Independence: war in Bahia consolidated national unity – 07/01/2023 – Politics

The dawn of July 2, 1823 pointed to a sunny day, with no clouds in the skies, even in the midst of one of Salvador’s rainy winters. Still at dawn, under a clear sky, 83 ships sailed from the bay of Todos-os-Santos carrying 4,520 Portuguese officers, soldiers, enlisted men and sailors.

They were led by General Inácio Luís Madeira de Melo, then governor of arms of the province of Bahia and leader of the Portuguese troops, nicknamed by the people of Bahia “evil Madeira”.

Even after weeks of negotiations with promises of peaceful surrender, Madeira de Melo decided not to capitulate and withdrew its troops from the Bahian capital with the hope of reorganizing the Portuguese resistance to the Independence of Brazil.

But it was too late. The expulsion of the Portuguese from Bahia, which completes 200 years this Sunday (2), was consolidated as the main milestone in the construction of post-Independence national unity in a Brazil that is still fragmented and with a continental territory.

“The expulsion ensured that a Portuguese enclave in Bahia would not be consolidated. If that central province remained with the Portuguese, Brazil would hardly have the shape it has. It would be split in half”, evaluates historian Pablo Iglesias, professor at the Federal University of West Bahia.

With an organized and well-armed army, the Portuguese tried to maintain Portuguese dominance from the northern provinces of Brazil, resulting in conflicts in Bahia, Piauí, Maranhão and Grão-Pará.

They were provinces where Portugal had a strong military presence, an allied Portuguese press and enjoyed prestige with part of the local elites. In Salvador, for having been the capital of the colony between 1549 and 1762, Portugal had greater military power, with forts and armaments.

Brazilian resistance, however, began even before the Grito do Ipiranga. In Bahia, supporters of Independence set up a parallel government in the village of Cachoeira, in the Recôncavo of Bahia, from where they organized to surround and regain control of the Bahian capital.

First, the patriotic battalions were assembled, formed mainly by poor whites, freed blacks and enslaved blacks who had been sent by their masters. Reinforcement would come in the following months, when the Pacifying Army left Rio de Janeiro with weapons, officers and soldiers.

The siege of the capital was carried out by land and sea, leaving the Portuguese without access to food and supplies. The clash that began with the air of a civil war in February 1822, with a suffocated uprising in the streets of Salvador, ended as a war between two countries.

Despite having entered history as a local conflict, documents point to a national character in the War for Independence in Bahia, which had the participation of people from Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba and even Rio de Janeiro who swelled the ranks of the troops.

“It is not a process of independence for Bahia because it is not a separatist struggle. It is the struggle for national integration and the formation of an independent nation”, says Wlamyra Albuquerque, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a doctor in social history from Unicamp.

In the book “Independence of Brazil in Bahia”, historian Luís Henrique Dias Tavares (1926-2020) points out that, after battles in July 1823, then Colonel José Joaquim de Lima e Silva highlighted the performance of two soldiers, one from Pernambuco and another from Paraíba.

The man from Pernambuco was Francisco Luís, just 14 years old, who hid in a forest area from where he fired shots that killed an officer and three Portuguese soldiers. Manuel de Abreu França, from Paraíba, was disarmed and arrested in battle, but managed to escape wielding a fish knife.

The exchange of forces also helped to cool down internal disputes between provinces. The participation of Sergipe people in the war in Bahia, for example, made Emperor Dom Pedro 1st demand respect for the document signed in 1820 that decreed the separation of Sergipe from Bahia.

After the military victory on July 2, 1823, Bahia returned to live with the paradoxes and complexities of a land strongly marked by slavery and the loss of protagonism of the city that had been the main port of the South Atlantic.

The effects of the approximately 14 months of war, the departure of around 10,000 Portuguese from the city and the end of the aid that came from producers in the Bahian Recôncavo during the conflicts exacerbated the problems.

“Bahia was devastated. The economy was stagnant, and education in the next ten years was disastrous. When the Portuguese left, Bahia did not publish a book for three years”, highlights historian Pablo Iglesias.

Part of the political and intellectual elite of Bahia went to Rio de Janeiro, capital of the new empire commanded by Dom Pedro 1º. Another part went to Pernambuco, where more radical political movements culminated in the Confederation of Ecuador, a separatist movement that erupted in 1824.

The conflict in the neighboring province caused Bahia to increase its territory. As punishment for the rebel movement, Pernambuco lost part of the territory that is now western Bahia. For three short years, this region was still part of Minas Gerais until it was definitively annexed to Bahia in 1827.

Slavery remained one of the main pillars of Bahia’s economy, which remained one of the entry points for enslaved people, even after the ban on the slave trade in 1850.

The enslaved people who were confiscated for the War of Independence by General Pierre Labatut, a French mercenary who commanded the Brazilian troops between October 1822 and May 1823, did not see the hope of manumission after the war materialize.

“People celebrate Independence, but it is not resolved in 1823. There is tension between popular groups around the issue of slavery. What we see is that slavery was an elite pact that guaranteed this national cohesion”, says Wlamyra Albuquerque.

Slavery functioned as an amalgamation between the elites and landowners, who feared an uprising by enslaved people along the lines of the Haitian Revolution. But there were reactions in Bahia: in 1824, the Periquitos revolt started a rebellion against the demobilization of a battalion formed by blacks. Eleven years later there was the Malês Revolt, which was quickly quelled.

In the middle layers of Bahian society, an anti-Portuguese sentiment prevailed in the post-Independence period and a polarization that would last until the mid-19th century, including episodes of violence against the Portuguese that became known as “mata-maroto”.

In the field of memory, the War for Independence remained in the footnotes of historiography outside Bahia in the following decades, despite the wide popular participation of the parade that celebrates the struggle of names such as Maria Quitéria, Maria Felipa, Joana Angélica, João das Boots and Bugler Lopes.

The 2nd of July would only be officially recognized by the Brazilian government as a national date in 2013, exactly 190 years after Brazilian men and women were unsubmissive and built Brazil as it is.