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Where’s the Empire in Brazilian Empire?
Race, Gender, and Imperial Nostalgia
in Brazil
An Essay Dedicated to Wiebke Ipsen

Marc A. Hertzman

Existia um imperialismo brasileiro? O termo “império brasileiro” é uma

daquelas que os estudiosos utilizam muito mas interrogam pouco. Este artigo
considera o significado da palavra império no contexto brasileiro, utilizando
como fonte de inspiração ideias desenvolvidas por Wiebke Ipsen, historiadora
que faleceu em 2009 depois de uma luta prolongada com câncer. Baseado em
pesquisa original, o artigo utiliza duas pessoas, uma esquecida e outra muita
conhecida, para sugerir novos caminhos na história dos séculos dezenove e
vinte. A primeira personagem, Jovita Alves Feitosa, vestiu-se de homem e ten-
tou lutar na Guerra de Paraguai. A segunda figura, o Barão do Rio Branco,
foi um dos diplomatas mais importantes da virada do século. Considerados
juntos, a Jovita e o Barão, e as memórias coletivas dos dois, sugerem que
existia, sim, um “imperialismo brasileiro,” mas que se o encontra em lugares
surpreendentes.

Icancer.
n 2009, historian Wiebke Ipsen passed away after a prolonged battle with
The lasting impact and importance of her work is evident not only in
the original arguments she made, but also in the compelling questions that
her scholarship continues to raise. In the pages below, I build on some her
most important ideas to offer a new reading of “Brazilian Empire,” an often
used but rarely interrogated phrase.1
In her dissertation, Ipsen shows that Brazilian women from diverse racial
and socio-economic backgrounds mobilized in support of the Paraguayan

Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1 1

ISSN 0024-7413, © 2015 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Wisconsin System
2 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

War (also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864–1870), during which
Brazil fought with Argentina and Uruguay against Paraguay. Women’s par-
ticipation in the war effort, Ipsen demonstrates, was closely linked to their
collective desire for broader political inclusion. But while women’s physical
and material sacrifices secured recognition and provided a platform from
which to launch an early suffrage campaign, their efforts were ultimately
blunted by what Ipsen calls “delicate citizenship,” a set of discourses and pol-
icies that recognized women’s “feminine” contributions to the war effort (e.g.,
supportive roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters) but left their po-
litical rights and their standing within the nation fragile and conditional.2
Ipsen’s delineation of “delicate citizenship” helps clarify how and why
female political mobilizations took the path and shape that they did in
nineteenth-century Brazil, and her work links Military History and Wom-
en’s & Gender History, fields that do not often engage with one another. Her
dissertation also opens a number of interesting avenues for further inquiry.
The first chapter focuses on Brazil’s Voluntárias da Pátria (Volunteers for the
Fatherland), women who volunteered to fight on the front lines. Jovita Alves
Feitosa, a young woman of color from northeastern Brazil was among the
handful of known Voluntárias. As Ipsen notes, available archival material
heavily privileges the lives, words, and actions of wealthy white women over
those with darker skin and fewer material resources. Nonetheless, Ipsen is
able to partially reconstruct Feitosa’s remarkable story, and in doing so lights
the way down several inviting paths. Years ago at the Casa Rui Barbosa in
Rio de Janeiro, I came across an interesting article about Feitosa, published
by O Malho in 1905. I eventually passed the piece on to Wiebke, but only
after dragging my feet. By the time I dug the article out of my records she
had completed her dissertation. The article is, therefore, an appropriate point
of departure for this piece and for my own attempt to engage several key
questions about race, gender, and empire. To begin, a brief discussion of the
meaning of Brazilian Empire is in order.

Empire and Perspective

After declaring independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazil maintained a
constitutional monarchy until 1889, a year after it abolished slavery. The years
between Independence and the declaration of the republic comprise what is
known as Brazil’s Imperial Era, but that label can be misleading, particularly
in light of current understandings and discussions of empire and imperial-
ism. Especially during the 1850s and 1860s, Brazil did intervene regularly in
its neighbors’ affairs, but national territory hardly expanded between 1822
and 1889. Suffice to say, the sun set every day on Brazil’s Empire. If the relative
absence of territorial growth makes “Brazilian Empire” (O Brasil Imperial,
Hertzman 3

or simply O Império) something of an oxymoron, the phrase itself remains

firmly entrenched in the lexicon of historians, who have rarely interrogated
or explored the term’s multiple potential meanings.3
From the outside, Brazil may seem to be a colossus, even if the view from
inside is often much different. The War of the Triple Alliance, the focus of
Ipsen’s work, is a case in point. The conflict decimated Paraguay’s popula-
tion and landscape. But on the Brazilian home front, the war exposed severe
weaknesses, including the inability to furnish a full fighting force without
pressing slaves, vagrants, and convicts into service.4 These and other short-
comings made Brazil seem less a belligerent titan than, in the words of one
author, an “anemic giant.”5
A century after the end of the Paraguayan War and more than a half-
century after the fall of the Empire, the Bolivian writer and diplomat Raúl
Botelho Gosálvez published a study titled Proceso del Imperialismo del Brasil
(The Process of Brazilian Imperialism). The book’s cover displays two maps.
One depicts the mass of land granted to the Portuguese Crown in 1494 by
the Treaty of Tordesilhas and the other shows the considerably larger swath
of territory that Brazil had come to encompass over the subsequent four-
and-a-half centuries. In a separate map towards the end of the book, Botelho
Gosálvez uses bold arrows to illustrate what he calls Brazil’s “Geopolitical
Constants”: five prizes (Colombia’s Orinoco Basin, Peru’s Pacific Coast, Bo-
livia’s oil, Paraguay’s watershed, and the Rio de la Plata) drawing Brazil with
gravitational-like force across its neighbors’ borders.6 Few Brazilians at the
time thought their country was on the verge of a continental takeover, which,
in any case, never materialized. (This is not to dismiss the very real resent-
ment and fears of economic aggression that many of Brazil’s neighbors still
hold.) But while Brazil did not set out to colonize South America in 1960,
the year that Botelho Gosálvez published his study, it did inaugurate Brasília
as its capital, a move meant, at least in part, to signal the culmination of
a centuries-old project to integrate and “tame” the national territory in its
entirety.
Paradoxes of the 1860s—when Brazil unleashed violent force in Paraguay
while masking “anemic” realities at home—and the 1960s—when the most
significant act of expansion took place within the nation’s borders—suggest
the need to think creatively and perhaps counter-intuitively about Brazilian
Empire. When its meaning is assumed and left unexplored, the term becomes
flat and meaningless. But when it is interrogated and understood to extend
beyond extra-territorial expansion and to also include the usurpation of “do-
mestic” land, violent “civilizing” campaigns against Native people, and other
forms of “internal colonialism” empire’s relevance in the Brazilian context
becomes readily apparent.7 And as we will see in the pages below, when em-
pire is understood as a set of processes and ideas that extend beyond physical
4 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

