The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821 Author(s): F. W. O.

Morton Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Nov., 1975), pp. 249-269 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/156161 . Accessed: 28/05/2012 17:00
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1. Lat. Amer. Stud. 7,

2, 249-269 Printed in Great Britain

249

The Military and Society in Bahia, I800-i82I

In recent years, the military institutions of societies both past and present have become an increasingly active field of study and research. Brazil, where the professional military play so commanding a role in the national life today, has received a substantial share of attention. But studies on the Brazilian, military have hitherto been principally concerned with the period since the fall of the Empire (1889). This is understandable.Since the ' questao militar ' took shape in the aftermath of the Paraguayan War (I865-I870), the professional military have always been a major force in Brazilian politics and often a decisive one. But the history of the military in Brazil is very much longer. Regular troops arrived with the first governor-general in I549, and the famous regulamento of that year made provision for the arming and drilling of the colonists.1 By the end of the colonial period, Brazil's major captaincies possessed a surprisingly elaborate military organization, which involved almost all groups in the free population, and which was the outcome of two-and-ahalf centuries of royal effort to ensure the safety, external and internal, of Portugal's most valuable possession. It is the object of this article to examine that organization in relation to the society of the captaincy of Bahia in the last two decades before Independence. This seems worthwhile on several counts. Bahia was one of the most important regions of colonial Brazil, and its wealth and vulnerability to attack had made necessary a large military establishment. The professional military numbered perhaps i per cent of the whole free population and in time of peace their pay alone absorbed approximately a third of the captaincy's revenue.2
1 Luis Monteiro da Costa, Na Bahia Colonial: Apontamnentos para Historia Militar da Cadade do Salvador (Salvador, n/d) p. 6. 2 The regulars totalled perhaps 2,000 all ranks in I8oo; the free population is unlikely to have exceeded 200,000 in that year. See the letter of Marechal-de-CampoCorrea de Mello to Governor D. Fernando Jose de Portugal of 14 May, 800oin the Secao dos Manuscriptos of the BibliotecaNacional do Rio de Janeiro (hereinaftercited as BN/SM) I, 31, 30, 9I. This compares with 6,150 regulars in all of far more populous New Spain in the same year. Lyle McAllister, The " Fuero Militar " in New Spain (Gainesville, Florida, 1957), p. 98. By i818, the Bahian regularshad a paper strength of 3,138.

250 F. W. 0. Morton

The part-time military units included the bulk of the free adult male population. This comprehensiveness alone, rivalled only by the Church among the institutions of the day, suggests that the place of the military in society deserves investigation. Second, a study of the military might be expected to shed light on two recurring themes of colonial Brazilian history: the imposition of institutions formed in Europe on a widely different society, and the division of power within those institutions between the Portuguese Crown and the local elites. Third, Bahia, like severalother parts of Brazil, experienced a series of insurrectionsin the years immediately after Independence in which both the professionaland the part-timemilitary played leading roles. Since the participants in these insurrections had in many, perhaps most, cases served before Independence as well, a study of the military in the earlier period should go some way to elucidate the causes and nature of these insurrections. Last, the considerable volume of documentation preserved in the Public Archive of Bahia, from the years I800-I82I, in particular the complete registers of military patents, makes it possible to examine the military in more detail than in earlier periods. The most fundamental aspect of the military structurewas its division into paid, full-time regulars - the 'first line' or tropa paga - and part-time units, called either militia (the 'second line') or ordenanfas (the 'third line '), unpaid except for certain regular officers seconded to the militia for training purposes. Both professionals and militia were formally part of the royal army;3 but the differences between them in background, function, and relation to the larger society were naturally considerable. The Professional Military: The Officers In I8oo the tropa paga of Bahia consisted of two regiments of infantry and one of artillery, as well as some small detachments and specialized units. Despite the size of the captaincy and the poor state of its roads, no effective cavalry force was formed before I8Io. Almost entirely stationed in the capital, Salvador, the professionals were essentially a garrison intended to protect the city and its hinterland from invasion by a European state. All the rank-and-fileand the bulk of the officers were recruited in Bahia itself. The statement of Sr. Caio Prado Junior that the tropa paga of the colonial era' was almost always composed of Portuguese regiments which kept even their names of origin' presumably refers to the stationing of three such regiments in Rio in 1789; 4 it was the reverse of the truth in Bahia where, in
3 4

See the petition of the Bahian militia colonels for recognition of their equality with the
regular colonels in 1769 in BN/SM II, 33, 29, 48.

Caio Prado Junior, Formacao do Brasil Contempordneo(Ioth ed., Rio de Janeiro, 1970) p.
310.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

25I

contrast not only to Rio but to the situation in the Spanish Empire as well, no European units were posted before 18i8. Professor C. R. Boxer has written of '... the extreme reluctance of Brazilians of all classes to enlist in the regular army,' but this must refer only to the rank-and-file; the supply of officers never failed.5 Each regiment, in addition to its complement of thirty-six officers, had a penumbra of supernumerary (agregado), honorary (graduado) and retired (reformado) officers. There were still other nominally members of the General Staff at Lisbon (the Primeiro Plano da Corte) and unattached to any unit at Bahia. At times, there may have been one officer for every twelve other ranks, a high ratio, although one which was to be exceeded in some years after Independence.6 This popularity of service as an officer was not due to the favourable material conditions it offered. Admiral Lord Cochrane, a man whose mind ran much on money, at the end of the period observed that the Portuguese service was notoriously the worst-paid in the world, and he appears to have been thinking of the rather better-paid Navy.' Certainly, it must have been difficult for a lieutenant to maintain his status as a gentleman, including supplying his own housing, on ?2.Io.o a month (values of i800), a rate of pay which had remained unchanged since at least I759, although prices had risen from I790 on.8 It is difficult not to suppose that many junior officers had some private means. Many of them doubtless took advantage of their privilege of living out of the barracksto remain with their families, in some cases even after marriage. Officer rank nonetheless had much to offer. It gave the holder social status, for a royal patent conferrednobility on its grantee, a somewhat diluted honour in the Portuguese Empire, but one which entitled its possessor to wear a sword and ride a horse. It carried privileges, most notably that of the foro militar, the right to be tried by other officers in the separate military courts. Perhaps most important, it was one of the very few opportunities Bahian society offered for rising in the world and founding a family without resorting to trade and thereby forfeiting (in most cases) noble status. Promotion was slow, especially for the less favoured groups discussed below, but it was fairly
s C. R. Boxer, The PortugueseSeaborneEmpire (London, 1969), p. 311. 6 See letter of Correa de Mello cited above (Note 2) in BN/SM I, 31, 30, 9I; also Luis dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no Sculo XVIII (3rd ed., 3 vols., Salvador, 1969), I, 248. 7 Dundonald, Earl of (Lord Cochrane), Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chile, Brazil and Greece(2 vols., London, I859) n, 13. 8 Compare the paylist of I803 in BN/SM II, 33, 28, o0 with that in Jose Antonio Caldas, Noticia Geral de Toda Esta Capitania da Bahia (facsimile of I759 edition, Bahia, I95I), p. 464. On prices, see Katia de Queiros Mattoso, ' Conjonctureet Societe au Bresil a la Fin du XVIIIe siecle: Prix et Salaires a la vieille de la Revolution des Alfaiates Bahia 1798' in Cahiersdes Ammriques Latines, v (I970), 33-53.

