On the night of December 6, 1824, under the full moon’s light, a convoy of almost one hundred incarcerated individuals left the Dömitz fortress in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. They made their way to the transatlantic vessel Wilhelmine, anchored on the Elbe River. Still in their chains, the group moved under the watch of the gendarmerie. Before boarding the ship, their shackles fell to Mecklenburg’s soil—a final relinquishment of their former status before becoming Brazilian citizens. It was as if their pasts had been stripped away. This was no ordinary group of travelers: being furtively shipped across the ocean, they marched under the cover of the night. They were neither free settlers nor voluntary emigrants in the eyes of the diplomats orchestrating the operation.
Between 1824 and 1825, 345 inmates from the workhouses, correctional facilities, and jails of Bützow, Dömitz, Güstrow, and Rostock were transferred to Brazil, where they would become “green Cossacks” as settler-soldiers tasked with occupying strategically located agricultural-military establishments situated along the ethnic and political frontiers of the nascent nation.Footnote 1 Among their ranks was the sailor and lace merchant Johann Heinrich Lembke, a native of Teldau, resident of Wismar, imprisoned in Dömitz.Footnote 2
Through a microanalysis of Lembke’s life story, this article analyzes how the Brazilian empire planned and executed a project of settlement and colonization on its borderlands.Footnote 3 As I shall demonstrate, Lembke’s trajectory (see Figure 1) allows us to examine the figure of the settler within the context of a territorial empire coming into shape in the New World. Consequently, it also allows for a more nuanced investigation of the very concept of the colony, which was wielded by Brazilian statesmen as a fundamental strategy for integrating the vast imperial territory. As I map the changing legal and professional categories of Lembke and his contemporaries, and trace his encounters with the justice system on both sides of the Atlantic, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First, it shows that the category of settler (or colono) in nineteenth-century Brazil was not a stable social or legal identity but a contested, juridically precarious designation—continuously produced and undone by the successes and failures of imperial governance. Second, it demonstrates that Brazil’s colonization project in the 1820s was a genuinely global experiment in empire-building, one that drew on political repertoires from Russia, Austria, and Britain while entangling European migration, Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the institution of slavery in ways that resist easy categorization.Footnote 4 A microanalytical approach is precisely what allows us to trace a more accurate genealogy of Brazil’s formation as a de facto empire in the early nineteenth century, inserting the rupture from Portugal into a broader, global narrative integrated with the exchange of information about spaces of colonization and militarization elsewhere.Footnote 5
Maps of the trajectory of Johann Heinrich Lembke between the northern German territories and Brazil.
Source: Designed by the author.
European migration to Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century has been well studied. Scholars have examined how immigration schemes became entangled with abolitionist pressures, as Brazilian elites, increasingly anxious about their dependence on enslaved labor in an Atlantic world moving toward emancipation, looked to European settlers as a potential workforce. Jeffrey Lesser has shown how successive immigration projects, from the independence era through the late nineteenth century, were shaped by evolving ideologies of race, ethnicity, and national identity, as the Brazilian state worked to define who could become Brazilian and on what terms. The “whitening” logic that undergirded many of these schemes was never simply pragmatic: it indexed deeper anxieties about Brazil’s place in a world order that conflated civilization with European descent.Footnote 6 Yet the historiography of German immigration in particular has tended to foreground the successful, industrious settler (the pioneers who cleared the forest and built the colony of São Leopoldo in Rio Grande do Sul), while treating less legible figures like Lembke as embarrassments to be relegated to footnotes, or passed over in silence. H. Glenn Penny has argued that German history read through the lives of mobile individuals looks fundamentally different from the narratives that have dominated the field—a reorientation that this article takes as its point of departure for the German half of Lembke’s story.Footnote 7
What a close reading of the archives restores is precisely the figure the idealized narrative requires to exclude: the convict, the deserter, the man who refused to stay put. This exclusion has consequences for how we understand the Brazilian state-driven colonization in the first half of the nineteenth century. German settler-soldiers were recruited to serve a militarized frontier function, occupy the borderlands, pacify Indigenous populations, and constitute a loyalist counterweight in an unstable polity. The silence about slavery in the administrative correspondence examined here is itself significant because it registers the ideological work that the category of the settler (colono) was asked to perform, which was precisely to appear untouched by the institution that defined Brazilian society.Footnote 8
Lembke’s story also raises broader questions about how historians of Latin America can engage with the scholarship on settler colonialism. Over the past two decades, that body of work—associated above all with Patrick Wolfe’s argument that settler colonialism operates through a “logic of elimination” directed at Indigenous peoples, and with Lorenzo Veracini’s typology of the settler as a figure who arrives to stay and transform the land into propertyFootnote 9—has generated productive debates about colonial formations worldwide.Footnote 10 Brazil presents a particularly complex case. On one hand, the empire’s colonization projects were explicitly premised on the territorial displacement of Indigenous peoples; statemen’s and diplomats’ own correspondence confirms that the Brazilian colonization scheme was designed to push European settlers into frontier zones where Indigenous communities lived, transforming them, in their words, “from savages and cannibals into peaceful and hardworking citizens.” On the other hand, the Brazilian state’s relationship to its settlers was itself coercive: men like Lembke were recruited from prisons, dispatched to military colonies, and subjected to surveillance, punishment, and forced labor on the empire’s peripheries. They were instruments of dispossession, but they were also, simultaneously, instruments of a state that had no intention of granting them stable citizenship (thought promising it). The category of settler in this context was not a social identity that men like Lembke inhabited freely, since it operated as a juridical designation imposed on them by a governance apparatus that could revoke, defer, or simply ignore the rights it had nominally promised. This matters for settler colonialism theory because it suggests that in the Brazilian case—and perhaps more broadly in Latin America—the settler was never simply the agent of colonial dispossession that Wolfe’s model, derived primarily from Australian and Anglo-American cases, presupposes.Footnote 11 The settler was also a subject of empire, governed through logics of coercion, mobility control, and legal precarity that fundamentally structured the empire’s relationship to enslaved (and freed) people and Indigenous communities. Microanalysis is the methodological register in which this complexity becomes visible. I argue that it is at the level of the individual life, traced through fragmentary sources across multiple archives and jurisdictions, that we can see how the settler figure was produced, contested, and undone.