expansion and also include discursive erasures and patriotic pronounce-

ments linking national grandeur to territorial integrity, the concept becomes
useful for understanding Brazil not only during the nineteenth century, but
also the twentieth. During the early twentieth century, politicians, journal-
ists, and memorialists waxed nostalgic about the imperial period, construct-
ing a symbolic bridge across time and space to connect the nation’s coastal
centers with its distant inland borders and, perhaps more significantly, to
wrap empire and republic together in an uninterrupted narrative of national
splendor. These discourses, proffered mainly by male politicians and writers
of means and privilege do not comprise an organic or representative whole.
But they are useful, nonetheless, for what they tell us about how a cohesive
national identity was often imagined at the expense of others and in such a
way that allowed republican ideas to link up with thoughts and processes in
play since at least the early nineteenth century.

“O Alferes Jovita”: Race and Gender in Unsettling

(and Unsettled) Times
It is possible to find some of the hidden and less straightforward meanings
of Brazilian Empire in the remarkable story of Jovita Alves Feitosa. Feitosa
was born in 1848, in Ceará. Her mother died when she was twelve, and four
years later she moved west to Piauí to live with her uncle. In 1865, to join the
armed forces she disguised herself as a man and walked more than 250 miles
to the provincial capital, where she enlisted as Antonio Alves Feitosa. Her
identity was soon discovered, and she was taken to a local police station for
questioning. She explained to her interrogators that she intended neither to
pursue a lover, nor to become a nurse (as some had assumed), and that she
instead wanted to be a soldier who would fight and defend Brazil. She was ac-
cepted as a volunteer and entered the army at the rank of 2nd sergeant. After
a month of training, she and Piauí’s male volunteers made their way to Rio
de Janeiro, where they prepared to depart for the front line. News of Feitosa’s
actions spread quickly. Crowds received her at various points along the way
as she traveled to Rio. But once there, the Minister of War ordered her dis-
charge, effective on September 16, 1865. Little is known of what Feitosa did
for the next two years. Some say that she clandestinely made her way south
to battle, though there is no hard evidence of this. In October 1867, newspa-
pers in Rio reported that she committed suicide after her lover, reportedly an
Englishman, left Brazil and returned home.8
A lack of documentation makes it difficult to know whether the suicide
story or the accounts of her heroism in battle are fact, fiction, or something
in between. There is no doubt, however, that observers attributed great im-
portance to her actions, during the 19th century and long after it.9 Feitosa’s
Hertzman 5

lasting importance is evident in the 1905 O Malho article that I came across at
the Casa Rui Barbosa while Ipsen was finishing her dissertation. The article’s
title, “Mais uma heroína brasileira: O alferes Jovita” (Another Brazilian Her-
oine: The Ensign Jovita), combines apparently incongruous gender referents.
The word “heroína” clearly marks her femininity, but the masculine noun
o alferes (ensign) provides a counterbalance or perhaps a gendered para-
dox.10 O Malho compared her to Anita Garibaldi, another female soldier. The
daughter of Portuguese immigrants, she married Giuseppi Garibaldi, a cen-
tral figure in the struggles for Italian unification, whom she fought alongside
in Uruguay and Argentina. The couple traveled then to Italy and participated
in the 1848 revolutions. O Malho called Garibaldi “essa outra grande heroína
filha de nossa pátria” and noted that romance inspired both women to take
up arms. Despite the fact that she said just the opposite in 1865, O Malho
maintained that “love” drove Feitosa (and Garibaldi before her) to war.
O Malho, which mistakenly described Feitosa as being from Minas Gerais,
explained how she followed her man to the battlefield. “A formosa filha de
Minas, sabendo que o seu amado partira a combater o ditador [paraguaio
Francisco Solano] Lopez, vestiu-se de homem e, assim disfarçada, lá se foi
também, alistada num batalhão.” While the paper emphasized Feitosa’s fem-
ininity, it also underscored her bravado:
Si encontrou o eleito de sua alma, não sabemos: é histórico apenas que ne-
nhum soldado foi mais valente. Nunca, no mais aceso do fogo, a viram tremer
[. . .] os oficiais superiores notavam com admiração e entusiasmo aquele sol-
dado imberbe, franzino, de compleição delicada, de feições tão puras, que era
entretanto um leão.”11

Alongside its article, O Malho ran a photograph of Feitosa dressed in an

unusual ensemble that once again combined apparently contradictory gen-
dered references. Viewed from the waist up, her portrait could easily be
taken as that of any male soldier. Her hair is tucked neatly under a hat that
matches her button-down uniform shirt. A large firearm rests on her shoul-
der. A white skirt (or apron) around her waist disrupts this otherwise un-
remarkable military portrait. The picture resembles a costume that Feitosa
wore during public appearances and theater performances in which she and
a small number of other female would-be-soldiers participated after their
stories became public. On at least one other occasion, Feitosa wore a fardeta,
a uniform jacket worn by soldiers for cleaning.12 The fardeta and the skirt
evoked domesticity and femininity, traits that supporters of the war effort
hoped would rouse men into battle. In 1865, a newspaper in Ceará wrote,
“When a pretty young [woman] does not fear the war and presents herself
with a weapon to fight the enemies of the Patria, could there be a man who
refuses to imitate her?”13
6 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

