” to “gradually substitute slave service with free labor.” Then, Azambuja proposed a centralized association to promote foreign migration to Brazil through government and private funds, in close collaboration with European emigration agencies and in communication with new welcoming hubs in provincial capitals across the Empire. His ideas invoked Land Law stipulations empowering government to import a fixed number of colonos at the expense of the Treasury and to issue additional credits whenever costs exceeded budget allocations for colonization. Finally, Azambuja’s blueprint also prioritized surveying and selling public lands as much as propaganda to battle German newspapers’ “calumnies” against emigration to Brazil.Footnote ²⁶

Azambuja’s proposal incited the Empire minister and one-time empresario hopeful Francisco Gonçalves Martins to call a commission to draft the ordinance activating the Land Law, which he filled with old colonization mavericks like Calmon, Paraíba Valley plantaters Baependi and José Teixeira Leite, and ex-SPC member Caetano Alberto Soares. The Land Ordinance passed in 1854 and established a Lands and Colonization Department with the unserendipitous selection of Azambuja as its interim director. The appointment helped the ACC take root by giving Azambuja an insider’s view of emergent policy proposals and colonization efforts in newly opening frontiers.

As the ACC incorporated, Azambuja accompanied minister Ferraz’s 1855 decree abolishing restrictive residency permits for foreigners and allowing them to use their passports for travel within the Empire and a later decree expediting naturalization procedures by eliminating residency prerequisites and allowing district councils and justices of peace to certify requests. Shortly after, a budget law established the first regulations over colono transports by tethering anchorage exemptions for colono vessels to yet-to-be-determined rules.Footnote ²⁷ Azambuja may have also gotten wind of novel ideas conveyed through diplomatic channels. From Madrid, for instance, Francisco de Varnhagen proposed an Empire-wide land census geared to establish property taxes on both cultivated and fallow lands, a corrective for the ills of large-holding perpetuated by the Land Ordinance of 1854. In his view, properties reverting to public lands, including aforamentos (to be abolished under the project’s terms), should be sold and priced according to their distance to the nearest urban center or rail line, but, Varnhagen believed, empresarios involved in “European agricultural colonization” should also receive free land grants. From Berlin, consul Sturz also championed an “adequate general land tax” to fix Brazil’s “shoddy colonization” and eliminate “emphytheutic schemes” and parceria contracts so as to outcompete Montevideo’s new consul in Berlin, who was speculating in lands to give German emigration a “concentrated direction” toward Uruguay.Footnote ²⁸

Azambuja may have downplayed these international threats as he came to understand that internal frontiers like the newly created province of Paraná generated strong demand for colono-provisioning companies like the ACC. Carved out of the southern paulista district of Curitiba, Paraná speedily evolved into an export powerhouse linked to Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, and Montevideo. Even though its main port, Paranaguá, lagged behind Rio or Salvador, by 1855 it outstripped Desterro, doubling the latter’s revenues and tripling its export values. New colonies in Paraná, however, took time to flourish, including Charles Peret Gentil’s Superaguy, whose director lasted but eight months.Footnote ²⁹ Paraná’s first president, Zacarias de Góis e Vasconcelos, blamed Indian raids such as the one against the military colony of Guarapuava and probably bristled at Kaingang, Guaraní, or Kaiowá peoples’ negotiations with the imperial government to secure land claims, at times successfully.Footnote ³⁰ The ACC could, at any rate, help colonization endeavors establish a firmer footing by purveying colonos to self-styled frontiersman like João da Silva Machado, Luiz Vergueiro’s co-organizer in the Santos colonization company back in 1836. Machado, known as barão de Antonina, was a liberal linked by kin to the Vergueiros who had nonetheless combated the revolts of 1842 and consequently earned his title. In 1854, he became senator for Paraná and continued to expand ongoing roadworks with liberated Africans around the military colony of Jataí. As Antonina lobbied for military outposts like the ones built in Pernambuco and Alagoas in the proximity of indigenous settlements, the imperial government authorized eight new indigenous colonies next to presidios or old Jesuit aldéas along the Paraná river as part of a larger flurry of measures for Paraná’s development.Footnote ³¹ Antonina thus began importing Portuguese settlers to new outposts as far inland as Mato Grosso, confirming for Azambuja a growing market demand for colonos.Footnote ³²

As novel ideas circulated and agrarian frontiers ratcheted up, Azambuja officially incorporated the ACC in April 1855 in an inaugural assembly at the Praça do Comércio. Eighty-six attendees commanding up to 377 votes and covering two-thirds of available shares quickly confirmed Azambuja as vice-president. The largely symbolic presidency unanimously went to the marquês de Monte Alegre. Two others elected to the executive board had also matched Azambuja with 373 votes: Luiz Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck, the author of Idéas sobre colonisação, and Francisco José Fialho. Meanwhile, elected members for an administrative council – a consultive body for the board – included former áulicos and statesmen from the imperial stratosphere such as Abrantes and the visconde de Ipanema, whose lands south of the Court the ACC could tap for colonos.

The ACC’s charter and board elections strengthened Azambuja’s hand to negotiate government benefits and solidify the ACC as a profit-yielding enterprise with at least five income streams: transatlantic transport costs aboard its own vessels or chartered ships; sales, leases, or aforamentos of any land under its ownership; fees charged to “spontaneous emigrants” seeking its services or staying at its hostel; interest rates on colono loans; and room and board services to its own recently arrived colonos. In the run-up to the ACC’s government contract of 1857 negotiated with Manoel Felizardo, the new director of the Lands and Colonization Directorate, Azambuja secured a new source of earnings: a 30$ government prize for every adult colono, and 20$ for minors aged 5–10, plus an interest-free 1,000-conto government loan to import 50,000 colonos within 5 years.Footnote ³³ Stable revenue sources and government privileges tethered to company performance seemd to foolproof ACC finances.

Azambuja drafted statutes that greatly eased requirements for participation relative to other colonization companies by offering one of the cheapest share prices at the time(100$), at half the cost of one Banco do Brasil share, a third of Mucury’s, a quarter of an Amazon Company’s, and five and ten times more affordable respectively than a single entry into União e Indústria and the Macaé and Campos navigation company. Also, subscribers could transfer their shares and thus underwrite other commercial transactions, and exchange scrip for equivalent value in ACC land plots. Azambuja also facilitated participation in general assemblies by setting the quorum for biannual meetings at one-quarter of all shareholders and allowing absent members to delegate votes to other members.

With these generous conditions, the public readily welcomed the ACC. Some 267 shareholders had signed up at the time of the government contract. Voting was initially staggered at 1 vote per 10-share interval up to 100 shares. Between 100 and a ceiling of 300 shares, members only obtained 1 vote per 50 shares. Hence, while a considerable cleavage existed in company participation between the members with the least shares and those with the most, the latter’s power was capped at 14 votes. Even the smallest shareholders enjoyed a modicum of representation: ownership of 5–10 shares yielded 1 vote, eligibility for board positions started at 10. Only 14 percent of subscribers owned more than 50 shares. The rest leaned heavily toward the middle and lowest ranks of ownership, with 25.5 percent owning exactly 50 shares, and 45 percent owning 20 shares or less (Figure 6.1). The ACC’s low entry threshold led to membership concentration in the lowest rates. Meanwhile, middle-tier shareholders made up the largest single group and left a wide gap between them and the highest-rate shareholders because they probably found greater voting power less appealing, given that such a large cohort of low-rate members had a balancing effect over the voting power of those with the most shares. This solid low- and middle-ownership base that did not require more shares to have their voices heard made the ACC into a less seigneurial company than the SPC or CCB. Wheras five viscondes, three barões, and three marqueses featured as members, bureaucrats, merchants, and military men made the bulk of ACC and contributed decisively not only to increasing its start-up capital to 1.557:500$ by 1857, but also producing a 731-réis dividend.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 6.1 Distribution of ACC share ownership, 1857

Soon, the ACC assembled a remarkable colono conveyance network. In Rio, it leased the Santo Antônio convent and opened a hostel in the Ilha do Bom Jesus to house arriving colonos until they were contracted by third parties. As part of renegotiations in 1857, the imperial household ceded one of its properties, the Quinta do Cajú in the present-day area of the Ilha do Fundão, with its yearly pension of 2:400$000, for the construction of a large-scale migrant inn. Overseas, the company organized a competitive recruitment system. It subcontracted ad hoc recruitment drives in the Azores, bringing in one shipload of 116 in 1858 and another of 245 colonos in 1859, and it opened agencies in Paris, Porto, and Berlin, which respectively hauled 1,563, 569, and 137 colonos to Brazil in 1858.Footnote ³⁵

A diverse cast manned these agencies. In Berlin, the ACC hired Dr. Schmidt, Brazil’s old vice-consul, who had the experience to surmount Prussian strictures against emigration. In Paris, a close friend of ACC board member Fialho who worked at the Brazilian legation facilitated contact with a French firm, H. Beaucourt & Comp., hired to supply 6,000 colonos to the ACC.Footnote ³⁶ Meanwhile in Porto, the ACC depended on Guilherme Augusto Machado Pereira, a wealthy merchant who resided in Brazil until 1852 and sat on the fiscal board of the Banco Mercantil Portuense. At lower pay, the ACC also employed a cunning recruiter by the name of Antonio Joaquim de Andrade Villares, who had hired colonos for the barão de Nova Friburgo and could more inconspicuously recruit colonos without passports and even minors, helping the ACC meet its migrant quotas by illicit means.Footnote ³⁷

Yet the ACC’s ballooning costs provoked a polemic about the government’s obligations to colonization companies. In April 1858, critics maligned private colonization as a racket that exhausted public funds in the name of the common good.Footnote ³⁸ The main attack came from an anonymous contributor nicknamed Vadius, later revealed to be the conservative mathematician Cândido Baptista de Oliveira. As enovy to Russia, Cândido Baptista had mailed colonization literature back to Brazil; as provincial vice-president, he helped Aureliano with the Delrue colonos. But, as Vadius, he believed that “colonization for money” was “the worst kind” and thought it unconscionable that “respectable … personalities at the court” condoned “making money” as the ACC’s ultimate goal. Vadius claimed that the ACC’s outsized government loan was meant to pay its top managers and called attention to the Empire minister’s scandalous guarantees of a 7 percent return in dividends at all costs. Dovetailing with sardonic criticisms of “the wages, bonuses … and subventions” for the “great management services” charged by ACC principals, Vadius ran the numbers and concluded that government subsidies would feed the problem by mushrooming beyond projections with per capita prizes on colonos rising to 42$, exponentially costlier than Herman Blumenau’s and Léonce Aubé’s rate of 5$, and Montravel’s and Caetano Dias’s 13$. In Vadius’s view, government could only make good on returns if it instead surveyed and readied lands for sale to incentivize both foreign and Brazilian settlers. Even though over the course of several weeks two other aliases – Junius and Alpha – responded feverishly to these claims, citing Pedro II’s throne speeches and the late Paraná’s own sanction of the the 6,000-conto ACC credit, Vadius carried the day.Footnote ³⁹

In the heat of controversy, Monte Alegre resigned as ACC’s president. Azambuja then issued a public explanation of the ACC’s shortcomings, citing an “insufficiency of means at its disposal” that handicapped it in relation to other countries’ colono recruitment drives. The ACC tried renegotiating its government contract, raising per capita prizes to 80–120$ for the first 4,000 individuals – far higher than Vadius imagined – and trying to apply its 2,000-conto loan, used mainly as credit for planters to request colonos, to other uses.Footnote ⁴⁰ In return for these allowances, the imperial government assigned a fiscal officer to the ACC who also became its president: the barão de Muritiba, a wealthy conservative senator from Bahia who had just retired from the Tribunal da Relação and was close with colonization empresarios and bureaucrats, including Aureliano, Abrantes, ex-SPC shareholder João Pereira do Faro, and colono importer Antonio Martins Lage, the latter two as board members of the Botafogo Club presided over by Muritiba.Footnote ⁴¹

Muritiba’s appointment expedited colono voyages for some months. About a dozen vessels arrived from Porto and Bremen with Portuguese field hands or Prussian and Hessian artisans for Rio Grande do Sul, the União e Indústria, Mucury, and the ACC itself. But arrivals tapered off from 2,385 in 1858 to 1,630 the next year, far below the ACC’s obligation to recruit 10,000 during that time. A month into Muritiba’s appointment, the ACC’s dividends dipped to the lowest rungs among the 48 public companies at the Court and certainly the lowest among the six colonization companies despite the unprecedented subsidies it received. Muritiba ceded the presidency to senator Cândido Borges Monteiro in 1859, but the ACC continued to tailspin following rumors that Borges siphoned shareholder capital for Muritiba to rent some property.Footnote ⁴²

Troubles in the Colono Trade: Fraud, Exploitation, and Illicit Gains

By the late 1850s, tales of abuse had become legend. A song from Lisbon’s carnival even parodied the figure of the recruiter for “the land of the banana” who hooked unwitting youngsters with his words.Footnote ⁴³ Stories of naive emigrants falling prey to false promises, of young Portuguese treated like enslaved Africans, and of workers sapped of their vital savings began reaching wider audiences. Paulo e Maria, ou a escravatura branca, a play about star-crossed lovers staged at Lisbon’s Teatro de Dom Fernando in late 1858, narrated the fate of a young man, Paulo, coaxed to emigrate to Brazil only to work among slaves. With its melodramatic turns – the colono trader was revealed as Paulo’s father and Paulo’s lover Maria committed suicide after herself traveling to Brazil to find him – the plot was a cautionary tale about the misfortunes awaiting emigrants, and a timely anti-emigration agitprop. Rio audiences would have had a taste of these themes and adaptations if the one-act tragedy O engajamento na cidade do Porto, ou os traficantes de escravos brancos, already on sale in one bookstore, had passed muster with the Dramatic Conservatory, which quickly censored it.Footnote ⁴⁴

The real stories behind these dramatic reenactments piled up, as news of packed and understocked ships fed the old trope of a “white slavery” or the belief that European emigrants were traded and treated like enslaved Africans. Portuguese newspapers rushed to denounce the inefficacy of existing laws to curtail emigration in the face of incidents like that of brigantine Arrogante, which arrived at Recife from São Miguel in December 1853 overloaded with 400 colonos without passports.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Portuguese community in Recife contemplated in dismay how colonos threw themselves overboard when the ship dropped anchor. Portuguese merchants mobilized against vice-consul Joaquim Baptista Moreira – nephew of the consul in Rio – and pressured Lisbon to dismiss him for his complacency and complicity. Abuses continued into 1855, often with serious consequences, as when the Portuguese galleon Defensor arrived in Belém with 288 colonos and a bout of cholera that infected enslaved stevedores and continued to spread along the colonos’ voyage on an Amazon Company’s steamship all the way to Óbidos.Footnote ⁴⁶

Portuguese lawmakers tried to stem abuses and poor transport conditions with the Law of 20 July 1855, which regulated contracting in Portuguese territory and forbade clandestine exits. Yet the arrival in late 1858 of the Brazilian galleon Dous Amigos in Rio with a jarring load of 603 passengers from São Miguel signaled that abuses only grew to new proportions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Brazil’s service contract law of 1837 severely blunted Portuguese diplomats’ ability to claim jurisdiction over Portuguese subjects and enforce their government’s orders. More troublingly still, these envoys themselves often contributed to colono abuses. In 1858, João Baptista Moreira, Portugal’s vice-consul and chargé from 1827 to 1834, and consul general in Brazil after 1835, faced accusations that he had helped the barão de Nova Friburgo hire two underaged Portuguese colonos. Indeed, in 1862, after Moreira’s retirement, the Portuguese government investigated the consular archive and found widespread evidence of corruption. Whereas in 1835 – his first year as consul – Moreira boasted of liquidating more than 23 inventories of Portuguese subjects worth almost 17 contos, it now emerged that, over the following quarter century, he had embezzled Portuguese subjects’ intestate inheritances, with at least 42 contos missing from the consulate’s coffers. Dealing with colonos and their troubles provided Moreira with illicit opportunities of self-enrichment that complemented formal ones such as the SPC shares he had once owned. His record also proved that abuses took on many forms and could even come from those entrusted to protect colonos.Footnote ⁴⁸

These revelations coincided with broader calls to rein in colono recruitments in Porto. In 1859, ACC agent Villares was accused by a Portuguese deputy of deceiving workers hired for São Paulo roadworks in 1855, who only saw their contracts once in high seas. Villares claimed the workers had freely signed their contracts and some in the press saw no wrongdoing, but the Portuguese government denounced the ACC for contractual lapses, claiming that “emigrants were deposited in an island far from the city, with no communications; that they arrived with onerous debts, etc., etc.” The ACC cautiously severed its links to Villares, but by then the harm was done, as the Portuguese government forbade any exits from Porto to Brazil involving Villares or any other ACC agent.Footnote ⁴⁹

The ACC’s dealings in Paris brought even greater calamities. Late in 1857, the ACC managing director Francisco José Fialho engaged in talks with Manoel Ferreira Pinto, a Portuguese merchant, Cantagalo planter, Petrópolis Railroad Company president, and fellow member of the ACC. Pinto had tried to launch a colono-purveying enterprise in 1853 but instead became the factor for a Parisian firm led by a Henri Beaucourt, who he recommended to Fialho to import colonos for the ACC. Fialho devised a 13-conto contract to Beaucourt’s liking: the firm would import as many colonos as the ACC needed but from ports and steamship lines of its own choosing, set up its own agencies where it saw fit, and determine upfront and travel accommodation costs as long as these did not increase colono debts in Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁰ With the contract signed in early 1858, the ship Liguria departed Genoa with 420 colonos but, after calling at Gibraltar with sick passengers, the captain made for Mahon without explanation. Colonos mutinied and, forcing a landing in Marseilles, had to be repatriated. Despite this fiasco, Beaucourt continued to send colonos to poor reviews from Brazilian contractors. After welcoming about 122 of these, Ottoni even referred to them as the “refuse of diverse recruitment expeditions,” though acknowledging that a “turbulent minority” that protested in Santa Clara due to unmet expectations had showed him a “Beaucourt contract” and translations of Beaucourt’s ads confirming deceitful promises and illegal surcharges.Footnote ⁵¹

Olinda and the new ACC president, Muritiba, had to deal personally with the fallout of Beaucourt’s frauds when the Bavarian consul requested the repatriation of a 60-year-old tailor named J. T. Seeligner and his family, who received false assurances of quick employment from Beaucourt. Privately, Muritiba accused the Seelingers of trying to obtain advantages in cahoots with Beaucourt and confessed to Olinda, “If this precedent passes, any who do not encounter Eldorado among us will believe themselves in the right to allege deception and demand repatriation.”Footnote ⁵² Publicly, Muritiba found the perfect scapegoat in an ACC commissioner working with Beaucourt in Antwerp (coincidentally, Fialho’s friend from the Paris legation) and summarily discharged him.Footnote ⁵³ Beaucourt in turn continued to send colonos until the end of the year and spent the next battling insurers for his losses with the Liguria.Footnote ⁵⁴

