King Dom Miguel I of Brazil - An Absolutist Brazil Wank

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Prince Pedro of Portugal was a willful young man, and his early life in Rio de Janeiro, away from the big battles happening in Europe, gave rise to a strong desire to take part in great events. When the Pernambucan Revolution came in 1817, defying the rule of this father in the Americans, the young Prince jumped to the chance to fulfil his role as a martial leader, the same way as the man he was so keen to emulate did in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte.

While his marriage to the Archduchess of Austria, daughter of the last Holy Roman Emperor, was already arranged, the ceremony by proxy having already taken place in Vienna, this didn’t prevent the young prince from convincing his indecisive father to allow him to accompany the Kingdom’s troops to Recife to crush the revolt.

A decision the old monarch would regret.

While the revolt was dutifully and swiftly crushed by the Crown’s troops, Portuguese and Brazilian alike, Prince Pedro of Portugal, the Crown Prince of the United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves, perished from a wound infection after confronting the rebels during the taking of Recife, another would-be monarch butchered by liberal iron in an already troubled epoch.

The news of the death of the heir of the Portuguese Empire created shockwaves through the whole Empire, from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon. His father, grieving the loss of his eldest son, cracked down with extreme brutality on the leaders of the revolt, executing men like Frei Caneca, Cipriano Barata and Manoel de Carvalho, among many which held liberal sympathies in the Kingdom of Brazil.

In Lisbon, while the liberal fervour was already starting to boil together with the resentment for the continuous presence of the monarch in Rio de Janeiro, the death of the Heir apparent at the hands of the republican rebels would considerable stain the constitutional movement in the European homeland.

Most important of all, the death of Pedro would make way for his younger brother, Dom Miguel, who different from his older brother, was closer to his mother Carlota Joaquina than to his father the king. Miguel would be officially declared heir of the United Kingdom soon after the death of his brother, and his marriage to the recently widowed Princess Leopoldina, who had never even meet her deceased husband, would take place a few months after her arrival in Rio de Janeiro, to respect her official mourning period.

While Dom Pedro held sympathies for liberalism and held Napoleon in great esteem, even while being an enemy of the Bragança, Dom Miguel was much more conservative in his political ideals, being an adherent of the old regime, disdainful of parliaments and liberal ideas, and a great admirer of Metternich, a position which would only by confirmed by the death of his brother at the hands of the republican dogs.

 

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The marriage between the Prince Dom Miguel and the Archduchess Leopoldina was a happy one, even if coming to be under inauspicious circumstance’s, namely the death of Miguel’s older brother. The Prince, being a very devout catholic, was loyal to his wife, which quickly became extremely celebrated in the Rio de Janeiro court for her intellectual persona. Just a year after the marriage, in 1818, the first son of the couple would be born, named in homage to his father, the little prince who would later be known as Miguel II of Brazil.

Nonetheless, the political situation was becoming increasingly unstable for the Braganças.

The elevation of Brazil to an entity on the same level as Portugal, with the creation of the United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves in 1815, greatly infatuated the Brazilian elites with the Crown, but angered the Portuguese to an extreme degree, now reduced to a de facto colony of their previous colony, with the continuous presence of the Court in Rio de Janeiro, unjustified in their eyes now that the Napoleonic threat was definitely over.

In Rio, King John VI faced division inside the family. Fearful of the proximity between his heir Miguel and the Queen Carlota Joaquina, the monarch sidelined the prince from the reigns of government, a thing which only served to enrage his already spiteful wife even more.

The last drop came in 1820, when a liberal revolution started in Portugal. While initially the rebels, emanating from Porto, hoped to achieve control of the homeland without significative bloodshed, their hopes were frustrated when Lisbon, the old capital, resisted the rebels and sided with the King, having being previously reinforced with more loyal troops following King John’s paranoia after his firstborn death at the hand of the republicans.