O Malho’s treatment of the “heroine” Feitosa contrasts with the unam-

biguously mocking and critical tone the press typically reserved for gender-
bending men and women. Turn-of-the-century pundits and authorities
ridiculed “women-men (mulheres-homens),” described by Sueann Caulfield
as “women who attempted to escape the boundaries of their female-gendered
bodies by taking on male identities.”14 Vida Policial described one mulher-
homem as “a victim of a morbid, pathological condition [.  .  .] her natural
tendency, her instincts, were conspicuously masculine.”15 During the 1910s
and ’20s, social commentators feared that changes in fashion had led to the
“masculinization” of women.16 Around the same time, police routinely ar-
rested and persecuted homosexual men.17 In such a context, nationalism and
nostalgia—wistful memories of a heroic, bygone era of Brazilian glory—
allowed O Malho to strip Feitosa of her potentially transgressive message and
portray her as a symbol of a heroic chapter in the nation’s history. “Ainda
passados tantos anos,” the magazine wrote, it was able to obtain her pho-
tograph, a veritable window into “um dos mais belos episódios da guerra
contra o Paraguai.”18
Whatever her actual intentions, and however Feitosa defined her own
sexuality, the paper cast Feitosa’s male disguise as temporary and even nor-
mative. It was not deviance but rather love for a male companion and for
her patria that inspired her to don a soldier’s uniform. That narrative placed
Feitosa safely within the confines of “straight” female-male heterosexual-
ity and allowed O Malho to extoll her dedication to Brazil and the manly,
“lion”-like exploits of the delicate, baby-faced woman. O Malho’s juxtaposi-
tion of Feitosa and Garibaldi is also significant. During the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, many prominent intellectuals and officials
envisioned the gradual “whitening” of Brazil. Through a combination of
social engineering and directed racial mixture, Brazil’s Native and African-
descended peoples would eventually disappear.19 In 1865, José de Alencar
(José Martiniano de Alencar) published his famous novel, Iracema, an al-
legory that traced the origins of Brazil to a tragic love affair between Mar-
tim, a Portuguese sailor and a Native woman named Iracema, whose union
produces the nation’s first son. Iracema eventually dies. “On earth,” the
book’s famous last line reads, “all things pass away.”20 A half-century later,
prominent intellectuals again presaged the disappearance of non-white
people, only now the focus tended to be on afrodescendentes more than
native Brazilians. In an infamous paper delivered in 1911, the director of the
National Museum noted that “ethnic reduction” would eventually wipe out
Brazil’s black and mixed-race populations. Though the process would take
time, the director noted that it was already well under way. “Scattered over
the thinly populated districts,” Afro-Brazilians “tend to disappear from our
territory.”21
Hertzman 7

O Malho stopped short of explicitly embracing whitening in its depiction

of Feitosa. But the racial labels that were applied to her during the 1860s and
then a half-century later seem to be indicative of larger changes that took
place between the publication of Iracema and the early twentieth century. At
the very least, they emphasize the malleability of racial labels and Feitosa’s
public figure. A short biography, written in 1865, described Feitosa as a tipo
índio (“Indian type”).22 A newspaper article published the same year called
her mulata. Decades later, long after her death and years after Brazil had
transformed itself from a monarchy to a republic, O Malho insisted that she
was morena.23 “Morena”—a racially amorphous but decidedly less “black”
term than “mulata”—provided a perfect vehicle for representing Feitosa in a
way that deemphasized her “non-whiteness.”24
When O Malho published its article in 1905, Brazil was still struggling to
bring together its vast territory and to rally moral support around a single,
unifying racial identity. Communication and supply-line failures during the
Paraguayan War raised issues that, nearly a half-century later, remained un-
solved. Todd Diacon writes that between 1889 and 1930, “The incorporation
of faraway lands and peoples was quite possibly the primary activity of the
Brazilian central state.”25 In other words, Brazil had hardly mastered some
of the basic fundamentals of empire—conquering, controlling, and incor-
porating land and people—even decades after the fall of the monarchy. In
1907, military officer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon attempted to address
those challenges by spearheading an ambitious (though ultimately failed)
attempt to extend telegraph lines into the distant Amazonian hinterlands.
Rondon, whose mother was of indigenous descent, sought to “preserve”
Brazil’s Native people and bring them into the nation’s fold, ceremoniously
draping indigenous children in the Brazilian flag and advocating for a non-
violent approach to Indian “incorporation.” While Rondon’s policies were
influential, violent land grabs and blatant slaughter—practices handed down
from colonial times—hardly ceased during the early twentieth century. And
though it is easy to find ambiguities in Rondon’s racial ideology, the larger
goal behind his embrace of Native people was their eventual assimilation.26
The turn of the twentieth century was also marked by social unrest, in-
cluding frequent worker mobilizations, many of which were organized by
Afro-Brazilian laborers. In 1897, the government used brutal force to end the
bloody Canudos conflict in the northeast. In 1904, the Revolta Contra Vacina
rocked Rio de Janeiro, and in 1910 nearly half of enlisted Navy men serving in
the city executed a four-day revolt to protest corporal punishment, a leftover
and reminder of the slave era.27 In short, there were plenty of reasons why an
editor might think twice about publishing the photograph of a dark-skinned
woman holding a weapon. By portraying Feitosa as “delicate,” romantic, and
ultimately harmless, O Malho made the photo, the article, and Feitosa safe
8 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

and acceptable and defused the inflammatory ideas that she might have
otherwise elicited.
Appearing less than two decades after abolition and amid growing un-
rest, the article in O Malho also served as a means to reconfigure collective
memories of the Paraguayan War and, by extension, Brazil’s past, present,
and future. Understood as an example of a triumphant, imperial heyday, the
war became a means for diverting potentially nettlesome questions about
race and projecting a heroic history onto the republican present. During
the war, the Bahian government recruited all-black companies, a practice
that reversed military policy, which, since the 1830s had adopted, officially
at least, a color-blind approach to enlistment. The reasons that male black
soldiers gave for joining the military resembled those that Feitosa provided
under questioning in 1865. In describing his motivations, one black captain
declared, “impelled by a supernatural force, I come to offer myself to the
government to fight for the honor, integrity, and sovereignty of the empire,
which vile gauchos insanely seek to offend.”28 Feitosa described her inten-
tions and motivations in similar fashion. “Eu tenho muita raiva dos Para-
guaios, queria ir para a guerra para matar essa gente,” she said in 1865. That
rage, she explained, reflected her faith and dedication to the nation and her
undying allegiance to the Emperor.29 After the war, black male soldiers and
officers were marginalized and ignored (white veterans did not fare much
better), and it is unsurprising that O Malho all but neutralized the color of
Feitosa’s skin, not to mention her bellicose inspirations for taking up arms.30
By making her into a delicate, romantic morena, O Malho effectively headed
off a more radical and potentially unsettling interpretation of her story.