The imperial government’s troubles regarding colonization extended well beyond the ACC’s dealings. The most serious problem stemmed from colono restiveness in the Vergueiros’ Ibicaba and Angélica plantations in 1856–1857. The problems had started with recruitment, when in 1855 a number of Swiss men and women took up the offers of Emil Paravicini, who worked as agent on call for the ACC’s representative in Hamburg as well as for the HCV, Caetano Dias da Silva’s Rio Novo, Vergueiro & Co., and even some enterprises in the United States. Among the departed was Thomas Davatz, a school teacher commissioned by the cantonal government of Graubünden to report on the conditions encountered in Brazil. Davatz picked coffee and taught classes at Ibicaba, which readied him to respond to the forty-five questions provided by cantonal authorities on a range of topics, from schooling and weather vagaries to the items colonos received from planters and the price of land allotments. Davatz failed to report back when the Vergueiros got wind of his gloomy report mentioning inequities such as the recalculation of colono debts based on favorable exchange rates for Brazilian currency, which lengthened repayment times. Luiz Vergueiro threatened to murder Davatz, who organized fellow workers to write to the Swiss consulate in Rio. After a heated discussion between the two, a group of colonos picked up their tools and went to Davatz’s aid on 24 Dec. 1856 – the start of the alleged “uprising of the sharecroppers.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Without news from Davatz, Graübunden officials and the cantonal governments of Zürich and Bern sounded the alarm and demanded explanations from Paravicini, who offered to consult the Vergueiros for subsidies to send a Swiss investigator. In November 1856, Zürich dispatched a young chemist, Dr. Jakob Heusser, as commissioner to São Paulo. Once there, Heusser spoke with colonos at Ibicaba, Angélica, Senador Vergueiro, and other plantations, sharing his first impressions with his superiors by April 1857 and concluding his report back in Europe. During Heusser’s inquiry, the Vergueiros stopped at nothing to get the imperial government on their side.Footnote ⁵⁶ José Vergueiro pestered Justice minister Nabuco de Araújo, alluding to an “infernal plan” implicating slaves and a looming invasion of European warships and alleging a republican conspiracy to take the province by arms. “Davatz,” he claimed, “is an astute man … of cold blood and Jesuitic education.” In a separate letter to the provincial vice-president, Vergueiro warned of the alleged co-conspirator, a colono named Oswald, who was supposedly banished from Switzerland “for being a Communist, from where he went to Algeria” before arriving in Campinas, “from where he sent calumnious correspondence to Europe” against the Vergueiros. The conciliation cabinet responded calmly to José Vergueiro’s demands for imperial troops in Ibicaba and neighboring colonies. But the War minister, marquês de Caxias, who had crushed the 1842 liberal revolts, would not rush to aid his nemeses.Footnote ⁵⁷

Provincial authorities did appoint someone to investigate the Vergueiros’ allegations. For three weeks in early 1857, Alagoan jurisconsult and interim police chief in São Paulo, José Tavares Bastos (father of the rising liberal Aureliano Tavares Bastos) conducted interviews around the region’s plantations, concluding that the agitation was limited to Ibicaba and that colono complaints appeared legitimate. Yet his report blamed deficiencies in Brazilian law rather than the Vergueiros, highlighting faults in judicial proceedings, vigilance over service contracts, and poor selection parameters for imported colonos. Among 17 remedies, Tavares Bastos Sr. suggested updating the 1837 contract law and typifying contractual infractions in detail, correcting flaws in parceria such as monetary value calculations across currencies, greater oversight over the employment of minors, and proscribing prison sentences for cases of non-payment or absenteeism.Footnote ⁵⁸

Whereas these recommendations were either willfully ignored or fell through the cracks of the ministerial transition of 4 May 1857, Heusser’s report still had the power to force changes. The Vergueiros desperately tried to preempt the report, feigning friendship with Heusser and even hiring his helper as a colono. José Vergueiro went as far as publicizing a questionably translated thank you note from Heusser to make it appear as an official report and asked the JC to publish Heusser’s letters to the former Swiss consul in Rio, Charles Peret Gentil – a close acquaintance of the Vergueiros and author of a flattering tract on their colonies.Footnote ⁵⁹ Allegedly, in this letter Heusser admitted that the Vergueiros did not run “a simple money-oriented speculation” and blamed their enemies for inciting the uprising. The new Swiss consul called the ruse.Footnote ⁶⁰ And by year’s end, the Swiss cantons wrote to Olinda with strenuous objections over their findings on egregious abuses of power and exorbitant interest rates on (inheritable) colono debts, protesting the very nature of parceria contracts as favoring Brazilian entrepreneurs. Swiss officials demanded all of Vergueiro’s colonos “freed from slavery” and transported to state-run colonies before they published their documentation and Davatz’s own account of his time in São Paulo.Footnote ⁶¹

Countering Abuses, Strengthening the State?

With Brazilian colonization vaulted into such a profound crisis, Olinda did not sit idle. His trajectory had duly prepared him for this moment, including his lifelong government service as deputy, senator, regent, minister in eight cabinets (four of which he presided), his presidency of the SPC back in 1836, and his tenure in the Conselho de Estado. He began his crisis response by publishing internal communications with his Foreign minister regarding the colono revolts and the Swiss inquiries, following suit with a longer pamphlet unsparingly defending the Vergueiros. Olinda extolled parceria contracts while excusing or offering bland correctives to the problems in Ibicaba. Translators were in short supply, he claimed. If a juíz de paz had a conflict of interest, other judges could step in. And then he shifted blame. He hit back at Swiss authorities for sending their elderly, sick, and poor, and cited the Swiss consul’s own observations on that point as well as his celebration of Vergueiro establishments only four months before the disturbances. As if following the Vergueiros’ tactics, Olinda reproduced Heusser’s letter to them and unearthed Swiss consular reports confirming that colonos could relinquish their debts in a few years. Indeed, “if well understood,” the parceria system could “protect men against hunger and cold in this sumptuous Brazil; and could offer, if not wealth and independence, at least a pleasant, even happy, subsistence” according to Olinda. Only those seeking “unearned advantages” and seduced by “fallacious promises” of liquidated debts and free land could squander the benefits of parceria.Footnote ⁶²

Olinda’s indelicate response served as a perfect divertissement as he sought correctives to colonization’s blatant flaws by consulting statesmen across the political spectrum. Earlier, he had taken stock of fellow conservatives’ opinions. Soares de Andréa, the general who quashed the Cabanagem and the 1842 revolts, had shared his preference for prioritizing military and indigenous colonies in the northeastern provinces and refraining from “looking for colonos in their own lands,” offering instead government loans and subsidies to companies with contracts that avoided “excessive usury.”Footnote ⁶³ Olinda had also relied on the practical assessments of allies closer to the ground such as Felizardo, whose recommendation of Hermann Blumenau as an “honest and active man”’ contributed to Olinda ratifying the empresario’s contract for his Itajaí colony within a month following a two-year wait.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, Olinda’s appointee to the Rio Grande do Sul presidency, Ângelo Muniz da Silva Ferraz, brought news on the struggles of empresarios like Montravel, who had only imported 49 colonos in 1857, and Jacob Rheingantz and his unfertile land grant.Footnote ⁶⁵

Ex-Empire minister Luiz Pedreira do Couto Ferraz also counseled Olinda, but in contrast to conservative visions of a discreet state, he leaned in favor of active government support for colonization. “With time,” Ferraz had become “more convinced that immigration [would] not advance, much less become centralized, without some sacrifice on the part of the Treasury.” Government had to exceed “present expenditures and allocations … to prove efficacious” while cost-saving by substituting wages with foodstuffs and medicine.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ferraz’s notes coincided with the overtures of a longtime German resident in Rio who invoked emigrant drives to Chile, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope to convince Brazilian authorities to cover all travel expenses for his countrymen, warning that “what comes cheap ends up being costly” and offering model contracts between Hamburg authorities, shipping firms, and British colonial administrators.Footnote ⁶⁷ By sounding Brazilian statesmen’s ideas about colonization, Olinda realized that more direct government action was imperative.

Liberals also furnished Olinda with invaluable suggestions. Francisco de Paula Souza recommended keeping Joseph Hörmeyer, an Austrian-born veteran Brummer conscripted to fight Rosas in 1851, in the government’s payroll as an emigration propagandist. Hörmeyer, who had already completed a commissioned handbook for emigrants to Brazil with an appendix on the Mucury Company settlements, received a pay raise from Olinda and by 1859 began publishing a journal that saw four volumes until 1861. An envious Sturz, already resigned from his diplomatic post, fulminated Hörmeyer as Brazil’s “speaking trumpet.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Erstwhile Foreign minister Ernesto Ferreira França also enriched Olinda’s reflections, even though the two had a long-standing enmity since Olinda’s attempts to foil Ferreira França’s senate run for Pernambuco in 1847–1848.Footnote ⁶⁹ A decade later, Ferreira França became a new Supreme Court minister, reaching the highest echelons of imperial politics. And after championing peopling for years, he undertook a tour of German lands that positioned him well to counsel government on emigration affairs. He informed Olinda of the leading emigrant shipping firms of Robert Miles Sloman and Johann Godeffroy; warned about smaller agencies trying to sabotage the Brazilian recruiter, Dr. Schmidt; and turned Olinda’s attention to Hamburg’s Emigration Authority (Auswanderer-Behörde), a bureau that fixed prices, resolved conflicts, and cared for migrants’ well-being ahead of departure.Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition, Ferreira França’s remittances to the IHGB provided the most thorough update of colonization holdings since the early 1840s, including his own book on German-Brazilian relations published in Dresden; works on British colonization; many more on German emigration to the United States, Chile, Honduras, and New Zealand; and even one book on Austrian colonization in Hungary useful to think about internal frontiers like Paraná.Footnote ⁷¹

Olinda used these ideas to take stock of the government’s record on companies. In draft notes, he surveyed colonization efforts in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, the United States, and Australia and concentrated on French Algeria, where the pacification of the Kabylie in 1857 had paved the way for a specialized colonial ministry that trumped the reformism of Saint-Simonian state officials graduated from the École Polytéchnique. The new “system to fuse French colonos with Arabs and Moors” laid bare, for Olinda, the shortcomings of earlier Algerian colonization and signaled the “uselessness of government sacrifices to sustain companies.” “Beautiful theories and prestigious names,” he asserted, “have hereto served as the sole bases for these enterprises, founded … on the hope that, once colonies start out, Government is obligated to continue protecting and subsidizing them.” Olinda concluded that “neither country nor colonos have profited from these enterprises” and that “a commercial association … cannot offer the advantages that one would think at first sight.”Footnote ⁷²

Although Olinda settled on the wisdom of terminating company subsidies and directing funds instead to land-clearing activities and colonos’ initial sustenance in colonization nuclei, he took action to reinforce the ACC by authorizing new rules to oversee its recruitment agencies. These new measures sought to transform recruitment by offering per capita prizes for recruiters in compliance and by making agents, shipowners, and captains financially liable for reported abuses.Footnote ⁷³ But Olinda was not simply giving the ACC free rein, which became clear when he also approved new ACC statutes that gave the imperial government almost full control of the company by allowing the prime minister to appoint the ACC’s president and vice-president. In other words, Olinda solidified his belief in terminating subsidies by bringing the company under direct government oversight, if not outright control. And yet, refusing to abandon the principle of profit, these government rules also increased per capita prizes for adult colonos (50$) and children (30$ each).Footnote ⁷⁴

Even more impactfully, Olinda swiftly enacted the first official ordinance regulating emigrant voyages. The new Regulamento de transporte de emigrantes (Emigrant Transport Ordinance) became a decisive policy benchmark not only because it empowered the Brazilian government to oversee migrant transports but also to carry out its own. Its blueprint originated in a budget law for 1856–1857 that mandated greater oversight over colonization and was greatly enhanced by Olinda’s decades-long engagement with the colono trade. The Ordinance allowed Olinda to bring Brazilian policies in line with international efforts to improve maritime conveyance of contract workers such as the British inquiries into coolie transports seeking to curtail mortality rates as thousands of laborers shipped out of India following the Sepoy rebellion of 1857.Footnote ⁷⁵ Olinda’s Ordinance established a ratio of one colono per ton and minimum space dimensions for every passenger. It regulated food rations, kitchens, beds, and medical personnel according to passenger load and instituted sanitary measures like separating animals from humans. For the first time in Brazilian law, the Ordinance also restricted entry of physically or psychologically disabled individuals unaccompanied by relatives. Captains would have to produce detailed passenger manifests and preserve copies of contracts for all colonos onboard. Stringent supervision and the application of fines for violations fell under the Lands Directorate but also involved the Navy’s surgeon-general, the Navy auditor, and the customs director. The Ordinance deterred would-be offenders with fines that doubled emigrant travel costs and incentivized those in charge of applying it with a gratuity for every case resulting in fines. Significantly, the Ordinance left its mark until the end of the Empire as its compliance became an obligatory precondition for all colonization contracts.Footnote ⁷⁶

Olinda’s actions reined in the private business of colonization for governmental purposes but proved insufficient to revert the tide against emigration to Brazil. Sturz himself, who angrily resigned from his post in 1858, referred to “brain-burned Olinda” and to the “oligarchical and exploitative principles” that guided him, likening the Emigrant Transport Ordinance to a police ordinance for Helots.Footnote ⁷⁷ More substantive discussions took place in the Berlin-based Zentral-Verein für deutsche Auswanderungs-und Kolonisations-Angelegenheiten (Central Association for German Emigration and Colonization Matters), which gave a space to the grievances of Prussian mercenaries who fought for Brazil against Rosas and even to one much older veteran of Pedro I’s Cisplatina War, Samuel Gottfried Kerst, who chastised Brazilian attempts to replace enslaved Africans with German proletarians and called instead for a German national colonization in Uruguay.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Brazilian press reported on some of the Zentral-Verein’s demands, including that German colonos receive “all the rights and liberties afforded to the Brazilian-born.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Paraná’s earlier cabinet had kept abreast of some of the developments orbiting the Zentral-Verein, particularly the Hapsburg Empire’s attempts to cut exits to Brazil in 1853 as part of a neo-absolutist awakening under the new monarch, Francis Joseph, and an interior minister disinclined to police another wave of exiles as in 1848.Footnote ⁸⁰ And yet, up until the Ibicaba and Beaucourt scandals, Brazilian statesmen did not fully grasp the weight of the Zentral-Verein nor of its spirited and diverse membership, which included Hamburg’s shipping magnate Robert Sloman and Göttingen luminary Dr. Wäppaus; HCV president Schröder and secretary W. Hühn; colonization empresarios involved in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, and California; and the Prussian War and Interior ministers, Eduard von Bonin and August von der Heydt.

In 1859, with Zentral-Verein discussions and the Swiss inquiries in the background, von der Heydt issued a watershed decree halting emigration to Brazil. The Heydt Rescript of 3 November 1859 forbade any direct financing of emigrant voyages as well as any related propaganda riling up young men to take leave for Rio. The measure, which remained in effect in unified Germany until 1898, drastically reduced the number of migrants arriving to Brazil from Hamburg and Bremen and ravaged the HCV, which struggled to meet its migrant quotas until it reorganized in 1897 as the new Hanseatic Colonial Society. Coming in the wake of a forceful wave of reformist measures in Brazil, the Heydt Rescript appeared in its face to be an unexpected repudiation of Olinda’s efforts to rein in the colono trade and bring colonization companies into line.

However, the Rescript was not a reflex response to the abuses at Ibicaba, as scholars have long thought. Its intention, rather, was to retain military personnel at a time when Prussia most needed its soldiers. Napoléon III and Franz Joseph I had just agreed to the Treaty of Villafranca finalizing the Franco-Piedmontese war in which France had supported the Count of Cavour’s bid to make the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia independent from Habsburg control. With enemy troops mobilized but suddenly disengaged from conflict, von der Heydt understood that the time had come for Prussia to stand guard. As Wilhelm of Prussia became prince regent during his brother Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s deathbed, the replacement of War minister von Bonin with Albrecht von Roon, who lionized military reform, refashioned Prussian forces. After debates raged for much of 1858 and 1859, “the money was there but the able-bodied recruits were not.”Footnote ⁸¹ Minister Roon pushed to modify the Service Law facilitating recruitments and absorb the militia known as the Landwehr into formal army regiments. Meanwhile, von der Heydt sought to contribute by stalling emigrant exits to destinations that had historically absorbed Prussian recruits.

Still, Brazilian colonization did not grind to a stop in spite of the Heydt Rescript. The arrival of 581 colonos from Portugal and Italy heralded an upward trend ahead of December, the peak month for migrant arrivals.Footnote ⁸² In Bahia, some 105 colonos arrived in 1858–1859, many of them minors headed to Engenho Novo, a sugar estate where 15 colonos had already repaid their debts by 1860. Building on these low-key attainments, Bahian planters sought the ACC to request colonos from Saxony, contacting the appropriate consul while asking for government favors for a national colony on the Rio Pardo, signaling the growing acceptance of mixed colonies.Footnote ⁸³ Meanwhile, after taking over the ACC, authorities in Rio continued to goad fazendeiros to hire colonos in order to consolidate demand.Footnote ⁸⁴ The new Agriculture ministry established in 1860 took over colonization matters and kept Hörmeyer on its roster so that, under the new minister’s orders, he could go after a “hostile” Bremen gazette publishing “calumnious and indolent falsities.” With Sturz decamping to the United States and intermittently attacking Brazil, Hörmeyer was the last scribe standing until minister Felizardo also destined funds to the vice-consul in Porto for the purpose of “flattening out any remaining obstacles for Portuguese emigration to the Empire.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Colonization companies were less resilient than the colono trade in general. The ACC dragged on by handling multiple logistics of migrant arrvials. In 1860, it redirected at least 130 incoming German colonos and others from Mucury to Rio Grande do Sul, exploiting ACC’s close relationship with the province established thanks to ACC president Muritiba’s conservative connections to the prior provincial president, Ângelo Muniz, who rose to the Empire ministry.Footnote ⁸⁶ The ACC continued to welcome incomers at the Bom Jesus hostel until at least 1863, the last years for which any information is available. By then, it had imported 5,908 colonos and managed the disembarkation and lodging of another 3,938 imported by the government. Requests for colono and foreign offers for emigration drives continued to arrive after 1859, including one in 1862 from the Frankfurt Society for the Protection of Emigrants asking for information on existing colonies and available lands. But the ACC never regained the vitality of its early days. In 1863, its third president, Borges Monteiro, reported on the closure of the Porto agency due to its runaway debts and inability to meet colono quotas on account of increased Portuguese vigilance over underaged emigrants. Surprisingly, the ACC still issued its ninth round of dividend payments to shareholders, which at 5 contos was one of the highest yet and brought the total profits produced by the company to almost 32 contos. At that rate, the ACC would have generated the equivalent of its initial government loan within a decade.

