Tiradentes (Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier), one of the leaders of the 1789 republican uprising in Brazil, faces the authorities as they come to arrest him. Attracted by the ideals they associated with the constitution of the United States, Tiradentes and his co-conspirators also rejected having their town of Ouro Preto pay inflated taxes far in excess of the profits local mines were producing. Acervo do Museu Julio de Castilhos
people of all classes and emancipate Black and mulatto slaves born on the continent.9
The Inconfidencia Mineira Conspiracy differed from the American Revolution since few of its activists engaged in local self-governing assemblies and few, if any miners and artisans, let alone mulattos or freed slaves, were directly involved. The Tailors' Conspiracy (Conjuragao dos Alfaiates) that occurred in the northeastern port city of Salvador in 1798 was, however, led by mulattos such as the tailor Joao de Deus do Nascimento. The plantations surrounding Salvador produced the sugar, indigo, and cotton, which, unlike the mines, were increasingly prosperous at the end of the eighteenth century.
One day in mid-August 1798, twelve posters calling for the creation of a republic mysteriously appeared on church walls. The open call to arms of approximately 200 alleged conspirators was designed to turn the streets into centers of mobilization. The ten percent of the population who could read would presumably talk to those who were illiterate in order to win their support. The posters promised equality of all people, pay raises for those serving in the military and militias, free trade, and price reduction on staple products such as meat and manioc.10 The Tailor's Conspiracy engaged at least a few women, low-ranking soldiers, artisans, a school teacher, local intellectuals who, though poor, owned over one hundred books, and mulatto tailors like Joao de Deus do Nascimento. And, in a city where only one-third of the population was white, the group promised to free all slaves.
A general meeting on August 25, 1798, in the Dique Field just outside Bahia attracted only fourteen of the approximately 200 thought to be actively involved in planning the uprising. The authorities moved in quickly and arrested those they marked as leaders. The degree of repression imposed on alleged conspirators ranged from incarceration, whippings, and abandonment off the coast of Africa to hangings after which the bodies were drawn and quartered. The swift repression seems to demonstrate the depth of fear over the uprising of the largely Black and mulatto population.11
The existence of slavery in so many of the countries that underwent democratic revolutions raises perennial questions about the limits of democratic commitment in the age of democratic revolutions. While Thomas Jefferson accepted the existence of slavery in his version of democracy, the late eighteenth-century democratic movements in Brazil were made up of mulatto and Black freedmen and slaves and attempted, as in the Mineira Conspiracy, to make provision for freeing slaves born in Brazil.
Other slaves and freedmen and women of color were able to organize democratically in Brazil through associations connected with the Catholic Church. Throughout Minas Gerais, but especially in Ouro Preto, the wealthy invested in church building and decoration, and the poor and middling groups, including slave and free blacks and mulattos, formed benefit societies tied to different religious groups. These societies not only accumulated resources equivalent to life-insurance policies to cover funerals for themselves and their families, but also served as discussion and pressure groups to help slaves and freedmen and women express their wishes. In Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, the architect and sculptor known as Aleijadinho became head of the confraternity of mulattos dedicated to promoting the worship of St. Joseph (Sao Jose), who, as a carpenter, was sometimes adopted as the patron saint of workers. Particular madonnas and saints such as the Virgin of the Rosary and the only Black female saint, St. Ephigenia of the Cross, for whose cult Aleijadinho constructed a chapel, were also thought to be especially attentive to the needs of Blacks and mulattos.12
Independent groups of citizens mobilized in the American, French, and Brazilian democratic movements, sometimes working through preexisting societies such as the Free Masons. In France, democratic revolutionaries formed political clubs and local legislative committees that sometimes included women, and in Brazil, similar groups were run by or included Blacks and mulattos. They gathered together and tried to create the embryos of future popular democratic governments. In the course of their struggles, American colonists created a democratic republic that reinvigorated existing charters, laws, and institutions and created new ones. Yet, as became clear in the Federalist Papers, especially in the works by James Madison, the American patriotic leaders were perennially afraid of the masses they associated with mob violence. As Madison expressed in Federalist Paper No. 10, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."13 Underscoring this same preoccupation with a suspicion of majority rule, he wrote in Federalist Paper No. 48, "One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one."14 And the white men who succeeded in creating an independent country, remembered neither its women nor its slaves.
In France, artisans and workers, including women, helped launch the revolution through political organization and perpetual conversation. In their local assemblies based in their own neighborhoods, they created loose organizations with tight bonds. That is, they transformed their clubs, workshops, and taverns into centers of debate and legislation, converting themselves into citizens of popular democracies. They advanced their ideas through public debate with their neighbors and political allies, but they could not consistently maintain local democratic assemblies and clubs.
In Brazil, with the courts closed to all but the elite, groups like the religious brother- and sisterhoods contributed to providing people with an organizational structure to fight for democratic changes. Not yet having even those local institutions or a relatively free press that would enable them to relay their views in a peaceful fashion to fellow citizens or those in charge of the national government, those committed to social change in eighteenth-century Brazil were forced to express themselves almost exclusively through attempted uprisings. But, despite the revolutionary violence of the eighteenth century, local citizens generated independent institutions that shaped all subsequent struggles for democracy.