252 F. W. O. Morton

certain as far as the rank of captain. An officer could be reasonably sure of placing his sons in the military and often of marrying his daughters to other officers as well. If he became a major or better, he was likely to have direct access to the government, and could often thereby improve his own prospects and those of his family. A post as ADC to the governor or the inspector-general of troops was especially valuable. In a society intensely conscious of status, with strong family loyalties and few openings for individual advancement, these advantages were substantial. They were, however, unequally distributed among the officers. Five main groups can be distinguished within the corps.9The first comprised those transferred to Bahia from Portugal or from the Portuguese dominions in Asia and Africa. With these may be included the four officers transferredin this period from the Navy (a common practice in the Portuguese service). The second consisted of those transferred from other parts of Brazil, principally Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. Members of both these groups often arrived in the suite of a new governor or inspector-general(but did not always depart with him); otherwise they were named by royal fiat to a particular regiment. If it proved to have no places vacant, they became supernumeraries. The officers who began their careersat Bahia fell into two large groups and one smaller. The first consisted of those who had entered the service as 'cadets '. Cadets had a status intermediate between officers and men and were, in effect, officer trainees. They were by law the sons of nobles, a category which included officers of the first and second lines, as well as individuals holding patents of nobility or fidalguia.'" This institution had, of course, many parallels in late eighteenth-century Europe."1But there it had been intended to preserve and strengthen the nobility (and thus the whole social hierarchy) by giving its members privileged access to an honourable career, at the same time identifying their interests more closely with those of
9 The analysis which follows rests on the Livros de Patentes for the regulars in the years under study in pastas 384, 386, 387, 389, 395-6, 399-400, 402 and 404 in the Documentos Historicos of the Arquivo Pablico da Bahia (hereinafter cited as APB.DH.) and in the section of Ordems Regias in the same place. Material has also been found in the Arquivo Historico Ultramarino at Lisbon and in the Secao dos Manuscritosof the Biblioteca Nacional at Rio. There were 336 individuals (other than military surgeons and chaplains) who are known to have served as officers at Bahia in the years 1800-21. While this figure is certo tainly not complete (e.g. an officer who served without promotion from 800oo 18I2 and then retired would probably be missed), it is probably something like 90% of the true total. 223 of these individuals can be classified into the five groups, leaving 113 whose previous place of service or rank are unknown. 10 On cadetship, see the carta regia of 27 February- 8I3 in APB.DH. Ordemns Regias. pasta 115/I24. Even natural sons of nobles were eligible: see APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta io6/
132.

11 R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution (2 vols., Princeton, 1959), I, 73-4.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

253

the state. Whatever the success of this policy in Europe, its effects in Bahia were equivocal from the Crown's point of view. Cadets were usually sons either of the leading sugar planters of the Bahian Reconcavo or, in the majority of cases, of other officers.12The system of cadetships thus both favoured the emergence of professional military families, discussed further below, and brought about the inclusion in the officer corps of members of the landed aristocracy,a class in which nativist feeling had long been strong. Cadetships, therefore, tended to entrench two elite groups with strong local ties in the professional military structure. But 'nobles' never acquired a monopoly of officer rank, as they did in several European states of the day. The most numerous group among the officers comprised those promoted from NCO rank. Since the NCOs themselves had almost always been promoted from the ranks, these officers had thus almost certainly entered the service as privates. The third, smaller group was that of the former standard-bearers of (porta-bandeiras), whom there were sixteen in the period, and who seem to have been midway in status between former cadets and former NCOs. Some were probablysons of officers; others, for lack of definite information, must be assumed to have risen from the ranks. This breakdown of the officers into five groups by previous rank or place of service, revealed principally by the registers of patents, corresponds rather closely with a more general classification of them by their birthplaces: Portugal, Bahia, and the other captaincies of Brazil.'1 Something, therefore, can be said of the relative status and success of the officers of the five groups with some confidence that these relate to their places of birth and hence to their ' ethnic' or ' national' characters.A breakdown of the available figures is given in Table i, which shows the absolute numbers and percentages in each group who had reached the rank of major or higher, or who had become ADCs to the governor or the inspector-generalor troops, before I822. It will be seen that the differences in the careerprospects of the five groups
Professor John N. Kennedy, in ' Bahian Elites 1750-1822 ', Hispanic-American Historical Review, LIII (1972), 415-39, has stated that 'no sons of landowners or merchants have yet been discovered in the service' (p. 429). The present writer agrees with this so far as the merchants are concerned, but he identified not only sons of landowners but several important senhores de engenho among the professionalofficers. 13 The birthplacesof 40 officers can be known with certainty and those of I40 with some probability, principally from petitions from them or their relatives preserved at Bahia and Lisbon. Of these I8o, 39 belong to the 113 officers who are not included in the five groups (above, note 9). There are thus 141 officers whose birthplaces and previous rank or place of service can be compared. Among the 36 who had served in Portugal the correlation is (not unexpectedly) very high, 35 having been born there; 20 out of the 25 who had served elsewhere in Brazil had been born there; and while the birthplaces of only one-half (83) of the officers in the three ' Bahian ' groups are known, 80 of them had been born in Bahia.
12