“O maior dos brasileiros”: Abolition, Territorial Expansion,

and Imperial Nostalgia
When O Malho looked back on Feitosa’s actions and the Paraguayan War,
Brazil was immersed in an extended period of reflection about the legacies of
monarchy and slavery and about the relationship between urban, coastal cen-
ters and the nation’s distant, inland borders. The deaths of prominent states-
men Joaquim Nabuco (Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Araújo) and the
Baron of Rio Branco (José Maria da Silva Paranhos Júnior) in 1910 and 1912
(respectively) placed slavery and territorial expansion front and center in
public discourse.31 Nabuco was a leading abolitionist and Paranhos Júnior a
powerful diplomat who negotiated a slew of border treaties before and during
his time as Minister of Foreign Relations from 1902 to 1912. As Ori Preuss
shows, despite vocal protests from opponents who portrayed him as a bellig-
erent imperialist, Rio Branco’s exploits securing land for Brazil helped give
rise to “patriotic pacifism,” a discourse that depicted territorial expansion as a
Hertzman 9

gentle, diplomatic act that even brought peace and unity to South America.32
Images of the Baron’s father, the Viscount of Rio Branco (José Maria da Silva
Paranhos), author of Brazil’s 1871 Free Womb Law (also known as the Rio
Branco Law), figured heavily in memorializations of his son.33
To supporters, the Baron and his father represented a bridge across time
and space and an epitome of everything that Brazilian statesmen should be.
Dunshee de Abranches, a representative from Maranhão, vigorously sup-
ported the Baron, whom he called “The Greatest of Brazilians” in several
lengthy addresses before the Câmara de Deputados.34 Writer and diplomat
Arthur Pinto da Rocha placed the Baron among a pantheon of national
heroes that extended all the way back to Pedro Álvares Cabral.35 The fact that
the Baron’s and the Viscount’s careers collectively stretched across the entire
second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth
made them ideal symbols of continuity between monarchy and republic.
Abranches described how the Viscount, a “diplomata do Império” and “es-
tadista de uma monarquia,” helped create “toda a machine de um governo
republicano.” While addressing the Câmara, he quoted Nabuco, who had
called the Viscount “o mais moderado, constante e inteligente defensor dos
interesses da nossa posição, a mão mais segura e delicada a que eles esti-
verem entregues.”36 Another man made similar comments about the Baron,
who, the observer explained, “não era partidário deste ou daquele regime,
para ele tanto se lhe importa prestar os seus serviços a Monarquia como a
Republica—porque como brasileiro emérito ele só aspira o progresso da
pátria.”37 Such comments reflect how quickly and easily political winds could
shift and exemplify the thin the line that often separated monarchist and
republican. Machado de Assis satirized those very dynamics in Esaú e Jacó,
published in 1904.38 The two title characters, twins born just before the rat-
ification of the Free Womb Law, are in most respects identical. But one day
while shopping, one comes to fancy a portrait of Robespierre and the other
a picture of Louis XVI. The purchases that ensue make one son loyal to the
monarchy and the other a dedicated republican.
What Assis artfully depicted as absurd was, to others, an expression of an
unbroken history of national progress and triumph. Supporters saw in the
Rio Brancos not just a channel across monarchy and republic, but also a sym-
bol of territorial cohesion. Abranches gushed that the Baron was known and
loved “from city to city, valley to valley, backland to backland.”39 Other sup-
porters drew attention to the massive amount of land that the Baron helped
secure for Brazil. In Abranches’s estimation, the “eminent patriot” “defended
and conserved” 750,000  square kilometers disputed by Argentina, France,
Colombia, and Peru, and helped expand Acre by more than 150,000 square
kilometers.40 The Centro Cívico Sete de Setembro cited similar figures and
illustrated how the 900,000 total square kilometers secured by Rio Branco
10 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

represented a greater amount of land than that of entire countries. This

was no idle praise; the Baron was indeed responsible for claiming massive
amounts of land for Brazil. Significantly, all of the treaties he negotiated were
signed after the fall of the Império—while there was little territorial expan-
sion during Brazil’s Age of Empire, there was plenty after it.
To his detractors, the Baron was a belligerent imperialist, unbefitting of an
enlightened republic.41 His supporters parried such charges by insisting that
the Baron did not, in fact, conquer anything and instead had simply defended
what rightfully belonged to Brazil. The Centro Cívico likened him to the first
European colonizers. “Só os conquistadores dos tempos dos descobrimentos
e os grandes capitães da idade heroica deram ás suas pátrias respectivas ter-
ritórios tão vastos quanto o Sr. Rio-Branco deu ao nosso amado país. Com a
grande força do talento, habilidade, persuasão, erudição e patriotismo con-
seguiu ir anexando ao Brasil trechos litigiosos e territórios contestados.”42
Others employed what Ipsen might have called “delicate” imagery, much of
which resonated with O Malho’s treatment of Feitosa. Abranches described
how the Baron’s intervention in border disputes in the Amazon helped Bra-
zilian nationals expel “invaders” from Bolivia and Peru who had attacked
from “all sides.”43 Pinto da Rocha called the Baron’s land grabs conquistas
pacíficas and suggested that they had saved South America from “future frat-
ricidal wars.”44 Others called the Baron a proponent of “American fraternity”
and “South American harmony.” Edgard Ribas Carneiro authored a short
piece about the Baron titled “O Pacifista.”45
The melding of expansion with defense of homeland was crucial to
constructing a narrative that celebrated and incorporated the past and the
present in a way that would be acceptable to holdover monarchists and re-
publicans alike. In remembering the Baron, supporters often drew a direct
link between internal social order and territorial integrity, both of which
were in turn connected to Brazil’s global standing. Abranches described how
the Baron sought to make Brazil “great and respected” and fought against
“elements” who threatened the “order and internal security of the Republic.”
Abranches also suggested that the Baron helped solve Brazil’s “internal an-
archy” and its unsettled “commercial geography.”46 Another supporter con-
cluded that Rio Branco’s high standing in the U.S. and Europe made his name
“uma segura garantia do future da nossa querida pátria, desde os tempos
memoráveis da monarquia até a presente data.”47
To spin a narrative that connected monarchy to republic, and inter-
nal order with border security and international notoriety, the Baron’s
supporters frequently referred to his father, the author of the Free Womb
Law. Without directly giving him credit for the Viscount’s law, one pub-
lication nonetheless suggested that the young Baron “apareceu como um
anjo consolador empunhando o facho da civilização” to rescue the “infelizes
Hertzman 11

