Riograndense Republic

It matters for three reasons. It was the longest and most serious of the provincial revolts that shook Brazil during the Regency, and the only one that produced a functioning state — with a constitution, a bicameral assembly, a war fleet of sorts, a newspaper and envoys — rather than a provisional junta. It was the moment at which the Portuguese half of South America might have broken into more than one country, as Spanish America had done a generation earlier; that it did not is one of the reasons Brazil today is a single continental state. And it put the central question of Brazilian society on the table by accident: the republic armed several thousand enslaved men on a promise of freedom, and then, in its last year, allowed the men it had armed to be destroyed and the promise to be settled with their owners.

The war has also been remembered in ways that obscure it. Since the 1930s the Farroupilha has served as the founding myth of Rio Grande do Sul, celebrated in parades, statues, place names and a public holiday, and the republic has been retrospectively credited with federalism, republicanism and even abolitionism. The record supports a narrower and more interesting story: a revolt of the provincial elite over taxes and appointments, radicalised into independence by a minority in the officer corps, sustained by the border trade with Uruguay, and ended by a settlement that gave the rebels almost everything they had asked for in 1835 — and the enslaved almost nothing.

At a glance

Why did the far south break with Rio?

Rio Grande do Sul was the one province of Brazil whose economy faced inwards. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and, increasingly, coffee were grown for export and shipped from the ports of the north-east and the centre-south; the far south produced almost nothing that Europe wanted and almost everything that the rest of Brazil ate. Herds on the great estates of the campanha were driven to the salting houses (charqueadas) around Pelotas, where the meat was cut, brined, salted and dried into charque — a food that kept for months without refrigeration and that fed, above all, the enslaved workers of the coffee and sugar plantations. Hides, tallow and horns went with it. Between 1845 and 1889 charque and hides together made up, on average, about seventy per cent of the province's exports, and almost all of that trade went to other Brazilian ports rather than abroad: in 1847, for instance, some 2.4 million arrobas of charque were shipped to Brazilian ports against 152,000 to Europe.

That structure made the province acutely sensitive to two things: the price of imported salt, and the tariff on charque coming the other way from the Río de la Plata. Brazilian producers complained that the salted beef of Uruguay and Argentina entered Brazil on easier terms than their own product, which paid provincial taxes and, in many accounts, export duties as well, while the imported article slipped through under the low ceilings of the commercial treaties. The complaint was not baseless. The treaties signed with Britain in 1810, and renewed in 1827 for fifteen years, capped the duty on most foreign goods at 15 per cent, and that ceiling was not raised until the tariff reform of 1844. Salt, essential to the salting houses and taxed at around 30 per cent as a reliable source of revenue, was a second grievance. Meanwhile the consumers of charque were the planters of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and the north-east, who wanted cheap food for their slaves and who had no interest in paying more so that Rio Grande could sell dearer. Every demand for protection therefore set the southern ranchers and meat curers against the most powerful interests in the empire.

The provincial grievance was sharpened by politics. Under the additional act of 1834 the provinces received elected assemblies with control over provincial revenue, education, policing and public works — a real concession, but one that stopped short of the two things the southern elite wanted most: control of the provincial presidency, which the central government continued to appoint, and control of the customs houses, which collected the duties that mattered. In the province's own telling, it had been turned into an inn of the Empire: it supplied the soldiers and the horses for the wars of the south — the campaigns in the Banda Oriental in 1811 and 1816, the long Cisplatine War of 1825 to 1828 — and received in return appointments from Rio and a tariff written for the planters. The phrase is Bento Gonçalves's, from the manifesto he issued in 1835, and it captures the tone of the provincial case better than any statistic.

There was also a frontier to consider. The border with Uruguay was not a line so much as a shared pasture. Herds crossed it, ranchers owned land on both sides, and the politics of the Platine republics — the long quarrel between Rivera's Colorados and Oribe's Blancos, and behind them Buenos Aires and the Argentine Confederation — was followed in Alegrete and Bagé with the attention that Rio paid to Europe. The Cisplatine War had ended in 1828 with the creation of Uruguay as an independent buffer, which solved a diplomatic problem for Britain and Argentina and left the Rio-Grandenses with the costs. For the men who governed the province, the lesson of the 1820s was that Rio would spend their lives and their cattle on imperial quarrels and then sign the province's interests away.

