Frontier Goiás, 1822-1889 9780804767743

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FRONTIER GOlAS,

r822-r889

Frontier Goids, I822-I889 David McCreery

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2006

©2oo6 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. This book has been published with the assistance of Georgia State University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCreery, David. Frontier Goias, 1822-1889 I David McCreery. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-o-8047-5179-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-ro: o-8047-5179-X (alk. paper) r. Goias (Brazil: State)-Economic conditions-19th century. 2. Agriculture--

Brazil-Goias (State)-History-19th century. 3· Goias (Brazil: State)-Politics and government-19th century. 4· Goias (Brazil: State)-History-r9th century. I. Title. HCr88.G6M36 2oo6 330.981'73-dc22 2006005165 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in ro.5/12 Sabon

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: A Province on the Edge of the Modern World

Vll

I

r.

State Structure

24

2.

State Power

50

3·

Industry, Commerce, and Communications

4·

Agriculture and Food Supply

79 105

5.

Stock Raising

130

6.

Land

7·

Work

155 180

Conclusions

206

Glossary

217

Notes

221

Bibliography

277

Index

293

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my family, my wife Angela and our children, Anthony ("Shimby") and Elizabeth Carmen for their continued love and support. Professor Mary Karasch, of Oakland University, the undisputed doyenne of Goias studies in the United States and a historian of Brazil of international reputation, has aided this study literally from beginning to end, introducing me to Goias's state archives in my first days in Goiania and then reading and making extensive comments on the completed manuscript. Thanks, Mary. In Goiana Professor Jose Antonio C. R. de Souza hired me as a visiting professor in the graduate history program at the Federal University of Goias, arranged a CNPq Fellowship to fund the position, and aided us in every way. His wife Professor Waldinice M. Nascimento welcomed us into their home, explained to me the complexities of her native Goias, and on occasion even drove me to my research. Professors Dallsia Elisabeth Martins Doles (deceased), Gilka Vasconcelos de Salles, Maria Amelia de Alencar, and Leandro Mendes Rocha at the Federal University helped me with my research and teaching, and Dona Gilka read and commented on the manuscript. Professor Maria do Espfrito Santa Rosa Rosa, of the Catholic University of Goias, was kind enough to invite me into her group working in the history of the sertiio. Professor Oclair Giraldin introduced me to Porto Nacional and helped me gain access to the notary records there. The Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq) of Brazil funded eighteen months teaching and researching in Goiania. Georgia State University paid for return visits to Goias to finish the research, and the interlibrary staff at GSU has always come through with the books I need. Successive chairs of Georgia State's History Department, Drs. Tim Crimmins, Diane Willen, and Hugh Hudson, have generously supported my work. Professor Marshall Eakin read and commented on the manuscript when it was being considered for publication. Again, my sincere thanks to all.

FRONTIER GOlAS,

r822-r889

Introduction A PROVINCE ON THE EDGE OF THE MODERN WORLD

Gold mines discovered by a few audacious and enterprising men, a horde of adventurers throwing themselves upon imagined riches, a society formed in the midst of all manner of crimes, that acquired its habits of government under the rigors of military despotism, whose customs were weakened by the influence of the climate and spineless laziness, a few instances of splendor and lavishness, ruins and a sad decadence. This, in a few words, is the history of the province of Goias. -Jose Martins Pereira de Alencastre, Anais da Provincia de Goids, I986.

Confected initially by the French traveler Auguste de Saint-Hilaire early in the nineteenth century and repeated a generation later by a provincial administrator sent from Rio de Janeiro, here is a succinct description of birth in original sin. It may surprise those familiar with the prosperous and relatively peaceful twentieth-first-century state, but from the late colonial period through the nineteenth century Goi:is's residents struggled with the heritage of poverty, isolation, and violence which history had set them. Marooned by changing circumstances on the edge of the state and the national economy, local leaders at once lamented the effects of the province's fall from grace while at the same time hoping that a vanished prosperity might yet be resurrected. Complicating these tasks, they felt, was the lethargy of the local population and the neglect of the rest of the country: "From the position Goi:is occupies, it seems that all the other provinces turn their back on her." 1 Few had illusions about short-term possibilities, but they remembered, or supposed they remembered, a better time, when Goi:is had enjoyed an importance it now manifestly lacked and when at least some among them had become rich. Sodden with sin this imagined past may have been, but it nevertheless exerted a hold on provincial consciousness not easily loosened or supplanted.