254 F. W. O. Morton
TABLE I

Career Prospects of Officers at Bahia 1800-21 Ranks Groups

I
Lt.-General Marechal-de-Campo
Brigadier Colonel Lt.-Colonel Major ADC Totals

II (a)
I

III (b)

IV (c)
I

Totals
I 4
9 23

3
I 5 4 3 2 I8 2 3 2 2 2
12

4 2 3 4 13 I 8 9 I I

2 13 6
15

i6
33 4 go

37

Totals in each group % in each group A'

36
50%

25 48%

67 19%

79
11%

i6 6%

113 33%

336 27%

reachingrank of major,

Source: Arquivo Publico da Bahia, Documentos Hist6ricos: Patentes pastas 384-406. Note: Group I-Portuguese Group II-Other Brazilians Group III-Bahians (a) Former Cadets (b) Former NCOs (c) Former Standard-Bearers Group IV-Previous Place of Service or Rank Unknown Each officer is given under the highest rank he attained in the period.

were substantial. The Portuguese and Brazilians from outside Bahia did not monopolize the higher ranks; they were too few to do so. But they did occupy a share of them wholly disproportionate to their numbers. An exsergeant from Bahia had little better than a one-in-ten chance of reaching the level of major, and only one ever passed that rank; while a Portuguese had one chance in two, and thirteen of them, over one-third, passed it. This predominance of the Portuguese was, of course, the result of official policy. The only reason it was not even more pronounced was a chronic shortage of willing and suitable candidates in Portugal itself. The report of Marechal-deCampo Correa de Mello in May I8oo, already cited, and its covering letter from Governor Dom Fernando Jose de Portugal, are illuminating on the obstacles to recruiting more Portuguese officers.14The low pay of junior officers was the most important of these. The success of the Brazilians from other captaincies is less readily explained; but an important cause appears to
14

BN/SM I, 31, 30, 9I: APB.DH. OrdemsRdgias. pasta. 93/76.

The Military and Society in Bahia,

I800-182I

255

have been that they, more commonly than the Portuguese, arrived in Bahia already holding senior rank and frequently in the suites of influential relatives. The gap between Bahians and non-Bahians should not obscure the gap between the two main groups of Bahians. Former cadets were almost twice as likely as former NCOs to become majors. Moreover, cadets usually joined the service very young, often at sixteen (the legal minimum age) or even less. Thus Joao Egidio Calmon, a member of one of the leading sugar families, was born in 1783 and became a cadet in 1796.15 Cadets were frequently given as ensigns (alferes) or second lieutenants before they were twenty. patents Therefore, many if not most of the cadets first commissioned in the period would have been under forty in the latter year. This was, in fact, I800-I82I the case with those whose birth dates are known. The former NCOs, on the other hand, became officers only after service as privates and sergeants, and much evidence exists to suggest that such service was usually long. Former NCOs must, therefore, often have been much older than former cadets of comparable rank. An NCO in his forties or fifties must often have found himself an ensign only to be commanded by an ex-cadet captain twenty years younger than himself. That the former NCOs resented this state of affairs seems probable. The division between former cadets and former NCOs was certainly based on class, for that was implicit in the qualifications for a cadetship. What is less clear is how far it was based on colour as well. That the cadets were white is reasonably certain; although coloured officers existed, there is no record of their sons becoming cadets. A letter in April I80o from Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho (then President of the Royal Treasury) makes it crystal clear that colour and lower-class status alike were equally obstacles to acquiring a cadetship.16But direct information on the racial background of the former NCOs is, unfortunately, almost non-existent. Indirectly, it can be argued that they originated from a group, the rank-and-file,who, as will be seen below, were predominantly coloured. It would, however, have been entirely consistent with the general practicesof Bahian society, then as now, for a disproportionate number of them to have come from the small minority of whites in the rank-and-file. All that can be said with certainty is that some of the former NCOs were free coloureds, and it is possible, perhaps probable, that a majority of them were. In colonial Bahia, in general, free coloureds did not rise above the middle levels in society or in the civil, ecclesiasticaland military institutions; and in
15 Lauren o Lago, Brigadeiros e Generais de Dom Joao VI e Dom Pedro I no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1941), p. 63.
16

APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 94/72: Sousa Coutinho to D. Fernando Jose de Portugal,
21 April I80I.

256 F. W. 0. Morton

the case of the military it is possible to see to some extent how this came about. One important cause was the concept of past military servicesas an hereditable claim on the Crown's favour. Like cadetships, this had many parallels in eighteenth-centuryEurope, and like them too it was related, if less directly, to the distinction between nobles and non-nobles. Cadetship gave privileged access to officer rank to those whose families had been ennobled by service; hereditableservice gave them privileged promotion thereafter. Under the system of hereditable service, an individual's services, or rather the claim on the Crown's favour arising from them, could be transferredor bequeathed to his relations. To take a humble example, in I803 one Vicente Rodrigues Tourinho made a gift to his natural sons of all his services as a private for seventeen years and five months, and had the gift duly notarized.17 Individuals petitioning the Crown for promotion would cite not only their own services and those of their direct ancestors, but even those of living collateral relations if permitted by the latter to do so. Although promotion in principle took place only by examination under the terms of a royal alvara of 4 June 1763, it is clear that this was far from always being the case in practice. In I8II, Inspector-GeneralCaldeira Brant is found complaining of the frequency with which the alvara was disregarded.18In the absence of military engagements (none took place between the Dutch Wars and I817) long service by a petitioner, his ancestors and relations (accompanied by certificatesof good conduct [folhas corridas] for all of them) became the most important yardstick for determining promotion, particularly in the senior ranks. Military office had thus evolved part-way toward the proprietaryand herediltablestatus which was the condition of most civil offices in the Portuguese Empire. In consequence, military posts, and especially senior posts, came to be concentrated in a relatively small number of families. Approximately thirty such families can be identified in the early I8oos; a few of them were junior branches of Reconcavo sugar families such as the Argolos and Muniz Barretos, but most of them are now known only as military men. Intermarriage among them seems to have been frequent. All were either completely Bahian or rapidly assimilating. They formed a good proportion of the Bahianborn officers, perhaps even a majority of the former cadets. Any calculation of their numbers must be provisional, in view of the difficulties of identification posed by the Brazilian system of personal names, but it appears that at least Ioo officersbelonged to such families in the period I80o-I82I. That these officers born to their calling should develop a proprietorial
17 APB. Documentos juridicos. Notas de Escriturada Capital. pasta I47/373. 18 APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 111/244: Caldeira Brant to Arcos 26 Jan. I8i1.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