What kind of province was Rio Grande do Sul?

It was a province of some 70,000 people in 1814, of whom about 20,600 were enslaved, and perhaps five times that number by the end of the 1850s: the count of 1858 gives 353,427 inhabitants, 70,880 of them enslaved. The usual figure quoted for 1835 — 360,000 people and 100,000 slaves — implies a fivefold increase in twenty-one years and then no growth at all for the next twenty-three, and should be treated with suspicion; the safest statement is that the province grew fast in the 1820s and 1830s through immigration and the cattle trade, and that roughly a fifth to a quarter of its people were held in slavery.

The countryside was organised around the estância, the cattle ranch, and it was not a society of smallholders. Land grants from the crown had been handed out in enormous strips along the rivers, and the labour on them was a mixture of enslaved men, agregados (retainers allowed a patch of ground in return for service), peões working for wages in kind, and the seasonal hands who drove the herds. The wealth of the province sat in cattle and in the charqueadas: at Pelotas, on the channel between the Lagoa dos Patos and the sea, there were 22 salting houses in 1822 and around 30 by 1850, and in its prime the town is thought to have produced more than four-fifths of all the charque made in Rio Grande do Sul. The cattle did not stop at the border. Perhaps a hundred thousand head a year were driven in from Uruguay, either bought or lifted, to keep the Pelotas houses working — a dependence that made the province's economy and its politics inseparable from the Platine wars.

Porto Alegre, the capital, was a port and a bureaucratic town of perhaps fifteen thousand people, with a customs house, a provincial treasury, a bishop, a theatre and a newspaper or two. The German colonies founded from 1824 in the Sinos valley, north of the capital, were a different world: small farms, Lutheran and Catholic villages, little involvement in the cattle economy and, when the war came, very little sympathy for it. The republic never took hold there. Nor did it take hold in the coastal towns, whose trade was tied to Rio and to the imperial customs service, or among the merchants of Rio Grande, the southern port city, which stayed loyal throughout.

The province's elite was small, intermarried and military: men who had served in the border campaigns, held colonels' commissions in the cavalry, sat on municipal councils and owned land on both sides of the frontier. Many were Freemasons, and a few had absorbed the republican vocabulary of the exile politics of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. A landed elite with military experience, a grievance about tariffs and a border across which men and cattle could always move: that combination made the revolt possible, and made it last.

How did the revolt begin?

It began as a provincial quarrel, not a national one. In 1835 the regency appointed Antônio Rodrigues Fernandes Braga as president of the province, and Braga opened his term by denouncing the local opposition as separatist — an accusation that did some of the work of making it true. The liberal faction in the province, led in the capital by Bento Gonçalves da Silva and in the interior by men like José Gomes de Vasconcelos Jardim and Domingos José de Almeida, had been pressing for the removal of the president, for a bigger say in appointments, and for protection of the charque trade. When the provincial assembly and the municipal councils proved unable to move him, the cavalry did.

On the night of 20 September 1835 Bento Gonçalves's horsemen entered Porto Alegre. There was little fighting; Braga took refuge aboard a ship and sailed for the town of Rio Grande, and a council of notables installed a substitute president. The rebels' published demands were still provincial: the dismissal of Braga, a president acceptable to the province, and relief from the duties on charque and salt. They did not declare independence, and the imperial government did not treat the episode as a secession: it appointed a new president, José de Araújo Ribeiro, and sent him south with a squadron of eleven brigs and schooners and a body of troops, and in June 1836 imperial forces recovered Porto Alegre. The rebels withdrew into the interior, where the cavalry was at home and the imperial infantry was not.

So the first year of the war was fought over who would govern the province within the empire, and the empire won it. What turned the quarrel into a secession was the fleet, the restoration of a president by force, and the conviction among the rebel officers that Rio would never concede anything that mattered while it could appoint men who owed it their careers. The recovery of the capital also left the rebels without a port, a customs revenue or a city — the strategic problem that shaped the rest of the war.

Why did a provincial quarrel become a republic?