While debates over political structure, constitutionalism, and the continuation of slavery raged in the Brazilian public arena in the early nineteenth century, one question permeated them all: given that Brazil had become an empire, what would be the optimal plan for populating the borders of its vast territory, incorporating Indigenous peoples, and establishing control—direct or indirect—over its peripheries? In tracing the set of strategies that flourished in unexpected locales, my goal is to reveal the connections between a variety of political imaginaries and to shed fresh light on failed or unfinished colonization and settlement projects, the inscriptions that remain from building an empire in the tropics. The life of Johann Heinrich Lembke is one such inscription.
A Former Citizen and Lace Merchant
I know that Johann Heinrich Lembke was arrested in November 1813 by the Wismar police thanks to documents from the city’s orphans’ court: the guardianship and custody records of Charlotte Friederike, Lembke’s daughter (“born to a maid named Krüger”).Footnote 12 After her father’s transfer to the prison in Bützow that same year, Charlotte, then just a few months old, came under the protection of tutors appointed by the local government. The file holds the tutors’ accounting reports for the girl’s care until she reached adulthood, as well as documents pertaining to the auction of Lembke’s house in Wismar, and an inventory of the inmate’s few possessions.Footnote 13
The archival record maps Mecklenburg’s complex bureaucratic structure, which the aristocracy still controlled. Tutors responsible for Charlotte’s upbringing negotiated with merchants, who supplied her needs; auctioneers raised funds to finance the costs her care would incur. The case remained open until 1843, thus becoming a “mine of involuntary data” about the lives of impoverished peoples in the northern German territories, their familial strategies, and the internal mechanisms of judicial administration.Footnote 14 It is a sheaf of papers that “exudes an everyday banality.”Footnote 15 But the case also contains silences: the questions left unasked by the judge, the murmurs from the deponents, the unexpected disappearances. This nineteenth-century world emerges in a collage of fragments, traces that expose what was not said, inviting us to fill in the gaps.Footnote 16
What I have managed to learn about Johann Heinrich Lembke’s life before his migration to Brazil, I have found by pulling loose threads from that case file. He was born in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the rural village of Teldau, 75 kilometers from Hamburg. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Mecklenburg transformed economically, politically, and socially, yet the local nobility maintained its firm grip. The vast estates remained under control of aristocratic families, as they continued to exert considerable influence over regional politics even after the territory’s disannexation from the Confederation of the Rhine (1808–13) and its elevation to a Grand Duchy (1815). The region combined low population density (only 380,000 inhabitants as of 1818, in an area of 13,000 square kilometers), with limited urbanization (about 7 percent of the population lived in the larger cities of Rostock and Schwerin). The agricultural sector remained important for the economy,Footnote 17 and serfdom persisted until 1820. At the time when Lembke migrated to Brazil, the vast majority of peasants still depended on large landlords for access to land.Footnote 18
Johann Heinrich left Teldau for the same reasons that pushed thousands of young men from Mecklenburg’s farms toward its ports: economic stagnation, declining wages, and the pull of a maritime life that offered, at minimum, mobility. Wismar was a hub for unskilled workers, with its poorly developed port services, and ranked well below its Hanseatic counterparts—Rostock, Bremen, Hamburg.Footnote 19
With a population of approximately five thousand, the city retained its fortified urban design when Lembke resided there. The streets he traveled were “wide and well-paved.” Without a potable water supply, Wismar relied on open channels. Social life revolved around the Church of the Virgin Mary, the town hall, and the quay, where small vessels docked directly at a wooden pier. The bay reached only 2.50 meters in depth, so ships of greater tonnage moored at a distance or sought refuge off the island of Poel.Footnote 20 Despite its modest size, Wismar drew men and women of diverse origins to its shores, creating a kaleidoscope of political ideologies and cultural influences. The port facilitated the trade of Mecklenburg grains—wheat, rye, barley, oats—to Amsterdam and London. Wismar also received English salt and New World products such as sugar and tobacco. Trade with other Hanseatic and Baltic cities moved manufactured and specialized goods such as textiles, porcelain, jewelry, tools.Footnote 21 The city connected to the dynamic maritime economy of the Baltic, to Saint Petersburg, Stockholm and Riga, Königsberg and Danzig, Copenhagen. Its maritime community engaged actively in port politics and business. Sailors established a union to defend their privilege of transporting goods on their ships free of charge (Führung or portage). Stopping from port to port across the Baltic, or reaching Amsterdam and London, they traded what they carried, profiting from these sales and becoming small traders in their own right. Despite various attempts at prohibition, this practice was still common in the 1820s.Footnote 22
Accustomed to short-term journeys and small crews, Johann Heinrich Lembke and his colleagues pursued other activities on a seasonal basis. This was an absolute necessity for many, as Wismar sailors earned significantly less pay than their counterparts in larger ports like Hamburg and Bremen.Footnote 23 At some point in the early nineteenth century, possibly between sea voyages, Lembke began trading textiles and specialized in buying and selling lace (a lighter, more easily transportable fabric), which found a market among tailors who manufactured clothes for the region’s elite families. Perhaps he carried these goods with him on his Baltic voyages, as other sailors did, to make a little extra money beyond his ship wages. For some reason, it was precisely around the time of his daughter Charlotte’s birth, in mid-1813, that the police accused him of a series of crimes.
The Baltic Sea maritime world offered ample possibilities for illicit activities. Petty thefts and smuggling of all sorts were relatively common infractions. Seamen often lived between the underworld of crime and port life, navigating between minor and socially accepted illicit actions, months of work away from family, and periodic encounters with human fragility at sea.Footnote 24 They thus formed a diverse community with some common interests: a “social zone” that demanded collective political organization to confront harsh working conditions, exploitation by ship captains, and the inherent mobility of their shared occupation.Footnote 25
Charlotte’s guardianship file offers no detailed account of the crimes the Wismar police charged against Johann Heinrich Lembke. What I do know is that he received a life sentence, with the result that the local court ordered the auctioning off of Lembke’s house and belongings and the relocation of his daughter. A public servant became his legal representative, diligently recording and monitoring the expenses of Charlotte’s tutors (from clothing, footwear, and food to piano lessons).