This bounty had Olinda to thank for. After seeing his cabinet sink, Olinda strove to secure its colonization-reformist thrust. A year later at the Conselho, Olinda partook in arguments over a credit approved in 1856 allowing government to spend up to six thousand contos in colonization. Because funds remained as the credit expired and financial commitments tied to the credits had yet to be fulfilled, the Conselho had to determine whether the funds could be used beyond their initial deadline, even though an affirmative response amounted to extending one cabinet’s policies beyond its incumbency. Olinda claimed that any portion of the credit committed to a specified expense within the valid period did in fact authorize spending beyond any deadline in order to meet those commitments. The law, he emphasized, did not state that expenditures had to be completed within the stipulated three-year window. Because it “fell upon Government to consult the interests of colonization so as to determine the time window for their realization,” the ACC could in effect continue to receive government subsidies tied to the 1856 credit. Olinda’s patronage thus carried on beyond his cabinet thanks to a deft opinion joined by ex-ACC president Monte Alegre and Limpo de Abreu, the minister who publicized the SPC’s statutes in 1836.Footnote ⁸⁷

Olinda’s generosity did not extend to the Mucury Company, however. Even though Ottoni sat on the board of the Banco do Brasil, his company depended entirely on government aid.Footnote ⁸⁸ After settling 1,013 colonos, Ottoni asked the government for an extension of the terms of contract and an advance on a previously agreed subsidy in late 1858, but Olinda responded curtly. The Mucury contract signed at the end of 1856, only months apart from the ACC’s credit decree, entitled Ottoni to a 300-conto loan to be disbursed in equal installments over three years. Near the end of 1858, Ottoni had received only 70 contos. But because he had surpassed his annual colono quota of 1,000 and sorely required additional funding, he requested that the remaining portion of the loan be made available to fulfill ongoing expenses. Counseled by Felizardo, Olinda took a reserved approach, agreeing to advance no more than a hundred contos per year, as stipulated, and with disbursements directly tethered to colono arrival rates. The “small sum estimated to promote colonization,” Olinda explained, “demands that the strictest economy be observed.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Olinda had shown no shortage of means to keep the ACC afloat. As Mucury’s agents in Leipzig reported to Ottoni, the Brazilian government authorized the ACC to recruit a thousand colonos with travel costs paid by Brazilian diplomats in Lisbon, Hamburg, Antwerp, and other ports. Recognizing that they “could not provide large advancements as they do,” Ottoni’s men concluded that “any who wish to emigrate to Brazil will preferably go to the ACC.”Footnote ⁹⁰ As his agents lost ground, Ottoni bore the implicit brunt of Olinda’s preference for the ACC.

Withheld funds came as a death sentence for the Mucury Company, with Olinda’s admonishing tone a further reminder of the true partial nature of the post-conciliation state. In Ottoni’s own telling, recent colono cohorts purveyed by the Land Directorate and the ACC had brought chaos to Mucury’s colonies. Olinda could not patronize another enterprise prone to uprisings or diplomatic inquiries.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1860, Finance minister Silva Ferraz effectively shuttered the Company by canceling the government’s commitments, coinciding almost perfectly with Ottoni’s failed electoral run for a Chamber seat for Minas. In a detailed final report to shareholders, Ottoni exculpated himself from the Company’s fate. He then published an incendiary tract against the electoral reform of 1860 that cleared his name after his defeat.

In the tract, Ottoni invoked his 13 years of experience at the helm of the Mucury Company to get credit for opening communications in landlocked Minas, and laid bare his expectation that the nascent parishes around Filadelfia would provide electoral clout. Surely, the earlier electoral reform of 1855, which facilitated the creation of smaller districts, would have allowed Ottoni and his supporters to enter the Chamber en masse, propelled by the new settlements in the Mucuri valley. But the redistricting of the province mandated by the 1860 electoral reform undercut that expected support in those places where only voters could “prove whether the Mucury Company’s empresario is a speculator or a patriot.” Ottoni raged against the sure victory denied him but presaged a vengeful return: “If a partial vote tore me from there, a thousand impartial votes may designate me for another seat in which, uncovering … the oligarchy, I will have the glory to serve.”Footnote ⁹² Colonos elsewhere had already mobilized socially and politically, establishing mutual aid societies and organizing against electoral irregularities, as a group of 135 colonos from Petrópolis did when they were intentionally excluded from their district’s qualifying lists.Footnote ⁹³ Olinda accompanied these developments through Conselho discussions on the rights of naturalized Brazilians, in particular those born of foreign colonos, and so he was perfectly aware of the political implications of peopling the Mucuri and did not look kindly on the electoral weaponization of colonization frontiers.Footnote ⁹⁴

* * *

The ACC and the Mucury Company embodied a bourgeoning, more streamlined colonization entrepreneurialism aiming to correct the failings of prior efforts. Yet the inevitable scandals that accompanied their activities reinforced their reliance on government support and resulted in divergent destinies that laid bare enduring tensions beyond the conciliation period. Conservatives and moderates who shared Olinda’s vision of a centralized monarchical state and strong regulatory prerogatives obtained government backing, while those with a more radical track record who could use colonization to build new constituencies fell short of receiving similar treatment despite their efforts to comply with, and even exceed, contractual expectations. Dismissing Ottoni allowed Olinda to reestablish what he understood as a political balance. Lanced on every side by conservatives who protested the financial reforms of his liberal minister Bernardo de Souza Franco or the prioritization of colono recruitment over land surveying, the question of who to support and to what extent hung over Olinda’s head like the sword of Damocles.

Forced to choose, Olinda ended up favoring the ACC over the Mucury Company, spelling the latter’s doom and flagging that dormant political enmities could resurface after conciliation. But the problems raised by colonization enterprises forced Olinda to adopt more nuanced decisions that defied partisanship. When foreign governments recriminated Brazilian empresarios for abusing colonos, Olinda closed ranks around his countrymen and adamantly defended another liberal firm, Vergueiro & Co. Eventually, Olinda’s cabinet dissolved. But his interventions in colonization matters had immense repercussions. The product of a damage-control response and in-depth study of colonization, Olinda’s Emigrant Transport Ordinance became a mainstay of colonization contracts up to the end of the Brazilian Empire in 1889. Through it, Olinda put forth a potent claim for regulation that sounded both the limits and possibilities of state intervention in the lives of companies and in the colono trade.

Colonization defied narrow definitions of government action and confronted cabinets with a true litmus test on their impact, raising key questions about governmental power, responsibilities, and capacities. How far could the government go in financing private enterprises through direct subsidies? And when should the imperial state step in as local incidents mushroomed into international recriminations? Olinda inherited these dilemmas together with the conciliation’s expectations of a government that balanced conservative and liberal creeds. His responses ultimately demonstrated that government would only do so much to mobilize colonization enterprises. Rather, it would develop the regulations to help colonization companies flourish as long as they responded to its interests, and to rein them in when they did not.

In 1860, the British legation in Rio de Janeiro sent glowing news to the Foreign Office. As agricultural production rode to record highs thanks to the rising price of Brazil’s leading exports, colonization strode apace. Over the previous decade, 7,262 colonos had landed in Rio Grande do Sul alone. Since 1854, foreign migrant arrivals had reached 10,000 a year, with the ACC contributing 5,908 in all for that period – just over 14 percent of the net annual entries.Footnote ¹ By 1859, imperial authorities registered a leap to 19,695 entries, according to reformist Aureliano Tavares Bastos.Footnote ² In addition to São Paulo’s colônias de parceria (sharecropping colonies) and São Leopoldo’s 15,000-strong population, there were now 15 government colonies, 4 subsidized colonies, 13 private colonies with partial government aid, and 4 entirely private colonies. Totaling at least 26,422 colonos in all, this signaled that the Brazilian Empire had begun reaping the fruits of a decades-long investment in colonization endeavors.Footnote ³

These numbers captured colonization promoters’ renewed enthusiasm during a time of profound global transformation. Despite widespread civil wars, Brazilian colonization advocates saw promising years ahead, exploiting global conflicts as windows of opportunity to recruit colonos. The imperial government itself expressed interest in ramping up migrations, prompting its representatives abroad to keep an eye out for prospective colonos. Even politicians and professionals at odds with the government in power took up colonization drives as temporary business opportunities. A rising political figure by the name of Quintino Bocaiúva exemplified the daring of the times when he set to work in a Brazilian colonization agency in New York in part due to his generation’s struggles to obtain political appointments even in liberal cabinets. Taking advantage of the end of formal hostilities in the United States, Quintino set course for New York to recruit veterans discontented with the tenuous peace after Appomattox.Footnote ⁴

This was a new era, marked by an unprecedented diversity of plans for all regions of the Empire’s ever-increasing colono quotas and divisive political struggles. Abroad, regional conflagrations like the world had not witnessed since the defeat of Napoléon drove migratory movements. National efforts to receive colonos also spurred migrations as soon as a much touted – if doubtful – international peace settled after the 1870s.Footnote ⁵ A standardized but locally adaptable language of colonization took shape across the hemisphere, including in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. In Brazil, with the end of the Paraguayan War, planters, technocrats, professionals, and statesmen applied colonization experiences from previous decades to an increasing array of scenarios and populations including national ones. In contrast to the more ethnically or racially restrictive policies that arose decades later, even amid debates about the racial adequacy of migrants, the last decades of migration and settlement management during the Empire perfected the business of colonization by expanding its scope overseas as well as within Brazilian borders. In Bahia, for instance, the abandoned colony of Rio Pardo came back to life in 1862 to house an “emigration of nationals,” which numbered 2,000 individuals from the drought-stricken interior. A similar experiment followed in Piauí.Footnote ⁶ In view of these experiences, Brazilian spendthrifts quickly found that promoting national colonies – establishments peopled by the working poor rather than foreign colonos – could pave the way for a post-abolition future.

According to prevalent scholarship, Brazil’s gradual abolition laws during this time generated a labor shortage panic that increased demand for foreign colonos. Frantic calls for braços para a lavoura compounded racist attitudes, reputedly, to shape Brazilian planters’ preferences for white European workers. Yet, contrary to this accepted narrative, standards about migrant or settler adequacy were much talked about but proved elusive on the ground, raising the question about whether they were in fact the driving force of colonization. Rather, colonization advocates depended on sudden windows of opportunity to identify target migrant pools and activate their received wisdom on the “science of colonization.” Diverse factors contributed to the random consideration of particular populations from across the world for Brazilian colonization, displacing labor replacement ploys or selective racial or national parameters as guideposts for directed migrations.

Indeed, for myriad reasons, a medley of migrant groups arrived in Brazil in quick succession, including Polish exiles, US Confederate veterans, and Algerian settlers. Their often competitive wrangling for government favors laid bare the opportunistic character of migrations in the midst of widespread global conflict. These crises-propelled arrivals also structured a dynamic interplay between local, national, and international factors that had a mobilizing effect on Brazilian statesmen. Imperial officials issued orders for meeting these expatriates’ needs and demands as much as to resolve the dilemmas they dragged in, and local and provincial authorities enthusiastically rushed to comply or to adapt. Ultimately, however, colonization powered forth thanks to a daring, if also problem-ridden, combination of migrant expatriates heading to Brazil to fully exploit perceived advantages and the drive of a new colonization company hoping to capitalize from bringing them to Brazil.

Polish Emigration and the Limits of the Catholic Connection

Addressing the Chamber of Deputies in 1860, the new Agriculture minister anticipated rising migrant entries – but only in the far-off future. If the United States had taken dozens of years since the Homestead Act to lure growing numbers of settlers, he argued, Brazil required more than the seven years elapsed since its Land Law Ordinance of 1854 to do the same. But foreign colonization projects soon began to land on the imperial government’s docket by force of circumstance, without the effort or expenses that England invested in Australia, France in Algeria, or the United States in “a vast German network … to apprehend new guests.”Footnote ⁷

The first overseas proposal came with a new Polish exodus following Russia’s disastrous suppression of the January Uprising of 1863. Led by Catholic Poles, the rebellion coincided with Napoléon III’s ambitions over the Rhine, which threatened war in the western Polish regions occupied by Prussia.Footnote ⁸ These events had already stoked concerted emigration schemes such as the one offered to emperor Maximilian I of Mexico by John Pope Hennessy, an Irish-Catholic member of the British Parliament who supported a stronger British intervention in Poland.Footnote ⁹ Now, a similar proposal arrived in Brazil with count Anton von Ladislaw Jasienski, an aristocratic London exile of the earlier Polish rebellion of 1830–1831 who docked at Recife in 1864 to organize the Associação Promotora da Colonização Polaca (Association for the Promotion of Polish Colonization).

In its inaugural meeting, a board of directors tasked Jasienski with opening affiliates across Brazil’s dioceses. The Polish Association found favor in Church circles, including in the northernmost province of Pará, but struggled to expand beyond them due to its professedly apolitical nature. “Men of all parties belong to it,” Jasienski tried insisting, “because they all belong to the banner of humanity and patriotism.” To underscore this message, the Associação even suggested that Polish settlers could man the imperial army in the bourgeoning war against Paraguay. For months, however, Jasienski obtained courteous expressions of interest but no financial backing from Rio elites. Nonetheless, at the end of 1865 he did secure an incorporation decree from Pedro II, who also promised public lands somewhere in São Paulo or Paraná.Footnote ¹⁰

Brazilians themselves showed little interest in Polish migrations. By his own account, Jasienski clashed with both locals and resident foreigners who objected to the Associação’s Catholicism. For instance, months after obtaining his incorporation decree, Jasienski went to Pernambuco to procure similar favors. But the president of the the Associação Comercial Beneficiente in Recife, Philip F. Needham, who was not Catholic, remained noncommittal, which prompted Jasienski to withdraw to the Pimenteiras military colony.Footnote ¹¹

By that point, Jasienski also understood that another class of civil war expatriates had overtaken the imagination of his potential supporters: the Confederate veterans making their appearance across Brazilian regions and seen by many as a more enterprising migrant cohort. “I must not hide to Your Majesty,” Jasienski confessed to Pedro II, “that the greatest, most valuable sympathies are reserved for the Americans … the motive for such predilection seemed to me a bad symptom for the future of the Monarchy and of Religion in this Province.” In the early weeks of 1867, as numerous entrepreneurs from the US South embarked on expeditions to settle in Brazil, Jasienski left for New York, where he tried to procure the recently appointed Brazilian emigration agent, Quintino Bocaiúva. Jasienski’s plan was to pick Catholic Poles arriving from Russian, Prussian, or Hanse lands for re-shipment to Brazil to reap the same advantages the Brazilian government showered upon US emigrants.Footnote ¹²

Other Polish wanderers arrived at the Court besides Jasienski. In February 1866, vicar Karol Mikoszewski addressed cariocas in the Correio Mercantil. A leading figurehead in the Provisional National Government after the Uprising of 1863, Mikoszewski was one of the reputed organizers of insurgent Catholic peasant freeholds. Critics described him as the Polish revolutionary government’s “most implacable judge” and said he had “assassinated, stabbed, hanged, poisoned, strangled, dishonored and stolen from the poor who had not wished to follow the revolutionary current.” Yet, as the envoy of a relatively obscure Central Commission on Polish Immigration, he had come to Rio representing the victims of “Muscovite barbarity.” With a more compelling message than Jansieski’s, the vicar spoke of martyrdom and Siberian exiles, evoking the Catholic fervor and valor of Polish rebels against Russian oppression, themes that echoed favorably in Brazilian cries against Paraguayan dictator Solano López and in the hushed reservations of ultramontane elites against religious freedom. Machado de Assis wrote a gushing portrait of Mikoszewski, describing aid to Polish expatriates as “an act of Christian charity, and a way of rendering cult … to their immortal patriotism.” Even satirical weeklies joined the cause, with one inviting “all people of good taste and inclined to charity” in Rio to a benefit concert for the Polish.Footnote ¹³

How much pecuniary support Mikoszewski received in Rio remains anyone’s guess, but Polish migration to Brazil nevertheless increased as Poles from the Prussian province of Upper Silesia fled Germanization policies and other hardships.Footnote ¹⁴ Several entrepreneurs in Paraná united under a colonization company by the name of Sociedade Colonizadora Pereira Alves and Bendaszewski & Cia. brought 1,097 Polish colonos from 1873 to 1878. As part of a government contract in 1874, the main associates – colonel José Antonio Pereira and Eugênio Bendasewski, a Polish shopkeeper in Rio – committed to importing 4,000 Basques, Slavs, Germans, Lombards, and Belgians within four years into the colonies of Pereira and Euphrasina, on the bay of Paranaguá. Even though their contract was rescinded in 1877 due to their failure to fulfill their quota, they still profited from the experience, as Bendaszewski got elected to Curitiba’s city council in the years ahead.Footnote ¹⁵

The for-profit Polish migration Jasienski envisioned following political defeat did not materialize due to changing conditions of receptivity. The political leanings of a younger Brazilian generation neutralized Catholicism as a parameter that automatically spelled a preference for certain migrant groups. In addition, the concurrent arrival of Confederate expatriates as potential settlers in Brazil eclipsed for a time any Polish emigration schemes, which would nonetheless take hold later on in response to different political circumstances in Europe and only once the Confederate fever in Brazil had passed.

A Penchant for Confederates

Jasienski and Mikoszewski did not find the support they expected partly because they failed to engage a rising cadre of young radicals taking politics by storm – a group that later became known as the “generation of 1870.” These promising professionals enjoyed the protection of old-guard Liberals like Joaquim Saldanha Marinho, who in 1860 acquired the third most important newspaper in Brazil, the Diário do Rio de Janeiro (DRJ) (where Quintino Bocaiúva worked as coeditor), and who would shortly become grão-mestre of the Grande Oriente Unido. And they enjoyed the support of Antonio Francisco de Paula Souza, a Liberal Paulista heading a prominent family clan from Itu, in the vicinity of Campinas and Sorocaba, who rose from deputy in 1863 to minister of Agriculture in 1866.Footnote ¹⁶ However, many of these younger Liberals were not born into privilege and faced obstacles to government employment and political placements. By the 1860s, a law degree and political patronage no longer guaranteed entry into the most selective circles of imperial society, much less to government.Footnote ¹⁷ Hence, professional occupations such as journalism absorbed this floating talent pool, while business undertakings furnished some financial independence and a hard-won political acumen.