On 10 September 1836, on the plain of Seival near the Bagé road, Antônio de Sousa Neto's cavalry — some four hundred men — met and defeated a loyalist force of about five hundred and sixty under João da Silva Tavares. The victory was small in itself and decisive in its consequences. That evening the republican officers in Neto's camp argued through the night, and the next morning, 11 September, Neto read out a proclamation of independence before his assembled troops. The republic was born in a military camp, not in a provincial assembly, and its first act was a declaration of war to the finish. It was, in that respect, the southern twin of the Texan republic proclaimed six months earlier: a slaveholding frontier society seceding from a state whose capital lay far away.

The radicalisation had been prepared by civilians. Since 1834 the Italian exile Luigi Rossetti had been publishing in Porto Alegre, and with him a group of Mazzinian refugees — Livio Zambeccari among them — had been arguing that Brazil's monarchy was the obstacle and a republic the only legitimate form of government. Their newspaper, O Povo, carried the argument into the provincial elite, and the men who proclaimed the republic at Seival were reading it. It is worth being precise about what this did and did not mean: the republic was not a democracy, and most of its leaders were slaveholders; but the small group around Rossetti gave the revolt a language in which independence, federalism and the end of slavery could be spoken of together, and that language outlasted them.

Bento Gonçalves was not among the proclaimers. He was a monarchist by conviction and a soldier by profession, and he had spent his career in the imperial army; the republic was forced on him, in the judgement of the historians closest to the record, by the radicals in his own camp. On 2 October 1836, crossing the Jacuí to join forces with Domingos Crescêncio, he was surprised on the Ilha do Fanfa by a flotilla under the English-born Brazilian admiral John Pascoe Grenfell and taken prisoner with most of his staff. He was shipped to Rio de Janeiro and held in the fortress of Lage. On 6 November the republic's assembly acclaimed him president in his absence, with four vice-presidents, and a government was installed at Piratini under his name. He escaped in 1837 — the circumstances are variously told, and the versions agree only that he got out and made his way south — and returned to the province to take up the office to which he had been elected.

The republic's early years went well enough in the field. Neto took Caçapava do Sul in April 1837 after a seven-day siege, with fifteen guns and more than five hundred prisoners. Municipal councils in the interior adhered, some enthusiastically and some because the cavalry was outside the town. The government moved its capital to Caçapava do Sul, in the hills north-west of Piratini, in February 1839, and then, when that town fell to an imperial column in March 1840, to Alegrete on the Uruguayan border. By then the republic had a functioning administration: ministries of the interior, war, finance and foreign affairs; a customs service of its own on the border roads; a newspaper; and a diplomatic correspondence with Montevideo that was, in effect, its lifeline.

How was the republic governed?

On paper it was a liberal republic of the classic early-nineteenth-century kind, and the paper survives. The constitution was eight years in the making: a constituent assembly was summoned in February 1840, met in the middle of a war, split into factions, and produced a text only on 8 February 1843, at Alegrete, in the eighth year of the republic's independence. It declares that the Rio-Grandenses form "a free and independent nation, which admits with no other any bond of union or federation" — a clause aimed as much at the confederation with Santa Catarina as at Brazil. Government is republican, constitutional and representative. Sovereignty resides in the people, exercised through elections. Power is divided into three — legislative, executive and judicial — with no equivalent of the Brazilian emperor's Moderating Power, which is the constitution's clearest debt to radical liberalism.

The legislature was bicameral: a chamber of deputies, one for every six thousand souls (fixed at twenty-four until a census could be taken), and a senate of twelve elected for twelve years. The franchise was narrow in the way of its time and place. To vote in the parish assemblies a man needed an annual income of 100 mil réis from land, commerce or employment; to be an elector, 200 mil réis; to sit as a deputy, 300 mil réis and his twenty-fifth year. The illiterate were excluded, so were freedmen, so were naturalised foreigners, and deputies had to profess the religion of the state. The state religion was Roman Catholicism, with other faiths permitted only as domestic worship in houses without the exterior form of a temple — the same formula as the Brazilian constitution of 1824, and a reminder that in this respect the rebels were copying the empire they had left.

Slavery is not mentioned. The constitution's guarantees of liberty and property simply did not extend to the enslaved, and the omission was deliberate: several of the men who signed it owned slaves, the republican press argued about abolition, and Rossetti was pushed out of the editorship of O Povo for arguing it too loudly. No abolition law was ever passed. The one route to freedom the republic offered was military service, and even that was a promise rather than a statute.