The judicial record describes Lembke in terms worth examining closely. Most documents named both his occupational identities (“sailor” or “merchant”) and his custodial status (“detainee” or “inmate”). But one inventory protocol merits particular scrutiny. On May 1, 1815, the Mecklenburg judicial system deemed Lembke a “former citizen and lace merchant” (ehemaliger Bürger und Spitzenhändler). The designation carried weight. Citizenship in the early nineteenth-century German territories, beyond a bureaucratic status, bore specific rights of residence, movement, and political participation that jurists were still working to define. Statesmen kept population issues near the center of their concerns, treating them as key to economic prosperity and internal security. “Due to the eccentric course of frontiers in Germany,” historian Andreas Fahrmeir notes, “few people lived far away from a border.”Footnote 26 Determining belonging, therefore, preoccupied administrators at every level.Footnote 27
Individuals believed to be criminals, like Lembke and many other migrants, became stateless, stripped of their political and civil rights because of their illegal activities. Authorities could revoke their right of residence, which meant that they could face deportation. Their life stories, behaviors, and affiliations became a state concern.Footnote 28 Incarceration reduced them to what they had been. They existed in a limbo between a consolidating state power that sought to control their spatial mobility and their own insistence on moving.Footnote 29
Transferred to the fortress of Dömitz in 1821 and stripped of the civic status that had once make him a “citizen,” Lembke performed forced labor, repairing the internal and external structures of the building. Deprived of civil rights, personal freedom, and far from his home in Wismar, he likely shared a poorly ventilated cell with three or four dozen inmates in the basement of an overcrowded edifice that was designed for military rather than correctional purposes.Footnote 30 His fellows prisoners had been incarcerated for theft and homicide, desertion, sodomy, and vagrancy. Women also lived in the fortress, sent to prison for conditions including depression, concealment of birth, petty theft, or simply “for correction.”Footnote 31 Such workhouses granted the state special authority “over persons considered individually perhaps a mere nuisance, but collectively a threat to social welfare.”Footnote 32 As one of Mecklenburg’s penal administrators wrote in the early 1820s, referring to all the correctional houses and prisons in the region, “none were in such poor condition as our penitentiaries in Dömitz.”Footnote 33
It was no coincidence that, in mid-October 1824, Count von der Osten Sacken, a member of the governing commission of the Rural Workhouse of Güstrow, arrived at Dömitz with the specific mission to assess whether prisoners could be recruited and dispatched across the Atlantic as settler-soldiers. This process formed a crucial part of the diplomatic negotiations between the Grand Duke Friedrich Franz and a representative of the Brazilian empire, Georg Anton von Schaeffer. In June 1824, incarcerated individuals from Güstrow had already been pardoned and transferred to Brazil.Footnote 34 For the Grand Duke and his bureaucrats, this project had the potential to unburden Mecklenburg’s overcrowded jails and rid local communities of their undesirables. Dömitz became a crucial site.
By late 1824, time was pressing. The Count had to attend the Mecklenburg Diet, and the Duchy appointed an agent named Passow to enlist “various convicts from the prison-fortress [of Dömitz]” and evaluate “the economic and family conditions of those convicts willing to emigrate.”Footnote 35 Once authorities identified potential migrants, prisoners would be officially pardoned, enter into a contractual agreement with the Brazilian government, and be released from incarceration to embark for the New World. At that time, pardon and forgiveness were not an official part of the judicial process. The sovereign—in this case, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin—held the power to modulate the justice system and its decisions as he saw fit.Footnote 36
It seems that the soon-to-be emigrants had an active voice in determining whether to transfer to Brazil.Footnote 37 On November 8, 1824, Johann Heinrich Lembke expressed his desire to migrate “as a soldier,” making a special request:
I humbly dare, with longing and hope, to lay my request at the feet of this illustrious council: to allow my dear and unforgettable daughter to accompany me to Brazil. I am a father concerned with my daughter’s well-being, and I am certain Your Excellencies will not object to this request. I swear on my life that I will return to dedicate my earthly pilgrimage to God. If my dear daughter, out of innocence, fears accompanying her father, in any case, I express my great desire to see her before I depart. … most submissively, Heinr. Lembke.Footnote 38
Lembke was bent on securing a pardon, leaving prison, and emigrating. However, he faced a dilemma. Should he take his daughter with him, or leave her behind? Although Charlotte (then aged eleven) visited her father in the fortress at Dömitz and they both agreed that she would accompany him to Brazil, Lembke did not take his daughter with him on the transatlantic crossing. Instead, he would pursue a career in the military, which entailed a perilous and itinerant existence. In a subsequent letter dated November 11, just three days after the missive transcribed above, “the convict Lembke considered that, in the future, as a Brazilian soldier and without a family, he would not be able to dedicate the necessary attention and care to his daughter.”Footnote 39 Less than a month later, on December 6, 1824, Lembke and a hundred other incarcerated individuals headed to Altona, along the Elbe River. The night had been meticulously selected, “because on that date there is a full moon … and the night’s brightness greatly aids the Gendarmerie in maintaining order,” noted a Mecklenburg bureaucrat.