2

INTRODUCTION

State and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Brazil Most of those who write about the construction of state and nation in nineteenth-century Brazil agree that these processes proceeded more or less simultaneously and from the top and the bottom at the same time. 2 This was not, of course, the way the new nation's leaders understood events. For them, state building was a conscious, top-down, "Junker" project undertaken in the face of the opposition, or at least the apathy, of the majority of the population. In their understanding these elites were the nation. They first began to come together around the idea of a Brazilian nation-state during the Cortes's debates on colonial autonomy and subsequently had rallied to independence and a constitutional monarchy, both to maintain their power and to keep a republic at bay. In order to make this new state work, however, politicians at the national level found it necessary to court the regional and local power brokers who controlled Brazil's vast interior, entering into power-sharing alliances with these. 3 Not surprisingly, political struggles during the next century were primarily over the distribution of power among these interested parties. Where such alliances or pacts broke down, or threatened to break down, the central regime might resort to force, but particularly in the first years its repressive capacity remained limited and, as a result, its hold on distant provinces precarious. By the r 84os, however, a more powerful, centralized state, if only by comparison to the past and to its Latin American neighbors, had begun to emerge, under the direction a conservative reaction labeled by national history "0 Regresso." In the words of Professor Jose Murillo de Carvalho, the new state now had "taken root" but remained still "a macrocefalica, with a huge head and short limbs, that did not impinge on the municipalities and hardly touched the provinces. " 4 Even as its hegemonic reach increased, the Empire found it impossible to free the state from continued dependence on the "lords of the sertao (interior)." Few among Brazil's nineteenth-century elites would have accepted that the "nation" included the majority of even the country's free population, characterized, they felt, by ignorance and, worse, lack of property. Yet the continued health of a constitutional monarchy demanded periodic legitimation through effective popular involvement in the political process. An important part of the process was performance: citizens become accustomed to sharing in activities of and for the state. It was precisely the absence of such involvement that doomed to civil war the infant republics of Spanish America. As well, many of the Empire's independence leaders espoused a late eighteenth-century liberal ideology that anticipated at least the selective participation of the people in politics. 5 Elections, for example, ritualized and reinforced the people's role in the state process. Although

INTRODUCTION

3

Pedro I dismissed the original Constitutional Assembly when it seemed poised to deliver too radical a document, the r824 Constitution that he did approve instituted a voting system as democratic as any in the Atlantic world at the time, with modest property and no literacy requirements. But how, then, were elites to guarantee their continued power and, they imagined, national survival? The answer was a voting system that combined indirect election to the more important offices with public balloting, opening the process to fraud and intimidation. The emergence of political parties in the late r83os, however, tested elite cohesion and led to competition for votes and voters, with the twin effects of increasing electoral violence and raising the danger that a breach might open in the political system, allowing the masses to grasp for real power. The eventual solution, in Brazil as in the southern United States, was the imposition and manipulation of literacy requirements. Under such circumstances, how did the mass of the population, marginalized by geography and power, experience the state? Acceptance of, or at least acquiescence to, the national government seems to have been remarkably widespread: after the disturbances of the r83os and r84os, for example, violent challenges to the Empire plagued only the border province of Rio Grande do Sui. Of course, low-level popular resistance to specific government policies such as taxes and military recruitment was endemic, as it was in most preindustrial societies. Over all, however, and certainly compared to the numerous conflicts in Spanish America in these years or the United States' bloody civil war, popular opposition to the central authority in Brazil remained diffuse and muted under the Empire. In large part this was because the state made few effective demands on the general population, but also, and more importantly, because it made these demands through customary social and political hierarchies. On a day-to-day basis, the state was the local elite, to whom the population had always given obedience: "The prince reigns with the help of the lords of the land, who govern." 6 As it operated under the Empire, politics converted traditional, personalist ties of dependence into political loyalties, to the locally powerful, to the state, and, eventually, to parties. But even as the coronet (regional or local political boss) remained the key institution linking the center to the sertlw, the basis of his power was shifting, from socio-economic and political resources under his direct control to a negotiated ability to mobilize support from the provincial, or state, and national governments. Identification with the state was a low-cost proposition for most of the population most of the time, it took an accustomed form, and the benefits of such identification were increasingly evident. For all the undeniable growth of the power and penetration of the Brazilian state under the Empire, it nevertheless remained in many areas of the

