F. O. Morton The Military and Society in Bahia

The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821
Author(s): F. W. O. Morton
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
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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
by F. W. O. MORTON
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 pro-
fessional 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 pos-
sessed a surprisingly elaborate military organization, which involved almost
all groups in the free population, and which was the outcome of two-and-a-
half 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 im-
portant 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-Campo Correa de Mello to
Governor D. Fernando Jose de Portugal of 14 May, 800o in the Secao dos Manuscriptos
of the Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro (hereinafter cited 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 regulars had a paper strength of 3,138.
250 F. W. 0. Morton
The part-time military units included the bulk of the free adult male popula-
tion. 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 imposi-
tion 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 several other parts of Brazil, experienced
a series of insurrections in the years immediately after Independence in which
both the professional and the part-time military 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 structure was 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-file and 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 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.
4 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 super-
numerary (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 barracks to 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 conferred nobility 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 Portuguese Seaborne Empire (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, ' Conjoncture et Societe au Bresil a la Fin du
XVIIIe siecle: Prix et Salaires a la vieille de la Revolution des Alfaiates Bahia 1798' in
Cahiers des 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.9 The first comprised those trans-
ferred to Bahia from Portugal or from the Portuguese dominions in Asia and
Africa. With these may be included the four officers transferred in 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 careers at 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."1 But 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 sec-
tion of Ordems Regias in the same place. Material has also been found in the Arquivo
Historico Ultramarino at Lisbon and in the Secao dos Manuscritos of 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 cer-
tainly not complete (e.g. an officer who served without promotion from 800oo to 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.12 The 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 them-
selves 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 (porta-bandeiras), of whom there were
sixteen in the period, and who seem to have been midway in status between
former cadets and former NCOs. Some were probably sons 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-general or troops, before I822.
It will be seen that the differences in the career prospects of the five groups
12 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 impor-
tant senhores de engenho among the professional officers.
13 The birthplaces of 40 officers can be known with certainty and those of I40 with some prob-
ability, 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 else-
where 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.
254 F. W. O. Morton
TABLE I
Career Prospects of Officers at Bahia 1800-21
Ranks Groups
I II III IV
(a) (b) (c) Totals
Lt.-General I I
Marechal-de-Campo 3 I 4
Brigadier I 2 4 2 9
Colonel 5 3 2 13 23
Lt.-Colonel 4 2 3 I 6 i6
Major 3 2 4 8 I 15 33
ADC 2 2 4
Totals I8 12 13 9 I 37 go
Totals in each group 36 25 67 79 i6 113 336
% in each group 50% 48% 19% 11% 6% 33% 27%
reaching rank of major,
A'
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 ex-
sergeant 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-de-
Campo 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.14 The 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. Ordems Rdgias. 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
patents as ensigns (alferes) or second lieutenants before they were twenty.
Therefore, many if not most of the cadets first commissioned in the period
I800-I82I would have been under forty in the latter year. This was, in fact,
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.16 But 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 con-
sistent with the general practices of Bahian society, then as now, for a dispro-
portionate 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, ecclesiastical and 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 services as an hereditable
claim on the Crown's favour. Like cadetships, this had many parallels in
eighteenth-century Europe, 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;
hereditable service 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 transferred or
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-General Caldeira Brant is found complaining of
the frequency with which the alvara was disregarded.18 In 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
certificates of 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 proprietary and here-
diltable status 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. Inter-
marriage among them seems to have been frequent. All were either completely
Bahian or rapidly assimilating. They formed a good proportion of the Bahian-
born officers, perhaps even a majority of the former cadets. Any calculation
of their numbers must be provisional, in view of the difficulties of identifica-
tion posed by the Brazilian system of personal names, but it appears that at
least Ioo officers belonged 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 Escritura da Capital. pasta I47/373.