On December 11, Brazilian representatives took charge of the children, men, and women and led them onto the Wilhelmine, anchored in Blankenese. As they boarded, the individuals, unshackled, received the promise that they would become “Brazilian citizens” (as per the agreement between Mecklenburg and the Brazilian agent).Footnote 40 The men would serve as settler-soldiers in a postcolonial frontier occupation project. Lembke set sail for Brazil,Footnote 41 while Charlotte remained in Wismar under the care of her guardians. As was the case with most immigrants, Lembke would never see the promise of full political rights in his “new homeland” (neue Heimat) fulfilled. He would enter into a legal limbo on both sides of the Atlantic—stateless in a Grand Duchy and a settler without citizenship in a tropical empire.Footnote 42
Brazil’s independence reshaped the lives of thousands of Europeans, entangled as it was with the decline of the Iberian Empires.Footnote 43 From 1824 to 1829, approximately seven thousand peasants, urban artisans, convicts, war veterans, and adventurers migrated from the German territories to the tropics (and many more expressed a desire to do the same).Footnote 44 These individuals and their families formed the human material for the first systematic occupation project of regions that Dom Pedro I’s administration deemed critical, defended in Europe by a team of diplomats experienced in the art of empire-building.Footnote 45 Brimming with dreams and hopes, people like Johann Heinrich Lembke sought a new home in Brazil and abandoned their families and friends, some of whom would later also migrate to the New World, following what Charles Tilly defined as “chain migration.”Footnote 46 However, for this to occur, a project had to be established, beginning with shared ideas, practices, and experiences. Before migrants could be relocated, scenarios had to be drawn up, knowledge was exchanged, and predictions were made.Footnote 47
Lembke and the approximately four thousand other men who migrated from the German territories to Brazil and donned the uniform of Dom Pedro I’s army went down in history as the “emperor’s mercenaries” (mercenários do imperador)—soldiers who sold their military services to the highest bidder. This, however, is a teleological interpretation. When, in 1822, the emissary of the Brazilian empire went to Europe with the secret mission of recruiting immigrants in the German territories, he bore very clear instructions, considered the “essential point” of his mission: to organize rural-military colonies to which soldiers should migrate “under the guise of settlers,” as well as “purely settler individuals” whose military function would be effective only in times of war “in the manner of the Cossacks or an armed militia.”Footnote 48
This language did more than circulate precise concepts and repertoires; it also announced their global ambition. At the outset of the nineteenth century, the empire’s agents tirelessly investigated ways to occupy and colonize their peripheries. They sought inspiration from the Russian steppes and the Austrian ethnic frontiers, gathered pamphlets and collected books, held meetings with scholars, and questioned their peers during diplomatic negotiations.Footnote 49 In doing so, they repositioned Brazil within a global arena of research on frontier occupation technologies, and offered, in return, to absorb Europe’s social problems, namely overcrowded prisons and pauperized peasants. The colonies that Brazilian elites planned amalgamated an array of imperial fantasies and futures. They emerged from a contested, “unstable and precarious” project, part of a much broader and constantly redefined “imperial network.”Footnote 50 What could be better than a microscopic view, then, to account for their situational dynamism and experimental incompleteness?
Cossacks and Convicts
The first phase of the mission to recruit settler-soldiers for the Brazilian empire in the German territories—the plan that would change Johann Heinrich Lembke’s fate—began in June 1822. Dom Pedro I and his wife, Leopoldina, alongside their closest advisor, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, commissioned the Bavarian physician Georg Anton von Schaeffer to lead it. By then, Portuguese America had already seen a number of movements advocating greater autonomy for the provinces; the circulation of divergent ideas about uniting the American territories under the (more or less centralized) command of Rio de Janeiro; the emergence of plans for “recolonization” by royalists and Lisbon; the return of D. João VI to Portugal after the death of Queen Maria; and finally, his son Pedro’s decision to “stay” in Brazil.Footnote 51
Schaeffer left for Europe before Brazil’s formal separation from Portugal and Pedro’s acclamation as “emperor and perpetual defender of Brazil.” On September 1, 1822, the physician-turned-diplomat set sail for Le Havre, France, bearing confidential instructions that he had received directly from José Bonifácio. These tasked Schaeffer with informing the emperor of Austria, princess Leopoldina’s father, that she would remain in Brazil with her husband, Pedro, given the “political circumstances of Rio and the wishes of its people.” This would be the only matter that could “transpire to the public.” In secret, Schaeffer was to “penetrate” the political circles of Austria, Bavaria, and Prussia with the aim of securing their support “for the Brazilian cause.” The mission’s “essential and secret” objective was more audacious: to implement a daring migratory plan that would result in the establishment of a “rural-military colony with more or less the same organization as the Don and Ural Cossacks.” Two “classes” of people would be recruited—“soldiers under the guise of settlers,” incorporated into the Brazilian army for six years, and settlers per se, “who would serve in times of war in the manner of the Cossacks or an armed militia.” Upon completing their initial term, the former would automatically become the latter, receiving “lands to cultivate.”Footnote 52
While Schaeffer’s mission took shape in the diplomatic corridors, Johann Heinrich Lembke was in the third year of his sentence in the fortress of Dömitz, performing the forced labor to which he had been condemned for life. The two men inhabited entirely different worlds. Schaeffer, a physician turned diplomat, moved through the courts of Europe with secret instructions and grand designs. Lembke, a convicted sailor, spent time repairing the walls of a crumbling military prison in northern Germany. The classification that Schaeffer was drafting—“soldiers under the guise of settlers”—was not yet a category that described anyone in particular. Within two years, it would define Lembke precisely. The instructions named the regions for these rural-military colonies. They were to be located in the northernmost backlands of Minas Gerais (bordering Bahia) and the vicinity of the Caravelas River, “near the sea.” The immigrants would open “communication roads with neighboring provinces or seaports, for mutual convenience” and wear uniforms from the government, “like those of the Don Cossacks, with the alterations that this [Brazilian] climate requires.”Footnote 53