Lisbon resisted the advance of the rebels for weeks in a siege, before being subdued while it’s reinforcements were only being mustered in Rio de Janeiro. When dust had settled, Portugal formed a government controlled by the Cortes, a liberal body formed by local Portuguese elections. Enraged by the acts of violence perpetrated by the Crown against it’s Portuguese subjects and humiliated by the status of Rio de Janeiro, the first act of the Cortes was to demand the immediate return of the King to Lisbon, with the threat of taking the Crown away from him and crowning another native noble if he failed to comply.

Fearful of coming back to Portugal himself and becoming a prisoner of the Cortes and their planned liberal constitution, King John VI conspired to send his heir Dom Miguel to the metropole, a path which was immediately rejected by the Queen and by the Prince. At the same time, the Brazilian population and elites protested against the Cortes and pressured the monarch to stay in Brazil, dreading the recolonization of Brazil by this new liberal Portuguese government.

When it looked like Dom João had finally taken the decision to go back to his homeland and subject himself to the will of the Cortes to preserve the unity of the Empire while leaving Prince Miguel in Brazil as his Regent, his health deteriorated and he fell ill. A few weeks later, the old monarch perished in the São Cristovão Palace in Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by doctors and his entourage of slaves and servants.

While many were quick to whisper that the Queen or even the Prince had a part in his death, no proof of wrongdoing existed, and those that dared to speak this loud were quickly dealt with. Nonetheless, and autopsy of the body of the King, more than a century after his death, revealed that the likely cause of death was arsenic poisoning.

After King John IV passing, his son Dom Miguel, now the legitimate King Miguel I of the United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves, was placed into the same impossible situation as his father, even worse, for he was a young man with scarce political experience. Going to Portugal would be akin to becoming a hostage of the Cortes, like King Louis XVI was before his beheading.

After unfruitful negotiations, where Infanta Isabel Maria, the King’s older sister, was sent to Portugal to negotiate his return to Lisbon with the condition of no constitution being imposed, only to be taken as an effective prisoner of the liberals, the King settled on an aggressive course. Defying the will of the Cortes, Miguel arranged his acclamation in Rio de Janeiro, assuming de jure the position of sovereign of the whole Empire, a proposition which was recognized by most colonial dependencies in Africa and Asia, while formally condemning the Cortes as a treacherous and criminal institution which held no legal and legitimate authority.

The war which would result of this, would change the destiny of Brazil and Portugal forever.

 

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With the continuous presence of the Court in Rio de Janeiro, most Portuguese military garrisons in Brazil chose to side with the King over the Cortes without bloodshed, with some exceptions, like the Montevideo garrison, were General Lecor had to seize Álvaro da Costa and take control of the city in a local coup. While some native Brazilian agitation existed, the crisis didn’t develop into a Brazilian versus Portuguese scenario outright, but in a Portuguese absolutist and Brazilian vs Portuguese constitutionalist one.

In Portugal, the metropole suffered due to the absence of the country’s monetary reserves, which had been transported to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Worse, the best part of the fleet, as well as all colonial possessions, also chose to obey the power of the King rather than the writ of the Cortes. To achieve a little bit of legitimacy, the Liberal government coerced the King’s older sister, Isabel Maria, to take the post of Regent for her nephew, the son of the King and Queen Leopoldina, while he was still in Rio de Janeiro, now recognized by it as the legitimate ruler of the Portuguese Empire, as his father had legally forfeited his rights after his act of treason against the body.

Nonetheless, after mustering the Divisão Auxiliadora in Rio de Janeiro, together with pieces of other Portuguese military garrisons as well as Brazilian volunteers from over all Brazil, the King managed to create a well-equipped force of roughly five thousand men, the “Exército da Reconquista”, which was supposed to take Portugal back from the heathens like the Crusaders of old did.

But when the mighty fleet of the King stopped to resupply in the loyalist Azores, they were confronted by a frenetic surprise attack from the liberal armada. In special, a British Mercenary named Thomas Cochrane, made captain of a ship of the line in the constitutional fleet, managed to sink and capture many loyalist ships.

While the bulk of the King’s Armada managed to sail back to Rio de Janeiro, confidence in an easy victory was tarnished, and the Constitutional side managed to achieve control of the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. The war then turned into a sluggish conflict of maritime raids and skirmishes along the Atlantic, either side refusing to engage in a decisive battle.