257

attitude to the service as a whole was to be expected, and comes out clearly in an incident in I80o. Perhaps the most notable of the military families was that of Souza Portugal, whose head in I8oI was Major Pedro Alexandrino da Souza Portugal, son, twice grandson, brother, and brother-in-lawof colonels. In that year he petitioned the Crown to be given the post of lieutenant-colonel of the First Regiment, of which he was major, on the grounds that he had twice in two years ' suffered the bitterness of seeing preferred' to himself for promotion, first a Portuguese from the Oporto Regiment, second the mineiro Felisberto Caldeira Brant Pontes (later inspector-generalof troops, and later still marquess of Barbacena).Refused, Souza Portugal petitioned again, this time to be made lieutenant-colonel of the Second Regiment, observing that that unit' has never had imposed upon it any outside higher officer'. Refused again, he managed, by deliberately ignoring Caldeira Brant's orders on the parade-ground, to provoke the latter into arresting him. Souza Portugal declined to apologize, was duly court-martialled and acquitted. Souza Portugal's own account of the incident leaves little room for doubt that he had insulted Caldeira Brant in the most public way possible, and the verdict can only be explained on the grounds of family influence (Souza Portugal had married into a landowning family and was to die a senhor de engenho) together with a desire on the part of the officers of the court (several of whom were Portuguese) to avoid inflaming feelings further.19The whole incident brings out the resentment felt by the Bahian officers of the outsiders parachuted in among them and their proprietorialattitudes to their regiments. But propertyand caste cut both ways. The success of the military families in accumulating the posts not given to officers from outside Bahia, a success which the hereditabilityof service must have tended steadily to increase, made it that much more difficult for an officer who was a 'new man' to better himself. Seven of the nine former cadets and former NCOs who reached a lieutenant-colonelcy or better before 1821 belonged to a military family (Table I), as did fourteen out of the twenty-two who became majors. It seems, reasonableto conclude that the system of cadetships and of hereditableservice which createdthe military families also enabled their members to reach higher rank more often and at an earlier age than an officer outside their number could hope to do. Here the institutional mechanisms by which the poor and the coloured were allowed to rise so far and no farther can be seen at work. The Professional Military: The Rank-and-File The professional officers were thus socially, racially and ethnically heterogeneous. The rank-and-file, in contrast, were predominantly poor,
19 APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 95/36, 723.
L.A.S.-5

258 F. W. O. Morton

coloured and Bahian. This was due to the practice of recruitment through forcible impressment by the captains-majorof the various towns. A lengthy list of privilegiados, persons exempt from service in the line in virtue of their status or occupation, existed; the records of the Inspectorateof Troops mention more than a dozen categories all told, down to salesmen for the royal playing-card factories.20Such persons were highly likely to be white, comfortably off, or both. The system thus ensured that recruitment would fall most heavily on the free poor, which in Bahia meant largely on the free coloureds.21 The only defence available to the poor against the captain-major's was to take up the cultivation of basic foodstuffs, the supply of pressgang which to the city and its Reconcavo was a subject of unending official concern. Such farmers in theory, and sometimes in practice, were exempt from service in the paid regiments. But anyone foolish enough to cross his local captainmajor was likely to find himself in the ranks, which tended to be regarded as a fresh-airjail by all parties.22No overall figures on the racial composition of the rank-and-file have survived, but some lists of deserters show 222 free coloureds out of a total of 271 deserters,and this picture is generally borne out by the short lists of recruitssent in by a few captains-major.23 Once enlisted, the new recruits usually found the conditions of service discouraging. Pay was extremely low, at about threepence a day. Food, uniforms and accommodation were supplied, but the first was monotonous and sometimes inedible, the second European in cut, cloth and weight, and the third overcrowded and insanitary. In I8Io, Inspector-GeneralCaldeira Brant proposed to give the men two meals a day instead of one, and to feed them vegetables and fruit in addition to meat and manioc. Whether or not he was successful does not appear.24Soldiers who were married or had other dependents must have found the going hard. Discipline seems to have been both lax and erratic.2 As in all the armies of the ancien regime, heavy floggings were the principal punishment used, but there are indications that they were inflicted rather infrequently. The foro militar, on the other hand, which for an officer meant speedy justice at the hands of sympathetic colleagues, for a private simply re-inforcedhis subjection to his commanders.
20 APB.DH. Inspetoriadas Tropas. pastas 588-595. 21 Thales de Azevedo, Povoamento da Cidade da Salvador pp. 224-226; Jose da Silva Lisboa, ' Carta a Domingos Vandelli' in Anais da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, xxxII

(I9Io), 22

505.

APB.DH. Capitaes-Mores. pasta 417: Antonio Jos6 Calmon de Souza e Eca to D. Fernando Jose de Portugal, 23 March i800. 23 BN/SM II, 33, 32, 28: lists of desertersby Manuel Alexandrino Machado, 28 July i827. 24 APB.DH. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 589: Caldeira Brant to Arcos, 23 Oct. 18ro. Cf. Thomas Lindley, Narrative of a Voyage to Brazil (London, i805), p. 88. 25 Arquivo Historico Ultramarino de Lisboa, Documentos Avulsos do Conselho Ultramarino, caixa 400 (Bahia): D. Antonio Miguel de Mello to Sousa Coutinho, 30 March I797.