Notably, these aspiring politicians were prepared to cash in when Confederate veterans mulled leaving their homelands for Mexico, British Honduras, and the Brazilian Empire. A rambunctious, pro-slavery foreign policy and a fledging southern navalism in the decades before the Civil War preceded and informed talk of emigration among unreconstructed southerners.Footnote ¹⁸ Since the 1790s, debates about emigration in the United States had focused on the possibility of expatriating freedmen and women to Haiti or Africa, ideas that Black communities in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere weighed differently and hotly debated.Footnote ¹⁹ But the tables turned when the tightening sectional crisis over the future of slavery in new US territories and the tenuous compromises reached during the 1850s transformed white slaveholders themselves into prospective expatriates. After losing the war in 1865, unreconstructed southerners heeded long-standing campaigns for US expansion into Latin America, especially those of Navy officer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who had spent years talking up the Amazon basin as a future Mississippi. Advocating to expand a “policy of commerce,” Maury touted an American Amazon through the popular southern improvement journal DeBow’s Review and at the southern commercial conferences of 1852 and 1853 in New Orleans and Memphis. The findings of an exploratory voyage to the Amazon commissioned by him also came out in pamphlet form, telling an even wider audience of the agricultural potential of a region closed off to international navigation.Footnote ²⁰

Information about Brazil more generally circulated in the United States through other media. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist trained under von Martius, delivered lectures on Brazilian zoology in US university circuits even before he completed his own tour of the Amazon in 1865 and published A Journey in Brazil in 1868. His travel companion, Dr. Hartt, enraptured audiences with lively reports on their findings, going so far as to produce a live boa constrictor during a New York presentation. US readers were perhaps more familiar with Brazil and the Brazilians (1857), a popular work written by Methodist minister Daniel Kidder and Presbyterian missionary James Fletcher, which coincidentally reached its sixth print run in 1867 as emigration drives from the US South got underway.Footnote ²¹ The first English newspaper published in Brazil, the weekly Anglo-Brazilian Times, also made its rounds in US ports through the new Brazil-New York steam-packet line, while its founder and editor, an Irishman by the name of William Scully, put forth a guidebook to show that a move to Brazil promised “prospects far superior to those offered by Australia, New Zealand, or the United States.”Footnote ²²

Yet emigration remained a contentious subject in the US South. New Orleans minister Ballard Dunn acknowledged that emigration was not for everyone even as he rambled against federal taxes and the putative insecurity of life and property after the war.Footnote ²³ Northern papers encouraged “anticipative exiles” from the south to “stay at home” and “fight what remains of this contest at the ballot-box.” When the ex-Confederate major Lansford Warren Hastings readied “five hundred unreconstructed brethren” to leave Alabama for Brazil, one newspaper described the expedition as “full of woe” and forecasted that “all Alabama may be in Brazil some morning” as it warned readers of Hastings’s attempt to profit from contractual “forfeitures” incurred by passengers unprepared or with excess baggage on the day of departure. In the South, too, newspapers cautioned that emigration contracts for Brazil were regarded “more in the breach than in the observance.” “Let our people stay at home,” it read. Brazil, where Blacks and whites mingled “indistinctly,” was “no country for them.”Footnote ²⁴ Notwithstanding racist predictions, queries about Brazil overwhelmed the vice-consular offices Brazil had set up in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Pensacola. From late February to early December 1865, Brazil’s minister Joaquim Nascentes de Azambuja (brother of the ACC director Bernardo Nascentes de Azambuja, discussed in Chapter 6) received at least 75 inquiries about emigration at the Brazilian legation in Washington, the vast majority from southern states but at least 12 from non-Confederate or border states.Footnote ²⁵ At first, official response fell short of this surge in interest. Brazil’s general consul only tepidly promoted Brazil as a destination. Yet, after the Anglo-Brazilian Times published an overview of the “favors of emigration,” Brazil’s vice-consul in New Orleans distributed “official information” without authorization in order to incite migrants to head for Brazil. And when Brazilian deputies pressed the general consul on his own passivity on the matter, he finally hurried a brochure with land prices and other conditions of emigrant reception.Footnote ²⁶

Scientific accounts and commercial propaganda compelled US southern agents to visit Brazil in search of favorable settlement contracts and subsidies. In mid-1865, a Shreveport paper alleged that Maury had obtained more than the 1,000 acres offered to each Confederate veteran, a promising start for an emigration drive if only emperor Maximilian of Mexico had not subsequently hired him as his own colonization agent instead.Footnote ²⁷ Soon, southern prospectors sent optimistic reports from Brazil. Robert Meriwether and H. A. Shaw, two scouts commissioned by the Southern Colonization Society of Edgefield, wrote back to South Carolina with excited impressions about interior São Paulo.Footnote ²⁸ An ex-Confederate surgeon by the name of James McFadden Gaston offered greater details, referencing American merchants, coffee factors, and railroad engineers who could help the newly arrived establish a footing in a strange land.Footnote ²⁹ Within three days of arrival in Rio in September 1865, Gaston secured an audience with Ignácio da Cunha Galvão, the appointed head of a new colonization secretariat created as part of the 1864 revisions of Olinda’s Emigrant Transport Ordinance (1858). Galvão avidly welcomed Gaston and began drawing contracts for land sales and government aid.Footnote ³⁰ Compared to Azorean or German colonos or even to Jasienski’s efforts, Gaston’s ease of access to government conduits was unparalleled.

Local officials also responded energetically to prospectors beyond São Paulo and Paraná, the two provinces attracting the most southerners. As president of Minas Gerais in 1865, an eager Saldanha Marinho reported to Bocaiúva that he had “obtained much in favor of American emigration” from the provincial assembly, a deed he repeated as São Paulo’s president in 1867–1868.Footnote ³¹ Such enthusiasm might have given Bocaiúva the first inklings of the role that a colonization agent could play, for which he would have found further confirmation in other provinces. In Bahia, for instance, president Manoel Pinto de Sousa Dantas organized a special commission of six “illustrious citizens experienced in public affairs” to devise guidelines for encouraging the settlement of the colonos americanos along the Jequitinhonha and Pardo rivers. The leading recommendation of the commission, one of whose members professed that “Yankees” possessed the “congenital quality … of never ceasing to work,” was to appoint a special emigration agent in the United States.Footnote ³²

As they waited for this future Brazilian agent to materialize, officials in provinces far and wide across the Empire did their best to please US incomers. Authorities in Belém, for instance, flocked to Lansford Warren Hastings when he arrived in mid-May 1866. Hastings was an adventurer who walked the Oregon trail in 1842, sat at the California constitutional convention in 1849, and partook in Confederate and filibustering schemes around the southwest border with Mexico before a newspaper described him as one of many “disappointed applicants to the office of Governor” in Alabama. Nevertheless, paraenses treated him obsequiously, offering accommodations and subsidizing survey tours on an Amazon Company steamer, whose very owner, the barão de Mauá, credited Hastings’ presence with the projected aperture of the Amazon to international commerce on 7 September 1867. Indeed, a month to the day of the Amazon’s opening, Hastings signed a contract with Pará’s government endowing him with 60 square leagues of public lands between the Tapajós and Curuá rivers close to Santarém. Minister Sousa Dantas prodded provincial authorities to begin land surveying activities for the Hastings grant immediately. When, months later, a party of American emigrants came to inspect the Hastings grant, they, too, were afforded free room and board for an entire month in Santarém.Footnote ³³

In the end, however, numerous miscommunications and delays revealed the chasm between government officers’ eagerness to please Confederate migrants and the actual execution of their plans. While provincial governments hustled to survey lands and provide arrivals with a reception center, accountability became a problem. Pará’s provincial president approved 26:000$000 in loans to Hastings for land measuring and parceling activities and appointed two Brazilian engineers to begin work, but months later land surveys remained incomplete. Authorities later refused to pay an American surveyor who stepped in to continue land measurements. Meanwhile, it became clear through the provincial president’s communications that allotted funds were being employed for the daily sustenance of auxiliary personnel and for objects for personal use.Footnote ³⁴

Bahia, too, had to come to terms with other such accounting problems, each of which showed how initial government promises of financial support could spiral into greater spending. Having already received 1:400$000 in loans from the provincial treasury, US migrants John Ogden and Henry Thompson demanded an additional advance of 600$000 in late 1866. The commission convoked by Sousa Dantas while still Bahia’s president had recommended that no more than one conto (1:000$000) be disbursed in loans to the first 50 families that settled in the Jequitinhonha valley. Hence, the new request effectively doubled the initially stipulated quantities. Nonetheless, the demand was met.

And news spread fast. Ogden’s and Thompson’s success in attaining the increment inspired Charles Rowley, another prospector, to look into favors from Bahian officials on top of those already on offer by the central government. His efforts led one official to warn that “Government should be cautious and remain informed of their proceedings.”Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, the government slowly awoke to the need for policing contractual compliance. From New York, the Brazilian consul suggested spying on prospectors like Gen. William Wallace Wood by having vice-consuls “observe his goings” to ascertain “his position and influence” and “the means he has at his disposal.” On paper, the alarm seemed unwarranted because Wood had obtained promising conditions from Brazilian officials for the thousand families from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia he allegedly represented. But a few months later, Wood in fact found stable employment, settled down in Natchez and suspended his efforts.Footnote ³⁶

Significantly, Brazilian officials seemed to willfully ignore the fact that the demise of slavery in the United States was a primary motivation for southern “fire-eaters” to seek new abodes overseas. So much was evident in the US press. According to the New York Herald, these “‘last ditch’ men who say they cannot and will not remain in the South or a country where the negroes are free,” looked to Brazil as a potential homestead “where they can once more … live under a slave government.”Footnote ³⁷ Accordingly, Gaston, Meriwether, and Shaw, all of whom were prior slavers, actively pressured the Agriculture minister to revoke the law of 7 November 1831 prohibiting the importation of enslaved persons and non-Brazilian libertos. They alleged that their freedmen and women would accompany their old enslavers as free laborers of their own accord.

The matter came to a head when, against initial objections from the Brazilian consul, Mississippi planter John Abraham Cole embarked from New York to Rio with some of his former slaves in early 1866. His case came before the Justice section of the Conselho de Estado, which emitted an opinion against the importation of Cole’s slaves, citing the 1831 law to avoid the fraudulent importation of slaves under the guise of freedmen.Footnote ³⁸ Significantly, the three authors of this opinion – which was quickly sanctioned by the emperor – were old-guard politicians that critically espoused modernizing trends: Nabuco de Araújo, the chief advocate for the international opening of the Amazon; Eusébio de Queirós, the author of the slave trade ban of 1850; and Francisco Jê Acaiaba de Montezuma, now visconde Jequitinhonha, the auditor of SPC finances in 1839 (see Chapter 3). But even after the Conselho’s 1866 decision, southern emigrants continued to cite slavery to justify their translocation to Brazil. James Cone of Brenham, Texas, for example, couched his requests to Bahia’s president on the basis of his and his compatriots’ search for “some country where the institution of slavery still existed, whose climate & productions were similar to those of the late Confederate States & whose Government & laws were such as to give full protection to life, liberty & property.”Footnote ³⁹

Liberals and emergent republicans had some reason to turn a blind eye to slaveholding among US settlers. For one thing, the Brazilian Empire had steered clear of the US Civil War, maintaining a semblance of neutrality.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then there was cotton. Even before the collapse of US cotton exports in 1862–1863, cotton enjoyed a renaissance in São Paulo driven in part by the exhausted soil of the old coffee frontier in the Paraíba Valley, as the district council of Bananal confirmed to São Paulo’s provincial president in 1861.Footnote ⁴¹ Improvers saw the decline of coffee as fertile ground for innovation. In a “Manual for the Cotton Cultivator,” Cândido Nascentes de Azambuja (brother to the director of the Land and Colonization division and the ACC founder) assayed international cotton markets, identifying New Orleans and Algeria as the most productive. The following year, AIN editor and ex-SCT member Frederico Burlamaque published his Monographia do algodoeiro and supervised experimental cotton cultivars at the IIFA, where he served as secretary under the marquês de Abrantes. By 1863, Agriculture minister Pedro de Alcântara Bellegarde distributed 1,000 lbs. of Georgia cotton seeds donated by US chargé d’affaires William van Vleck Lidgerwood, as he celebrated that “the progressive increase of the culture and harvesting of cotton across the Empire make it the most lucrative of all cultures.” As the Confederate emigration to Brazil picked up its pace, the Anglo-Brazilian Times echoed this prediction, reminding readers that cotton was “a staple … well adapted to the capabilities of white labor and small proprietorship” and so perfectly fitting for newcomers from the US South, heralds of a new cotton era.Footnote ⁴²

Brazilian officials’ and intellectuals’ riveting enthusiasm for Confederate exiles, especially in preference over Polish migrants, serves as a salient reminder that colonization did not simply reflect a transition to free labor. Rather, in this era of global conflict, it sat at the juncture of complex labor, economic, and expatriate streams that in various ways overlapped with planter and government interests. Soon, the vogue for Confederate veterans also dovetailed with a new colonization company whose express purpose was to exploit both Southerners’ interest and pro-US emigration sentiment in Brazil.

The Sociedade Internacional de Imigração: Unlikely Alliances and the Pitfalls of Yankeesmo

As global conflicts brought various new migrations into focus, Brazilian planters, urban professionals, and government figures rushed to make the most of peopling initiatives. In early 1866, landowners from the exhausted coffee frontiers rallied together with old-time liberals, brokers, planters, and young republicans around Vassouras planter Caetano Furquim de Almeida’s call to establish a new colonization association. Furquim de Almeida was long familiar with colonization as the younger brother of late Baptista Caetano de Almeida, the São João d’el Rei luminary who kickstarted the Azorean colono trade in 1835 with captain Jardim (see Chapter 3).Footnote ⁴³ Having married into the Teixeira Leite family led by the barão de Vassouras, Furquim de Almeida now belonged to an old plantation elite seeking economic alternatives and new improvement methods, including colonization.Footnote ⁴⁴

The first meeting had poor attendance. But discussions remained enthusiastic and, thanks to foreign attendees, substantive. A coffee factor with the surname Schmidt (with unclear relationship to Brazil’s vice-consul in German cities) underlined the necessity of “liberal measures” and better communication routes to increase migrant arrivals. US broker Charles Nathan in turn suggested that the proposed association focus on attracting emigrants from the US South, which benefited concurrent efforts to organize a steamship line between southern states and Brazil. Francisco Travassos Valdez, who had served as a Portuguese official in the Luso-British mixed commissions at Angola and the Cape of Good Hope, as government secretary in Timor, and as secretary of Portugal’s special commission on colonization and indigenous work in overseas provinces, recommended Portuguese colonial policies, including state-sponsored Azorean and Madeiran emigration, land distribution, and a credit-purveying Banco de Ultramar.Footnote ⁴⁵

Quintino Bocaiúva, soon to become Brazilian agent in New York, tried to bring these various strands together while restoring the focus on colonization. Invoking peopling tropes, he proffered that the “most noble aspiration of American peoples must be to nullify of the desert” through immigration, which required rural credit and, notably, liberties like civil marriage, which went against the grain of Catholic precepts. He then celebrated a current bill on limited liability associations that could promote “the spirit of association [and] fecundate the sources of public wealth,” encapsulating attendees’ collective anticipation of profits from the proposed company.Footnote ⁴⁶

The group elected to a charter-drafting commission reflected a balance of foreign and national members including Furquim; Tavares Bastos; US broker C. J. Harrah; Portuguese merchant and director in Rio of the Brazilian and Portuguese Bank Limited, Rodrigo Pereira Felício; German merchant and interim Württemberg consul, Herman Haupt; and the Irish editor William Scully. Soon after, the Sociedade Internacional de Imigração (SII) came to light.Footnote ⁴⁷ Board elections held few surprises: Furquim took the presidency and Tavares Bastos became executive director, while Bocaiúva and Fernando Castiço, a Portuguese journalist at the Court, joined Haupt, Harrah, and Scully as board members. The SII began operations within and beyond the Court, true to its mission to seek “the whole country’s support.” Bocaiúva’s editorials courted supporters regardless of political preferences or nationality, pontificating that directed migrations were a “national question [that] should not be of interest only to those of this or that party, but to everyone.” Membership swelled to 343 subscribers, of whom 285 paid their dues. The SII won the unstinting support of Bahia’s Commercial Association, which saw it as contributing to peopling by providing “good services” in the form of immigrant hostels and colonies.Footnote ⁴⁸

The SII’s diffuse remit earned it ample favors while in practice it pursued a reformist agenda. From its first meeting, the company got the blessing of Agriculture minister Paula Souza and colonization secretary Galvão, who offered to cover rent in any building of its choosing. The SII soon opened a migrant hostel on the rua da Imperatriz. At the same time, it commissioned reprints of Antonio Joaquim de Macedo’s Da liberdade religiosa no Brasil and Portuguese liberal Alexandre Herculano’s Estudos sobre o casamento civil in order to allay concerns that migrants’ creeds or family inheritances (due to non-Catholic marriages) would go unprotected in Brazil. “In effect,” preached Tavares Bastos in the first company report in 1867, “to pretend that the system of public land sales by itself had been enough to attract Old-World emigrants … would be an incomplete and inexact appreciation.” To follow the US model, Brazil had to cultivate “individual liberties, local subsidies, decentralization, popular education,” in short, “all the driving forces that constitute the mechanisms of modern democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The Court’s top dailies and the Commercial Association of Rio de Janeiro provided firm footing for the SII. Its diverse membership included brokers, lawyers, business owners, customs officials, and philanthropists. One, John Frederik Russell, was a high officer in the National Guard and a pharmacist at the Largo do Machado. Others were partners in Mauá’s companies.Footnote ⁵⁰ Prominent public officials included José Ignácio Silveira da Mota, soon to be senator and owner of the Ilha das Flores, a future migrant hostel. There were offspring of old colonization advocates and extended planter kin, including Henrique Lahmeyer, an important coffee factor married to Furquim’s daughter. Journalists and scribes such as Adolph Hubert, editor of the Courier du Brésil and early disseminator of Allan Kardec’s texts in Brazil, and Francisco Leão Cohn, a National Guard lieutenant and copyreader for the Diário Official, completed the list.

Bocaiúva outshone other members in promoting the SII, using his position as new DRJ editor to praise it and report on its operations with a verve that transcended the simple agrarianism of Saldanha Marinho’s earlier editorship.Footnote ⁵¹ As a successful playwright, Bocaiúva dramatized old topics, arguing that land tenure and immigration promotion were indissolubly tied to larger questions of political rights and even to a higher national calling.Footnote ⁵² He even dared antagonize senator José de Alencar regarding the Brazilian Constitution’s ban on naturalized foreigners’ eligibility to political office, even though they agreed on the inviolability of foreigners’ marriages and religious freedoms.Footnote ⁵³ “The press” itself, said Bocaiúva, was “an apostolate.” And as one of the principal if most contentious preachers of the SII’s mission, he left the DRJ to spread the word among potential emigrants themselves.

Bocaiúva arrived in New York in late October 1866. Interested parties who read his ads or leaflets found him amid the downtown bustle at 26 Broadway, a stone’s throw away from where one of the anchorages for the Brooklyn Bridge would soon begin construction. From his new stead, special agent Bocaiúva collected information on available resources for colonos from sympathetic provincial authorities in Brazil like Rio Grande do Sul president Francisco do Rego Barros, brother to the Rego Barros who had recruited the Brummers many years earlier. In view of both provincial and imperial government inducements, Bocaiúva hence began to target US citizens as well as newly arrived Germans and Irishmen.Footnote ⁵⁴ Top dailies were dismayed at the hundreds of men lined up on any given week outside Bocaiúva’s office. And none of them were Black. As Bocaiúva’s handbills made clear, “no colored people” were “permitted as emigrants,” in keeping with prohibitions on the importation of slaves “from any country whatever” established in principle in 1831 and reinforced in 1850. For Bocaiúva, it made sense to reprise these precedents in preparation for the possibility that ex-Confederates would bring formerly enslaved workers to Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁵

Yet the huddled masses that “crowded [the entrance to the office] from morning till night” were not in fact the “Americans” for whom, apparently, Brazilians felt “a warm affection” as “models of enterprise, science, skill, and progressiveness.” To draw in this kind of emigrant and avoid “the poorer classes,” Bocaiúva publicized that emigrants could attain up to 125,000 braças of land at varying prices in provinces of their own choosing (Figure 7.1). Colonos were also exempted from import duties for their belongings and from military (though not National Guard) service, and they could naturalize as Brazilians within two years. Furthermore, the Brazilian government would offer room and board in a migrant hostel upon arrival, transport to their final destination, subsistence for the first six months, land surveying and clearing, agricultural implements, seeds, and a “provisional house” awaiting them in their new “homestead.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 7.1 Bocaiúva’s propaganda to lure “enterprising” Americans

FGV-CPDOC, QBccp 1855.08.21.