To solve this, and under the secret instructions of her older brother, Isabel Maria, the nominal head of the constitutionalist side, sent secret letters to King Louis XVIII of France, asking for French intervention to stop the tide of Jacobinism in Portugal and to turn it back to it’s rightful King by the Grace of God. But before Paris could answer with force, her conspiracy was discovered by the de facto leaders of the liberal government in Lisbon, which tried to seize her to no avail while she escaped to Madrid, where the other sister of King Miguel, Maria Isabel, was married to King Ferdinand VII of Spain.

As a retaliation for the Infanta’s conspiracy, the Lisbon government started a reign of terror against those who had Loyalist sympathies, and in a moment of foolishness, a Portuguese Republic was declared, to the anguish of great powers of the Congress of Vienna, who dreaded the return of the revolutionary fervour.

Spain itself had suffered it’s own liberal constitutional revolution in 1820, when the Tenente-Coronel Rafael de Riego, which was supposed to lead the reconquest of Spanish America, turned his guns to Madrid, taking the homeland and putting Spain under a constitutional monarchy with King Ferdinand VII, a difficult cohabitation.

But when the Portuguese Republic was declared in 1823, both the King of Spain and the leader of the Spanish Cortes smelled an opportunity to fulfil an old Spanish aspiration, to take the Portuguese throne for itself, a much closer endeavour than the lengthy reconquest of the Spanish America.

Mustering an army before the other great powers could react, Madrid invaded Portugal, with the help of the more moderate Portuguese liberals, taking Lisbon and placing Queen Maria Isabel of Spain, a Braganza by birth, as the Queen of Portugal under a Constitutional monarchy. While the prospects of a Queen de facto controlled by the Spanish Crown were not good in the books of any faction in Lisbon, it was considered to be preferable to the inevitable white terror that would come should King Miguel managed to retake the old homeland.

At the same time, the elevation of his wife to the throne of Portugal endeared King Ferdinand VII of Spain with his own liberal government, preventing Paris from intervening in the Iberian Peninsula now that the worst excesses of the liberal movements were controlled by it’s own moderate counterparts.

The war between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro entered into a new phase of constitutional supremacy, with the covert help of the Spanish Navy, hoping to use Brazil as a springboard to retake other Spanish possessions in South America. In 1824, a small fleet commanded by Thomas Cochrane managed to take Luanda by surprise, sacking the African city with extreme brutality and taking it’s riches as payment.

Rio de Janeiro, while initially in the advantage, was now becoming increasingly outclassed by the constitutional navy, specially now that Madrid’s support was turning the tide of the war decisively. With the loss of Luanda, as well as the rest of Angola, the easy connection between Rio and it’s African and Asian colonies was lost.

While another Constitutional Fleet was already sailing towards Mozambique, the British started to pressure the two governments, Lisbon and Rio, to stop hostilities and to sign a treaty, fearful that the continuation of the war would see Portuguese America reconquered with Spanish help.

In London, representatives of the two sides tried to negotiate a peace, but neither side would concede on the most important matter: who should sit on the Portuguese throne. At the end of the negotiation, it was merely established that hostilities would cease and commerce would be re-established between European and American Portugal. The Asiatic Portuguese possessions were supposed to be kept under the power of Rio de Janeiro, but the taking of Mozambique by Lisbon made this proposition null and void, as Macau and East Timor quickly accepted the authority of the Cortes to allow their continuous access to the European market, while the British took Goa by force and placed it under it’s “temporary tutelage”.

The Portuguese Empire was effectively partitioned between two Portuguese monarchs, King Miguel I in Rio de Janeiro, ruling over all of Brazil, as well as his older sister Maria Isabel, ruling as a constitutional monarch in Lisbon under the auspices of her husband and the Cortes, controlling the remaining Portuguese Empire. Both monarchs would go to their graves claiming the whole Empire as theirs.

While this was never intended by King Miguel, this is considered by historians as the moment when Brazil de facto achieved it's liberty from the metropole, even if in a convoluted way, in one of the most counterintuitive liberation process of all American history.