escravizados.”48 The same text, published in honor of the Baron, included an

illustration of the Viscount’s bust, poised atop a pedestal with a white angel
at his shoulder, gazing down on a half-dressed black mother and her child.
Defending the Baron against critics, Abranches declared that “Rio Branco”
was not just a “name,” but a “symbol” that “penetrated the slave plantations”
and even the “hidden shadows of the quilombos” to lighten the “hearts
of mothers” and illuminate “the smile of children.” The Viscount, he ex-
plained, liberated the newborns (nascituros) and “dava o golpe de morte na
escravidão.” During a time of “ininterrupta agitação externa,” the Viscount
had not limited himself to simply solidifying “para sempre a supremacia
do Brasil na política sul-americana.” Indeed, even while defending Bra-
zil’s borders in territorial disputes, he also revitalized the nation’s “cultura
jurídica” and “nossas liberdades cívicas.”49 In honoring the Baron, Pinto da
Rocha called Brazil a “refuge for every race” and then compared Zumbi, the
legendary leader of the runaway-slave kingdom Palmares, to white leaders
who struggled for independence from Portugal.50 Another writer described
how the Baron “completou a obra humanitária de seu venerando progenitor,
pregando a fraternidade e o amor ao povo livre, sustendo as multidões e
encaminhando-as para o bem.”51
Discussions of the Lei Rio Branco made little mention of the children
theoretically made free under the law, but much attention was given to the
mothers’ wombs. The Baron of Paranapiacaba lauded the Viscount by writing,
“Não há para mim memória mais sagrada do que a d’esse imortal Brazileiro,
que na lei de 28 de Setembro de 1871, justamente cognominada ‘Lei Aurea,’
desfechou golpe de morte na instituição do cativeiro, estancando na origem,
o seu manancial com a libertação do ventre das escravas.” The Viscount, he
went on, “pôs um dique a renovação do cativeiro, livrando do estigma servil
o fruto do ventre escravo,” and, in the process, preserved “as leis de igual-
dade e fraternidade.”52 A. D’Espanet marveled at the way that the Viscount’s
“lei da libertação do ventre escravizado” helped “extinguir gradativamente a
escravidão no Brazil, de modo a não perturbar o trabalho agrícola” and that
successfully reconciled “os interesses dos partidos adversos.”53
The early-twentieth-century celebrations of the Viscount preserved and
also significantly tweaked discourses that the Free Womb Law’s supporters
used in the 1870s to ease slave owners’ fears of their own inexorable decline
in power and property. One opponent summarized those fears by saying, “If
the government is one to liberate the womb, and if it obliges the master to
bring up the ingênuo [children born free under the law], neither the slave
mother of the ingênuo nor the child itself owes the master any debt of grat-
itude.”54 Proponents, including Rio Branco, went to great lengths to argue
that slaves and their children would remain faithful to their masters, thereby
preserving the “familial” bonds that tied slave to owner and that bolstered
12 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

masters’ patriarchal privileges and power in society writ large. But between
the passage of the Free Womb Law in 1871 and final abolition in 1888, debates
about the end of slavery shifted in important ways. Abolition itself took on a
distinctly “feminine” character. New groups, Roger Kittleson shows, helped
“[shift] the issue out of the realm of formal, partisan politics and lending it
a feminine gendered character [. . .] an understanding of abolition as a non-
partisan moral question.”55 This helped the Brazilian monarchy gradually
replace slave owners as symbolic caretakers of slaves and freed persons. By
signing the Free Womb Law while regent in 1871 and then the Golden Law
in 1888, Princess Isabel made herself into the enduring “Redeemer” figure
of Brazil’s slaves.56 As Camillia Cowling demonstrates, especially during the
final years before abolition, slaves and libertos personally petitioned Princess
Isabel for assistance, which bolstered her image as maternal caretaker.57
In the early 1910s, some two decades after abolition, the ideas and dis-
courses of the 1870s and ’80s lived on, though in new forms. The celebrations
of both Rio Brancos cast the Viscount—not the Princess—as the savior and
protector of slaves and specifically slave wombs and children.58 Twentieth-
century images of the Viscount are, arguably, no more paternalistic than
those of Isabel, but by casting a male figure as protector and liberator of slave
women, their wombs, and their offspring, the Viscount’s supporters verily re-
produced the same masculine figure that slave owners constructed of them-
selves decades earlier. That figure loomed large in a post-abolition milieu
that made physical autonomy, mobility, the right to reproduce on one’s own
terms, and protection from sexual aggression—“bodily control,” as Cowling
puts it—central to ongoing struggles to define the meaning and reality of
freedom.59 In such a context, Jovita Alves’s actions during the Paraguayan
War and O Malho’s treatment of her take on additional significance. By turn-
ing herself into a man, Alves demonstrated control over her body in the most
dramatic sense. Decades later, and, indeed, during her life, pundits sought to
wrest back that control.
Discourses proffered in the wake of the Baron’s death linked benevolent
white patriarchs who secured distant land for Brazil to images of fragile
women of color (and their wombs) who had been rescued at home by those
same patriarchs. High opinions of the Viscount were transferred to the son,
thereby melding two men and two eras into one and tempering accounts of
imperial belligerence by referencing a gentle, patriarchal, and humanitarian
abolitionism. In this way, Brazilian abolition and the good will of white men
became a counterbalance used to soften accusations of militarism. Brazil did
not attack other nations. It simply defended and protected its borders. White
patriarchs and helpless black women thus became foundational components
of an optimistic narrative in which abolition came to serve as a shield against
anti-imperial critiques.60
Hertzman 13

Conclusion: “Delicate Citizenship,” Abolition, and Empire

The cases of the Baron of Rio Branco and Jovita Feitosa point us towards at
least three sets of points and questions about race, gender, and empire. Each
link up with Ipsen’s work and may be read more as invitations or provoca-
tions than as definitive conclusions. First, the fact that the Brazilian Empire
did not act much like an empire—at least in the traditional sense of stak-
ing claim to land abroad—raises questions about the origins and intentions
of the Império’s founders, and the very meaning of empire in nineteenth-
century Brazil. Why did Brazil choose to constitute itself as an empire in the
first place? Why did the 1824 Constitution describe the newly independent
nation as an empire, and not a kingdom or a monarchy, for example? Was
“empire” merely a synonym (or imperfect gloss) for “monarchy” and “king-
dom?” Was the label meant to place Brazil on the same juridical or concep-
tual footing as Portugal (or Great Britain), or does the choice simply reflect
a lack of available political terminology with which to describe the kind of
national and political entity that Brazil wished to be?
The answers to at least some of these questions have as much to do with
the powers with which Brazil’s founders wished to imbue their leader, Dom
Pedro I, and the delicate balancing act of replacing a colonial monarchy with
an independent one, as with the things that we associate with “empire” today.
The choice to make Pedro an emperor, and not, say, a president, was made
carefully and intentionally. Elevating the son to the new seat of power repre-
sented, in the words of one historian, “a total break with the past [. . .] but in
contemporary usage the word [emperor] implied both the ruler of unusually
extensive territories and a monarch whose accession to the throne involved
an element of election. The title was therefore ideally suited for conciliating
all currents of political opinion.”61 In this sense, empire appears to be little
more than a byproduct of political wrangling over the scope and nature of
Pedro’s position. But what about the more grandiose ideas and images that
came to be associated with it? Where exactly did the imperial nostalgia of the
early twentieth century come from and how did it evolve over time? The 1824
Constitution neglected to define the nation’s borders, a fact that has been in-
terpreted as an indication that the nation was “conceived of as a people rather
than as a territorial entity.”62 It also seems likely that the founders, aware of
the prolonged challenges that defining and securing the borders would en-
tail, intentionally left national space an open question, a choice which yielded
clear results nearly a century later, years after their empire had fallen, when
the younger Rio Branco helped augment Brazil’s physical boundaries.
Kirsten Schultz points us in interesting additional directions. Though
not primarily concerned with the specific questions discussed here, Schultz
shows that Brazil’s founders saw themselves as the latest in a long chain of
14 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