Government in practice was looser and rougher than the text. The republic's authority rested on the cavalry of the interior, the confiscation of loyalist cattle and property — a system that both sides ran and that Leitman has called the war's real economy — forced loans from merchants, and the customs on the border roads. It never controlled a port, never coined money that circulated beyond its own armies, and never collected the kind of revenue that would have let it pay its officers. Its politics was factional from the start. The "majority" around Bento Gonçalves and Domingos de Almeida wanted independence pursued to the end; the "minority" around David Canabarro and Antônio Vicente da Fontoura had concluded by 1842 that a negotiated return was the only realistic outcome, and the constituent assembly was the arena where the two groups fought. In August 1843 Bento Gonçalves withdrew from the presidency, disgusted with the drift towards negotiation, and Gomes Jardim took office. The republic's last two years were governed by men who were looking for a way out.

What was Garibaldi doing in the South Atlantic?

Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1834, a merchant captain from Nice with a Mazzinian conviction and a price on his head after the failed rising in Piedmont. He had met Bento Gonçalves, by his own later account, while Bento was held in Rio, and he obtained from him a letter of marque — a privateering commission — which made him, in effect, the republic's navy. What followed is the most famous episode of the war and the least militarily significant.

The strategic problem was that the rebels had no outlet to the sea. Imperial squadrons under Grenfell controlled the Lagoa dos Patos and the rivers, which was the province's internal road system, and the ports of Rio Grande and Porto Alegre with it. Garibaldi's answer was to build a fleet inland. At Camaquã, on the estância of Bento Gonçalves's sister, a shipyard was set up alongside a powder works, and two armed launches were built: the Seival, of about twelve tons, and the Farroupilha, of eighteen. In July 1839 the two boats were taken up the Capivari river, hauled ashore, and dragged some ninety kilometres overland on carts with a hundred yoke of oxen — through winter mud, in six days — to the Lagoa Tomás José, and from there to the bar of the Tramandaí, where on 15 July they put to sea with a mixed crew of about seventy men.

The result was the only real amphibious success of the war. On 22 July the flotilla, joined by Canabarro's cavalry, took Laguna from the landward side, through the Garopaba do Sul lagoon and the Tubarão river, while the imperial garrison waited for an attack through the bar. Four days later the republic of Santa Catarina was proclaimed. Garibaldi took the port of Imbituba in the autumn, raided as far north as Paranaguá, and ran the blockade more than once. It could not last. In November an imperial force of several thousand men under General Andréa, with a squadron under Admiral Mariath, retook Laguna, and the republican navy ceased to exist as a fighting force. Garibaldi escaped inland on horseback, with Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro — Anita, a Laguna woman who had left her husband and joined him — riding with him; she was pregnant, and their son Menotti was born in Mostardas in September 1840. The couple went to Montevideo in 1841, where Garibaldi worked as a trader and a schoolmaster and married Anita in March 1842.

The campaign's importance was retrospective. Two launches could not break a blockade, and the collapse at sea in November 1839 was one of the turning points of the war. But the overland haul, the taking of Laguna and the figure of Anita became part of the founding story of Italian unification, and through Garibaldi the war in Rio Grande became the one Brazilian conflict that nineteenth-century Europe knew about. His memoirs, dictated decades later, are the source of most of the vivid detail, and should be read as a veteran's recollection shaped by later fame rather than as a dispatch.

Why did a second republic appear in Santa Catarina?

Because the first one needed a harbour. The occupation of Laguna was not an accident of Garibaldi's appetite for adventure; it was the republic's only route to the sea, and with it to the customs revenue, arms and credit that came through Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. Laguna sat behind a lagoon system with a shallow bar, connected to the interior by the Tubarão river, and the rebels hoped to make it a port of entry for the whole province. The plan was to take the town, hold the southern half of Santa Catarina, and use its port to break the imperial blockade.