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Perhaps worst of all, service had no definite term; the handful of privates who had neither died nor deserted before they reached their sixties might hope to retire on half-pay after petitioning the Crown for the favour. Nothing could thus be less surprising than the frequency of desertion from the ranks. In the first six months of 1813 alone the Regiment of Artillery had
seventy-one deserters out of an established strength of Cases of the 200oo.26

same individual deserting three times or more were common, giving the regiments a revolving-door quality. Captains-major tended to suspect any newcomers to their districts of being deserters.The sole exception to this state of affairs was the cavalry, an aristocraticarm which was always well up to strength after its formation in I8io.27 What is unexpected is that there were some soldiers who did not desert. No doubt the routine of military life appealed to some. For others, service may have offered a true career, for, as has been seen, the path upward, if narrow, was not closed altogether. In general, however, the system of recruitmentand the conditions of service produced privateswhose commitment to a military careerwas minimal. Many of them were separated from the majority of their officers by the colour of their skins in a highly colour-conscioussociety. Active zeal to serve king and country in arms seems to have been rare, if not unknown. Considering the professionalmilitary as a whole, it has alreadybeen pointed out that their organization was closely modelled on that characteristic of eighteenth-century Europe. There, only one general social distinction, that between nobles and commoners, was recognized; out of it grew the system of cadetships, the concept of service as a hereditableclaim on the royal favour, and the exemption of certain privileged groups from service in the line. But,, since officers and men could not be imported as easily as ranks or uniforms, these criteriafor promotion and favour interacted with the divisions of colour and birthplace peculiar to Bahia to create a complex and unstable situation. Outsiders, favoured over Bahians, thereby reduced their opportunities to rise; while Bahians who were noble, white, members of a military family or all three together effectively monopolized the higher posts not assigned to outsiders. Most favoured of all were all the officersrelative to the rank-and-file. The latter served for the most part only because they were too poor and too friendless to avoid doing so, while even the least privileged among the officers served because their position offered solid advantages and the hope of obtaining more. At the same time, the professional military, like every other colonial institution, representeda sharing of power and influence between the Crown
26 APB.DH. 27 APB.DH.

Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 59I: Caldeira Brant to Arcos, I2 Aug. I813. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 588 (i8io).

260 F. W. 0. Morton

and local elites. The former benefited from the defence of a valuable possession and from the considerable opportunities for patronage afforded by the military. But the elites, and particularlythe military families, also had a large stake in the institution, gaining from it not merely a livelihood, but economic security, enhanced social standing and potential political strength. The decades under considerationin this article were of course the age of the Spanish American revolutions. The implications for Portuguese colonial rule of an army so largely officered by the Brazilian-bornwere, therefore, serious. The Crown had long used a number of techniques to maintain control of the colonial military. The appointment of Portuguese-bornofficers and still more the special favour shown them not only reduced the military's capacity to act by dividing them against themselves; it created a privileged group whose interests were bound up with continued royal control, and, by fostering competition for place and promotion, it increased the importance of the Crown's role as the fountain of honour and the final arbiter of disputes. In the same way, the immensely complicated system of issuing patents (each officer had two, gubernatorial and royal, the latter issued at Lisbon, for each rank he held) was more than a rich source of confusion and delay which left a vast mass of official correspondence behind it.28 By making officer rank and its advantages difficult and expensive of access, and by ensuring that many officers would be in a state of bureaucraticdelinquency at any given time, it kept up the value of the Crown's monopoly of political legitimacy. The Crown's strength thus lay in the very complexities of the system and the tensions they engendered. Such techniques appearedadequate until the Pernambuco rebellion of 1817 revealed how strong a hold liberal and nationalist ideas had obtained on the military of that captaincy. A wholly Portuguese battalion was soon posted to Bahia as to the other cities of Brazil. This action clearly revealed the Crown's heightened mistrust of the local military, just when the Pernambuco rising (which had been in large part suppressedby the Bahian regulars) had made them conscious as never before of their potential strength. Three years later the professional military were to bring colonialism and absolutism to an end in Bahia in the rising of February, I82I. But in the act of ending the traditional role of the Crown, the professionals allowed the internal divisions the Crown had so long exploited full play; and the early imperial period was repeatedlyto see them fighting each other rather than any other social group. Divisions of class, colour and national origin
28

APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 94/148: carta regia of 27 Sept. 1787; pasta I06/223 Sousa Coutinho to Ponte, 24 Nov. I808; pasta o06/272 Linhares to Ponte, 24 Jan. I809. Arquivo Historico Ultramarino de Lisboa, Documentos Avulsos do Conselho Ultramarino, caixa 398 (Bahia)cartasregias of 1 Aug. 1803and 4 Nov. I803.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

261

repeatedly influenced the lines of cleavage, although their influence was to some extent obscured by a tendency for the bulk of any unit to stay together in a crisis. Nor, since the system of cadetshipsand hereditableservice remained in force, did those divisions tend to disappear. Thus the Artillery, with the highest proportion of former NCOs among its officers, could almost always be found on the side of revolt, the cavalry with its wealthy and aristocratic officers on that of order; while the infantry units vacillated or, occasionally, split. In the ' Constitutional Revolution' of February I82I itself, although the rising enjoyed almost universal support, the hostility between the Brazilian and the Portuguese military was clearly evident, and fighting between them only narrowly averted. The original conspiratorsincluded representativesof both nations; but they centred around a group of Artillery officers including several young lieutenants and captains who had been promoted from the ranks.29 Relations between the two national groups deteriorated steadily thereafter, and the arrival of a new, Portuguese, military governor (commandante d'armas) in February 1822 precipitatedopen fighting in the capital. In this, the Portuguese were victorious, not least because of the inability of the Brazilian infantry regiments to act as units in a crisis. Some individuals accepted the new military governor; more simply disappeared; the majority of the men and junior officers decided for the Brazilian cause, but only after a delay which allowed the Portuguese battalions to occupy most of the key points in the city.30 These divisions, followed by defeat, destroyed the Brazilian units as fighting forces; they were slowly re-assembled during the war of 1822-1823, but, as will be seen, their role in it was decidedly secondary to that of the militia. The departure of the Portuguese forces in July 1823 was far from ending the quarrels of the professional military. The long-standing divisions of class and colour were exacerbatedby the incorporationinto the first line of the 3rd and 4th Battalions, predominantly coloured units raised during the war; and the presence of units from Rio and Pernambuco added localist, 'Bahian' feeling to the potential cause of conflict. Discipline weakened; the French Consul reported that the black and mulatto soldiers were parading the streets, robbing and maltreating the remaining Portuguese and demanding a republic.31Disorder culminated in the assassination in October 1824 of the
29 Bras do Amaral, Historia da Independencia na Bahia (Salvador, I923) pp. 11/12; Inaicio Accioli de Cerqueira e Silva, Memorias Historicas de Provincia da Bahia (2nd ed., ed. & ann. Bras do Amaral, Salvador, 1919-I940) III, 270-274. 30 Alnais do Arquivo Publico Bahia xxvI (I940) 126-142; Bras do Amaral, Historia, da pp. 1I7, 125; Accioli, Mem6rias, III, 293-332, 455-480, 488-519. 31 Archives du Ministrre des Affaires Exterieures, Paris: CorrespondenceCommerciale/Bresil/ Bahia vol. 1/334: Guinebaud to Minister, 21 Sept. 1823.