4

INTRODUCTION

interior "a dim shadow, more of a future project than an actual reality." 7 A key problem was the chronic poverty of both the central government and provincial regimes. Professor Steve Topik has argued that the availability of revenues from export taxes gave the Brazilian state an autonomy unusual for the time and place, 8 but it also allowed the state to put off the hard task of domestic fiscal reform and, thus, continued its reliance on existing political and economic structures. Specifically, the Empire could not break free of its dependence on local elites not only for political control but also for the collection of internal taxes. These elites, in turn, often defrauded the state to their own advantage, at the same time that they squeezed those below them where they could. The victims blamed the state for their illtreatment. Provinces depended heavily on vaguely illegal, interprovincial "export" taxes which met with widespread smuggling, evasion, and fraud. State poverty led to ineffectiveness which further impoverished the state. and it also complicated efforts to improve transport and communications, a further cause of the isolation of the interior. Yet Brazil did not come apart as happened to so much of Latin America in these years, and instead the central regime achieved a steady, if uneven, growth in hegemony over the national territory, even as this territory expanded. Hegemony in this context includes both political and ideological components: political hegemony rests directly on the threat or use of force or physical coercion, while ideological hegemony implies the achievement of policy ends based on willing, or apparently willing, compliance, on shared ideas and values. State institutions such as schools and popular societies taught national geography and history and mythology, and periodically these enacted patriotic rituals, in order that the people would learn "the duties and privileges that the title of citizen confers." Each year the state church recognized at least fourteen official festivals celebrating the Empire and the royal family. 9 Yet, and despite the best efforts of the state, its agents, and supporting elites, the construction of hegemony here as in most societies remained a partial or incomplete process and continued to encounter, indeed to generate, resistance, whether opened or disguised. One point, for example, on which the Empire's nation building did encounter sustained opposition among the nonslave poor was in connection with forced wage labor. The reluctance of the "lazy" ex-slave or lower-class mulatto or caboclo (Indian-white mixture) to work for wages was a staple of elite discourse and despair throughout the century, both nationally and in Goias: "The people of Goias are little industrious," a traveler imagined, "not because they lack natural resources but because they let themselves be dominated by indolence and give themselves without restraint to the pleasures of the senses." 10 Still, the Brazilian state under the

INTRODUCTION

5

Empire made no serious effort to forcibly incorporate the mass of the population into wage work. Contract laws and regulations against "vagrancy" existed, but these were little enforced in rural areas, and the Empire undertook nothing comparable to, for example, the coercive work schemes of neighboring Argentina or the peonage systems of Peru or Mesoamerica. Brazil's government and economic elites could allow such slippage because they were able to obtain sufficient labor power from other sources: at first Indian and then relatively cheap African slaves and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, European immigrants met the worker requirements of the more dynamic sectors of the economy. Freedom from forced labor, paid or not, was a significant part of what Brazil's free poor gained from the pact that legitimized the state. Another effect was that outside of the cities bureaucratic state agents had little direct or day-to-day contact with most of the population, whether slave or free. As many observers have pointed out, an important element facilitating the expansion of state hegemony and the acceptance of that state power as legitimate in nineteen-century Brazil, and one that set this government apart from its Spanish American neighbors, was the rule of a legitimate monarch: "Brazilians recognize that Our Majesty is the most certain architect of the stability of our institutions. " 11 Typically, the annual reports required of each provincial president began with reference to the well-being of the royal family, and authorities structured public and patriotic ceremonies to reinforce popular loyalty to the Crown. One such evening in I83os Meiaponte, Goias, for example, ended with "the presentation of the portraits of Her Majesty and the Emperor to which the assembled group gave vivas for religion, the Constitutional Emperor, perpetual defender of Brazil, the Empress, his Highness the Royal Prince and the Imperial Family, and the Constitution." 12 It is not necessary to suppose that the mass of the population always accepted such state-sponsored rhetoric at face value to understand that participation in patriotic rituals or festivals worked to promote a sense of inclusion in the body politic, at the same time that it reinforced key status hierarchies. 13 Important, too, in the construction of the civic religion of nationalism was the conscious differentiation of Brazil from an inferior Spanish America: "Brazil, more prudent than the other peoples of America, love our institutions and, thanks to God, understand that it is in the domain of peace that riches grow." 14 It is also worth remembering, and allowing for local affections, that after the I 84os in most of Brazil loyalty to state and Emperor had few serious competitors, apart from the occasional and self-destructive outburst of messianic religion. With the defeat of the I 84os revolts, politically troublesome regionalism largely subsided, and Brazil lacked the settled but unassimilated indigenous majorities that plagued nation-building schemes in the Indian Republics.