Image courtesy of CPDOC-FGV.

To calm public excitement over Brazilian promises, Bocaiúva set a $50 fee as a “guarantee of good faith” that would be duly reimbursed to emigrants once en route to Brazil. Incensed critics saw the charge as profiteering, including Johann Jakob Sturz, who was in the United States at the time and now sported a “hostile spirit against Brazil.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In response, an anonymous contributor to the New York Times under the pseudonym “Veritas” – no doubt Bocaiúva himself – defended Bocaiúva’s credentials and cited Cornelius Garrison, owner of the steamship line to Brazil engaged with Brazilian diplomats since 1863, as a reputable associate who lent further credit to the Brazilian agency’s work.Footnote ⁵⁸

Full Steam Ahead: Cuban Contributions to a Brazilian Recruitment Network

A tight-knit community of Cuban merchants and exiles in New York grounded Bocaiúva’s operations thanks to his close friend Bernardo Caymari, a savvy Cuban entrepreneur. Caymari had made a name for himself when the US government brought suit against him and Fausta Mora, a Cuban scion who owned many Manhattan properties, for freighting “merchandise” to either Confederate or Juarista rebels in Texas and hauling back $60,000-worth of cotton from Brownsville.Footnote ⁵⁹ With Bocaiúva at hand, Caymari swiftly navigated Brazil’s bureaucracy to obtain a contract between the Brazilian government and the United States and Brazil Mail Steamship Company (hereafter USBM), which he secured in February 1866. The new packet service departed New York to stop at the international hub of St. Thomas before proceeding to Belém, Recife, Salvador, and Rio. As USBM representative, Caymari also secured a lucrative contract to convey US emigrants to Brazilian ports, with USBM obtaining 10 percent of the price of passage up front and receiving reimbursements within a month.Footnote ⁶⁰ As part of the deal, the USBM agreed to verify that emigrants were in fact agricultural workers and to comply with Olinda’s 1858 Emigrant Transport Ordinance. The terms of agreement spanned two years at the height of the US exodus, which showed that New York interests prevailed over Charles Nathan’s earlier attempt to establish southern steamship lines directly from the south, especially when the USBM also began covering departures from New Orleans at twice the cost as from New York.

Approved by minister Paula Souza, Caymari’s contract also assigned Bocaiúva as company agent, a position that would allow him to bridge the interests of the SII, the USBM, and the Brazilian government.Footnote ⁶¹ In New York, Bocaiúva worked expeditiously. Synchronizing with the Brazilian legation, conveniently located across the street from his office, and the USBM’s bureau, a few blocks south on Broadway in no. 5 Bowling Green. He contrived a massive emigrant sweep in record time, which earned him praise in Brazil. When a shipment of 220 migrants landed at Rio aboard the South America, an exultant Tavares Bastos told him of a private letter in which the emperor himself purportedly instructed Agriculture minister Sousa Dantas “to encourage Bocaiúva, who has talent and shows great inclination to be of service … Carry on, then. Go ahead!”Footnote ⁶²

Bocaiúva’s exertions set in motion a migrant inflow that scholars estimate at 2,000 US southerners, but which was likely higher considering that 279 and 522 emigrants left respectively from New York and New Orleans in the second quarter of 1867 alone.Footnote ⁶³ It was unclear how much Bocaiúva’s precautions may have contributed to the southern port’s greater departures over New York, where most transports from the US South would stop en route to Brazil. Regardless, it was profits that benchmarked Bocaiúva’s efficacy. From March to December 1867, Caymari billed the Agriculture ministry twenty times on behalf of the USBM for rendered services totaling 256:130$055. This astronomical sum represented 24 percent of the ministry’s entire budget for Lands and Colonization on that fiscal year. An additional – and contentious – receipt for a single steamship voyage from New Orleans in August increased the bill by over 51 contos. No wonder, then, that minister Sousa Dantas had to request two supplemental credits – one in May, one in December – for that year’s budget while he contested the August charge. In typical fashion, Bocaiúva’s recruitments and the USBM stretched thin available government allocations.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Brazilian government struggled to cope with the rapid pace and steep costs of emigrant recruitment. For example, Sousa Dantas made little headway in accommodating the South America’s emigrants despite a month’s notice of their arrival. The SII had to house 150 of the passengers in its hostel on Imperatriz street while Sousa Dantas barely managed to send 70 more to the government-run hostel further north at Praia Formosa. Poor selection parameters and poor public opinion also riddled the enterprise. Sousa Dantas realized that the South America settlers strayed far from the reputed industriousness of US emigrants.

In response, the USBM instructed Bocaiúva to produce passenger lists before departures. According to official instructions, Bocaiúva organized emigrants into three distinct classes. Those of first class – the most resourceful – were entitled to 30 percent reduction in the cost of travel, while a second class composed of those who lost their fortunes in the Civil War would receive favorable government loans. But Bocaiúva’s success lay on a third class comprised of “simple workers” or “proletarians” responsible for covering their own travel costs or finding a planter who did. Predictably, many of the migrants sent by Bocaiúva failed to meet their debt obligations within days or weeks of arrival.

Critics in the press took note. It was claimed, for instance, that the “emigrants … that came to Iguape” comprised all the “vagrants, vagabonds and lock-pickers from the streets of New York,” having committed “disorders of all kinds, fires, assassination attempts, thefts.” “Why not make Brazil into the Fernando Noronha of the United States?,” concluded one letter, referring to Brazil’s most notorious island penal colony, which some had recently proposed turning into an agricultural colony. An exasperated Sousa Dantas ordered Bocaiúva to move his operations to New Orleans, where he could respond to fresh inquiries from southerners and oversee expeditions like the one organized by Frank McMullan, a veteran of William Walker’s filibustering and a lobbyist for a steamship line from Louisiana to Rio (Figure 7.2).Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 7.2 The North America, one of USBM’s state-of-the-art steamers

The North America, The Mariners’ Museum Collections, 1941.0645.000001.

Image courtesy of The Mariners’ Museum.

Accidents and mishaps further complicated operations and tarnished the SII’s image. Early in 1867, and only three hours out of New York, the USBM’s 1,796-ton North America almost collided with a Danish vessel returning from Rio with coffee. Although a collision was averted, the Danish ship sank and sustained five deaths. Their ship made an emergency stop at Martinique before continuing to Brazil with its 262 immigrants, but “a great bustle” yet awaited it in Rio. Once arrived, several colonos were held as suspects in connection to the homicide of a “poor employee of the Chamber of Deputies who was walking by” when a shot pierced the night air in Imperatriz street. A JC correspondent acerbically jested, “don’t send us North Americans like the ones recently arrived, for they say they are famous rowdies. I don’t know where poor Brazil will end up with this furor, this fashion of Yankeesmo (Yankeeism).”Footnote ⁶⁶

Nonetheless, in 1867, at least 10,032 migrants entered Rio de Janeiro, even if only 1,575 of these were US citizens. In no small part, this success was owing to a new deputy colonization agent hired by Bocaiúva: Domingo de Goicuria, the exiled son of a wealthy merchant family from Havana, and also Bernardo Caymari’s father-in-law.Footnote ⁶⁷ Goicuria brought with him critical connections and experience spanning the breadth of colonization efforts throughout the hemisphere. During the 1830s and ‘40s young Goicuria worked for his father’s firm in England. Inspired by post-abolition experiments in Jamaica, in 1846 he offered the Spanish Crown a plan to import colonos to Cuba from his parents’ homeland in northern Spain, but slave traffickers sabotaged his attempts to obtain a contract from the Junta de Fomento. Goicuria’s reformism eventually earned him his exile, where he enmeshed himself in a revolutionary Cuban diaspora and a sprawling transatlantic political network.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1854, conservative Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna sold indigenous prisoners from the Caste War in Yucatán to Goicuria’s family firm in Cuba.Footnote ⁶⁹ Two years later, Goicuria found himself collaborating with William Walker in Nicaragua, hoping to eventually turn his forces toward Cuba. In 1862, a different Mexican president, Benito Juárez, appointed Goicuria Mexican commissioner to Washington, DC, where Goicuria tried to sell Cozumel island for the Lincoln administration to settle freedmen in the event of an emancipation decree (the proceeds of such sale would go to repay a loan Goicuria had provided to the Mexican government).Footnote ⁷⁰

Ever on the coattails of international plots, Goicuria set to work in Brazil’s Emigration Agency. Within a month, he arranged for the Marmion to convey 300 emigrants to Brazil, a task made easier by his decision to move the office to the USBM headquarters in Bowling Green. Months later, he sent the North America back to Rio with 136 “field hands.”Footnote ⁷¹ With the northern winter, however, Goicuria’s endeavors began to show some wear, in part because he lacked information required to accurately perform his tasks. In a confidential memo to Bocaiúva, he asked for land maps and the names of fazendas for sale, rates for daily wages, details about the availability of fish and oysters in Brazil as requested by potential emigrants, and a portrait of Pedro II and Teresa Cristina to grace his office walls. Notwithstanding his dearth of resources and even decorations, Goicuria continued to move large sums of money.

Goicuria contributed to Brazilian colonization more specifically by amassing a practical archive of useful referents to serve as models, which he shared with Bocaiúva.Footnote ⁷² Goicuria’s collection of documents included a sample “Contrato de arrendamiento” stipulating sharecropping conditions in Cuban ingenios (Figure 7.3) and a sample contract and blank “Order to Import Workers” from the American Emigration Company (AEC), whose offices were located in no. 3 Bowling Green adjacent to the USBM’s and therefore right along the path of Goicuria’s business rounds. The AEC was a migrant-recruitment enterprise championed by secretary of state William Seward and supported by US consuls abroad following the Act to Encourage Immigration of 4 July 1864. As such, via Goicuria, it served as a model for the SII, which also probably collected the migrants discarded by the AEC. However, the Brazilian agency’s problems coincided, too, with local campaigns against the AEC. Mayor and local rail entrepreneur Charles Godfrey Gunther accused it of importing strike-breakers and reducing European “redemptioners” to the status of Mexican peons. Subsequently, the withdrawal of federal support for the AEC in 1868 may have contributed to the Brazilian agency’s declining performance.Footnote ⁷³

Figure 7.3 Useful exemplars: A model of a Cuban arrendamiento contract furnished by Goicuria

FGV-CPDOC, QBccp1855.08.21-pasta 5.

Image courtesy of CPDOC-FGV.

Goicuria’s activities took a sharp turn for the worse when two of his organized shipments generated complaints and protracted litigation, which jeopardized not only the SII’s reputation but the imperial government’s as well. The first case involved the Catherine Whiting, which Goicuria chartered in New Orleans in late June 1867. Passengers and crew clashed on the way to Rio – a situation that Caymari attributed to sectional tensions. However, as soon as the vessel docked in Rio, some passengers lodged formal complaints about travel conditions with Galvão, who ordered a thorough examination of conditions aboard. The result was a 18:000$000 fine on the ship captain for violations of the 1858 Emigrant Transport Ordinance. Caymari paid bail at the Customs house, but he also began the long process of contesting the charges. Still unresolved in 1869, a Conselho opinion signed by 1857–1858 cabinet veterans Olinda and Souza Franco dismissed his case on a technicality – Caymari had missed a 10-day window to appeal the Conselho’s decision.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1872, the inheritors of the late captain of the Catherine Whiting successfully reopened the case with the help of the US consul in Rio.

A second legal quagmire involved the Circassian, which Goicuria chartered from its owner Ernest Fiedler for an emigrant-transport trip from New Orleans. Three days after the chartering, Sousa Dantas signed Goicuria’s letter of dismissal, but, unknowingly, the Circassian went ahead and purchased supplies at its station in Bremen, racked up $12,000-worth of repairs when it landed in New York, and in early December 1867 finally arrived in New Orleans, where Brazil’s consul had not inscribed even one passenger for the trip.Footnote ⁷⁵ The ship’s captain waited for the time window prescribed in the contract drawn by Goicuria. When the time expired, the captain tried to charge demurrage fees. Brazil’s consul refused to pay and announced that the Brazilian chargé in Washington, DC had ordered the Circassian withdrawn from any government contracts. Years-long appeals followed. In its 1873 decision on the matter, the Conselho’s Empire section concluded that the Brazilian chargé’s intervention had led to a misunderstanding and that the captain’s claim could not exceed US$20,000. But then, surprisingly, the Conselho denied that the said contract had been authorized in the first place, attributing full liability to the parties who had signed. Goicuria’s dismissal allowed the Brazilian government to plausibly deny its involvement in the Circassian affair. But the case dragged on when the captain’s widow claimed damages, which eventually resulted in the publication of a damning report by her lawyer, the boisterous southern abolitionist and acrid anti-Catholic, Hinton Rowan Helper, which channeled the affair all the way to the congressional floor in 1884. Brazil’s mishandling of colonization affairs had dire and lasting implications for its reputation in the United States.Footnote ⁷⁶

Indeed, Brazilians’ excitement with US migrants gave way to unsalvageable disagreements over suspect business dealings in multiple directions. Ballard Dunn was accused of embezzling settlers and posing as a government official in Louisiana. In response, he accused Goicuria of overcharging for the 200 spots aboard the Marmion. Charles Nathan also came under attack for allegedly overcharging Dunn for a loan for land purchases initially offered as interest-free. Caught in his “mistake,” Nathan charged the correct amount but then spread rumors about Dunn’s speculations around the Marmion.Footnote ⁷⁷ For both Dunn and Nathan, however, business continued. Nathan, in particular, ventured into new commercial opportunities with a contract to import 3,000 settlers from southern US ports. Even though logistical problems soon earned his scheme a “bad repute,” three years later Nathan was in Portugal recruiting workers for plantations in Louisiana.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even Eça de Queirós poked fun at his efforts in his sardonic monthly, As farpas.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps the most significant facet of his ongoing activities was that he continued to peddle new steam lines to Brazil and other parts of South America, showing how the SII inspired durable and consecutive rackets based on directed migrations.Footnote ⁸⁰

Violent dissensions also broke out among two of the most prominent SII board members. After deputies criticized Bocaiúva for importing “bad colonos” who could eventually “dominate” Brazilians, and exactly a day before Sousa Dantas dismissed Goicuria, editor William Scully described Goicuria as “unscrupulous,” his “sole object being to gain a bounty” as a “man-catcher” sporting a conscience at the level of “his breeches’ pocket.” Scully used the opportunity to advocate for a line from Liverpool and for similar benefits to be offered to European settlers. Bocaiúva responded to Scully’s “most insolent insults” by defending Goicuria’s actions, including the extra per capita surcharges he was authorized to apply. Not only was Goicuria mentioned in Cochin’s study of abolition, Bocaiúva remarked, but he was the kind of gentleman who would never set his office on fire in order to collect insurance, as he insinuated Scully had done. The polemic continued on the pages of the DRJ, now owned by Caymari, and the Correio Mercantil, where Scully claimed Bocaiúva had “swapped his family name for that of any animal … to escape creditors” and routinely “begged for commissions from government.”Footnote ⁸¹ Though arguably about colonization, this aggressive controversy disclosed alleged shams and swindles that only accentuated the overarching profit-seeking motive of its participants.

The USBM plied through the scandal, continuing operations until the expiration of company subsidies in 1875. In contrast, however, the Brazilian Agency in New York did close. Goicuria arrived in Rio in early 1868 and tagged along with Bocaiúva and Caymari as they schemed new speculations, including reselling privileges for trolley tracks to the suburbs.Footnote ⁸² But when rebellion broke out in Cuba in October, Goicuria left to organize an expeditionary force to join the rebels in the Ten Years’ War. Rushing to the island, he was soon captured and executed by garrote vil in 1870. Back in Rio, Bocaiúva eulogized his friend and recognized his service – his form of acknowledgment that, with Goicuria’s passing, the Brazilian colonization adventure in New York was also laid to rest.Footnote ⁸³

The SII and its New York agency embodied a multigenerational and politically inclusive experiment: a colonization company that interlocked variously and opportunisitcally with the Brazilian government, a powerful steamship company, and ongoing civil wars across the hemisphere and beyond. Yet, after Poles were displaced as ideal migrants, Brazilians’ aspirations of banking on the stream of US southerners wishing to leave their country met one calamity after another. Nevertheless, as the hopes placed on Confederates vanished and, with them, the SII, the larger enterprise of colonization endured as its leading businessmen trained their sights on new opportunities in the future ahead. Indeed, Bocaiúva’s experiences paved the way for an upward political trajectory that saw him eventually become Foreign minister in the Republican government that deposed the Brazilian Empire in 1889. The migration policies he espoused then, at the high point of the era of mass migrations, harkened back to the SII and his formative time in New York.

* * *

To be sure, despite the dissolution of the SII, migrants continued to arrive, propelled by fresh world crises, attracted by old Brazilian promises, and overseen by new government approaches to colonization. During the pro-Confederate vogue and the launch of the SII and the New York agency, Brazilian authorities learned how to better ensure access to services for desirable migrants and how to improve administrative oversight over settlement processes.

In the heat of the SII launch, minister Sousa Dantas approved a new Ordinance for State Colonies (1867) meant to guide land surveying and distribution of state-owned lands but also the administration and organized settlement of those lands by foreign colonos. This and other new regulations had a significant domino effect on colonization. Within the new framework, deputies discussed a bequest to grant lands for colonization to Pedro II’s daughter, princess Isabel, and her husband, prince Gaston d’Orleans, count d’Eu, whom she had married in 1864. At the same time, Bocaiúva’s friend and SII secretary Tavares Bastos took advantage of the new regulations to bring the government into an even more liberal colonization agenda. In the Chamber of Deputies, he pushed a raft of bills dealing with civil marriage, open ports in colonies, land grants for colonization, work contract and naturalization reforms, and the prohibition of slavery in cities with over 20,000 inhabitants within a decade. For the moment, most of these fell by the wayside, especially the proposal on civil marriage, which was destroyed by a Conselho decision on the impossibility of Protest-Catholic marriages.Footnote ⁸⁴ Still, those very same ideas became the ideological pillars of the SII. Indeed, the SII’s only surviving report was accompanied by Tavares Bastos’s “Memória sobre a imigração” in 1867, which served as a statement of reformist principles for the new company.