A letter Schaeffer signed on July 5, 1822, confirms that these guidelines emerged from a dialogue with José Bonifácio. In it, Schaeffer pledged to win “over some European courts for Brazil’s interest” and “dispatch some well-trained regiments under good officers and armed as well as possible.”Footnote 54 The settlers, “between three and four thousand,” would receive citizeship as soon as they arrived in Brazil, choose lands in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, or Bahia, and receive treatment “equally to the free English settlers in New Holland and the Cape of Good Hope.”Footnote 55 The July correspondence also delineated their military function. “At any moment [they] must be prepared to take up arms and will not be exempt from service in defense of the homeland.”Footnote 56
Further details emerged in correspondence Schaeffer signed under the pseudonyms “Andreas Pytagorawitschen, a Brazilian mulatto” and “Pythagora Andreas P.S.R.,” also addressed to José Bonifácio, shortly after his arrival in Le Havre on December 10, 1822. After relaying news from European newspapers about Brazil’s independence and the importance of Leopoldina’s figure to the recognition of Brazilian sovereignty—the only emperor in the New World was “married to a princess from the oldest and most revered imperial house in Europe”—, Schaeffer reported that he was gathering information for the transfer of “Brazilian Cossacks” to defend their “new homeland.” The plan was expansive and audacious, encompassing the establishment of colonies to form defensive lines along the coast and rivers, starting in northern Minas Gerais and southern Bahia (around the Doce, Mucuri, Viçosa, Caravelas, and Belo Monte rivers, for example). Subsequent colonies were to be located on the Parnaíba, Tocantins, Araguaia, and Xingu rivers, and in Rio Grande do Sul. Schaeffer concluded his message by confirming that he intended to recruit “a detachment of true native Russian Cossacks.” He further elaborated that the project would emulate “the European rural colonies,” quickly spreading “a degree of civilization among the wild tribes of the interior to gather them into agricultural tribes and subject them to the laws of society and fixed settlements.” In other words—summoning the full weight of the Eurocentric imagination about the inhabitants of the Americas— the project would transform Indigenous peoples “from savages and cannibals into peaceful and hardworking citizens … useful and loyal subjects of the Brazilian empire.”Footnote 57 The settlement of colonists and the integration of Indigenous peoples were inextricably linked. The redistribution of land to the newcomers would serve as a long-term “technology of state-building,” though it would not necessarily follow a “logic of elimination,” as settler colonial projects carried on in the British colonies did, for instance.Footnote 58 Schaeffer cast his project as a civilizing mission through population growth, agricultural production, and military protection. “As the youth’s ranks swell,” he asserted in one account, “a very suitable, robust militia will be formed for Your Imperial Majesty.” Founding colonies would yield two outcomes Schaeffer valued highly. On one hand, “a pleasant decrease in the number of black inhabitants will be a necessary consequence.” On the other, “the natives will approach the German settlers, take on their customs, manners, and trades … and will quickly become cultured, hardworking, and loyal subjects.”Footnote 59
The settlers that Schaeffer described in his correspondence bore no resemblance to Johann Heinrich Lembke. The idealized colonist was white, industrious, agrarian, and morally upright—a figure whose European origins would, in Schaeffer’s imagination, serve as a kind of civilizational guarantee. Lembke was white and European, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was a sailor and petty trader, a man of the docks and the Baltic routes, convicted of crimes serious enough to earn a life sentence. He had no experience of agricultural labor and no family to anchor him to a plot of land. He was precisely the figure that the idealized language of settlement required to exclude—and yet it was precisely such figures, recruited from prisons across Mecklenburg and transported under cover of night, that the Brazilian empire actually received. The gap between Schaeffer’s rhetoric and his methods was a structural feature of an empire that needed bodies for its frontiers and could not afford to be selective about which bodies it took.
By drawing on political repertoires and internal and external colonization projects from other empires, such as Russia, Austria, and England, Brazil entered a select group of colonizing countries.Footnote 60 The debate, of course, extended beyond Schaeffer and Bonifácio. Other Brazilian diplomats, such as Antônio Telles da Silva Caminha e Meneses (later the Marquis of Rezende), Brazil’s representative in Vienna, also gathered information about rural-military colonies in the far reaches of Russia and Austria.Footnote 61 But Schaeffer’s letters, read carefully, establish him as the project’s primary source of inspiration and the driving force behind this frontier occupation experiment.Footnote 62
Schaeffer and his diplomatic peers wrote with a persistent focus on futurity, convinced that Brazil was destined to become one of the world’s greatest empires (or even “the center of world trade,”Footnote 63 in Schaeffer’s words).Footnote 64 They planned to monarchize their neighbors in the Rio de la Plata region and to pacify the vast hinterland with white European settlers, turning Indigenous peoples into “useful” instruments for the “prosperity and security” of the new country. Tracing this process of learning, reinterpreting, and applying imperial policies opens new interpretations of post-independence Brazil, though any such reading must account for the unequal and mimetic exchanges between empires.Footnote 65
Intellectuals in Brazil’s service researched the political repertoires of frontier occupation through colonization, and not by chance. This very topic dominated political debates in Europe at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Brazilian diplomats did not engage imperial nostalgia, but quite the opposite. They sought out the most innovative ideas in Europe when it came to “making” empires. Amalgamating traditions (and peoples)—a favorite metaphor of José Bonifácio’s—was also an experiment, and, as such, it required constant adjustment as variables shifted.Footnote 66 Given the volatile politics of the early years of independent Brazil, instablity was the predictable result.
Schaeffer met with officials of the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1824 precisely to recruit inhabitants for these “Brazilian Cossack” settlements. His proposals won acceptance and led to the recognition of Brazilian independence in exchange for the transfer of prisoners. This, in turn, became a unique opportunity for Johann Heinrich Lembke, ultimately sealing his fate and his daughter’s for the rest of their lives. Lembke and Schaeffer had their trajectories shaped by the military needs of an empire on the other side of the Atlantic, seeking answers to the inherent challenges of the formation of a new state and turning to Europe’s frontiers, where new models of protection and repression, violence containment, and warfare were being tested. At the micro level, their lives interwove. Meanwhile, the broader view reveals the conceptual lineages, imperial rearrangements, and political rationalities behind the ideas that informed the creation of colonies stocked with “Brazilian Cossacks.”