6

INTRODUCTION

What should this state do or be able to do? Marx famously defined the capitalist state as a managing committee for the bourgeoisie, and classical economics essentially agrees, assigning the state the role of guarantor of private property. Recently, by contrast, analysts have given more attention to the "relative autonomy" of the state, to its institutionalization and its ability to function as an economic and political actor more or less independent of particular class or factional demands. If the Empire enjoyed growing fiscal autonomy, politically the state's continued dependence on transactional pacts with local and regional power brokers robbed it of much of its political autonomy. This manifested itself in rural areas in the failure of the state to monopolize legitimate violence and, as a result, its inability to guarantee popular security and rights independent of the power of these elites. The decision, or more properly the need, to farm out to private individuals the right to the legitimate use of violence opened the way for challenges to state power. In fact, however, by the I 8 sos most local and regional elites had made the decision to seek their advantage within the state rather than to oppose it; the social content of the I83os and I 84os uprisings had thoroughly frightened them. And legal assurances of property rights mattered little in the interior, where the economy was not capitalist and where other factors determined such rights. The state's inability in the sertao to exert autonomy from local interests or to monopolize legitimate violence necessarily raised transaction costs, but this served the interests of the locally powerful who had no use or need for the guarantees of bourgeois law.

The Weight of Memory The "decadence" of the present and the reasons for it were a constant thread woven through early nineteenth-century elite discourse. Of Goias, for example, travelers reported desolation at every turn: roads so little used that "grass hides every trace of them" and towns "in a state of decadence that surpasses any other"; fazendas (large estates), houses, and stores "that look as though they had been abandoned a century ago." 15 "Decadence," of course, implies a situation once better that has since declined. 16 Whether this accurately described Goias under the Empire, or, indeed, much of Brazil's interior during these years, was open to doubt. First, it defined "development" or "prosperity" chiefly in terms of successful gold mining, which at best brought wealth to only a handful of the province's inhabitants, together with misery and early death to the slaves imported to mine it and the Indians displaced or killed in the processY More broadly, Goias's gold boom rose and collapsed so quickly and con-

INTRODUCTION

7

centrated itself in so few areas that it left little of the economic or cultural residue characteristic, for example, of neighboring Minas Gerais. Against such a background, one historian has labeled Goias's years under the Empire "a century without history," while another instead wonders how the province's inhabitants must have felt, swept up in a storm of constant change. 18 The first perspective seems intuitively the more logical, given the limited shifts that Goias's economic and sociopolitical life appears to have experienced over the course of the century, and these slowly. In r82o, for example, most of the province's residents lived in the countryside and depended for survival on subsistence agriculture and the sale of cattle; by the r89os the state still remained overwhelmingly rural and cattle were its chief item of interprovincial trade. From the point of view of the historical actors themselves, however, and particularly those in the provincial capital, change may at times have seemed about to overwhelm them: from a monarchy to an empire to a federal republic, the arrival of the printing press and newspapers, party politics, escalating Indian attacks, exciting new consumer goods, and a flux of immigrant and transient populations, including mineiro (from Minas Gerais) and paulista (from Sao Paulo) cattle ranchers looking for land; gypsies; refugees from northeastern droughts; cattle buyers and traveling merchants; and desperate lepers struggling toward the newly opened hot springs at Caldas Novas. By the r89os the telegraph was in operation and railroads approached across neighboring provinces. As this suggests, how you experienced the century depended in large part where you were and what you did. The geography of imperial Goias embraced several environmental zones, and these, in turn, heavily influenced Luzo-Brazilian settlement and possible economic activitiesY Much of the province was cerrado, 20 grasslands punctuated by clumps of trees and low bush that grew chiefly along rivers or small, often seasonal, watercourses. The soil of the cerrado was predominantly sandy and infertile but in many areas supported coarse grasses suitable for extensive cattle grazing. Over time, however, the effects of fires set to clear pastures, deforestation to open land for agriculture, and overgrazing destroyed many native plant species, allowing invading, sometimes less nutritious grasses to take over and possibly altering patterns of rainfall. 21 Generally the soil in the north of Goias was thought to be of poorer quality than that of the center and south, and the economy there remained less developed during the nineteenth century. Running down the middle of the province from Descoberto in the north to Bonfim (Silvania) and Campinas in the south was the Mato Grosso, a twenty-to-thirty-kilometer-wide band of dense forest that initially impeded settlement and in the nineteenth century still sheltered indigenous enemies. Travelers found it difficult to make a passage through the Mato Grosso, particularly during the rainy season