Lusitanians who for centuries had “renovated” and reshaped the Portuguese
Empire. Especially after 1808, when the Crown relocated to Brazil, Portuguese
officials cast the “New World” as a place of regeneration and possibility for the
entire empire. Pro-independence factions, Schultz writes, “recognized what
eighteenth-century Portuguese statesmen characterized as Brazil’s continen-
tal dimensions and copious resources. They reaffirmed, as the royal exiles and
the city’s residents had in the 1810s, that Brazil was a place where prosperity
and political renovation could be achieved.”63 Perhaps perpetual “renovation”
meant that the meaning of empire could evolve and survive in the absence of
territorial expansion and even after the declaration of the republic.
Second, the bridging of empire and republic that marked early twentieth-
century discussions of the Rio Brancos and O Malho’s treatment of Feitosa
provides a poignant reminder of empire’s enduring legacies. If the making
of Feitosa into a national heroine cannot be compared with the well-known
“pacification” campaigns waged against native people, the way that her other-
wise radical story became a safe, familiar tale of female patriotism suggests
how memory of the Paraguayan War—the most clear and obvious instance
of Brazilian imperial aggression—functioned in tandem with the construc-
tion and maintenance of racial and gendered hierarchies at home. While lim-
ited sources make it difficult to know what Feitosa felt about the attention
she received while alive, it seems clear that she would not have approved of
O Malho’s treatment, which cast her as a romantic who followed her lover
into battle. During an era when popular uprisings shattered the fantasy of
a peaceful, orderly republic, O Malho took special care when presenting the
image of a gun-wielding woman of color. And Feitosa, Ipsen reminds us, was
hardly the only remarkable woman who challenged social orders only to see
herself and her actions appropriated and distorted as public displays of “ac-
ceptable” feminine virtues.
Third, Ipsen’s concept of “delicate citizenship” directs us towards a gen-
dered reading of the Rio Brancos’s collective legacy, which in turn provides
a new way to think about the relationship between abolition and empire. If
defending (or expanding) Brazil’s borders was an act of manly virtue, then
protecting “the enslaved womb” was a related, if gentler, paternal act. Un-
derstood as such, narratives of abolition offset imperialist acts and served as
proof of Brazilian benevolence and egalitarianism. With this kind of reason-
ing, and viewed from the safe confines of the republic, even the usurpation of
nation-sized tracts of land could be depicted in soft light.
Ultimately, the triumph of “delicate citizenship” and the public discourses
surrounding Feitosa and the Rio Brancos reveal a surprising answer to the
question posed in the title of this essay. In order to find ‘the empire in Brazil-
ian Empire,’ we may need to look in new places: inside the nation’s borders be-
fore 1889, and inside and outside of them after the founding of the republic.64
Hertzman 15

Notes
1. I am grateful and indebted to Ipsen’s widow, Michael Masatsugu; to James Green
for organizing a panel about Ipsen’s work that gave rise to this article; to her (and my)
dear friend, Katia Borges; and to her graduate advisers, Steven Topik and Heidi Tins-
man, who provided invaluable support, insights, and ideas. I also thank George Reid
Andrews, Ikuko Asaka, Solsiree Del Moral, Rachel Froes, Kaori Kodama, Harvey
Neptune, Lara Putnam, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Luso-Brazilian
Review for their encouragement and engaging critiques.
2. Wiebke Ipsen, “Delicate Citizenship: Gender and Nation Building in Brazil,
1865–1891.” PhD dissertation. UC-Irvine, 2005. Ipsen drew inspiration from a num-
ber of scholars, including Partha Chatterjee. As a graduate student in Tinsman’s
“Gender, Race, and Nation” seminar, Ipsen wrote a paper about Chaterjee’s work
that helped shape many of the ideas she would develop in the dissertation. Of par-
ticular interest here are phenomena from late nineteenth-century Bengal that res-
onate with the ones described by Ipsen in Brazil. The apparent disappearance of
“women’s questions,” Chatterjee shows, did not mean that earlier concerns “had
been censored out of the reform agenda or overtaken by the more pressing and
emotive issues of political struggle,” as others had previously argued. Instead, “na-
tionalism had in fact resolved ‘the women’s question’ in complete accordance with
its preferred goals,” namely, escaping colonial domination while preserving old so-
cial hierarchies and finding a new balance between the “traditional” and the “mod-
ern.” Culture was definitively divided into two spheres, one material and the other
spiritual. Women were effectively linked to the latter and, by extension, to the home
while men sealed their role as custodians of public life, the outside world, and “mo-
dernity.” As we will see, this “resolution” shares much in common with processes
taking place around the same time in Brazil. Chaterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist
Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colo-
nial History. Edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 237. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers UP, 1990.
3. Though they are interested in different questions than the ones addressed here,
the authors of a volume edited by Wilma Peres Costa and Cecília Helena de Salles
Oliveira important, related discussions of what Costa and Oliveira refer to as the
transition “from one empire to another.” Wilma Peres Costa and Cecília Helena de
Salles Oliveira, De um império a outro: Estudos sobre a formação do Brasil, séculos
XVIII e XIX (São Paulo: FAPESP, 2007).
4. For an in-depth discussion of these issues and of broader topics of race, gen-
der, and the military see, Peter M. Beattie. The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race,
and Nation in Brazil (1864–1945) (Durham: Duke  UP, 2001); Beattie, “Measures of
Manhood: Honor, Enlisted Army Service, and Slavery’s Decline in Brazil, 1850–1890,”
in Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America, 233–55. Edited by Matthew C.
Gutmann (Durham: Duke UP, 2003).
5. Julio José Chiavenatto, Genocídio Americano: A Guerra do Paraguai, 8th Edi-
tion (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1980), 59.
6. Raúl Botelho Gosálves, Proceso del Imperialismo del Brasil, de Tordesillas a Rob-
oré (La Paz: n/p, 1960).
16 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