Tavares Bastos drew much of his inspiration from an award-winning treatise on the history of nineteenth-century migrations by Jules Duval, and in doing so reinforced not only the crossed gazes between Brazil and Algeria as parallel colonization horizons, but their connections. As the Fourierist editor of L’écho d’Oran, Duval was also the author of influential works on French colonial policy and one of many Saint-simonians invested in Algerian colonization who had previously looked toward Brazil. In 1867, seeing Brazil’s exhibits at the International Exposition in Paris, he concluded that the Blumenau colony would help Brazil “take its place among the choir of countries in full march toward civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Coincidentally, at that time too, Brazil’s first consul in Algiers, François Ravan (appointed at the tail end of Olinda’s administration in 1858), and his vice-consul in Oran, Victor Masurel (appointed in 1861), put in motion a plan that would directly connect Brazil and Algeria.Footnote ⁸⁶ Beginning in 1867, these diplomats facilitated the arrival of yet another cohort of troubled expatriates to Brazil, when a group of colons from Oran mulled emigrating after a year of periodic seismic activity and prolonged drought. Within a year, five Algerian settlers left for Rio as prospectors to procure government favors. The Agriculture minister quickly made funds available to Paraná’s provincial president in order to “offer all the possible benefits to establish a great current of immigrants of proven behavior and inclined to work.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Thanks to such subsidies, three of the prospectors purchased land in the outskirts of Curitiba and sent for their fellow colons back in Algeria. In February 1869, about 90 German and French settlers arrived in Antonina, Paraná, from Algeria to hopeful expectations that they would rally French markets for Brazilian coffee.Footnote ⁸⁸ The vice-consul at Oran cautioned against replicating this drive, suggesting it was better to wait due to “the hardships endured by the Algerians after several years of locust invasions, bad harvests … famine, [and] bad administration.” But Brazilian officials were optimistic that their new regulations would sort out any complications.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Ordinance for State Colonies in fact made it easy for authorities to furnish the Algerians with tools, ready-made houses, food rations, and demarcated lands paid for in installments. But the colons quickly learned to leverage such good will to their advantage and profit. As they prepared to cultivate wheat and vines, their consul requested seeds from the imperial government. Then, one of the initial prospectors asked for more funds to finish his house, while the other two demanded – and obtained – ox-driven plows. The colons also pleaded for lands for their wives, with one even pretending he had separated from his. After the provincial president called out this “trick to obtain undue benefits,” the government withheld recognition of the Algerian settlement as an official colony as per the 1867 ordinance.Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite the negative letters sent by one of the prospectors to French newspapers, still in 1874 other Algerian colons arrived from Oran and Tlemcen, including a entire French family, and Spanish workers originally from Almería.Footnote ⁹¹ By then, however, the initial colons had moved elsewhere. As with the Poles, dissipating hopes of an Algerian migration put in evidence that regulatory frameworks in themselves fell short of sustaining robust emigrant sweeps. Without a company to incite and buttress those migrations, and excite authorities to please them, migrants expelled from troubled contexts could hardly secure a footing in Brazil.

The Algerian episode bookended a series of potentially profitable migration drives propelled by war-torn and crisis-ridden contexts from around the world. Polish, US, and Algerian arrivals, and even a revolutionary and savvy Cuban diaspora, signaled an amplified global profile for Brazilian colonization as much as a challenging transnational crossroads. Regional and national conflagrations bifurcated diplomatic channels, business endeavors, reformist efforts, professional aspirations, lives, and friendships. This time of turmoil also generated countless opportunities to enact and profit from directed migrations and colonization schemes. But these opportunities cut many different ways. Refugees and expatriates saw Brazilian colonization as a path both to political survival and transactional gains. Once their schemes were on the move, intellectuals, politicians, and planters across the Brazilian Empire saw these displaced outcasts – the dregs of the era’s armed conflicts and imperial conquests – as beacons of agrarian and cultural improvement. War expatriated people, to be sure. It also activated governmental rationales, company-making practices, and agile improvisations all centered on the profit-bearing potential of displacement.

If the slave trade ban of 1850 gave rise to the expectation that foreign colonos would replace the dwindling ranks of the enslaved, a new gradual abolition law in 1871 put an expiration date on the horizon that lent an unprecedented urgency to planters forecasting a dearth of labor. In this context, what could the Brazilian government do to fix and perfect the business of migration? And what remained beyond its capacity to stoke and oversee colonization efforts?

The decade that followed the 1871 Free Womb law threw these questions into sharp relief. As Pedro II did his victory lap around the United States, Europe, and northern Africa following the Triple Alliance War, princess regent Isabel set the tone for a muscular government hold over colonization. Processing the proposals streaming in since before her Regency, the princess regent captained the Conselho de Estado as their numbers peaked. From 1870 to 1875, a minimum of 19 colonization projects came before the Conselho, 8 of which from companies, while the rest came from individuals or commercial partnerships. Together, these proposals represented an expected net importation of 298,200 colonos over the following decade that amounted to a 3 percent increase in the country’s population in 1872 and that would have more than doubled the population of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s main port. Stringent government contracts over these proposals indicated the consolidation of hard-won lessons learned by Brazilian authorities from prior efforts and celebrated by new promotional tracts on Brazilian colonization. Indeed, the princess regent and the Conselho closely oversaw contracts, granting extensions when necessary and canceling agreements for noncompliance lest past colonization scandals repeated themselves.Footnote ¹

Through their efforts, the government consolidated its ability to regulate increasing migration throughout the 1870s, in no small part aided by a wartime atmosphere that produced a fad for military colonies.Footnote ² In peacetime, many of these settlements quickly translated to “national colonies” and colonias de libertos. By 1878, O Cruzeiro counted a total of 43 colonies across the Brazilian Empire, including state-led and private ones receiving government subventions. Their combined population of 96,760 colonos absorbed over 2,000 contos in imported goods and produced over 3,000 contos in exports.Footnote ³

Health and environmental crises further bolstered government capacity-building. The yellow fever epidemic of 1870–1871 compelled the Empire ministry to set up a special commission to board incoming migrants onto the Pedro II railway and catapult them to Juiz de Fora, where coffee grandees like the barão do Rio Bonito offered to cover additional costs.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, a brutal drought in the northeastern province of Ceará between 1876 and 1878 obligated the Empire ministry to transfer thousands of climate refugees from the northeast. Many of these colonos da seca (drought colonos) settled permanently in Rio, while others beseeched the imperial government to subsidize their return once the drought receded.Footnote ⁵

These emergency feats in population transport reflected significant gains in logistical capacity-building within the state apparatus, underscored by the Brazilian Empire’s first-ever census in 1872 and later by the attendance of a Brazilian representative to the ninth International Statistical Congress of 1876 in Budapest. By embracing demographic data-gathering, authorities also fine-tuned their ability to account for migratory patterns, as seen most immediately by the ever extensive data collection on the 10,252 migrant entries recorded in Rio by 1876. For every migrant incomer, authorities could now systematically ascertain family composition, number of families and function, name, age, gender, civil status, and professional background for each member, nationality, vessel and port of provenance, religion, arrival date, colony of destination, plus general observations.Footnote ⁶ The state’s embrace of statistics compounded the lessons learned by the Brazilian statesmen from their recurrent interactions with colonization companies to prop up a booming migrant landscape.

Yet one topic in particular cast a pall over these achievements: Chinese immigration. Journalists, empresarios, planters, and literati acrimoniously battled out whether coolies could and should replace the enslaved after 1871. A raw and blatant racism pervaded these debates.Footnote ⁷ Even Chinese colonization enthusiasts commented on the inadequacy of Asian workers for settlement projects, drinking from a well of sources including news about Chinese migrations elsewhere, Positivist propaganda, and emergent notions of “race” as a civilizational and criminal marker. Regardless of such prejudices, however, Chinese migrants were already showing up in Brazilian port cities. The coolie trade to Cuba, then at its height, was largely responsible for bringing Chinese migrations back into public debate. For some years, ships bound for Havana with workers from the Celestial Empire delivered curious stories for Brazilian journalists. In 1866, when the Lubeck-based galleon Emma e Mathilde shipwrecked off the coast of Pernambuco, 55 Chinese individuals were rescued by a nearby steamship. In mid-1867, at least three ships called at Rio on their way to Havana with a total of 1,018 Chinese colonos, while a few others stopped en route to Macao with returnees.Footnote ⁸

Conditions were not inviting for Chinese subjects to settle in Brazil, where Sinophobia roamed unchecked. But, contending with and often surmounting racist blowback, a bourgeoning entrepreneurial drive to bring Chinese coolies unfolded consistently throughout the decade, followed by a separate experiment with Indian workers. Emerging as a novel conceit by the hand of Quintino Bocaiúva and others, “coolie labor” inspired yet another company drive, this time bankrolled by powerful merchants in Rio. Their enterprise obtained support from Liberal ministers and even from coffee planters who sought to employ Chinese workers under a coercive system analogous to slavery.

Vociferous racist protestations accompanied this emergent Chinese colonization campaign. But bigoted, xenophobic rants paled in comparison to the weight of business factors in determining the feasibility of coolie importation schemes and the ultimate outcome of plans to implant Chinese labor in Brazilian society. Indeed, a host of other variables, many of them business-related, drove the din of Brazilian elites’ racist banter and also eventually drowned it out. Competition for government contracts among newspapers, colonization empresarios’ efforts to secure a Sino-Brazilian treaty, the 1873 financial crisis, and the tenuous hold of cabinets over public respect and, indeed, offices all shaped the coolie question in more profound ways than the superficial jingoism of its detractors. Ultimately, in the face of international, domestic, and local adversities, including the rise of a new planter lobby rallying behind rural credit as its root concern, the campaign for coolie labor wore itself out as its advocates waited in vain for Brazilian diplomatic inroads in China.

Racialist Consensus and the Limits of Debate

Back in the newsroom after his adventure as a colonization agent in New York, Bocaiúva closely followed episodes involving Chinese sojourners. During his absence, the DRJ had already printed a piece by Maurice Irisson from Paris-Magazine on “The Family in China,” opening the way for a reconsideration of the “Chinese question” among Brazilian readers. After his stay in New York, where he came across the Chinese domestic servants kept by Cuban friends such as the Moras and immersed himself in news about the Chinese workers completing the Transcontinental Railroad, Bocaiúva possessed an arsenal of ideas about the uses of coolies. Further inspired by a long exposé by Jules Duval on Chinese contract labor, Bocaiúva marked his return to public life in Rio with A crise da lavoura (1868), a sprite opuscule championing the adoption of coolie labor in Brazil.Footnote ⁹

A crise da lavoura extolled coolies’ productivity while repeating commonplace prejudices about their behaviors, including their alleged penchant for gambling, suicide, and focusing excessively on their salaries, not to mention their resistance to assimilation, which according to him would benefit Brazil. Yet the catalog of contexts flaunting growth in exports thanks to Chinese or Indian labor seemed endless: Guiana, Perú, Cuba, Trinidad, California, Réunion, plus Australia, Java, Borneo, Manila, and Cochinchina. The math spoke for itself. Organizing “a commercial company founded on the basis of official aid,” offering a “prize” of 40$000 for every coolie brought to Brazil, and instituting seven-year contracts capped at 1:183$500 per colono would yield exports totaling 160$000 in taxation revenue, four times the value of the government’s initial investment.

Meaningfully, Bocaiúva dissected colonization as a “doubly complex question” pertaining to, on the one hand, the old trope of “peopling [Brazil’s] immense, uninhabited territory” and, on the other hand, “furnishing arms for an agriculture threatened with [the] profound and inevitable revolution [of abolition].” Bocaiúva thus bifurcated emigration and colonization by differentiating between wealthy incomers –“the intelligent force that creates and directs” – and colonos –“the material force that works and produces,” a distinction also articulated by French political economist and Wakefield enthusiast Nicolas Villiaumé. These contrasting definitions appeased conservatives’ preference for spontaneous migrations that would increasingly feed the business of passenger travel and eventually replace government-subsidized colonization drives.Footnote ¹⁰

A crise da lavoura instigated a strong response in the press. Bolstering Bocaiuva’s tract, the DRJ translated an encyclopedic extract on coolies from Duval’s Histoire de l’émigration. Later, the newspaper sought to dispel any misunderstandings with a front-page article in English titled “What the Word Coolie Means.” Chinese in California, the piece claimed, were “emigrants … who have voluntarily left the shores of the Celestial Empire, just as Irishmen have abandoned their mud cabins … to seek a wider field and a higher scale of remuneration in the teeming West.”Footnote ¹¹ In contrast, the Anglo-Brazilian Times referred to coolies as “a species of temporary slavery” that distracted from seeking an immigration that took its destinations as “new homes, and aim[ed] at proprietorship and independence.” According to William Scully, Brazilians should enable “sugar-making to be profitably carried on by farmers without slaves, without coolies, and optionally with hired labor,” definitely with new machinery.Footnote ¹²

Bocaiúva’s tract also ignited debates in improvement circles. The IIFA received numerous copies, which attendees to its August 1868 meeting quickly snatched up. Among those present were the emperor himself, as well as scions like Nicolau Antonio Nogueira Valle da Gama, and public officials with colonization track records such as Ignácio da Cunha Galvão (see Chapters 5 and 7) and Bernardo Nascentes de Azambuja (see Chapter 6).Footnote ¹³ Two years later, the SAIN’s colonization section, headed by Galvão, presented a report on Chinese colonos that reiterated Bocaiúva’s dichotomy between “supplying workers for agriculture” and “peopling [Brazilian] lands.” The report concluded that temporary reliance on Chinese workers would prepare Brazil for more permanent settlement schemes with European colonos.Footnote ¹⁴

Dr. Nicolau Moreira, who attended both the IIFA and SAIN meetings, balked at the report’s support for coolie schemes. As AIN editor and director of the SAIN’s agriculture section, Moreira spoke after Galvão’s delivery. He attacked Bocaiúva’s ideas with a cannonade of sources, from Buffon to Malthus to Jules Duval. “Should a nation,” asked the doctor, “indifferently receive in its bosom a people whose crossing with its aborigines would result in a defective product?” Moreira relied on the incipient language of racial theory and foregrounded moral sanitarianism by surveying the ostensible deficiencies of Chinese and Indian peoples. The former, he claimed, would not offer “a proper immigration, but an artificial and systematic barbarity,” as they were “a people among whom man is a beast of burden,” and whose “individuals poison themselves daily with opium.” … “The race,” he continued, “languished because of the insufficient nutrition of rice” and its “cult of idols.” With Indians, in turn, he suggested that “assassinations, thefts, arson, attempts against modesty [became] quotidian” in countries welcoming their immigration, not to mention the stalling populations and drops in exports in places that had implanted coolie labor in the 1860s, such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana.

Moreira’s racist jeremiad consolidated the distinction between colonization and (e/im)migration first discussed publicly during the Confederados expeditions. It also firmly situated migratory issues within the realm of “applied sciences,” particularly ethnological anthropology. Most importantly, while Moreira and Bocaiúva profoundly disagreed on the adequacy of coolie labor for Brazil, they both agreed on the general outline of colonization as a policy, a scientific pursuit, and a field of historical debate. Their shared parameters on the value and necessity of colonization allowed for the two to spar amicably at the end of 1870.Footnote ¹⁵ For them, race provided a new lens for talking about colonization that did not fundamentally alter underlying colonization dynamics. If anything, in fact, these discursive transformations brought new interest to the business of migrations.

The Asian Workers Import Association (SITA) and the Coolie Honeypot Affair

Expectation tempered the tenor of the gentlemanly controversy unfolding over coolie labor in late 1870. Even though Moreira bordered on insult in calling Bocaiúva a “fervent apologist of Indiatic colonization,” both men showed restraint while awaiting the outcome of a scandal regarding a 10-year permit to import workers from Asia. The permit had been secured by José da Costa Lima Viana and João Antônio de Miranda e Silva, who then organized the Sociedade Importadora de Trabalhadores Asiáticos (Asian Workers Import Association, hereafter SITA). The contract, drawn by colonization secretary Galvão, put firm limitations in place, including the requirement that 90 percent of each shipment be field hands and that none evince “weak complexion” or opium addiction. Prior colonization statutes applied in full force, including the 1837 contract law and the 1858 Emigrant Transport Ordinance. Of particular interest, however, was that Agriculture minister Teodoro Machado Freire Pereira da Silva initially opposed authorizing the proposal but changed his mind when negotiations between the empresarios and the director of the state-owned Dom Pedro II Railroad resulted in an unofficial request for 500 Chinese laborers for rail construction.Footnote ¹⁶

The contract elicited a swift rebuke. A Reforma, the main newspaper of centrist Liberals founded in 1869 by Zacarias de Góis, Nabuco de Araújo, Teófilo Ottoni, and others, raised serious concerns about the price the government had committed to pay: £60 for each Chinese worker signed on to an eight-year contract, £50 for five years. While the paper refrained from accusing the “citizens who signed the contract, being as they are in their full right to seek all possible advantages from their business,” it reserved special condemnation for the director of the Dom Pedro II Railroad and for the Agriculture ministry not only due to the exorbitant costs of the scheme but because of an inexcusable and questionable lapse in the chain of command.

After weeks of concerned coverage, Conservative deputy for São Paulo Antonio Prado called fraud in the Chamber. Questioning why the contract with Lima Viana and Miranda e Silva had proceeded without legislative approval, he indicted the government-appointed director of the Pedro II railway, Mariano Procópio Ferreira Lage, for signing a contract without the approval of his superior. But Procópio deflected his responsibility by blaming the company’s secretary, Augusto de Castro, for carelessness, an accusation that quickly compelled the secretary’s resignation. Kicking up the dirt thrown on him, however, the day after Prado’s damning speech, secretary Castro issued a veiled threat, calling attention to the “ease with which, in an opportune moment, with the documents I have at hand, I could shut down the rumors [Mr. Mariano] has been whispering against me with the sole purpose of covering his own responsibility.”

Meanwhile, the Agriculture minister, a Conservative who had just traded Rio’s provincial presidency for a cabinet position, instilled calm by clarifying that the initial contract was temporary, although, according to A Reforma, the long-term contract had been finalized with paid duties to the Treasury. A series of exchanges between Procópio and minister da Silva – probably leaked by Castro – laid bare that the former knew he needed ministerial authorization, which the latter never conclusively granted. The “coolie honeypot” (a melgueira dos coolies), as the press nicknamed the affair, raised “grave concerns” over a contract “hurtful to public coffers” and conducted under obscure circumstances.Footnote ¹⁷

The episode inserted coolies and companies into the debates over the Free Womb bill of 12 May 1871, not on account of labor replacement conceits but in relation to questions pertaining to company profiteering. The questions around potential unlawful gains could be politically exploited, especially as lines of fracture deepened even within parties. The “dissidents of the conservative party,” as the likes of Prado were dubbed, pounced on the coolie honeypot affair, aligning against other conservatives.Footnote ¹⁸ The new Liberals involved in A Reforma went even further, weaponizing the affair to discredit the cabinet responsible for the Free Womb bill. The suggestion that Agriculture minister Teodoro da Silva was a swindler grew stronger with a report that, at around this time, a mail carrier for the Foreign ministry had approached an applicant for a lucrative mining privilege and had formalized a government contract without any express authorization from da Silva. When the transaction came to light, the carrier was fired from his post, but no official inquiry followed.