8

INTRODUCTION

that lasted in Goias from October through March. 22 Already by the first years of the Empire, however, slash-and-burn agriculturists had invaded the area, cutting and firing trees and brush to open areas for plantings and leaving abandoned patches gone over to brush and wild grasses. Cutting across the countryside were numerous rivers and creeks, many of which ran dry in July and August but came back as roaring torrents during the rains. Commonly they overflowed their banks, creating travel barriers and health-threatening swamps and bogs. Crossing rivers with life and goods intact was a constant challenge for nineteenth-century merchants and travelers, some of whom found themselves held up for days at a time or even trapped between rivers, unable to go forward or retreat: residents of the town of Rio Bonito, for example, reported that during the rains their town became an "island," cut off from road contact with the rest of the district. 23 Good agricultural land lay along some of the rivers and creeks but inhabitants shunned it, because of problems with floods and fevers bred in stagnant pools, and also for fear of water-borne Indian attacks. An exception was the Vao (valley) of the Rio Parana, northeast of the town of Formosa and noted early in the century for its cattle, horses, and disease.24 Further to the north the Rios Araguaia and Tocantins marked much of the province's northern and western boundaries, though this did not preclude territorial disputes with neighboring provinces. In the east along the division between Goias and the provinces of Piaui, Bahia, and Minas Gerais ran a range of low mountains labeled variously the Serra Geral or the Serra Mestre. Guarding the approaches to these mountains were the "Gerais," areas of sparse vegetation inhabited by a "savage" population feared by itinerant merchants, cattle drovers, and travelers. 25 With the decline of mining in the late eighteenth century and the gradual shift to cattle and small-scale agriculture, two regional patterns emerged within the province. The north pioneered the commercial production and sale of cattle, sending animals overland to coastal buyers, chiefly in Bahia. Effectively a cattle-hunting rather than cattle-raising activity, ranching here was extensive and the animals received little or no attention between roundups. Poor soils, limited market access, and the dominance of the cattle culture militated against the development of agriculture in the region. As a result, the north suffered chronic food shortages and high prices. By comparison, and because the early emphasis on mining had fixed attention on the center and north of the province, only in the early nineteenth centuries did the south begin to fill up with settlers and properties. In the southeast immigrants from Minas Gerais developed mixed holdings that produced tobacco and cotton, hogs and cattle, and they sold these to nearby settlements or across the Rio Paranaiba to Paracattl and the towns along the Rio Sao Francisco. To the southwest the province's economy

INTRODUCTION

9

focused more on cattle. Still, many of the supposed differences between the north and the south were as much imagined as real and were exaggerated for effect by interested parties. When the military officer Raymundo Jose da Cunha Mattos set out early in the IS2os to inspect Goias's provincial militia, residents of the capital warned him of the "barbarity" of the north. But he found, he said, little to differentiate the two regions and ridiculed the ignorance and pretensions of the inhabitants of both. 26 Still, a perception of divergence had taken root in popular imagination and with time estrangement grew. Several factors fed this. Because the north's origins lay more in mining, the decline of gold hit the region harder than the south, and it was here that colonial towns withered. 27 Indian attacks before mid-century were especially fierce in the north, forcing the abandonment of farms, fazendas, and settlements and prompting a general resentment that provincial authorities could not or would not do more to help the population: in February I848, for example, the dimara (town council) of Porto Imperial (Porto Nacional) protested that were it not for poor roads and Indian attacks theirs would be one of the richest freguesias (parishes) in the province, but the state gave them little assistance with either. 28 The north's interprovincial trade continued to go chiefly overland to the coastal northeast and by river to Para and Maranhao, whereas in the south commerce flowed between the province and Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. The vast distances that separated the provincial capital from the settlements in the north, together with bad roads and slow and irregular mails, meant that official correspondence, letters, and newspapers commonly arrived there late, if at all, and any response required came long after it was needed. While many in the north agreed that the region was "backward" even as compared to the south of Goias, others tired of stereotypes that painted them as ignorant and uncouth, and nourished separatist ambitions. 29 For a predominantly rural economy with a modest population, nineteenth-century Goias exhibited a surprising number of towns, a legacy of both the province's origins in mining and the subsequent decline of that industry. As a provincial president explained: "Once the surface mining ended, the population found itself held captive by many local bonds, far from the coast and without the comforts of civilization, and they were forced to take up agriculture, manufacturing, and stock raising. The towns that gold had formed persisted, inhabited by families now rooted in the soil." 30 Of course, "town" was a relative term. Not only were most of nineteenth century Goias's settlements small, more properly hamlets (arraiais) than towns, they remained largely empty for much of the year, filling up only when the rural people visited for festivals, elections, or jury trials. Because gold, and the water needed to work it, determined where

Peixe • Palmae

Arraias • Cavalcante•

Sao Jose do Tocantins• Flores•

Jaragu:·

400 450 480 320 240 450 320

900 900 960 800 600 960 640

* Per alqueire. ,. * Per arroba. NOTE: These are dizimo not market prices. SOURCE: AHEG, Municipios, Trairas, "Tabela

Demonstrativa dos Pre