Laguna fell on 22 July 1839 — 24 July in some accounts, which differ on whether the date given is the entry into the town or its formal surrender — and on 29 July the República Catarinense Livre e Independente, known as the Juliana Republic, was proclaimed, linked to the Riograndense Republic by a confederal pact. David Canabarro was its first president for about a week, and was succeeded by Vicente Ferreira dos Santos Cordeiro. The new state claimed the whole of Santa Catarina, and for a few weeks its authority ran from the southern coast up onto the plateau, where the town of Lages adhered. Its motto was "Liberdade, Igualdade, Humanidade".

It lasted four months. The rebels could not take Nossa Senhora do Desterro, the provincial capital on the island that is now Florianópolis: the imperial commander entrenched the Morro dos Cavalos, where the coastal plain narrows to a causeway, and the republican advance stopped there. A raid on Paranaguá at the end of October achieved nothing. The imperial counter-offensive came by land and sea together, and Laguna was retaken on 15 November 1839. Lages submitted early in 1840. The confederation had never been more than a statement of intent, and the constitution of 1843, with its clause forbidding any federation with another state, quietly buried it.

Why it failed is worth stating plainly, because it bears on the larger question of why the whole secession failed. Santa Catarina had no mobilised ranching elite, no cavalry, and no reason to prefer rule from Piratini to rule from Rio; its own notables were divided, and the countryside did not rise. A republic of the far south would have needed either the acquiescence of the coastal provinces or a foreign protector. It had neither.

Why could neither side win between 1840 and 1843?

By 1840 the war had settled into a shape that neither side could break. The empire held the cities, the ports, the lagoons and the rivers, and could move troops by sea; the republic held the interior and the border, and could move cavalry faster than infantry could follow. Imperial columns that marched inland found burnt grass, dispersed herds and an enemy that had gone; republican forces that came down to the coast found fortified towns and naval guns. The war became a guerra de recursos, a war of resources, in which the object was not territory but cattle, horses, taxes and the loyalty of municipalities.

The border was the republic's lifeline and its weakness. Arms, powder, credit and markets came through Uruguay, and the politics of the Platine republics determined how much came. Fructuoso Rivera, the Colorado caudillo and former president of Uruguay, supplied the rebels — arms, money, and the freedom of the border — partly out of sympathy and largely because a weakened Brazil suited him. But Rivera's own position depended on his quarrel with Oribe and Buenos Aires, and when that quarrel went against him the supply of help went with it. The rebels were thus never quite independent actors; their war was a theatre of the Platine war.

The empire, for its part, could not raise the men. Its army was small, its recruitment system depended on local notables, and the National Guard, created in 1831, was a militia of propertied citizens who were reluctant to march a thousand kilometres south. José Iran Ribeiro's study of recruitment in the Farrapos years shows how the empire built up a system of mass recruitment of civilians precisely so that it could fight wars of this kind, with all the local bargaining that implied. The 1840 declaration of Pedro II's majority gave the empire a court and a focus of loyalty, and an amnesty was offered to the rebels that year; Bento Gonçalves replied in December 1840 with conditions — that the empire take over the republic's debts, and that the slaves enlisted as soldiers be freed — which were, in substance, the terms eventually agreed five years later.

What broke the deadlock was a soldier. Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, then Baron of Caxias, was named president and commander-in-chief of Rio Grande do Sul in September 1842 and took up the post in November, in the middle of the Liberal revolts in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, which had drawn imperial troops north. He arrived with a reputation made in Maranhão, where he had ended the Balaiada, and with a method that amounted to counter-insurgency before the word existed: spies inside the rebel ranks, the encouragement of factional quarrels, amnesties offered to individuals rather than to the republic, the payment of rebel creditors and arrears, and the incorporation of rebel officers into the imperial army at their existing ranks. He also fought, when fighting was useful, and he worked to close the border by coming to terms with the Uruguayan authorities and by buying the cattle trade out from under the rebel columns.

By 1843 the republic was shrinking. Its capital had moved four times; its assembly had split; its president had resigned; its paper and its credit were worthless; and the men who had begun the war in 1835 were dying, dispersing or looking for terms. Caxias's achievement was to make surrender look like an honourable reinstatement rather than a defeat — and to make it look that way to the officers while leaving the question of the enslaved soldiers to be settled afterwards.

How did the war end?