One could say that Brazil lost the war, but won it's independence, and Portugal won the war, but lost it's empire.

 

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The result of the Portuguese Civil War shocked King Miguel I, who not only had the initial advantage, but truly believed that God would clear the path for his cause.

Nonetheless, far from being someone who would give up his birthright at the first setback, the King decided to play the long game, strengthening his American base with the hopes of one day recovering control over his ancestral homeland. This wasn’t such a hassle to begin with, considering the monarch lived in Brazil since he was seven years old, and was already arguably as much a Brazilian as a Portuguese.

With Portugal under the rule of the Cortes and his older sister, a Bragança by birth but a foreign Queen by circumstances, Brazil became, in many ways, and specially among those European Portuguese who held the deepest loyalties towards the King and the Church, the true seat of the Lusitan Nation, at least in a temporary capacity. Motivated by promises of land and by their distaste for the Spanish influence in Lisbon, thousands of Portuguese, low class and high class, would make the trip to the New World to settle in the southern part of Brazil.

In special, after the failed insurrection by revolutionaries in Cisplatine in 1825, quelled quickly by General Lecor, reinforced by soldiers returning from the defeated “Exército da Reconquista”, Rio de Janeiro took the properties of many Cisplatine landowners which were suspected of hoarding sympathy for the rebels and for Buenos Aires, granting those lands for the Portuguese exiles and for the soldiers who fought in the King’s campaigns, strengthening Rio de Janeiro’s grip over the Banda Oriental of the La Plata River. Charque, a type of dried meat, was the main produce in this area, and the King quickly acted to give the São Pedro and Cisplatine frontier yeoman and big landowners the protection needed from the Argentinian dried meat by means of heavy tariffs, which angered those coffee and sugar landowners more up north, which counted on the low price of said dried meat to fed their slaves.

This was only one of the reasons which started the internal political conflict between the King and the big slaveowners, but it was far from the most important.

After the London Armistice between Lisbon and Rio, no clear international consensus was established on who was the legitimate King of the United Kingdom, but Lisbon, being a European capital and with connections to Madrid, held the advantage here. Miguel, wanting to overcome the odds, considering that the condemnation of the Slave Trade was a consensus even among the most conservative nations of the Congress of Vienna, decreed in 1826 an immediate end to the transatlantic slave trade in Brazil, and mobilized the army and the navy to make this decision real. More obscure reasons existed for this decision, like the desire to spite his older sister by denying Lisbon the revenues from the sell of slaves in Angola, a thing he hoped would help undermine her rule, but also the British pressure and the perceived opportunity of seizing the fortune and properties of the rich Brazilian citizens which failed to comply with the law, considering no business made more noveau rich than the slave trade.

This decision antagonized the slaveowner class to an extreme decree, and liberal agitation started to grow in the shadows, with a special participation of the Masonry, which even if forbidden by the State, was becoming more popular day by day among the Brazilian elites.

Even if an advisory Council of State existed, with representatives from all provinces, the rule of the King was guaranteed by the support of three institutions: the navy, the army and the church, the last one holding a special role inside the conservative order espoused by King Miguel, in contrast to Brazil’s neighbours on all sides, Republics which had already mostly settled into a Constitutional order. These differences helped create a siege mentally in the Court, which prompted King Miguel to act towards the strengthening of the material capabilities of the Kingdom. In special, and allegedly as a trade back for the abolishment of the slave trade, but also as vengeance for the taking of Goa, Miguel repealed all the tariff exemptions with protected British goods since 1808, helping to foster the creation of early manufactures in Rio de Janeiro and other coastal cities, a thing which greatly ingratiated the King with the commercial and urban aspects of Brazil, and also generated revenue for the continue maintenance of the standing army and navy, a sword to the throat of the separatist elites the likes of which tried the revolution which killed his older brother.