7. Scholarship on the United States offers useful models for conceptualizing em-
pire as a broad set of linked internal and external processes. For citations and an
important cautionary note about linking mainland and offshore expansion, see, Amy
Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (London: Harvard UP,
2002), 17–18. “Civilizing” and “pacification” campaigns in colonial and nineteenth-
century Brazil are well documented. See, among others, Maria Regina Celestino de
Almeida, Os índios na história do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas,
2010); Pablo Antunha Barbosa, “A violência como prática civilizatória: Relações en-
tre indígenas, missionários, militares e fazendeiros nos aldeamentos capuchinhos
do século XIX no sul da província de Mato Grosso,” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de
la Alteridad Americana, 3, no. 1 (1st semester, 2013): 1–5; Amador Nogueira Cobra,
Em um recanto sertão paulista (São Paulo: Hennies Irmãos, 1923), esp. 120–47; John
Hemming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmil-
lan, 1987); Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and
the persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006).
For a stimulating, related discussions of the treatment and erasure native people and
identities in Brazilian history and historiography, see Kaori Kodama, Os índios no
Império do Brasil: A etnografia do IHGB entre as décadas de 1840 e 1860 (São Paulo:
Edusp, 2000); Vânia Moreira, “The Historian’s Craft and the Indians: A Fight during
the Empire,” Revista Brasileira de História 30:59 (2010): 51–69.
8. Um Fluminense, Traços biographicos da heroina brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa:
ex-sargento do 2o corpo de voluntarios do Piauhy: natural do Ceará, por um Flumin-
ense (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Imparcial de Brito & Irmão, 1865); Ipsen, “Delicate Citi-
zenship,” 35–37.
9. In addition to coverage that she received during the 1860s and intermittently
thereafter, her story inspired a novel, written in 1993, and a short biography published
in 2001. Assis Brasil, Jovita: Missão trágica no Paraguai (Rio de Janeiro: Notrya, 1993);
Kelma Matos, Jovita Feitosa (Fortaleza: Edições Demócrito Rocha, 2001).
10. “Mais uma heroína brasileira: O alferes Jovita,” O Malho, 13  February 1905.
Peter Beattie translates alferes as “ensign,” or standard-bearer, and Frank McCann
describes alferes as “the lowest rung on the commissioned officer’s ladder.” Beattie,
The Tribute of Blood, 345; Frank D. McCann, Soldiers of the Pátria: A History of the
Brazilian Army, 1889–1937 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 45.
11. “Mais uma heroína brasileira.”
12. Ipsen, “Delicate Citizenship,” 67–68.
13. Quoted and translated in Ipsen, “Delicate Citizenship,” 52–53.
14. Sueann Caulfield, “Getting into Trouble: Dishonest Women, Modern Girls,
and Women-Men in the Conceptual Language of Vida Policial, 1925–1927,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 172. Also see Mar-
gareth Rago, Os prazeres da noite: prostituição e codigos da sexualidade feminina em
São Paulo, 1890–1930 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1991), 115–16.
15. Quoted and translated in Caulfield, “Getting into Trouble,” 173.
16. Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender In-
equality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996), 29.
17. James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century
Brazil (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999).
Hertzman 17

18. It is worth noting that the apparently reverent tone does not preclude another,
more satirical one. Officers, even low-ranking ones, would carry a sword or a side-
arm, but never a rifle. Feitosa’s firearm and rank therefore represent another possible
incongruity, perhaps meant to mock her. I am indebted to one of the anonymous
reviewers for this insight.
19. The classic text on “whitening” is Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race
and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, Second Edition (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).
20. José Martiniano de Alencar, Iracema: A Novel, translated by Clifford E. Land-
ers (New York: Oxford UP, 2000, orig. 1865), 113.
21. Quoted and translated in Skidmore, Black into White, 66. Also see, Nancy Leys-
Stepan, ‘The Hour of Eugenics’: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1991).
22. Traços biographicos, 13.
23. Jornal do Commercio, 18 Aug., 1865, p. 1. Cited in Ipsen, “Delicate Citizenship,”
35; “Mais uma heroina brasileira: O alferes Jovita,” O Malho, 13 February 1905.
24. While morena can evoke hair color and a diverse collection of racial amalgams,
mulata is exclusively used to describe people with some degree of African heritage.
25. Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Ron-
don and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 14.
26. See, Diacon, 101–30.
27. Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões: edição crítica (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985);
Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern
Brazil, 1893–1897 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992); Joseph L. Love, The Revolt of
the Whip (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012); Zachary Ross Morgan, “Legacy of the Lash:
Blacks and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy, 1860–1910.” Ph.D. disserta-
tion (Brown University, 2001); Álvaro Pereira do Nascimento, Cidadania, cor e dis-
ciplina na revolta dos marinheiros de 1910 (Rio de Janeiro: FAPERJ, 2008); Jeffrey D.
Needell, “The Revolta Contra Vacina of 1904: The Revolt against ‘Modernization’ in
Belle-Époque Rio de Janeiro” Hispanic American Historical Review 67:2 (May 1987):
233–69.
28. Quoted and translated in Hendrik Kraay, “Patriotic Mobilization in Brazil:
The Zuavos and Other Black Companies,” in I Die with My Country: Perspectives on
the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870, edited by Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham (Lincoln,
NE: U of Nebraska P, 2004), 66.
29. Traços biográficos, 25.
30. Kraay, “Patriotic Mobilization”; Eduardo Silva, Prince of the People: The Life
and Times of a Brazilian Free Man of Colour, translated by Moyra Ashford (London:
Verso, 1993).
31. For introductions to the vast literature on Rio Branco, see E. Bradford Burns,
The Unwritten Alliance: Rio-Branco and Brazilian-American Relations (New York:
Columbia UP, 1966); Alvaro Lins, Rio Branco, o Barão do Rio Branco: Biografia pes-
soal e história política, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Alfa Omega, 1996); Cristina Patriota de
Moura, Rio Branco, a Monarquia e a República (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio
Vargas, 2003); Angela Pôrto, O Barão do Rio Branco e a caricatura: Coleção e memória
(Rio de Janeiro: Centro de História e Documentação Diplomática, 2012); Ori Preuss,
Bridging the Island: Brazilians’ Views of Spanish America and Themselves (Madrid:
18 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