It ended with a massacre and a treaty, in that order. In November 1844, with negotiations under way, the republican general David Canabarro was camped with some twelve hundred men on the arroio Porongos, in the south of the province. His force included the Black Lancers, the two battalions of enslaved and freed black cavalry and infantry that the republic had raised on a promise of freedom. Before dawn on 14 November a loyalist force under Francisco Pedro de Abreu — "Chico Pedro", the Moringue of the imperial side — attacked the encampment. The imperial cavalry went for the black camp. The white and indigenous units, camped across a stream, were not attacked, and most of their men got away. The Lancers were killed where they stood or taken prisoner; their commander, Joaquim Teixeira Nunes, was among the dead.

Whether Porongos was a battle, a blunder or a bargain has been argued ever since. The case for a bargain rests on a document, the "Carta de Porongos" of 9 November 1844, purporting to be Caxias's instruction to Chico Pedro that the attack on the black corps had been agreed with Canabarro. Some historians accept it as genuine — it is held in the state historical archive — and others regard it as a forgery produced to destroy Canabarro's reputation. Canabarro was court-martialled by the republic and the case dragged on in military courts until it was shelved in 1866. What is not in dispute is the political logic: the fate of the enslaved soldiers was the one question that could block a peace, because the empire would not accept that a rebellion could make a slave free, and the republic's leaders would not or could not insist. Killing most of them made the question smaller.

The negotiations themselves were conducted by Antônio Vicente da Fontoura, the leader of the "minority", who travelled to Rio de Janeiro in 1844 and dealt directly with the imperial cabinet, having first established through Caxias that there would be no mediation by Rivera. The Treaty of Ponche Verde was signed on 28 February 1845 at Ponche Verde, in the present municipality of Dom Pedrito, and the peace was announced on 1 March. It had twelve articles, and they were generous to the living and the propertied. The presidency of the province was to go to the man the republicans indicated. There was to be "full and entire oblivion" of everything done during the war, with no prosecutions, not even for private claims. Prisoners were to be freed and transported home at imperial expense. The public debt of the republic was guaranteed, "according to the statement of it that is presented". The civil acts of the republican authorities and of the apostolic vicar were validated. Republican officers were not obliged to serve again, and if they chose to serve they would be admitted at their own rank; the rank and file were exempted from recruitment; only the generals lost their posts. Property rights were guaranteed "in all plenitude" — a clause that, in a province where a large part of the property in question was human, said more than its authors may have intended. And by the seventh article, the imperial government guaranteed "the freedom of the slaves who have served in the republican ranks, or who are in them".

The seventh article is the one that did not work. The rest largely did: the rebel officers were reintegrated, several of them serving the empire later in Uruguay and Paraguay; the province's debts were assumed; the amnesty held; and Caxias, made Count of Caxias on 25 March 1845, went on to the Senate as senator for Rio Grande do Sul. The economic clause was slower. The peace was understood to commit the empire to protect the province's charque, and a duty of 25 per cent on imported charque is generally credited to the settlement — but the provincial assembly was still petitioning for 40 per cent in the early 1850s, and the planters' lobby in Rio fought every increase. Protection came late and by increments, and by then the province's producers had other troubles.

What happened to the men who had been promised freedom?

The republic had begun arming the enslaved in 1836, within days of declaring independence, and the practice grew with the war. The Black Lancers proper were formed as cavalry in September 1836 and as infantry in August 1838, when 426 men joined at once; they were recruited among the campeiro slaves of the Serra dos Tapes, the country between Canguçu, Piratini, Caçapava and Arroio Grande, men who knew horses and cattle and who were promised their freedom at the end of the war. At their peak, enslaved and freed black soldiers are thought to have made up between a third and a half of the republican army. They were not a gesture. They were the republic's best cavalry.

The empire understood the danger. In November 1838 the imperial government issued an aviso — Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos's device — offering freedom within the empire to any of the republic's freedmen who presented themselves to the legalist authorities, with compensation to their former owners. It was a counter-recruitment measure aimed at the same men, and it explains why the imperial side could later claim that it had freed the blacks of Porongos: there was a legal instrument, of a sort, on the shelf.