262 F. W. O. Morton

military governor, Felisberto Gomes Caldeira, by soldiers of one of the predominantly coloured units.32Gomes Caldeira, a white, an ex-cadet, a mineiro by birth and a nephew of Inspector-GeneralCaldeira Brant, was a near-perfect example of the privileged groups among the officers. His murder precipitated a split in the professionalsbetween the new units and the artillery on the one hand, and the two older infantry units, one of which was commanded by a member of a Reconcavo sugar family, Alexandre Gomes de Argolo Ferrao, on the other. These units, referred to by the French Consul as 'les troupes blanches ', marched out of the city to the nearby town of Abrantes, where they received moral and material support from the landowners and militia of the Reconcavo.33After a month's blockade of the city, the forces of the status quo prevailed; the rebels laid down their arms, and the unit responsiblefor Gomes Caldeira's death was shipped off to Pernambuco. In 1831 a renewed series of risings by the military took place, in which the Brazilian-bornwere at first reasonablyunited in opposition to the Portugueseborn officers, supposedly favoured by Dom Pedro I in support of his rumoured absolutist designs. But this united front did not outlive the Emperor's abdication. In April, an infantry battalion refused to accept a sugar aristocrat as its commander.34In May and August the bulk of the infantry failed to join risings by the artillery and a battalion from Piaui, but in October it was the turn of the infantry to mutiny and be left without support from any other unit. In all these risings massive desertions weakened the rebelling units, as had been true in 1824as well. For the rank-and-filea rising might initially have the character of a strike - better pay was always prominent in a mutinous unit's demands - but it rapidly assumed that of a jailbreak.35 The last and greatest of the risings of the early imperial period, the so-called Sabinada of 1837-1838, appears at first sight to form an exception to the pattern outlined so far. All the regular units supported the initial rising of 7 November 1837, and all of them remained loyal to it as units during the almost five months of fighting which followed.36 But appearances are misleading. Individual officers deserted to the government side in large numbers
:32

Accioli, Memdrias,iv, 147, I82-I83.

33 Anais
34

I56-157.

APB.DH.

Presi-

dente da Provincia:GovernoasCamaraspasta 1.269.

Parkinsonto Aston, I6 April, I831.

.36

BarrosPaim to Lima e Silva 21 Nov. I831. The permanent police force which had been raised in 1832 supported the rising at the outset bur deserted to the government side on 13 Nov. Its commander was a member of a sugar family and its pay differential over the military had been abolished by the rebels. Bras do Amaral, Historia da Bahia do Imperio a Republica (Salvador, 1923), p. 135.

The Military and Society in Bahia, I800-182I

263

and on predictable lines. Not a single aristocrat and only one ex-cadet remained with the rebels; ex-NCOs and artilleryofficerswere correspondingly well represented among them.37 The military families, the sugar aristocrats and the Portuguese-bornwere to be found commanding the forces of order, christened the Exercito Restaurador. At no time, therefore, in the troubled first decades of Brazilian independence did the professionalmilitary at Bahia put forth their united strength for a longer period than a few days; and on several occasions they fought each other. This failure was reasonably clearly related to the divisions of class, colour and national background which, inherited from the late colonial period, were revealed among them by the collapse of absolutism and exacerbated by the political struggles of the First Reign and Regency, in which the regular military were both actors and victims. The Second and Third Lines: Militia and Ordenanfas Like the professionals, the militia or second line included representatives from all the groups in the free population. Numbering ten regiments in the capital and Reconcavo in I8oo, a figure increased to fifteen by 1820, the militia was intended to serve both as a reserve for the professionalsin the defence of the colony against external attack and as a safeguard against slave risings in the sugar zone. Formally equal to the professionals in rank, they differed vitally from them in the basis of their organization, which was fundamentally by geographical districts, and in the relatively homogeneous background of their officers, predominantly drawn from the landowners of each regimental district. There were exceptions to this pattern. The most important were the four (later increased to six) militia regiments in the urban area of Salvador, which were organized within that area by colour and occupation alone. There was one regiment for the wealthier merchants, one for the poorer whites, one for the free mulattos and one, the famous Henriques, for the free blacks. In each case, officers and men alike were in principle (not always in practice) drawn from the same constituent group. In all militia regiments, as has been noted, the major and the regimental ADCs were seconded from the professionals, and hence were not usually landowners in the regiment's district, although exceptions occurred. Moreover, the landowners themselves were far from being a homogenous group. There were great differencesin structurebetween the Reconcavo, the centre of sugar culture, and the semi-aridinterior or sertao
37 This analysis is based on the pre-I82I Livros de Patentes in the Bahia Archives, and on the

trials of the insurgents in 1838-1840, printed in Anais do Arquivo Publico da Bahia, xxxix (I939).