From today’s vantage point, this utopian plan may seem a mere fantasy, verging on the absurd. It is evident that the plan ultimately failed, or at the very least remained unfinished. The military colonies did not materialize as anticipated. Geopolitical shifts resulted in a change of location. Planners initially assumed that the settler-soldiers would occupy the ethnic frontiers of the country’s northeast. Ultimately, however, southern Brazil received the four imperial German colonies (São Leopoldo, Três Forquilhas, São Pedro de Alcântara, and São João das Missões). They had no atamans as in the Russian steppes. They rather had civil directors. The “pure Cossacks” Schaeffer promised to recruit never came. The first generation of migrants faced a tortuous path to becoming citizens of the empire. The plots of land they received were poorly demarcated, generating endless legal disputes. Political instability and structural precariousness were to shape the daily lives of these families.Footnote 67
These were the conditions that awaited Lembke when the Wilhelmine set sail from Blankenese on a winter night in December 1824. He could not have known that the northeastern frontier Schaeffer had originally envisioned—the backlands of Minas Gerais, the rivers of Bahia—had already been abandoned as a destination. The shift in the geopolitical scenario in Brazil had a significant impact on the initial plans for establishing colonies along the internal borders of the Brazilian empire. The outbreak of the war against the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata upended the original sequence. Instead of settling first and soldiering second, the “Brazilian Cossacks” Schaeffer recruited went directly to war as soon as they arrived in Rio de Janeiro, entering the military bureaucracy before transport by sea to the front. The geopolitical pivots that redirected the empire’s settler-soldier experiment southward had occurred in chancelleries and ministries Johann Heinrich Lembke would never enter in response to a war he had not heard of. By the time he arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the spring of 1825, the colony of São Leopoldo had been established for nearly a year. Lembke was not a Cossack, and he was not quite a citizen.
Schaeffer’s correspondence with Rio de Janeiro reveals a frantic search for additional armed men, as evidenced through a series of orders and counterorders that bewildered Brazilian diplomats. In November 1824, just when Lembke was deciding to emigrate, the Brazilian envoy expressed his frustration to the foreign minister: “I received the order to dispatch a certain number of men, then came the counterorder, and then the order to dispatch three thousand men within four months.”Footnote 68
Through a complex network of informants, propagandists, and assistants—including pastors and priests, tavern keepers, merchants, sailors, and veteran officers—Schaeffer promised the world to soon-to-be settlers. What they ultimately received were delays and confusion, all while negotiating almost everything on credit and leaning on help from close friends and family members for support. Ships were slow to depart, once-enlisted migrants received no further contact, and most of the arrangements never reached completion. “When one starts something,” Schaeffer wrote in November 1824, “one must also finish it; in the process, one loses trust, credit, and honor, and when that is lost, it is irreparable.”Footnote 69
Empress Leopoldina, a close friend, wrote privately to Schaeffer, requesting “many, many soldiers” and counseling him against following certain government orders.Footnote 70 This back-and-forth mirrored the political volatility at the Rio de Janeiro court. Between 1822 and 1829, no fewer than eleven ministers headed the foreign affairs office. Consequently, Schaeffer’s letters addressed to one minister were commonly received by the next. This situation resulted in several complaints from the envoy to his superiors and, in particular, directly to the emperor.
Meanwhile, in the German territories, the recruitment process for settlers was almost never conducted peacefully. Brazil competed with the Netherlands, which was engaged in armed conflicts in its East Indies, and with Greece, in the throes of its war of independence. Both countries, Brazilian diplomats noted, offered more favorable conditions for foreign soldiers. Schaeffer encountered resistance across the continent. Prince Metternich, Austria’s prime minister, stood among the most powerful obstacles. Prussia watched Schaeffer closely; Count von Grothe, the Berlin court’s representative in the Hanseatic cities, voiced his disquiet with the pro-immigration initiatives and made no secret of his “animosity to the Brazilian government.” Portugal also sent spies to Hamburg, who trailed Schaeffer and trumpeted his wrongdoings.Footnote 71 In London, Felisberto Caldeira Brant Pontes (Marquis of Barbacena) and Manoel Rodrigues Gameiro Pessoa (Viscount of Itabaiana), the ministers responsible for the finances of Brazilian diplomacy abroad, balked at the resources Schaeffer demanded, considering the plan too costly, politically and financially alike.
Opportunities appeared and vanished; contingency marked the project on both sides of the Atlantic. To gather enough migrants (single men and families), Schaeffer traveled constantly through the German territories, hosted dinners for members of the local nobilities, convened secret meetings, and published appeals in newspapers. Though he established the Brazilian consulate in Hamburg—in one of the city’s wealthiest areas, alongside other diplomatic offices—traces of his negotiations can be found in archives spread across Germany, from Munich and Stuttgart to Bremen and Rostock, with a particular concentration in the capitals of states around the Rhine Valley.
Far from the idealized settler that Schaeffer and Bonifácio had designed these colonies to receive, Lembke arrived in Rio de Janeiro on April 22, 1825, aboard the Wilhelmine, with at least four hundred others, mostly soldiers under the command of an officer named Ewald.Footnote 72 The contract they signed required the armed men to transfer immediately to the imperial army upon arrival and remain in Rio de Janeiro until assigned to a military company. Lembke deceived the authorities, and, in early May 1825, he boarded the smack Delfina for Rio Grande do Sul, accompanied by fellow residents of Mecklenburg and other immigrants from Hessen-Darmstadt. He arrived at the colony of São Leopoldo on June 29, 1825, carrying the reputation of being one of the “Mecklenburg murderers,” a criminal past his contemporaries invoked whenever convenient.Footnote 73 The experiences of migrants like Lembke—considered problematic deviants—would be remembered as a “black page in the history of Germans in Brazil.”Footnote 74 These unwelcome and unwanted settlers would be subject to a “conspiracy of silence,” to borrow the words of German writer W. G. Sebald,Footnote 75 one which had withstood the test of time until very recently.Footnote 76
Undesirables
The foundation of São Leopoldo was not part of the monarchy’s initial plans when it dispatched diplomats to Europe. Rather, it emerged from unforeseen events and opportunities. Aiming to settle the newly arrived immigrant families—who were recruited to dispel suspicions that the empire was only enlisting soldiers in Europe—and at the same time protect its unstable southern borders, the government transformed an old public hemp factory (the Real Feitoria do Linho Cânhamo), into the first “German colony” in its history.Footnote 77
On March 31, 1824, sixteen months into Schaeffer’s European mission, the central government directed that a “colony of Germans” be established in Rio Grande do Sul. On April 22, surveyors selected the land. Winter was approaching, and measuring the area’s “dense and swampy forests” would take another seven months at least. The first cohort of settlers was scheduled to arrive there by the end of July 1824, with plot assignments at the discretion of José Feliciano Fernandes Pinheiro, the president of the province of Rio Grande do Sul. “It was not possible to verify the general measurement of the estates due to the great winter rains that make some places impassable,” he noted.Footnote 78 While soldiers arrived in Rio de Janeiro and transferred to army companies, immigrant families settled in São Leopoldo. We are left to imagine what strategy Lembke used to deceive the authorities in the Court and reach the colony in southern Brazil. Was he considered unfit for military service? Or simply too old to join the ranks?