In the Court, the charisma of Queen Leopoldina was only challenged by the repellence of Queen Dowager Carlota Joaquina, which despise was a consensus among the many factions which searched for the King’s favour. Under the advices of his wife, King Miguel arranged a soft exile for his dear mother, which was sent to Montevideo of all places, a growing town of 30k inhabitants, where she would happily and scandalously entertain many gentlemen of Platine origin until her death in 1835, and in special those of unitarian and monarchist links in Buenos Aires.

The Prince, being raised by the Queen, which different from the King, wasn’t so hopeful on the prospects of ever coming back to Europe now that the grip of Madrid grew ever stronger over little Portugal, was taught from birth to appreciate the growing Brazilian heritage, which different from Spanish America, where violent clashes gave birth to a militant identity, was growing slowly and with the acceptance of those who had been born in the European homeland.

 

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The prohibition of the slave trade in 1826 greatly turned the planter class against the Crown, a situation which would soon spiral out of control.

When Prince Pedro died back in 1817, this forced King João VI to persecute liberal sympathizers not only in the elites and bureaucracy but also in the military, considering many soldiers were among those who rebelled in Pernambuco. When King Miguel came to the throne after his father’s death in 1821, he continued to pursue his father policy of extreme ideological purity among army officers, a thing which only grew increasingly difficult after his defeat at the Portuguese Civil War in 1825.

Now, Brazil was essentially an independent nation in all but name, surrounded by constitutional republics which loathed the absolutist model espoused by the Rio’s court. Not only that, but the autonomist angles of the Brazilian planter class, eager to achieve it’s particularist aspirations, and fuelled by the ideological teachings of the enlightenment and liberalism, were starting to pressure the central government for a political reform, to no peaceful avail.

Following the end of the slave trade, enforced by the army and the navy, the Brazilian state cracked down hard on those planters and traders who tried to continue bringing slaves from Africa. A minor offence was enough to take away a whole landowner family’s fortune amidst fines, a policy which was pursued by the Crown with the objective of accommodating all the waves of exiles from Portugal, as well veteran soldiers which were promised good lands and bonuses in return for their loyal service for the King.

Even worse, wanting to profit on the increasing inter-province slave commerce, which was starting to see the northeast sugar slaves leak to the coffee plantations on São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro introduced heavy taxes on the internal slave trade. As a result, northeast landowners were forced to keep more of their non-productive slaves instead of selling them to the Paulista Market, a distortion which turned many fortunes to ruin.

In 1831, these contradictions exploded in the Ecuador Republic, following false rumours that the King was getting ready to abolish slavery. A local revolution, led by the slaveowner class, it achieved control over vast swathes of Northeastern Brazil, briefly taking the cities of Natal and Recife. Said revolt was overwhelmed at the coast by an army led by Lieutenant-Colonel Bento Gonçalves, an officer from São Pedro province, which was promoted for his loyalty and competence during the Civil War and during the fight against the Cisplatine rebels. In 1832, Bento Gonçalves took the city of Recife, which prompted King Miguel to grant him the title of Duke of Recife, remembering the circumstances where his older brother died.

Nonetheless, the fight continued viciously in the region, turning into a high-level insurgency which lasted many years. Many northeastern garrisons, callous over the favouritism showed towards Portuguese-born officers, turned against the Crown and sided with a Republic. At the same time, even if despised by the regular troops, quilombos and groups of revolted slaves sided with the Crown over their masters and regions, a manpower source which the King was increasingly open to entertain the more the revolt lasted.

In Rio de Janeiro, the Ecuador Revolt turned the Court to chaos. While Brazil escaped from the genocidal anger against European born that plagued the other Latin American nations during their wars of independence, tension between the Portuguese and the Brazilians started to grow. Resentment towards the lavish Rio de Janeiro court grew even among the court city dwellers, and the local Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo elites were conspiring to fulfil their liberal aspirations. With most of the army gone to quell the stubborn northeast revolt, as well as guarding strategic places like Montevideo, the Rio de Janeiro garrison was extremely reduced in scope.

Taking notice of this, a clique of liberal elites led by the Andrada Brothers initiated a coup attempt against King Miguel. Bribing and convincing the local military officers, many of them Brazilian born and coming from the slaveowner elite, they scheduled to launch the coup in December of 1833, just after the army led by Luis Alves de Lima e Silva departed for Recife with the latest soldiers for the meat grinder.