264 F. W. O. Morton

and the humid South Coast region. The Reconcavo was dominated by the slave-owning senhores de engenho, the wealthiest of whom constituted the aristocracy of the colony. The other regions were generally populated by small ranchers and farmers; powerful families existed in the sertao, but they had a purely local influence. These differences were reflected in the local militia units of these outer areas, which either existed almost wholly on paper or were the private preserves of single clans. These differences, when combined with their poverty and remoteness from the centre of events, ensured that the South Coast and sertao would have little influence on the political history of the time. Attention will therefore be focused on the militia of the Reconcavo, which outnumbered six regiments in 800oand nine in 182I. The senior officersof all militia regiments were deliberatelychosen for their rank and wealth. An alvara of December I802 ordered 'that all militia captaincies be filled with persons of sufficient means to keep themselves with fitting dignity; and this merely enacted, or possibly re-enacted,what had long been customary.38In 1813 Caldeira Brant as Inspector-Generalwrote of a petitioner: It is true that the petitionerhas served in the line and has more military understanding than any of the officersof the company,for which reasonhe was made First Sergeant;but he [cannot] be promotedofficerof militia while [he has] no fortune.He has only one slave,while the SecondSergeant a well-established is landdistrict.39 owner,one of the richestof the company's This picture of a regiment whose very sergeantsmight be landowners is borne out by a lisitof the officers of the Regiment of Infantry of Santo Amaro and Sao Francisco, the two towns which formed the heart of the Reconcavo and hence of the sugar zone. All the senior positions (including the paid positof major) and several of the junior were held by senhores de engenho; the next largest group was that of the cane-farmers (lavradores de canas) several of whom were relatives of the senhores and all of whom were in greater or lesser degree economically dependent on the senhores as a class. It is interesting to note that the age of the officers varied not with their military rank but with their social position. The captains who were senhores de engenho were on average almost ten years younger than the ensigns (two ranks below) who were not. Landowners occupied twenty-three of the thirty-two positions filled by non-professionals,and this was not due to a complete absence of merchants and lawyers, for Santo Amaro town, with an urban population of perhaps
5,ooo, had considerable numbers of both. Documents from the early imperial

period surviving at Bahia show that this aristocratic predominance was if

abound; cf. Palma to Vilanova Portugal, 2 Oct. I818 in Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, IG 113/460.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

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The alvardof I802, which, inter anything more marked after Independence.40 laid down that militia colonels should have had professional experience, alia, made no practical difference; colonels were simply named from the professional officers of aristocraticbackground (above, note 12). If service as a professionalofficer was reasonablypopular, that in the militia was still more so. Conferring social prestige and opportunities for public display, militia service was nonetheless compatible with earning a livelihood, since drill and training took place on Sundays only. Such a livelihood might be and often was much more comfortable than that of a professional officer. Militia service also entitled officers and NCOs to the privilege of the foro militar. Since, however, this was valid only for crimes committed on active service (in contrast to the practice in New Spain) 41 and since Bahian landowners normally had little to fear from the courts in any case, it is uncertain how far this was an inducement. What is clear is that demand, especially for the higher posts, far exceeded supply. Supernumeraries were many. Brazil was already a land of coroneis. Promotion was slow and infrequent, and, for officers who were not senhores de engenho, effectively impossible beyond the rank of captain. Nonetheless, even junior ranks seem to have been much sought after. Less is known, as usual, of the rank-and-file. But, rural society in the Reconcavo being what it was, they must have been drawn very largely from the dependents of the sugar industry, those who were neither masters nor slaves: factors and clerks, sharecroppersand craftsmen, and the inhabitants of the pockets of subsis.tence agriculturewhich lay between the best cane lands. A list of the rank-and-fileof the Regiment of Piraja in i8io has survived; it includes many carpenters and smiths, a few lavradores de canas, fishermen and, unexpectedly, tailors.42Privileged exemptions from service in the militia as from that in the professionalsmay have enabled those who were unable or unwilling to obtain patents as officers to avoid serving in the ranks, although the extent of such privileges was a moot point. There was in any case clearly less to be feared from service in a part-time force, and the militia regiments were always much more nearly up to strength (at least on paper) than were those of the first line.43 Such militiamen must have been accustomed to deference to the senhores de engenho, and probablymade little, if any, distinction between their natural authority and any office the state might confer on them. Thus the militia
40 APB.DII.

Presidente da Provincia: Militares Propostas. pasta 3.770; Militares Quartel-General

pa. 3.888.
41 42

McAllister The ' Fuero Militar ' in New Spain, p. 8. APB.DHl. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 588 (I8Io).

43

BN/SM II, 33, 34, 28: Table of Five Rec6ncavoMilitia Regiments i Feb. 1802.

266 F. W. O. Morton confirmed and re-inforced pre-existing social relationships. On Sunday afternoons the officers drilled the men whom they were accustomed to command on the other days of the week. The cohesiveness of a force so organized was likely to be far greater than that of the professionalsin a crisis, and this was repeatedlyproved to be true in the period I821-I838. The third line, or ordenanFas,were both like and unlike the militia. They preserved the ancient Iberian organization of the terqounder a captain-major (capitao-mor); each town had one ter?o, the capital, two. Their primary function was the maintenance of internal order, including the capture of fugitive slaves and deserters from the regulars; the captains-major, as has been seen, were also responsible for recruitment for the regulars. Unlike the militia, they were always organized on the bases of colour and occupation as well as of residence. Each terfo had companies of blacks and mulattos with their own officers, and others for professionalgroups such as the' companhias da justica' which included the advocates, notaries, bailiffs, and clerks of a town - most of them privilegiados in relation to the first two lines.44These differencesdid not affect the domination of the ordenanfas by the landowners, which meant, in the capital and the Reconcavo, by the sugar aristocracy. Indeed, the captains-majorwere almost always the greatest magnates in each town's district. The junior officers, on the other hand, seem to have been rather lower in the social scale than their counterpartsin the militia. This was probably in part due to the differentiationin honour between them. Officers of ordenanFas did not have the foro militar; their patents were signed by the governor, nott the king, and their children could not become cadets in the first line. Moreover, as already stated, they were chiefly concerned with unglamorous duties of police and recruitment. The rank-and-fileof the ordenanpasare the most obscure group of all, both as individuals and in the distinction between them and the militiamen, which was unclear even to those in charge of administering it at the time. But they too came from the free population of the Reconcavo countryside, and, therefore, must have been in greater or lesser degree dependents in daily life of their commanders. This control of the unpaid branches of the military by the landowners was repeatedly to be of decisive importance in the first decades of Independence, and in the struggle for Independence itself as well. In July 1822, the militia Regiment of Torre, virtually the private army of the great Pires de Carvalho e Albuquerque clan, occupied the heights of Piraja under the command of the future viscount of that title, and blockaded the Portuguese army in Salvador in the critical first weeks of the Bahian War of Independence. That
44 APB.DH. Presidente da Provincia: Militares Capitdes-Mores. pasta 3.798.