At that time, São Leopoldo’s population was growing by leaps and bounds. By mid-1826, two years after its creation, 229 “domiciled” families and 209 “non-domiciled” families lived there, 1,669 individuals who had migrated from the German territories in total.Footnote 79 While government directives required enslaved workers of the former Factory to relocate to the Court in Rio de Janeiro, some families (including freed ones) continued to reside in the vicinity of the new settlement.Footnote 80 Bavarians, Rhinelanders, Palatines, Swabians, Mecklenburgers, Hanoverians, and others encountered Hausa, Yoruba, Jeje, Nagô, and Benguela peoples. But Lembke, for his part, stayed in the colony for only a brief period.
Settlers in São Leopoldo lived under constant surveillance. Families had to maintain a fixed residence and work the land. In exchange for their plots, tools, breeding animals, and seeds provided free of charge, they were expected to produce agricultural goods. Military authorities pursued immigrants who fled, enforcing “their contract with the nation, which paid for their passage and transportation.” Those reluctant to comply were harshly punished, “to restrain and correct them.”Footnote 81 Without a specific legal apparatus, the provincial president, José Feliciano Fernandes Pinheiro, determined that less serious troublemakers would be detained during daylight hours at the military barracks in the colony. Repeat offenders or those who committed more serious offenses would be sent to the capital, to be placed in a military prison. Finally, those who committed the most serious crimes, “deserving greater punishment, [would be moved] … to another place.”Footnote 82 Internal exile found fertile ground in the minds of colonial administrators. It offered a mechanism of control, creating internal borders of legality (and illegality), temporarily suspending people’s rights, managing a population the law had not yet learned to govern.
Controlling settlers’ movement became another tool of governance in São Leopoldo. Authorities sought “by all means” to keep settlers from leaving the colony and visiting the capital, fearing they would become “idle vagabonds.”Footnote 83 As in Europe at the time, the city seemed dangerous, and agricultural work in the countryside was reformative, a means to steel one’s character and correct one’s behavior.Footnote 84 São Leopoldo was administered—albeit precariously—as a de facto agricultural-military colony. As the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler observes, the colony “produces and identifies enemies within and outside,”Footnote 85 in a transient process of affirming authority and creating difference.Footnote 86
Unemployed, landless, and without a family, Lembke made a poor fit for the new colony of “applied and industrious settlers.”Footnote 87 Instead, in February 1826, authorities dispatched him “as a volunteer” to the Imperial Carolina Camp, on the empire’s borders. Fernandes Pinheiro explained that this deployment served not only to reinforce combatants “at a critical juncture of the current war” against the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata but also to “expel from the colony a portion of perverse individuals who were already beginning to disturb it.”Footnote 88 While some “volunteers” had prior military experience in Germany (“they were not bad soldiers”Footnote 89), “many of them [were] not of the best conduct, prone and given mainly to drunkenness … they go unarmed, to avoid disturbances,” he concluded.Footnote 90 Transferred from one institution of control to another, troublesome settlers like Lembke were meant to find the discipline and morality they lacked in a life at arms.
As it expelled immigrants considered deviants, the colony also moved to defend itself against enemies close at hand: the Indigenous peoples who had originally inhabited the region. In São Leopoldo’s early years, settlers formed an improvised police force to confront the “savages” they described as still living in the surrounding areas.Footnote 91 In a letter dated June 18, 1826, a settler named Schlabrendorff told his family in Germany that “here [in Brazil], when you leave the house, you carry a shotgun and a machete … because of the Botocudos.” The immigrant employed a term that was part of the nineteenth-century vocabulary to characterize non-settled Indigenous people who lived independently of the state’s organizational apparatus. He further noted that “these wild people still live in our neighborhood.” The specter of the other haunted his imagination, although Schlabrendorff added that he, “unlike several other settlers,” had yet to encounter any Indigenous person. The response to a potential encounter with “savages,” however, deserved a special mention. Schlabrendorff wrote that “when they appear, we immediately open fire on them. In return, they take cruel revenge.” If the family member to whom the letter was addressed decided to immigrate as well, the settler advised: “when you come, please bring a good shotgun or some pistols … just be careful not to be declared a soldier in Hamburg.”Footnote 92
The establishment of São Leopoldo and the Cisplatine War transformed the original colonization plan. Its militarizing aspect heldFootnote 93— driven by frontier wars that demanded more and more armed men daily and by the administration of settlements, another layer of a project based on the territorial alienation of local Indigenous populations.Footnote 94
Proof Clearer than the Noonday Sun
Johann Heinrich Lembke moved through three strikingly similar spheres of social control in the early nineteenth century: from prison in Mecklenburg to a colony in Brazil; from the colony to an army camp on the frontier; and finally, from the army back to prison.Footnote 95 He never reached the Carolina Camp in Santana do Livramento. Somewhere on the march toward the frontier between Brazil and present-day Uruguay, he deserted from the imperial ranks, finding temporary refuge in the port town of Rio Grande. There, he sought passage “to the Netherlands.”Footnote 96 And in southern Brazil’s main port, Lembke once again encountered the criminal justice system.
On the evening of April 23, 1826, between the hours of 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., someone broke into a merchant’s shop in Rio Grande, on the northern side of town. The perpetrator used “a two-inch iron rod between the two half-doors, in five different places, removing the plate where the lock’s tongue is inserted.” He also opened drawers and “several chests and boxes,” stealing silverware and a “large sum of money,” causing a financial loss of “four contos de réis” to the proprietor, Antônio de Sá Araújo.Footnote 97
During the course of the investigation, the local police encountered a suspect carrying a substantial amount of money: Johann Lembke and his 310,000 réis. Interrogated after his arrest, Lembke declared that he had been a soldier in the “German unit,” from which he had deserted, “leaving behind all the military attire that had been provided to him.” He carried the money he had brought “with him from his homeland, where he had earned it through his trade as a seafarer.” The money was originally “Dutch ducats,” but he had exchanged it for Brazil’s currency with the captain of the Dutch brig Constante.Footnote 98 Unable to return to Europe—for reasons he did not disclose—Lembke planned to head to the provincial capital, Porto Alegre. As an alien in that society, he was considered a threat to public order.