With these allegations in the air, the coolie honeypot affair emboldened the opposition. Senator Zacarias requested copies of the official contract, an act that in itself constituted an indictment of the railway director and his secretary. Pressed by newspapers, particularly on the fact that “the public would profit much” with said contract, a newly appointed Agriculture minister was forced to address the issue in his yearly report. Meanwhile, SITA’s Lima Viana and Miranda e Silva stood their ground. They asserted that the Agriculture minister’s allegations that he had not authorized their contract with the Pedro II railway could not revert the rights they had legally acquired. When Procópio finally broke his silence, he claimed he was hurried to sign a contract without reading it. Sousa Dantas, the conservative senator from Bahia who had welcomed Confederados and was now known as barão de Cotegipe, defended him on the floor, summoning a statement in which Procópio’s secretary admitted making a mistake in transcribing the contract. Still, according to Zacarias, the empresarios were liable for the serious criminal offense of swindling government to “build up their own fortune,” as they had unremorsefully publicized their contract in order to gather shareholders.Footnote ¹⁹ Colonization companies and their quest for profit became the ideal moving target in a tense political moment.

In September, the Free Womb bill carried forth with 98 favorable votes in both chambers combined and a minority of 45 deputies and 7 senators voting against it. Afterwards, the coolie question receded from public view, though with a strong measure of backing from Ignácio da Cunha Galvão at the colonization secretariat. At the end of the coolie honeypot affair, Galvão publicly asserted that it was not the time to “submit to discussion whether it is convenient to introduce Asian workers” and asked “adversaries” of Chinese labor to “resign themselves … to this point of view: CHINESE WANTED.” Using information from Cuba, Galvão demonstrated that neither the empresarios nor Procópio had sought self-enrichment. The costs stipulated in the contract – £50–60 per Chinese worker, then equivalent to US$236–283 – were only slightly higher than the cost of importing coolies to Cuba, which averaged $225 per head. Moreover, contracts were sold at US$374 in Havana, landing importers a profit margin of US$149. This amount corresponded to the many capital inputs necessary for long-haul operations. With every contract under his purview, Galvão said, he paid close attention “to the sources of profits for contractors, and far from impeding them,” he sought “to shape the clauses so that they can obtain them.” Otherwise, contracting parties would avail themselves of trickery (alicantinas) to reap higher profits. Lima Viana and Miranda e Silva took advantage of this public clearance to secure an extension in 1871 of the two-year window for the first Chinese workers to arrive and asked for the same in 1872 and 1874.Footnote ²⁰

The coolie honeypot affair interrupted ongoing controversies regarding the desirability of coolie labor to Brazil and for a time risked derailing the very possibility of Chinese colonization. Accusations that hinged on the profiteering behind coolie labor contracts showed that the profit motive was a guiding principle of this emergent trade and also one of its biggest liabilities in the public eye. Yet Galvão’s support, and his recourse to information probably obtained through diplomatic channels, gave a necessary lift to the future of privately led colonization by opening up the coolie market in the wake of the Free Womb Law.

Down to Business

What the SITA empresarios lost in public confidence during the honeypot scandal, they made up for in new associates. They brought in George Nathan, Confederate Charles Nathan’s brother (see Chapter 7). And they started a partnership with Antonio Martins Lage and Robert Clinton Wright, a promising lineup considering their prior entanglements in migration matters. Lage had imported Azoreans and mainland Portuguese settlers for the Mucury Company in 1857 and a year later attempted to seek colonos in Germany. Wright, who was Lage’s long-standing business associate, headed the prominent Rio commission house Maxwell, Wright & Co. and had bankrolled the travels of James Fletcher, one of the authors of Brazil and the Brazilians.Footnote ²¹

Despite its all-star lineup, the SITA met resistance at every turn. With particular force, emigration bans compelled it to request periodic deferrals. Moreover, as the coolie trade reached fever pitch, nations involved in it enacted competing regulations to stall or at least control the exit of Chinese migrants. Macau, from where the SITA expected to obtain its Chinese workers, had closed down the coolie trade in the wake of reported abuses and high death rates at sea. In the worst of cases, such abuses led to mutinies that later required a thorny diplomacy. The case of the Nouvelle Penelope was exemplary: after wresting control of the vessel in 1870, the 360 coolies headed for Perú killed all but five crewmen, who they obligated to sail back to Canton. The French consul in China then followed the ringleaders and their collaborators all the way to Macau, where the colony’s Portuguese governor effectively surrendered them to Chinese authorities. The prisoners were then handed to the French consul for execution by beheading.Footnote ²²

Together with growing denunciations of atrocities, such disregard for due process and for the need for treaties to mediate jurisdictional conflicts informed bourgeoning efforts to restrain abuses in the Macau market. After trying to regulate the trata dos chins (“Chinese trade”) in 1872, the Portuguese government launched a massive inquiry whose results came to light in 1874 and led directly to a clampdown on coolie transport networks.Footnote ²³ The Chinese government launched its own inquiry on the abuses of the Cuban trata amarilla (“yellow trade”). Its findings, published in French and English in 1876, led to a Chinese ban on coolie emigration.Footnote ²⁴

Cautious but undaunted by these diminishing prospects, the SITA expended 100 contos in addition to the 10 contos it had deposited as a guarantee at the National Treasury to send representatives to San Francisco to negotiate with established shipping firms involved in the coolie trade. The same envoys later went on to China, where the French consul at Canton, baron Gilbert-Gabriel de Trenqualye, offered to line up 30,000 migrant workers pending permission from his government.

To succeed in these efforts, SITA also had to defuse the impassioned opposition aginst Asian migrants in Brazil. In 1875, João Cardoso de Menezes e Souza, future baron of Paranapiacaba, presented a report on colonization commissioned by the Agriculture ministry. With a fancy for French discourses on race and civilization – from Michel Chevalier’s “Latin races” to Leroy-Beaulieu’s moralizing science in De la colonization chez les peuples modernes – Menezes e Sousa relegated Indian and Chinese workers to the last pages of his report, referring to their presence in British and French colonies as a “second slavery.” He also warned against the high probability of “racial crossing” by pointing out that males constituted the majority of migrants from China and India.Footnote ²⁵

Far more cutting were the systematic and unrelenting views of Nicolau Moreira. In advance of the Philadelphia World Fair of 1876, which Pedro II would attend, the Agriculture minister commissioned Moreira to study immigration in the United States as the basis for a new emigrant guide for Brazil. The result was a detailed and extremely tendentious report, half of which was dedicated to criticizing Chinese migration as an affront to free labor and a source of prostitution, the corruption of youth, etc. Moreira’s attacks served the double purpose of defending migration from Europe or the United States as the best option for Brazil.Footnote ²⁶

SITA associates, including Lage, Wright, and George Nathan, understood the degree to which these reports undercut their efforts and responded with a formidable compendium promoting Chinese immigration. The volume included all the laws applicable to their proposed trade, favorable news clippings, and a resounding speech on the Senate floor by Cândido Mendes. He drew from his past experience as manager of the 1850s Companhia Maranhense de Mineração, in which position he had managed some of the Chinese colonos from the government contract with Sampson & Tappan. Mendes could thus speak with ample authority on Asian labor, though he also cautiously qualified “the Chinese as worker, not as colono.”Footnote ²⁷

However, no public figure took up SITA’s cause with greater zeal than Cansansão de Sinimbú, the Alagoan who had begun his steady ascent in the imperial state when he received honorary titles with like-minded coevals like Souza Franco and Cândido Baptista de Oliveira in 1841. Paving his rise to notoriety was his report on the Nova Friburgo colony, which he penned for minister Ferraz in 1852 (see Chapter 5). Having served as provincial president of Alagoas and Sergipe, Sinimbú possessed a personal interest in the sugar economy as Agriculture minister in the cabinet of 1862.Footnote ²⁸ Auspiciously chosen to preside over the Conselho de Estado and take the Agriculture portfolio once again in 1878, Sinimbú took up Olinda’s mantle as regulator and informed modernizer.

In 1878, Sinimbú convened a multitudinous Agricultural Congress celebrated in separate assemblies in Rio and Recife. In preparation, a questionnaire devised by Sinimbú surveyed the 279 attendees (plus the 121 other planters who registered but did not attend) on seven discussion points dealing with the agricultural industry’s travails. Questions two to four directly addressed concerns over labor shortages, asking participants to predict whether ingênuos born free after the law of 1871 would remain in large estates and to identify the best means to make up for dwindling field hands.

The queries turned the July Congress in Rio into a gladiatorial arena where the coolie question came to a head. A number of attendees as well as commissions from coffee-growing districts such as Juiz de Fora and Paraíba do Sul entirely rejected Chinese workers, with one individual referring to them as “retrograde and spent machines.” As a general rule, however, planters maintained a rote racism that nonetheless consented to using Asian workers as transitory labor, a stance adopted by a group of São Paulo planters. Conversely, growers from sugar districts such as Quissimã, north of Macaé in Rio province, weighed positive precedents with coolie labor in Australia against Brazilians’ ignorance regarding the benefits of Asian workers. Meanwhile, northeastern planters’ views on coolies at the second Congress celebrated in October in Recife did not align with those of provincial Rio’s sugar growers. Interventions by Henri Auguste Milet and António Coelho Rodrigues in fact advocated for employing Brazilian labor, including adult ingênuos, by means of more stringent policing over vagrants.Footnote ²⁹

The week after the Rio Congress, SITA empresarios pressed their case for coolie importation in the pages of O Cruzeiro, a newspaper launched by Portuguese emigré Henrique Corrêa Moreira to unseat the JC as the Court’s journal of record. In a series of six letters published from July through September, the company men followed-up on the parliamentary debates by dismissing anthropological assumptions of Chinese inferiority and updating readers on their efforts. In one of their early interventions in the Cruzeiro, they responded to a letter from planters in coffee-rich Valença that criticized the monopoly conceded to the SITA. Government, argued the planters, had extended its protection to “a specific enterprise under the mantle of favoring agriculture and at the cost of planters.” This public accusation, the letter asserted, reeked of favoritism and also of commercial fraud. In response, the SITA circle doubled down on justifying their endeavors, explaining that long-distance shipping and a lack of markets for Brazilian products in China presented considerable difficulties. In the face of these challenges, “the need for solid and constituted guarantees and advances of considerable sums” called for a suspension of “free competition, at least at first” in order to “consolidate navigation and open the horizon of a serious speculation.”Footnote ³⁰

And there was more to their defense. SITA’s empresarios further explained that attempts to secure coolie shipments from Canton through the French consul foundered due to the Chinese Empire’s objections to treaty nations remitting workers to third parties holding no agreements with China. They promised, therefore, to recruit workers from the United States and Perú as well and clarified that they did not seek to reap undeserved benefits. “We ask for no subvention whatsoever nor for planters to give us advances … only for reasonable prices and the support of public credit to watch over the interests of contractors and workers, and seek the just and discreet remuneration of our heavy advancements and efforts.” Pushing for a Sino-Brazilian treaty as essential to their success, the empresarios continuously invoked the “patriotism, intelligence and judgement of the actual cabinet” and especially the “experience and administrative wisdom of the statesman leading the agriculture portfolio.”

In this case, the medium was the problem. As the venue chosen by the empresarios, O Cruzeiro dragged the question of Chinese colonization and its advocates into a business feud with other newspapers. Editor Corrêa Moreira, long ridiculed as a “pato tonto,” or lame duck, due to his apparent disingenuousness, was relentlessly targeted by other news outlets such as the Gazeta de Notícias. Because of O Cruzeiro’s business structure as a sociedade em comandita rather than as a sole proprietorship, other media outlets criticized the newspaper as a racket, an image that further deteriorated when Corrêa Moreira sought exclusive government contracts to announce official news.Footnote ³¹ While the JC kept its distance, weekly lampoons spared no opportunity to poke fun not only at Corrêa Moreira but at the myriad causes his newspaper championed, Chinese colonization prominent among them (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 Coolies between business competitors

O Mequetrefe, no. 184 (24 Sept. 1879). Image.

Courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional

Indeed, while scholars have remarked on the racist underpinnings of the Chinese question, it is essential to note that tendentious stereotyping did not arise in motu proprio. Rather, it derived from, and even coded, greater political controversies, especially those mired in business disputes over government-bestowed privileges – the case both of O Cruzeiro and the SITA.Footnote ³² As O Cruzeiro continued to legitimize coolie schemes – publishing extracts from the Révue Scientifique or citing an Australian governor favorable to Chinese workers – sarcastic weeklies such as O Mequetrefe subjected the idea to withering scrutiny, mocking Chinese colonization with unabashed racist bromides and demonstrating that the coolie question had become the interphase of a business competition rather than a subject to be debated on its own merits.

While illustrated weeklies spent a good part of 1878 and the early months of 1879 skewering the Chinese as indolent workers or shifty chicken thieves, talks of a Chinese diplomatic mission gained traction. Shortly, Sinimbú approved sending a delegation to the Celestial Empire to secure a Sino-Brazilian commercial treaty. For this, lampoons rechristened him Chim-Nimbú, casting him as the figurehead of a new cohort of Brazilian Mandarins beset by “Chino-mania” (Figure 8.2). Clearly, attacks did not target the cause of Sino-Brazilian engagement as much as its paladins’ activities. O Mequetrefe, for instance, quipped about the cabinet’s chinoiseries in reference to obscure business transactions among empresarios and upper-crust politicians. And as talk of a diplomatic mission gathered force, so did attacks against those who supported Sino-Brazilian relations, putting in evidence the political and business motivations underscoring Sinophobic tirades.Footnote ³³

Figure 8.2 The coolie question as political weapon: Sinimbú rechristened Chimnimbú

O Mequetrefe, no. 183 (17 Sept. 1879).

Image Courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.

Sinimbú, however, contrived a clever counteroffensive. By the time Pedro II went to inaugurate the Philadelphia World Fair in 1876, Sinimbú had already commissioned Brazil’s general consul to the United States, Salvador de Mendonça, to write a study on the Chinese question. Sinimbú strategically chose to release that study some months after the Agricultural Congress of 1878. The study was printed at the offices of the Novo Mundo, a singular New York–based Brazilian newspaper with an ambivalent track record on the Chinese question. While the paper had published Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinese,” a poem that pandered to commonplace biases, its editor, José Carlos Rodrigues, also reported positively on the Chinese in San Francisco and on 30 Chinese men studying at Yale College. Rodrigues’s newspaper brought the Chinese question to the attention of Brazilians not unlike the Chinese students at Yale, the sons of a rising technocracy in the Paulista West and Rodrigues’s intended audience, as historian Roberto Saba has demonstrated.Footnote ³⁴

Hot off the press at the offices of the Novo Mundo, Mendonça’s work thus found a ready public. Trabalhadores Asiáticos, as the study was titled, was not just a master lesson for these informed mechanizers but even more so for the ranks of coolie naysayers in Brazil.Footnote ³⁵ Mendonça’s text made a compelling case for Asian emigration. The book surveyed the history of the Chinese Empire up to the most recent commercial treaties before examining the role of Chinese entrepreneurs and workers in the bourgeoning economies of the Hawai’ian archipelago, California, British Guiana, Indonesia, and Cuba. Mendonça’s erudite and encompassing study easily surpassed Moreira’s and Bocaiúva’s chatter and more subtly left racial questions to the very last four of its 229 pages. In Trabalhadores Asiáticos, Sinimbú thus counted on a persuasive and unimpeachable defense of Chinese labor that recentered public conversation in substantive arguments rather than invectives.

Indeed, Trabalhadores Asiáticos could have riled up support for SITA had the company not encountered greater obstacles. SITA had in fact made little headway in its attempts to recruit workers either from Canton or San Francisco due to the Chinese government’s insistence on maintaining its ban until it received guarantees of safe and just treatment for its subjects. SITA also lost the support of French consul Trenqualye when he got reassigned to Brussels after twenty years in Canton.Footnote ³⁶ Then, SITA associates beseeched the imperial government to pursue a formal treaty with China as the only way to guarantee access to that emigrant pool. Sinimbú complied, but the decision signaled a long wait.

SITA empresarios formally voided their government contract as they awaited the outcome of the newly appointed diplomatic expedition to China. All their paths had closed. To be sure, the SITA associates had organized a relentless campaign that successfully steered the government to its favor. Prime minister Sinimbú had in turn put in his effort to steer planter classes in Rio and in the northeast toward a more positive appraisal of coolie labor and weathered sardonic press attacks before finally moving toward a political overture to China. And yet, even after all these exertions, the pace of international diplomacy bore down on pro-coolie efforts, demonstrating the weight of global forces on domestic dynamics in Brazil. A similar experiment with Indian coolies would yet yield analogous lessons.

The Other Coolies: Indian Laborers and Mauá’s Collapse

Concurrent with SITA’s efforts, Brazil’s topmost tycoon skirted the Chinese question altogether in a bid to explore the possibilities of “Hill coolies,” as British authorities referred to migrant workers from India transported to colonies like British Guiana or Trinidad after the end of apprenticeship in 1838.Footnote ³⁷ As with the Chinese question, Brazilians cast aspersions on Indian laborers, but the latter’s alleged contentment with their place within the caste system magnified their allure for the sugar cane industry in Brazil. The “Hindou coolie,” reported O Cruzeiro, was ideal for Brazilian planters ostensibly because he “did not long for other horizons. Limiting his ambition to carrying out his work, he focuses on earning more money, which makes him more productive.”Footnote ³⁸

French industrial manufacturers informed such opinions by promoting coolie labor as part of their push to modernize sugar production. In 1874, for example, Louis A. Dolabaratz, an agent for Société Jean-François Cail & Compagnie, arrived in Rio to sell sugar refining machinery in the name of such a modernizing agenda.Footnote ³⁹ By then, Cail & Co. was the second largest rail developer in France and a leading machinery provider for the global sugar industry. Cail-built innovations such as the triple-effect vacuum-pan apparatus and the centrifugal machine powered a sugar surge in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Cuba, southern Spain, and Egypt, where central mills had taken hold as Cail’s preferred form for spatially organizing the industry.

Naturally, Dolabaratz’s sojourn in Brazil enticed planters and government alike. As Dolabaratz sold hard on his allegedly cost-saving wares, he proposed that the imperial government build central mills in sugar-growing provinces and retool them as agrarian normal schools.Footnote ⁴⁰ Off record, he also insinuated the need for coolies by providing officials with documentation on Indian workers in Mauritius and Réunion. There they had proved pivotal to growth, although the Mascarene islands’ sugar boom began to recede once drought, a searing malaria epidemic, and a potent cyclone brought planters to their knees from 1866–1868. After Dolabratz’s departure, Sinumbú shared some of those documents with conservative Paulino José Soares de Sousa and convinced him that Indian emigration was the most convenient substitute for slave labor.Footnote ⁴¹

The barão de Mauá, as one of the wealthiest men in the Brazilian Empire and a sugar producer himself, was particularly attuned to these new ideas. Atalaia, his estate in the Macaé district north of Rio, had earned plaudits at the National Exposition of 1875 thanks to the sugar refining process perfected by André Paturau, a mechanical engineer hired by Mauá straight from Mauritius. Although Atalaia fell short of the snow-like product of Five-Lille mills established by Khedive Ismail in the Lower Nile, some in Brazil believed that Mauá produced sugar of greater quality than other Brazilian planters in “the integrity and transparency of its crystals.”Footnote ⁴² After his dashing demonstration of technological innovation, Mauá devised his own coolie importation scheme in an intentional effort to capitalize on the surging interest in the sugar industry. Of course, Mauá could not afford not to, given the dire state of his finances. In 1869, the Uruguayan branch of his lead firm, Mauá Bank & Company, ran afoul of the government in Montevideo. In 1876, when colonel Lorenzo de la Torre took over the Uruguayan government, he canceled Mauá Bank’s special concessions, forcing the bank to suspend up to £10 million in payments, mostly to Brazilian creditors.Footnote ⁴³

Going into receivership, Mauá scrambled for opportunities to diversify and recapitalize his portfolio and in the process reinvented himself as an “agricultural entrepreneur.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Luckily, the crisis coincided with Pedro II’s departure to the Philadelphia World Fair. In his absence, Mauá approached a perhaps more receptive princess regent Isabel, who had given birth to her first surviving child five months beforehand.Footnote ⁴⁵ Mauá’s proposal of an ambitious coolie importation scheme was premised on the need to ensure the “reproductive elements of invested capital” and called attention to France’s treaty with Great Britain to import workers from the latter’s Asian territories. Soon enough, French possessions attained production levels unmatched by the British Antilles themselves. According to Mauá, failure to follow a similar path meant that Brazilian “investment of liquid capital in [mechanical] improvements will disappear.” Indian coolies, he believed, would also bolster European colonization by providing settlers with a cheap workforce.