Still, their plans had to be advanced ahead of time due to a big riot against the Portuguese born which was unleashed in November after a Portuguese noble tried to whip the son of a wealthy Brazilian landowner in a bar at the capital. The bar fight turned into a big battle in the streets of Rio, and the conspirers decided to launch the coup during this auspicious moment.

The King was warned just in time to escape with his family to Niterói, where the loyal troops led by young officer Lima e Silva were mustering to depart. In Rio de Janeiro, the rioters and the revolted troops, led by José Bonifácio de Andrada, took control of the capital, sacking the Court, killing Portuguese indiscriminately and declaring the birth of the Brazilian Republic, which, they said, was the real moment of independence for the Brazilian Nation.

While Bonifácio, like many others, was in favor of the abolition of slavery, the continuous reactionary actions of the Crown, as well as it’s unwillingness to reform, led him side with the slaveowners in a call to dislodge the monarchy from Brazil, the only faction which had enough power to confront the monarch. It was supposedly his intention to lead the Brazilian Republic towards a peaceful abolitionist path after Miguel was deposed, but we will never know the true degree of viability of his plans.

The still-born Brazilian Republic of 1833 lasted less than a week. Supported by loyal troops and ships in Niteroi, King Miguel and Lima e Silva marched to Rio de Janeiro and defeated the republican army just north of the city, in the Battle of Rio de Janeiro, thanks to the support of the navy, which unleashed it’s cannon fire against the revolters. The Andrada Brothers, as well as the military and political leaders behind the coup, were unceremoniously shoot by firing squad close to the city centre.

The next months were sparred taking control over the situation in the core regions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where many aristocrats and officers were implicated in the conspiracy, and where the troops led by Lima e Silva, now promoted to colonel and granted the title of Count of Niterói, were kept to maintain the peace, specially in São Paulo, which didn’t outright revolt, but experienced serious agitation, being the home province of the Andrada brothers and their clique.

As a result, the campaign led by Bento Gonçalves, the Duke of Recife, in the Northeast became even more manpower starved, which prompted the general to form the Black Lancers battalions to combat the planter rebellion. To fill the battalions, the King bestowed upon the Duke the authority to grant the liberty to any able-bodied slave who joined arms with the loyalist army, even if against the will of his owner, a measure which the now General contained to those landowners of suspicious loyalty.

In 1835, after four years of brutal fight in the Northeast, the Ecuador Republic was finally quelled, and the Treaty of Olinda was signed between the Rio government and the rebels, granting political amnesty for those who surrendered peacefully. The northeastern loyalist politician Pedro de Araújo Lima, a local Pernambucan, managed to dissuade the King from completely partitioning the province and killing all the leaders, instead going for a more moderate approach by merely taking the lands and properties of the revolted, a decision which allowed a peaceful end for the war and granted the statesman a lot of political capital both in the Court and in the Northeast, later being granted the title of Marquess of Olinda. The institution of captivity was greatly weakened by the continuous years of war in the Sugar producing region, which had seen many slaves freed, by themselves or by the hands of the manpower starved Duke of Recife.

Nonetheless, the greatest question still required a solution. The regional elites had revolted against Rio de Janeiro not only out of republican and constitutional aspirations, but due to the desire to protect their economic prerogatives and their way of life. As a punishment for this, and following the British example in 1833, the Golden Law of 1835 created a plan for the gradual abolishment of slavery in all Brazil. Instead of taking immediate effect, like the Banishment of the Slave Trade, the Law stipulated that the slavery would end in 1845, when the government would compensate the slaveowners. The legislation also stipulated that any slaveowner which took part or was suspected to have taken part in seditious activities was open to have their compensation cancelled. A later article was added, adding the cancellation even if a second degree relative of the slaveowner was the suspected seditious one, creating further reasons to not engage or incentivize acts against the Crown even among the inner family. The carrot and the stick approach.

The end of the greatest slave society in the Western Hemisphere was near.