When the Brazilians, particularly the prospectors and placerminers of Minas Gerais, heard that the English-speaking colonists in North America had thrown off the European yoke, they were moved to do likewise.
The earliest record I know of a political relationship between Brazil and English-speaking America is in Jefferson’s report to John Jay when Jay was handling foreign affairs for the Continental Congress, of a conversation he had at Nîmes with a Brazilian medical student. It was in the spring of 1787. Jefferson was Minister to France. He had managed to break away from the gray drizzle of Paris for a breath of sunlight in the Midi. The Brazilian was named José Joaquim de Mayo. He seems to have been a member of a group in Rio affiliated with Tiradentes and his friends in the province of Minas Gerais. These later became known as the Inconfidentes, those disloyal to the King. De Mayo was asking whether the Brazilians could get help from North America if they set up an independent republic.
Jefferson had to tell him that the Confederated States had only been independent for five years, and that they were much too busy with domestic problems — it was only in the coming summer that the forty odd delegates were to shut themselves up in Philadelphia to write the constitution which cemented the Union — to engage in military adventures; and that, besides, their commercial relations with Portugal were profitable and cordial.
But liberty was still his passion. Jefferson couldn’t help adding that “a successful revolution in Brasil could not be uninteresting to us. that prospects of lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to their aid, and purer motives our officers, among whom there are many excellent”; so he reported to Jay. Always the teacher, Jefferson went on to give the young Brazilian a little lesson in civil liberties. He explained that “our citizens being free to leave their own country individually without consent of their governments, are equally free to go to any other.”
Reading over the scanty record of this meeting in the drapery-hung parlor of some stuffy French inn among the Roman ruins of Nîmes, you got the feeling that Jefferson and De Mayo had no need to waste time defining their terms. In spite of their bad French they understood each other. The libertarians of the eighteenth century spoke an international language.
The revolutionary movement of the Inconfidentes was crushed. A few years later Brazil attained independence in a quite different way from any other of the American nations.
Instead of being an exploited colony Brazil suddenly found itself the head and front of the Portuguese empire. This was in 1807. Although the British had destroyed French and Spanish seapower at Trafalgar, Napoleon’s armies were sweeping Europe. In Portugal local republicans were greeting them with cheers. When the French advanced on Lisbon the ruling Bragança embarked his whole administration on a fleet said to have been of a thousand sail, and, under the protection of a British squadron, took off for Brazil.
For sixteen years he reigned in Rio as John VI of the Kingdoms of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve. Brazil developed mightily. The ports were opened to world commerce. European immigrants came in. A university was established. Printing presses were set up. Exiled French academicians started a school of fine arts. British soldiers and sailors trained the armed services. European investors set up industries. Rio took on a cosmopolitan cast it has never lost. Exports of sugar and forest products soared. Cattleraising flourished. The ranchers and the slaveowning sugar planters ran the country.
When the Braganças were restored to the Portuguese throne after Napoleon’s abdication the Brazilians refused to go back to a colonial status. They set up John VI’s son Dom Pedro I as constitutional emperor of an independent Brazil. When he failed to suit them, they sent him packing off to Portugal, and chose his son Dom Pedro II, still a small boy, to succeed him.
Dom Pedro II grew up to be an extraordinarily able ruler. He had the statesman’s knack. Personally an unassuming man of scholarly tastes, he dedicated his life to developing responsible parliamentary government on the English model. The fifty years of his administration consolidated the Portuguese-speaking settlements spread over such an enormous terrain into a unified nation. It was largely due to Dom Pedro’s foresight and moderation that while Spanish America split up after independence into turbulent and warring regimes, Portuguese America enjoyed comparative internal peace. When he was forced to abdicate in 1889 in favor of a federal republic, he went into exile leaving behind him among his beloved Brazilians habits of compromise and moderation in political affairs quite alien to the violence of the Spanish tradition. He was truly the father of his country.
The transition from monarchy to republic took place virtually without bloodshed. Though the Brazilian republic has suffered its share since then of the uprisings and pronunciamentos and military dictatorships that have until recent years been the rule in Latin America, the Brazilians have retained a respect for the legal way of doing things that seems more English than Mediterranean. Transitions from one regime to the other have tended to be by compromise instead of by violence. Brazil is a country of gusty oratory, but the bark of the politicians has usually proved worse than their bite.
There was an amusing instance of typically Brazilian moderation several years ago during Secretary of State Dulles’ visit to Rio. The Communists controlled the national students’ organization. Since hatred of the United States is their gospel, the leaders breathed fire and brimstone in an effort to stir up disagreeable incidents. Meanwhile the government and the more moderate factions among university students worked quietly to have everything smooth and rosy. The headquarters of the Communist students’ organization turned out to be on the one road in from the airport. Never would they allow warmonger Dulles to pass their headquarters, they kept proclaiming. When the fateful day came Mr. Dulles was driven without incident past a building draped in black. The Communist students had moved their headquarters to a back street.
Along with this knack for political moderation, Brazil offers a picture of racial tolerance rather unusual in the world. This too is part of the Portuguese inheritance. Although slavery was not abolished there until the 1870s, the history of the relationship between master and slave has been different than among the English-speaking peoples.
The Portuguese were a mixed lot to begin with. Their long intercourse with the Moslems of North Africa resulted in a certain tolerance of polygamy at variance with their Christian faith. During their great expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Portuguese adventurers and navigators established footholds not only in Brazil but on both coasts of Africa, in Abyssinia and Persia and India and China and as far east as Japan, where it was Portuguese priests who introduced the Christian religion.
Though their appetite for expansion was enormous their numbers were few. Portugal was months and years of slow sailing away from the outposts of empire. They picked up their wives where they could. Indeed the Portuguese adventurers seem to have taken a naïve pride in the acquisition of the greatest possible number of wives and concubines from among the local populations. The Brazilian settlers particularly were family men with a vengeance. Even today it is not uncommon to find a Brazilian supporting several families. Bastards of various hues were considered members of the family.
The Portuguese family was patriarchal in the Biblical sense. In Brazil, as in the Old Testament, the patriarch had power of life and death over every member of the family group. At the same time he was responsible for their welfare. When the scarcity of hands, in the homeland as well as in the colonies, was remedied by the importation of Negro slaves, slaves were considered part of the family, as they are in Arabia today. The master’s mulatto children enjoyed a certain status. Half-breeds, whether of Indian or Negro blood, tended to be drawn into the dominant culture, instead of being discarded into an outcast class as they were in English-speaking America. The social results of this difference in attitude have been tremendous.