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

267

war itself was won by the so-called Exercito Pacificadorwhich, while it incorporated regulars from Bahia, Rio and Pernambuco, was predominantly composed throughout of drafts from the militia and of units raised by the Reconcavo aristocracyat their own expense.45 Aristocratic control of the rural militia, as already remarked, survived and even flourished after Independence; it was destined to last as long as the militia (and its successor, the National Guard) remained an effective military force. Doubts were often felt of the loyalty of the free coloureds who made up the bulk of the militia's rank-and-file,but they proved groundless in almost all cases.46Geography, moreover, was on the landowners' side. The regulars, whose repeated risings constituted the most immediate threat to the new political dispensation, were concentratedin the city of Salvador, a situation of some natural strength, but also one easily blockaded by any enemy controlling both the sea and the city's natural hinterland, the sugar-growing Reconcavo. The latter formed a cordon sanitaire between the capital and those areas of the province, such as the impoverished South Coast and the sertao, where risings might have found support, as did their counterpartsin the interior of Pernambuco and Maranhao in these years. Equally, the Reconcavo militia was a very present help in time of trouble for provincialgovernments menaced by the regulars. Thus, in 1824, as pointed out above, the troops who withdrew from the city were supplied by the landowners, and many militia units joined them, serving without pay.47In April 1831, order was restored in the capital by a body of militia under the Viscount of Piraja.48In the Sabinada of 1837-1838, the Exercito Restaurador, while in part officered by regulars was, like its pacifying forerunner of 1822-1823, constituted for the most part of drafts from the Reconcavo militia, who once again blockaded the city in the first days of fighting and kept it closely besieged until its fall.49 But perhaps the most striking display of the military effectiveness of the landowners came in 1832, when a rising of civilian ' federalists' seized the important town of Cachoeira on the western edge of the Reconcavo. The militia of the sugar zone, once again under the Viscount of Piraja, took the town and crushed the revolt almost before it began, and well before the provincial government had been able to decide on any course of action.50
45 APB.DH.

46 APB.DH. Presidente da Provincia: Militares Capitaes-Mores.pasta 3.798. 47 Anais do Arquivo Publico da Bahia xxxix (1969) 206. 48 FO.I3 vol. LXXXVIII, No. 72: Parkinson to Aston I6 April I831. 49 Luis Viana Filho, A Sabinada: A Republica Baiana de 1837 (Rio de Janeiro, 1945), pp.
I03-105.
50

Patentes. pasta 406; Anais do Arquivo Publico da Bahia XIX (193I) 97-98; BN/SM I, 4, 2, 26, nos. 87, 142.

Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro IJ1 707; Accioli, Memorias, iv, 358-362.

268 F. W. 0. Morton

In the colonial age the military institutions of the countryside, with their unpaid, aristocratic officers, had been sources of patronage and instruments of social control, and the National Guard was to fulfil those purposes in later decades as well. But in early imperial Brazil they came to be military and political factors of the first importance. They, not the regulars, supplied the physical force by which the new alliance between monarchy and elites which had emerged from the years of Independence was able to defeat its enemies in the field. Conclusion The Bahian armed forces in the last decades of colonial rule thus differed among themselves in the degree to which they had adapted European structures to Bahian society. Both regulars and militia were organized on the regimental pattern characteristicof eighteenth-centuryEurope. Both deliberately gave preferencein promotion and command to certain privileged groups in a European way. But, where the professionals became a locus of conflict, potential before Independence and actual thereafter, among different groups, the militia (and the ordenancas)were a paradigm of society, and especially of the aristocratic, patriarchal society of the sugar-growing Reconcavo, the economic and strategic heart of the colony. This difference was in part due to the professionalismof the regular forces. Conflict is more likely to be found where livelihoods, careers,and social standing are at stake. But it also reflects the differing degrees of adaptation of the European model to Bahian realities. Recruited from the whole area of the captaincy, the only social distinction recognized in the professionals' procedures for recruitment and promotion was that between nobles and commoners. The second and third lines were organized by local districts, and sometimes by class, colour and occupation as well. The number of different groups representedin any one unit was reduced, and the military hierarchy reflected that of the larger society. Both branches of the military, like all the institutions of colonial Bahia, represented the clothing of local elite groups with the garments of royal authority. But the outcome was again different in each case. In the professional regiments, the Crown's monopoly of legitimacy was important, giving control as it did of individuals' careers. Its value was kept up by the elaborate system of granting patents and the rivalry for royal favour among the various groups within the officer corps. In the part-timeforces, in contrast, the Crown did little more than sanction the inevitable. The landowner officers were not indifferent to the status they obtained as militia officers. Bult,because they did not depend on the Crown for their livelihoods or careers any more than for their estates, they were highly cavalier in their attitudes to royal

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

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techniques of control. Hundreds of militia officers never troubled to obtain a Their authority had properlysigned royal patent, and this was symptomatic.51 other bases. The consequences of these differences were to be considerable in the politically disturbed years after 1820. The professionals repeatedly showed themselves incapable of acting together in a crisis. Brazilians fought Portuguese in 1821-1822. After Independence, whites and coloureds, ex-cadets and ex-NCOs, were usually found in opposing political camps. The men mutinied for higher pay, or took advantage of political crises to desert en masse. The militia, in contrast, were to be the instrument by which the landowners and especially the sugar aristocracysucceeded, first in ending Portuguese rule in the War of Independence of 1822-1823, and then in defending the traditional social and political dispensaition against the attacksfrom the dispossessed of Bahian society which marked the following fifteen years. The institution which had adapted more completely to Bahian realities proved the stronger in the end.

51 'here were more than 700 who had not done so in I805: Arquivo Hist6rico Ulrramarinode Lisboa: Conselho Ultramarino, pasta 25I/124, carta regia of 5 Feb. 80o5.