18 APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 111/244: Caldeira Brant to Arcos 26 Jan. I8i1.
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-law of 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-general of 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.19 The whole incident
brings out the resentment felt by the Bahian officers of the outsiders para-
chuted in among them and their proprietorial attitudes to their regiments.
But property and 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 hereditability of 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,
reasonable to conclude that the system of cadetships and of hereditable service
which created the 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-major of 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 Inspectorate of Troops men-
tion more than a dozen categories all told, down to salesmen for the royal
playing-card factories.20 Such persons were highly likely to be white, com-
fortably 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
pressgang was to take up the cultivation of basic foodstuffs, the supply of
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 captain-
major was likely to find himself in the ranks, which tended to be regarded as
a fresh-air jail by all parties.22 No 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 recruits sent 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-General Caldeira
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.24 Soldiers 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-inforced his subjection to his commanders.
20 APB.DH. Inspetoria das 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), 505.
22 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 deserters by 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.
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 200oo.26 Cases of the
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 aristocratic arm 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 recruitment and the conditions of service
produced privates whose commitment to a military career was minimal. Many
of them were separated from the majority of their officers by the colour of
their skins in a highly colour-conscious society. Active zeal to serve king and
country in arms seems to have been rare, if not unknown.
Considering the professional military as a whole, it has already been 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 hereditable claim 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 criteria for 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 officers relative 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, represented a sharing of power and influence between the Crown
26 APB.DH. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 59I: Caldeira Brant to Arcos, I2 Aug. I813.
27 APB.DH. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 588 (i8io).
260 F. W. 0. Morton
and local elites. The former benefited from the defence of a valuable posses
and from the considerable opportunities for patronage afforded by
military. But the elites, and particularly the military families, also had a
stake in the institution, gaining from it not merely a livelihood, but econ
security, enhanced social standing and potential political strength.
The decades under consideration in this article were of course the age of
Spanish American revolutions. The implications for Portuguese colonia
of an army so largely officered by the Brazilian-born were, therefore, seri
The Crown had long used a number of techniques to maintain control of
colonial military. The appointment of Portuguese-born officers and still m
the special favour shown them not only reduced the military's capacity t
by dividing them against themselves; it created a privileged group w
interests were bound up with continued royal control, and, by fostering
petition for place and promotion, it increased the importance of the Crow
role as the fountain of honour and the final arbiter of disputes. In the sa
way, the immensely complicated system of issuing patents (each officer h
two, gubernatorial and royal, the latter issued at Lisbon, for each ran
held) was more than a rich source of confusion and delay which left a
mass of official correspondence behind it.28 By making officer rank and
advantages difficult and expensive of access, and by ensuring that m
officers would be in a state of bureaucratic delinquency at any given time
kept up the value of the Crown's monopoly of political legitimacy.
Crown's strength thus lay in the very complexities of the system and
tensions they engendered.
Such techniques appeared adequate until the Pernambuco rebellion of 18
revealed how strong a hold liberal and nationalist ideas had obtained o
military of that captaincy. A wholly Portuguese battalion was soon p
to Bahia as to the other cities of Brazil. This action clearly revealed
Crown's heightened mistrust of the local military, just when the Pernamb
rising (which had been in large part suppressed by the Bahian regulars
made them conscious as never before of their potential strength. Three y
later the professional military were to bring colonialism and absolutism t
end in Bahia in the rising of February, I82I.
But in the act of ending the traditional role of the Crown, the profession
allowed the internal divisions the Crown had so long exploited full play; a
the early imperial period was repeatedly to see them fighting each other ra
than any other social group. Divisions of class, colour and national or
28 APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 94/148: carta regia of 27 Sept. 1787; pasta I06/223 S
Coutinho to Ponte, 24 Nov. I808; pasta o06/272 Linhares to Ponte, 24 Jan. I809. Ar
Historico Ultramarino de Lisboa, Documentos Avulsos do Conselho Ultramarino, caix
(Bahia) cartas regias of 1 Aug. 1803 and 4 Nov. I803.
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 cadetships and hereditable service 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 conspirators included representatives of
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 (com-
mandante d'armas) in February 1822 precipitated open 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 exacerbated by the incorporation into 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.31 Disorder 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 da Bahia xxvI (I940) 126-142; Bras do Amaral, Historia, pp. 1I7,
125; Accioli, Mem6rias, III, 293-332, 455-480, 488-519.
31 Archives du Ministrre des Affaires Exterieures, Paris: Correspondence Commerciale/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