Against that, the record of what actually happened after 1845 is thin, and the historians who have looked hardest disagree. Spencer Leitman concluded that the black farrapos left the war as they had entered it, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, or perhaps a new imperial uniform; Adriana Barreto de Souza, Caxias's biographer, concluded that the survivors received their manumission papers on arrival in Rio. Daniela Vallandro de Carvalho, who has worked through the inventories, police records and military correspondence more thoroughly than either, finds evidence for neither generalisation, and only one documented individual case of a freedman from Porongos securing his liberty: a soldier named Moisés de Souza Netto. What the documents do show is a bureaucracy of compensation. An imperial decree of 26 July 1845 ordered the valuation of "the slaves who served in arms in favour of the rebellion in the province of Rio Grande do Sul", and a commission was finally constituted in May 1848 to indemnify their owners, at no more than 400 mil réis a head. The first large group of "escravos libertos" — seventy-seven men — reached Rio de Janeiro in November 1845 and was placed in imperial military establishments, where the state could decide what to do with them.

The pattern is clear enough even where the individual fates are not. The treaty's seventh article gave the imperial government a promise it did not want to keep, to men whose freedom would have set a precedent in a slave empire; the compensation machinery treated them as a loss suffered by their owners; and the practical effect was that most of the survivors passed into imperial service, into marginal freedom, or back into slavery, in a society that had no place for black veterans with weapons and expectations. In the province's later memory they were forgotten for a century and a half. A monument to the Lancers was put up at Caçapava do Sul only in 2004.

What did the republic leave behind?

Not a state, and not a tradition of institutions. It left a set of grievances that were substantially settled — protection for charque, a presidency the provincial elite could live with, and the reintegration of the rebel officer corps into the imperial army — and a province whose elite had learned that it could bargain with Rio and be paid. The generation of 1835 supplied officers to the empire for the next thirty years; Caxias himself, the man who ended the revolt, sat for Rio Grande do Sul in the Senate.

The memory took longer. For two decades after 1845 the war was discussed in the province with embarrassment and suspicion; the first accounts, like Caldre Fião's novel O Corsário, treated it as a disastrous error. The rehabilitation came with the republic. After 1889 the Rio-Grandense Republic was recast as the precursor of the Brazilian republic and of federalism, and the state adopted the rebels' colours: the green, red and gold tricolour hoisted at Piratini in November 1836 became, with modifications, the flag of Rio Grande do Sul, and the republic's arms the basis of the state's. In 1935, with Getúlio Vargas in the presidency and the state's political class quarrelling with him, the centenary was staged on a large scale in Porto Alegre, in a park renamed Farroupilha; in 1937 the federal government burned state flags. In 1948 a group of students in Porto Alegre founded the traditionalist movement that invented, or codified, the modern figure of the gaúcho — the bombachas, the chimarrão, the prenda, the Centre of Gaucho Traditions — and made the Farroupilha the centrepiece of a civic ritual that is still performed every 20 September.

Historians have spent the last fifty years taking the myth apart without quite agreeing on what to put in its place. The social historians of the 1970s and 1980s — Leitman on the economic roots, Bakos and Flores on slavery and on Porongos — established that this was a revolt of the ranching and meat-curing elite, that it divided the province rather than uniting it, and that its record on slavery was worse than the myth allowed. Later work has shifted the emphasis to the Platine context and to the internal politics of the republic: the factional split that paralysed its assembly, the Mazzinian exiles who gave it its language, the border economy that fed it. The unresolved argument is whether the Farroupilha was essentially separatist — a war of independence that failed — or federalist, a provincial rebellion that was pushed into independence by a radical minority and then pulled back by a conservative one. The evidence supports the second reading better than the first, which is also why the war ended with a negotiation rather than a surrender.

Common myths about the Riograndense Republic

Timeline of the Riograndense Republic

What the map shows next

At 1836 on the map the map draws a province in revolt but not yet a state: the republic has just been proclaimed at Seival, its president is a prisoner in Rio, and imperial squadrons still hold the Lagoa dos Patos and the ports. The border with Uruguay is the republic's only opening, and the Banda Oriental beyond it is where its arms and its cattle come from.

At 1839 on the map the war has moved north and east: Laguna is in rebel hands, the Juliana Republic exists for four months, and the two launches that Garibaldi hauled overland are the republic's entire navy. By 1845 on the map the map draws a single Brazil again, the republic gone, its officers in imperial uniform and its constitution a printed pamphlet — while the republic of 1889 will later claim its colours.