Mauá requested a 25-year company privilege to import coolies from Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay under an Anglo-Brazilian treaty arranged by Brazilian diplomats. The company would distribute coolies on request from three model plantations spread across the Empire. Government would cover the voyage for the first 2,000 coolies, after which the company would cover 5,000 more in its first year. The company could begin operations within eight months, with fiscal revenues closely behind considering the high interest rates on travel cost subsidies recommended by Mauá.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mauá then found a partner in [Charles Antoine] Auguste de Chazal, a prominent fourth-generation Mauritian planter.Footnote ⁴⁷ And on 3 April 1877, the 453-ton French barque Jean Pierre arrived in Rio from Port Louis via the Cape of Good Hope carrying 197 “Indian immigrants” below deck and reporting no casualties. Some days later, at least 186 coolies took another steamer to the port of Imbetiba in Macaé, where they settled in at Atalaia.Footnote ⁴⁸

But Mauá’s scheme devolved quickly. Within a month, 14 aggrieved coolies made their way from Macaé to Rio by foot to protest their treatment with the British consul.Footnote ⁴⁹ After four days at the Court, a steamer took them back to Atalaia, but the incident marked only the beginning of Mauá’s difficulties. Mauá and his managers were blindsided by the Indian workers’ labor expectations and customary practices in Mauritius, as well as by the impact of gender imbalance on a majority-male cohort. Then, in early June 1877, one of the Indian workers was assassinated. Three others were arrested and transported to Rio as suspects, until a fourth later confessed to the public prosecutor at Macaé.Footnote ⁵⁰

Mauá, however, was more concerned with his finances than with the scandal. The same day, as news of the homicide emerged, a lawyer for one of his debtors accused him of intentionally avoiding paying damages to his English client during the construction of the Santos-Jundiaí railroad. Mauá’s Exposição aos credores (1878), an autobiographical and exculpatory letter to exasperated creditors, narrated his banking enterprises’ progression from 1854 until a debt moratorium in 1875, whose expiration in 1878 brought his operations to a crash. Facing personal liability for his crumbling financial emporium, Mauá surveyed his accomplishments and admitted enacting the coolie scheme exclusively to salvage his finances, as agrarian pursuits had never interested him.

According to Mauá, the “coolie experience” was somewhat successful. He judged half of the Indians as “good workers” and the other half as hoodlums hired in the immediacy of Port Louis against his express instructions. Mauá wished well to future coolie schemes, hoping that “100,000 coolies came every year for a whole decade,” even if Brazilians had to pay for their return trip, although he also admitted that “it never crossed [his] mind to colonize Brazil with that race.” As part of the liquidation of Mauá’s assets, Atalaia passed to government hands.Footnote ⁵¹

The Mauá episode ensured that Chinese rather than Indian coolie labor remained the core topic of debate around colonization alternatives in the aftermath of the Free Womb Law. Atalaia and its coolies flagged the unexpected liabilities that came from hiring Indian workers from the less regulated entrepot of Mauritius rather than from India, and it had thus laid bare the complications and interdictions that would follow if that supply channel to Brazil became routinized. Significantly, the episode also exposed the limitations that one man alone confronted in mobilizing a colonization scheme even if he possessed great wealth and opportune international connections. Collective enterprises such as SITA, with the experiential know-how provided by its advocates’ previous links to the SII, remained more powerful vehicles for colonization projects. Even if they faced their own adversities, they reaffirmed the greater might of companies as vehicles for colonization.

Lobbies and Credit in the Unraveling of the Chinese Question

In 1878, Sinimbú reinvigorated debates and business plans around Chinese coolie labor as the new prime minister and president of the Conselho de Estado, countering old coffee planters who rejected the idea amid tightening financial constraints. Sinimbú had become the uncontested architect of sugar’s revival, not of coffee, championing investment-heavy improvements that cemented a “web of mutually advantageous complicity” between foreign capital and the Brazilian government. Through his policies, these two spheres worked as symbiotes: imperial government guarantees unmatched at the provincial level benefited foreign factors as their technologies and investments allowed central-government officials to distribute infrastructural projects as favors to local clienteles. The Agricultural Congress further strengthened Sinimbú’s program by streamlining ideas about agricultural credit and coolie labor. In 1878, therefore, Sinimbú could drown opposition voices including among centrist liberals weakened by the recent death of senator Zacarias, a vehement detractor of Chinese and Indian immigration.Footnote ⁵² The new liberal ascendancy also diminished the clout of conservative sugar interests in the northeast.

To be sure, the coolie question waned after SITA’s demise, but the afterglow of its and Sinimbú’s efforts lit the path for similar daring proposals of coolie importation. Bernardo Caymari, for instance, came up with a Brazilian Mutual Aid Company of Coolie Emigration. His proposed company would negotiate with Chinese mutual aid societies in San Francisco or China to repatriate or directly import Chinese coolies with pre-approved contracts. The scheme cleverly adapted to the ongoing liquidity crisis by offering planters the possibility of covering the workers’ cost of travel with credit letters committed to repaying in six-month terms, that is, “when the salaried work had rendered its fruit.”Footnote ⁵³ Although Caymari’s plan was less ambitious than SITA’s, its very existence signaled SITA’s exemplary role and added pressure for Brazil to negotiate a treaty.

SITA’s decade-long campaign for a Sino-Brazilian treaty finally succeeded in 1879, when the Foreign ministry secured an extraordinary credit to finance the Brazilian Empire’s first diplomatic mission to the Celestial Empire. Chosen for the voyage were Eduardo Callado, then minister in Paraguay, and Artur Silveira da Mota, the son of senator and coolie labor enthusiast José Ignácio Silveira da Mota. A young intern from the Madrid legation, Henrique Carlos Ribeiro Lisboa, joined as secretary, entering government service in the footsteps of his grandfather, Junta do Comércio officer and mathematician José Maria Lisboa, and his father, Edinburgh-educated US envoy Miguel Maria Lisboa.Footnote ⁵⁴ Timing favored the mission. As the British customs commissioner at Shantou reported, the Brazilians would probably seek emigrants from that port, about 175 miles east of the Pearl River delta. In 1879, 17,216 emigrants left from Shantou, marking a slight decline in exits, but the following year a rice harvest failure spurred 49,500 new departures and hastened Brazilian efforts to reverse the Chinese ban on company agents.Footnote ⁵⁵ A Sino-Brazilian treaty was finally promulgated in 1881, although the Brazilian envoys excluded any stipulations on migrations to avoid jeopardizing their initial rapport.

The treaty slightly shifted public opinion toward a more positive appreciation of Chinese questions over the following years. French scientist Louis Couty, for instance, offered a relatively supportive lecture on Chinese immigration and salaries in Rio’s Polytechnical School.Footnote ⁵⁶ Brazilians who visited China or learned about it in the United States confronted prejudices more boldly – even if reproducing biases of their own. José Custódio Alves de Lima, for example, was a technocratic modernizer who edited the Aurora Brazileira in Syracuse University and was commissioned by São Paulo planters to recruit 3,000 Chinese workers in the United States in 1881. In a book on the United States he published in 1886, he repudiated complaints that the “Chinese element” could “completely nullify the national element, as if our Latin race, and the Teutonic race, did not have enough autonomy to resist such imaginary nullification.” The Sino-Brazilian mission secretary even more adamantly defended China by pointing to its internal diversity while blaming coolie-trade mishaps on the Tankia, who he described as the most destitute of Chinese peoples and the bulk of Macao’s emigrants.Footnote ⁵⁷

Then, in 1881, as planters worried about a gathering liquidity crisis and strained government budgets, they organized a propagandistic lobby, the Centro da Lavoura e Commércio, to develop new consumer markets. Centro members fiercely debated the Chinese question. China envoys Henrique Lisboa and the younger Silveira da Mota took to the floor to vouch for the honesty and utility of Chinese workers, but their speeches were rudely interrupted. Portuguese expatriate Ramalho Ortigão, the Centro’s vice-president, was forced to defend them. He declared that the Centro would protect the Chinese the same as any free immigrant. Despite the strained atmosphere of most meetings, members passed a resolution supporting Chinese immigration and petitioning the Brazilian government to name a consul and provide subsidies for a Chinese navigation company.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Centro’s polemics fired up abolitionists and Positivists as the most impassioned opponents against what liberal Joaquim Nabuco described as the looming threat of “Mongolization.” Among the former, the Black abolitionist intellectual José do Patrocínio became the leading avenger against a “yellow slavery,” speaking of the Chinese as “an eminent threat to the present European and Brazilian worker” and later turning to the Gazeta da Tarde with tireless tirades in line with the paper’s continuous criticism of “a Chinese mania” started by Sinimbú. Under the pseudonym of Proudhomme, Patrocínio satirized the request for subsidies for a Chinese steamship line while peppering his weekly political review with reference to the figure of the yellow slave. Sinophiles, he claimed, broke ranks with Brazilian “civilization, with our nature, which opened a horizon to the descendants of slaves, and asks for the Chinese worker, that is, the Chinese machine with no aspirations but the modest salary determined by the plantation or the barracks.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Miguel Lemos, the president of the Positivist Society of Rio de Janeiro, led his brethren against what he similarly perceived as the dangers of Chinese immigration. Lemos publicly opposed Salvador de Mendonça’s conferences on Chinese immigration and was a spirited participant in the Centro’s soirées. Later, he sought to sink coolie schemes once and for all by warning the Chinese ambassador in England and France, the marquis Tsêng, of Brazilian planters’ quest to install a new “disguised slavery.” Lemos called off any “solidarity with degenerate men who … confound their own greed with national dignity and interests,” unequivocally denouncing planters as speculators, and their plans as a racket.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whereas coolie supporters focused on Chinese workers’ utility, abolitionists and Positivists alike harped on the money-oriented nature of both coolies and their advocates – and targeted colonization as nothing more than a profiteering business pursuit.

In the end, however, it was financial dynamics, not political ones, that demoted Chinese immigration from the list of the Centro’s priorities. In the early 1880s, the Centro began its transformation from a simple agrarian lobby to what its promotional material published in Europe described as a “commercial-agricultural corporation” dedicated to perfecting production and promoting Brazilian coffee in “countries where its consumption is limited or close to null.” The three conferences celebrated at the end of 1882 accompanied the Centro’s first domestic Coffee Expo, which set the tone for a second such event a year later and for international exhibits as far as St. Petersburg. A short time later, the World Cotton Centennial in New Orleans also welcomed a Centro commission headed by none other than the consul general in the United States, Salvador de Mendonça. A leading authority of Chinese immigration now bowed to the internationalization of Brazilian coffee.Footnote ⁶¹

The Centro’s conferences prepared the ground for the ambitious rebranding of Brazil’s main export by focusing on financial and administrative reforms rather than immigration per se. At the first of four conferences, José Pereira de Faro made a resounding case for immediate capitalization needs. As part of the Darrigue Faro clan, the third barão do Rio Bonito had inherited not just his nobiliary status but also a long acquaintance with migration promotion efforts: his grandfather’s firm, Faro, Vergueiro & Co. was shareholder in the SPC of 1836, while his father, João Pereira Darrigue Faro, oversaw colonization affairs as provincial vice-president of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1850s. Having spoken to Nicolás de Avellaneda, Argentinian president and author of the famous colonization and immigration law of 1876, Rio Bonito credited Argentinian success in drawing foreigners to the “hefty sums” expended in propaganda and a “revolutionary militarism” that “opened way … to the plow.”Footnote ⁶²

Yet the lack of an adequate work contract law marred Brazilian progress. After shouldering heavy expenses to bring colonos, planters lacked the means to coerce them to contractual compliance. Working in the immigration service, Rio Bonito knew firsthand that colonos fled to the “vastness of this empire,” shortly after signing contracts. Thus, besides a passing allusion to Asian workers as a “transitional means,” this was as much as this conference would offer on the topic of migration promotion. Beholden as it was to old slaveholding and merchant classes, the Centro’s intelligentsia, led by Rio Bonito, simply abandoned the Chinese question. In no uncertain terms, the conference demonstrated how clearly domestic debates on foreign labor could decelerate when new means of wealth creation emerged, which confirmed colonization as a business pursuit in and of itself and not always indelibly tied to labor replacement concerns.

To be sure, Chinese labor migration was not entirely off the table. In 1882, private company-led Chinese colonization was still possible despite the gradual loss of support among the planter class. Prominent merchants could still put on offer the “comfortable and secure acquisition of [Chinese] workers at modest salaries” at their bureaus in Rio or São Paulo.Footnote ⁶³ As Eduardo Callado conducted negotiations for a coolie trade in Rio with visitors G. C. Butler, a US merchant recommended by the marquis Tsêng, and Tong King-Sing, the director of the state-owned China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, a new company popped up in Rio. The Companhia de Comércio e Imigração Chineza (Chinese Commerce and Immigration Company) quickly acquired 100 Chinese workers for the St. John d’el Rei Mining Company in Minas Gerais, a decades-old British enterprise still bristling from the freedom suits of hundreds of enslaved workers. Notably, in view of the dismal conditions at St. John d’el Rei’s Morro Velho and Cata Branca mines, the Chinese refused to work and fled, but their defection did not hinder negotiations for a broader coolie trade.Footnote ⁶⁴

In part, the pressure exerted by Miguel Lemos and later the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society on the Chinese ambassador in London achieved its intended effect – Tong King-Sing and Butler left Brazil less than a month after their arrival.Footnote ⁶⁵ In part, the hasty departure was the fallout of the marquis Tsêng’s tense encounters with the Brazilian minister in London on account of the latter’s alleged plans to send gunboats to China to secure coolies, as reported in the press.Footnote ⁶⁶ But taking a wide view, the latest Chinese immigration scheme fell through due to a mismatch between China’s expectations of good treatment for its subjects and the actual slavery-like conditions that awaited those colonos in Brazil, a problem that could not be easily resolved due to Brazil’s funding shortfalls.

In 1884, C. van Delden Laërne, a Dutch envoy who had served six years in Java, arrived in Rio to study coffee cultivation. Poring over statistics and news, he judged that the British government had directly foiled the Chinese colonization project. Yet, Laërne underlined the lack of an expected subsidy for the China Merchant’s line as a factor that also frustrated the possibility of a Chinese migration treaty. Lobby groups in Rio had certainly pressured against any subsidy, but in truth the Brazilian government could ill-afford such an extraordinary expense. As the Finance minister reported, a “regimen of deficits” had “imprisoned” the Empire by widening budgetary gaps between allocations and actual expenses. The regular budget for 1882–1883 featured a deficit of 899:801$000, which, with extraordinary expenditures, more than doubled to 21.314:596$000, of which 79 percent went to the Agriculture ministry alone.Footnote ⁶⁷ From this perspective, budget shortfalls doomed the Brazilian Empire’s most eventful overture yet toward the Celestial Empire, putting in evidence that financial expectations and the dearth of credit at different scales posed a more serious obstacle to Chinese immigration than the xenophobic tirades of some Positivists, abolitionists, and planters.

* * *

Above the din of racist rants, Brazilians rooting for coolie labor found their foil in the lack of diplomatic agreements with China and in credit constraints, not only among planters but more importantly in government budgets already stretched thin. Whereas the imperial government needed colonization companies like SITA as pathbreakers, these in turn necessitated government support. The absence of this delicate symbiosis inevitably thwarted empresarios’ expectations and government hopes alike.

Yet the Brazilian government’s stark inability to, for example, subsidize migrant transports or offer per capita recruitment prizes at this time was not the only indication of the implausibility of coolie schemes. The timing did not help either. In the early 1880s, governments embedded in coolie-trading networks doubled down on their vigilance over long-simmering problems in the trafficking or settlement of Chinese or Indian persons overseas. In the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 inaugurated an era of restrictions that, in principle, could have seen the Celestial Empire resort to Brazil as a preferred destination for its subjects but in fact led to greater guardedness among Chinese and US authorities reeling from the anti-Chinese violence that followed.Footnote ⁶⁸

Similarly, in the case of Mauá’s Indian coolies, long-standing internal dilemmas in the British government about how to handle re-emigration of coolies from Mauritius boiled over. An ongoing jurisdictional dispute pitted the India and Foreign Offices, which mutually attributed to the other any responsibility for the repatriation costs of the Indian coolies of Atalaia. Starting in 1880, the India Office was charged for the return of 153 of Mauá’s coolies to Mauritius but objected that, if allowed, its involvement could serve as precedent for covering the expenses of all destitute coolies. After a couple of years of wrangling, the India Office ended up defraying the costs of repatriation, but only as an exception.Footnote ⁶⁹

Indeed, this question of repatriation, which had already become a mainstay of work contracts in both the Indian and Chinese trades, epitomized the economic barriers to a workable coolie system for Brazil. Mauá’s inability to defray the relocation of Atalaia’s Indian laborers to Mauritius or India became a negative externality to a number of British government offices suddenly enmeshed in a sour dispute. Compounded by charges of maltreatment in Brazil, the certainty that Brazilians would not carry the costs of repatriation vaporized the possibility of future coolie transports under British sanction.

By 1883, after fifteen years of acrimonious debate, the conceit that Asian workers could replace the “servile element” had failed to gather more support. The cause had racked up a rather bizarre track record: starting out as a pet issue of unrepentant young radicals like Quintino Bocaiúva, it got picked up by the dashing merchants of the SITA and was defended by Sinimbú’s Liberal center before slaveholding elites from the Paraíba Valley ostensibly adopted it as a stratagem to perpetuate slavery by another name. In the face of mounting agitation, the planter-friendly Centro da Lavoura shed its initial interest in Chinese immigrants in favor of new credit lines. Then, when the Brazilian government refused to subsidize a regular packet between Chinese ports and Rio, the Chinese question simply lost steam. And finally, as an emboldened abolitionist movement reemerged in the mid-1880s, a new colonization association, the Sociedade Central de Imigração, arose that aggressively flaunted its contempt for Chinese workers and celebrated the Chinese Exclusion Act. As this new association lambasted the likes of the SITA merchants as lowly pursuers of “fabulous lucre,” it concocted its own moneymaking colonization pursuits and sank the Chinese question further into irrelevance.Footnote ⁷⁰