dominantly coloured units.32 Gomes Caldeira, a white, an ex-cadet, a mi
by birth and a nephew of Inspector-General Caldeira Brant, was a near-p
example of the privileged groups among the officers. His murder precip
a split in the professionals between the new units and the artillery on t
hand, and the two older infantry units, one of which was command
member of a Reconcavo sugar family, Alexandre Gomes de Argolo F
on the other. These units, referred to by the French Consul as 'les t
blanches ', marched out of the city to the nearby town of Abrantes, whe
received moral and material support from the landowners and militia of
Reconcavo.33 After a month's blockade of the city, the forces of the stat
prevailed; the rebels laid down their arms, and the unit responsible for
Caldeira's death was shipped off to Pernambuco.
In 1831 a renewed series of risings by the military took place, in whi
Brazilian-born were at first reasonably united in opposition to the Portu
born officers, supposedly favoured by Dom Pedro I in support of his rum
absolutist designs. But this united front did not outlive the Empe
abdication. In April, an infantry battalion refused to accept a sugar aris
as its commander.34 In May and August the bulk of the infantry fa
join risings by the artillery and a battalion from Piaui, but in October i
the turn of the infantry to mutiny and be left without support from any
unit. In all these risings massive desertions weakened the rebelling u
had been true in 1824 as well. For the rank-and-file a rising might initial
the character of a strike - better pay was always prominent in a mu
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
Sabinada of 1837-1838, appears at first sight to form an exception t
pattern outlined so far. All the regular units supported the initial ri
7 November 1837, and all of them remained loyal to it as units duri
almost five months of fighting which followed.36 But appearances a
leading. Individual officers deserted to the government side in large nu
:32 Accioli, Memdrias, iv, 147, I82-I83.

33 Anais do Arquivo Pablico da Bahia xxix (1969) I6I/xix (I93I) I56-157. APB.DH.
dente da Provincia: Governoas Camaras pasta 1.269.
34 Public Records Office, London: Foreign Office Archives, Brazil (F.O. 13), LXXX
Parkinson to Aston, I6 April, I831.
's Accioli Memorias iv, 279-280, 283, 348; F.O. 13, LXXXVIII, IOI, I06, 146, Park
Aston 14 May, 27 May, and 2 Sept. 1831; Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro IG
Barros Paim to Lima e Silva 21 Nov. I831.
.36 The permanent police force which had been raised in 1832 supported the rising at
set bur deserted to the government side on 13 Nov. Its commander was a memb
sugar family and its pay differential over the military had been abolished by th
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 artillery officers were correspondingly
well represented among them.37 The military families, the sugar aristocrats
and the Portuguese-born were to be found commanding the forces of order,
christened the Exercito Restaurador.
At no time, therefore, in the troubled first decades of Brazilian indepen-

dence did the professional military 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 professionals in 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 differences in structure between
the Reconcavo, the centre of sugar culture, and the semi-arid interior 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 com-
bined 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 800o and nine in 182I.
The senior officers of all militia regiments were deliberately chosen 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.38 In 1813 Caldeira Brant as Inspector-General wrote of a
petitioner:
It is true that the petitioner has served in the line and has more military under-
standing than any of the officers of the company, for which reason he was made
First Sergeant; but he [cannot] be promoted officer of militia while [he has] no
fortune. He has only one slave, while the Second Sergeant is a well-established land-
owner, one of the richest of the company's district.39
This picture of a regiment whose very sergeants might be landowners is borne

out by a lisit of 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 posit of
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
38 APB.DI-I. Presidente da Provincia: Militares Pessoal. pasta 3.777.
39 APB.DH. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 591 (I813). Other examples abound; cf. Palma to
Vilanova Portugal, 2 Oct. I818 in Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, IG 113/460.
anything more marked after Independence.40 The alvard of I802, which, inter
alia, laid down that militia colonels should have had professional experience,
made no practical difference; colonels were simply named from the pro-
fessional officers of aristocratic background (above, note 12).
If service as a professional officer was reasonably popular, 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 land-
owners 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, sharecroppers and craftsmen, and the inhabitants
of the pockets of subsis.tence agriculture which lay between the best cane lands.
A list of the rank-and-file of the Regiment of Piraja in i8io has survived; it
includes many carpenters and smiths, a few lavradores de canas, fishermen
and, unexpectedly, tailors.42 Privileged exemptions from service in the militia
as from that in the professionals may 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 probably made 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 McAllister The ' Fuero Militar ' in New Spain, p. 8.
42 APB.DHl. Inspetoria das Tropas. pasta 588 (I8Io).
43 BN/SM II, 33, 34, 28: Table of Five Rec6ncavo Militia Regiments i Feb. 1802.
266 F. W. O. Morton
confirmed and re-inforced pre-existing social relationships. On Sunday after-