“Of ordinary stature, with a long face, brown eyes, bald, dressed in white pants and a blue cloth jacket and vest,” Lembke told the authorities he had been living “off his commissions since he deserted” when he was preventively detained on June 14, 1826. In July 1827, the police transfered him to Porto Alegre, where lawyer José Martins Rebelo finally provided legal representation. Rebelo’s petition, dated August 16, argued that Lembke had not confessed to the crime and that the evidence was insufficient to convict. Lembke had been “innocently suffering imprisonment for more than fourteen months” and deserved an immediate trial, after which he would be “freed and released, with the return of his money.”Footnote 99
Ultimately, on August 28, 1827, a municipal judge reviewed the records and rendered a decision. The magistrate found “no guilt, and hence [that] no penalty should be applied.” For the judge, the legal standards required “proof clearer than the noonday sun” to convict someone—which, in this case, did not exist. “Therefore, for the reasons the defendant alleges in his defense, I order him to be released and to go in peace,” he concluded.Footnote 100
After this last trace left in the judicial records, I have found no further evidence of Johann Heinrich Lembke in the archives, whether in southern Brazil or in Germany. Did he fulfill his wish to return to Europe, having received his money back? Or did he manage to settle in the colony of São Leopoldo, overcoming the stigma attached to those Mecklenburgers who had left prison to colonize Brazil (a fact he sought to hide by presenting himself as Prussian to the judge in Porto Alegre)?
I have one clue. In a session at the Wismar orphans’ court in late October 1843, his daughter, Charlotte, stated that she had not heard from her father since his emigration: “My father, the lace merchant Lembke, went to Brazil several years ago; during all this time, I have heard no further news of him and do not know if he is still alive.”Footnote 101
Having been deported, expelled, recruited, investigated, imprisoned, and released, the sailor, merchant, former citizen, settler, and soldier Johann Heinrich Lembke finally ceased to have his life recorded. In this case, the silences of the archive are all too revealing.
Coda
Throughout his life, Johann Heinrich Lembke inhabited a porous continuum connecting penal and regulatory institutions, including prisons, colonies, and military forces. Like hundreds of other immigrants who settled on the southern borders of the Brazilian empire, he did not fit the idealized image of the settler that the Brazilian elites envisioned—white, peaceful, moderate, and keen on agricultural work. Nevertheless, his story deserves to be told. The traces of his daily life—which Benjamin would consider “deviations”Footnote 102—can define historical trajectories. They reveal a marginal reality that speaks to the state’s uncertainties and machinations, to the gaps in normative systems, and to the multiple strategies that ordinary historical actors wielded in order to live their lives during a time of wrenching transformations.Footnote 103
Not all inhabitants of the various German territories who transferred to Rio Grande do Sul were expelled and discarded by the project that José Bonifácio and Georg Anton von Schaeffer designed and that various Luso-Brazilian authorities carried out. Some survived the colony’s structural precariousness and “the hunger that devoured [them],” as a contemporary account put it. Administrative correspondence from São Leopoldo’s early years records that many settlers, particularly women and children, lacked the most basic necessities. Some did not even possess clothing “to cover their flesh.” The situation was so dire that one bureaucrat warned: “And what will [other] nations say at the sight of such behavior? Will anyone else dare to emigrate to this empire, where so many cultivating hands are needed? And to what point of despair can these [migrant] men reach?”Footnote 104
Historians have shown that it was precisely a civil war that propelled the colony’s economy. The Farroupilha Revolt (1835–45) divided settlers between republican rebels and monarchical loyalists and generated economic development. Local merchants (vendeiros) played a pivotal role in connecting the small manufacturers and agricultural properties of São Leopoldo to the lucrative market of the capital Porto Alegre.Footnote 105 Consequently, economic inequality also increased, accompanied by numerous opportunities for political favoritism and the misappropriation of public funds.Footnote 106 As the colony expanded its territory over the years, attacks against Indigenous peoples persisted. At the same time, the colony’s population (comprising Europeans and free Brazilians, as well as enslaved people from Africa and various regions of Brazil) multiplied exponentially. New immigrants arrived in significant numbers, contributing to land fragmentation and fostering massive agricultural surplus production. The first Brazilian-born descendants of the pioneer settlers attained citizenship, participated in the country’s nineteenth-century wars, and engaged in local politics.Footnote 107
São Leopoldo served, on occasion, as a model for other parts of the empire. At other times, and whenever its inhabitants demanded greater government action, political participation, or revolted against perennial Brazilian injustices, the colony was considered a “degenerate Germany, a state within a state.”Footnote 108 This transience reveals that, both for the elites who planned the colony and for its own inhabitants, São Leopoldo was as much a promise as an “anticipation of a future”Footnote 109—whether that future was perceived as bright or not.
Read against each other, Lembke’s trajectory and São Leopoldo’s history illuminate what neither can show alone. A microhistorical analysis attentive to structural processes brings nineteenth-century Brazil into a genealogy of concepts, practices, and imperial grammars circulating simultaneously across the globe. The occupation project that Brazilian elites designed during the independence era was variable and ambiguous—but not therefore a failure. It demonstrates, rather, an ongoing dialogue with the arts of governance, updated with each new experiment, each new project, whether completed or merely imagined.
Miqueias Henrique Mugge is a social and political historian (PhD, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2016). He currently serves as Academic Research Manager at Princeton University’s Brazil LAB (United States). Mugge’s research focuses on the political economy of war, slavery, and empire-building in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on the Brazilian borderlands. He is the author, co-author, and editor of books exploring topics such as Brazilian militias, slavery, and German immigration in nineteenth-century Brazil, and he is currently finalizing a manuscript tentatively titled Imperialist: Georg Anton von Schaeffer and the Making of Modern Brazil.
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