Iberoamericana, 2011), 179–210; Luís Cláudio Villafañe G. Santos, O dia em que adi-
aram o Carnaval: Política externa e a construção do Brasil (São Paulo: UNESP, 2010).
32. Preuss, Bridging the Island, 179–210.
33. On debates leading up to the passage of the Free Womb Law and its impact, see,
Martha Abreu, “Slave Mothers and Freed Children: Emancipation and Female Space
in Debates on the ‘Free Womb’ Law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871,” Journal of Latin American
Studies, 28:3 (1996): 567–80 Sidney Chalhoub, Machado de Assis: Historiador (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 131–291; Camillia Cowling, “Debating Woman-
hood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro,” Gender
& History 22:2 (2010): 284–301; Camillia Cowling, “O Fundo de Emancipação ‘Livro
de Ouro’ e as mulheres escravizadas: gênero, abolição e os significados da liberdade
na Corte, anos 1880,” in Mulheres negras no Brasil escravista e do pós-emancipação,
edited by Giovana Xavier, Juliana Barreto Farias and Flávio Gomes (São Paulo: Selo
Negro Edições, 2012), 214–27; Roger A. Kittleson, “‘Campaign All of Peace and Char-
ity’: Gender and the Politics of Abolitionism in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1879–88,” Slavery
& Abolition 22:3 (2001): 83–108; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, “Slavery’s Impasse: Slave
Prostitutes, Small-Time Mistresses, and the Brazilian Law of 1871,” Comparative Stud-
ies in Society and History 33:4 (1991): 669–94; Jeffrey D. Needell, Party of Order: The
Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2006), 272–314.
34. Dunshee de Abranches, O maior dos brazileiros: Necrologio politico e defesa
posthuma do Barão do Rio-Branco (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. de Almeida Marques & C.,
1912); Abranches, Rio-Branco: Defesa de seus actos (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacio-
nal, 1911).
35. Arthur Pinto da Rocha, Barão do Rio Branco: Elogio historico (Porto: Socie-
dade de Beneficencia Brasileira no Porto, 1912), 1.
36. Abranches, Rio-Branco, 7, 44, 45.
37. Vicente Avellar, O Barão do Rio Branco e o Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa
Gutenberg, 1909), 12.
38. Machado de Assis, Esau and Jacob: A Novel, translated by Elizabeth Lowe; ed-
ited with a foreward by Dain Borges (New York: Oxford UP, 2000).
39. Abranches, Rio-Branco, 7. Obstacles to inter-regional transport and communi-
cation made that kind of widespread knowledge, let alone support, all but impossible.
In 1914, two years after the Baron died, a landowner in the southern state of Santa
Catarina reportedly expressed great amazement upon seeing the Brazilian flag and
hearing the national anthem for the first time, even though both had been adopted
decades earlier. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 10.
40. Abranches, Rio-Branco, 45.
41. See Abranches, Rio-Branco, 9–10, 25–26.
42. Centro Cívico Sete de Setembro, Á memoria do Barão do Rio-Branco: Home-
nagem (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1912), 9.
43. Ibid., 45.
44. Pinto da Rocha, Barão do Rio Branco, 17–18, 29. Also see Afranio de Mello
Franco, Homenagem ao Barão do Rio Branco (Belo Horizonte: Imprensa Official do
Estado de Minas Geraes, 1912).
Hertzman 19

45. À memoria do Barão do Rio Branco: Homenagem da Classe Academica do Rio

de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1912), 22, 39, 57–60.
46. Abranches, Rio-Branco, 8–9, 19, 49.
47. Avellar, O Barão, 14.
48. Ibid., 12.
49. Abranches, Rio-Branco, 44–45.
50. Pinto da Rocha, Barão do Rio Branco, 1, 3.
51. À memoria, 34.
52. Avellar, O Barão, 65, 69.
53. A. D’Espanet, Barão do Rio-Branco: Notas politicas e biographicas (Rio de Ja-
neiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1911), 11.
54. Quoted and translated in Abreu, “Slave Mothers and Freed Children,” 575.
55. Kittleson, “‘Campaign All of Peace and Charity,’” 91.
56. Cowling, “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom;” Robert Diabert Júnior,
Isabel: A Redentora dos escravos: Uma história da Princesa entre olhares negros e bran-
cos (1846–1988) (Baruru, São Paulo: Editora da Universidade do Sagrado Coração,
2004). Also see Roderick J. Barman, Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the
Nineteenth Century (Wilmington, DL: Scholarly Resources, 2002).
57. Cowling, “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom.”
58. This is especially noteworthy because during the 1870s the Viscount and other
government officials avoided referring to the slave womb, cognizant that the term hit
a special nerve with masters concerned with their dominion over slave reproduction,
intimacy, and familial relationships. Abreu, “Slave Mothers and Free Children,” 571.
59. Cowling, “Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom,” 296. Also, Olívia Maria
Gomes da Cunha, “Criadas para servir: Domesticidade, intimidade e retribuição,” in
Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds., Quase-cidadão:
Histórias e antropologias da pós-emancipação no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2007), 377–417; Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Intenção
e gesto: Pessoa, cor e a produção da (in)diferença no Rio de Janeiro, 1927–1942 (Rio
de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2002); Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, “The Stigmas
of Dishonor: Criminal Records, Civil Rights, and Forensic Identification in Rio de
Janeiro, 1903–1940,” in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, eds. Sueann
Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), 295–315;
Hebe Maria Mattos, “Os combates da memória: Escravidão e liberdade nos arquivos
orais de descendentes de escravos brasileiros,” Tempo 6:3 (December): 119–37.
60. It is worth stating that those same images also became building blocks of
perhaps the most persistent of all Brazilian national myths: racial democracy. For
an important, related discussion of planter and abolitionist discourse, see Barbara
Weinstein, “The Decline of the Progressive Planter and the Rise of Subaltern Agency:
Shifting Narratives of Slave Emancipation in Brazil,” in Reclaiming the Political in
Latin American History: Essays from the North, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2001), 81–101.
61. Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1988), 99.
62. Ibid., 123.
20 Luso-Brazilian Review 52:1

63. Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese
Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 279. Also see,
Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, O tempo saquarema (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1987); An-
thony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France
(c. 1500–c. 1800) (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 27.
64. It is worth stating outright that this by no means should be confused that we
return to the earlier school of thought that portrayed the monarchy as a halcyon,
egalitarian place. See Barbara Weinstein, “Not the Republic of Their Dreams: Histor-
ical Obstacles to Political and Social Democracy in Brazil,” Latin American Research
Review 29:2 (1994): 262–73.