noons 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 professionals in a crisis, and this was
repeatedly proved 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 terqo under 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 ha
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 wit
their own officers, and others for professional groups such as the' companhia
da justica' which included the advocates, notaries, bailiffs, and clerks of
town - most of them privilegiados in relation to the first two lines.44 These
differences did 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-major were 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 counterparts in the militia. This was probably i
part due to the differentiation in honour between them. Officers of ordenanFa
did not have the foro militar; their patents were signed by the governor, not
the king, and their children could not become cadets in the first line. More-
over, as already stated, they were chiefly concerned with unglamorous duties
of police and recruitment. The rank-and-file of the ordenanpas are 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 administer-
ing it at the time. But they too came from the free population of the Reconcav
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.
war itself was won by the so-called Exercito Pacificador which, while it incor-
porated regulars from Bahia, Rio and Pernambuco, was predominantly com-
posed throughout of drafts from the militia and of units raised by the
Reconcavo aristocracy at 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.46 Geography, moreover, was on the landowners' side. The regulars,
whose repeated risings constituted the most immediate threat to the new
political dispensation, were concentrated in 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 counterparts in the interior of
Pernambuco and Maranhao in these years. Equally, the Reconcavo militia
was a very present help in time of trouble for provincial governments 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.47 In April 1831, order was restored in the capital by a
body of militia under the Viscount of Piraja.48 In 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. Patentes. pasta 406; Anais do Arquivo Publico da Bahia XIX (193I) 97-98; BN/SM
I, 4, 2, 26, nos. 87, 142.
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 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 t

unpaid, aristocratic officers, had been sources of patronage and instrume
of social control, and the National Guard was to fulfil those purposes in
decades as well. But in early imperial Brazil they came to be military
political factors of the first importance. They, not the regulars, supplied
physical force by which the new alliance between monarchy and elites w
had emerged from the years of Independence was able to defeat its enem
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 characteristic of eighteenth-century Europe. Both deliber-
ately gave preference in 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 professionalism of 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 represented in 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 pro-
fessional 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-time forces, 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
techniques of control. Hundreds of militia officers never troubled to obtain a

properly signed royal patent, and this was symptomatic.51 Their authority had
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 Portu-
guese 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 aristocracy succeeded, first in ending Portuguese rule in
the War of Independence of 1822-1823, and then in defending the tradi-
tional social and political dispensaition against the attacks from 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 Ulrramarino de
Lisboa: Conselho Ultramarino, pasta 25I/124, carta regia of 5 Feb. 80o5.

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The Military and Society in Bahia, 1800-1821

The Military and Society in Bahia, I800-i82I

The Professional Military: The Officers

s C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1969), p. 311.

certain as far as the rank of captain. An officer could be reasonably sure of

Career Prospects of Officers at Bahia 1800-21

Source: Arquivo Publico da Bahia, Documentos Hist6ricos: Patentes pastas 384-406.

Note: Group I-Portuguese

14 BN/SM I, 31, 30, 9I: APB.DH. Ordems Rdgias. pasta. 93/76.

17 APB. Documentos juridicos. Notas de Escritura da Capital. pasta I47/373.

The Professional Military: The Rank-and-File

19 APB.DH. Ordems Regias. pasta 95/36, 723.

repeatedly influenced the lines of cleavage, although their influence was to

military governor, Felisberto Gomes Caldeira, by soldiers of one of the

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

At no time, therefore, in the troubled first decades of Brazilian indepen-

The Second and Third Lines: Militia and Ordenanfas

Like the professionals, the militia or second line included representatives

This picture of a regiment whose very sergeants might be landowners is borne

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

confirmed and re-inforced pre-existing social relationships. On Sunday after-

44 APB.DH. Presidente da Provincia: Militares Capitdes-Mores. pasta 3.798.

In the colonial age the military institutions of the countryside, with t

organized by local districts, and sometimes by class, colour and occupation as

techniques of control. Hundreds of militia officers never troubled to obtain a

The consequences of these differences were to be considerable in the

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