In 1860, the British legation in Rio de Janeiro sent glowing news to the Foreign Office. As agricultural production rode to record highs thanks to the rising price of Brazil’s leading exports, colonization strode apace. Over the previous decade, 7,262 colonos had landed in Rio Grande do Sul alone. Since 1854, foreign migrant arrivals had reached 10,000 a year, with the ACC contributing 5,908 in all for that period – just over 14 percent of the net annual entries.Footnote ¹ By 1859, imperial authorities registered a leap to 19,695 entries, according to reformist Aureliano Tavares Bastos.Footnote ² In addition to São Paulo’s colônias de parceria (sharecropping colonies) and São Leopoldo’s 15,000-strong population, there were now 15 government colonies, 4 subsidized colonies, 13 private colonies with partial government aid, and 4 entirely private colonies. Totaling at least 26,422 colonos in all, this signaled that the Brazilian Empire had begun reaping the fruits of a decades-long investment in colonization endeavors.Footnote ³

These numbers captured colonization promoters’ renewed enthusiasm during a time of profound global transformation. Despite widespread civil wars, Brazilian colonization advocates saw promising years ahead, exploiting global conflicts as windows of opportunity to recruit colonos. The imperial government itself expressed interest in ramping up migrations, prompting its representatives abroad to keep an eye out for prospective colonos. Even politicians and professionals at odds with the government in power took up colonization drives as temporary business opportunities. A rising political figure by the name of Quintino Bocaiúva exemplified the daring of the times when he set to work in a Brazilian colonization agency in New York in part due to his generation’s struggles to obtain political appointments even in liberal cabinets. Taking advantage of the end of formal hostilities in the United States, Quintino set course for New York to recruit veterans discontented with the tenuous peace after Appomattox.Footnote ⁴

This was a new era, marked by an unprecedented diversity of plans for all regions of the Empire’s ever-increasing colono quotas and divisive political struggles. Abroad, regional conflagrations like the world had not witnessed since the defeat of Napoléon drove migratory movements. National efforts to receive colonos also spurred migrations as soon as a much touted – if doubtful – international peace settled after the 1870s.Footnote ⁵ A standardized but locally adaptable language of colonization took shape across the hemisphere, including in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. In Brazil, with the end of the Paraguayan War, planters, technocrats, professionals, and statesmen applied colonization experiences from previous decades to an increasing array of scenarios and populations including national ones. In contrast to the more ethnically or racially restrictive policies that arose decades later, even amid debates about the racial adequacy of migrants, the last decades of migration and settlement management during the Empire perfected the business of colonization by expanding its scope overseas as well as within Brazilian borders. In Bahia, for instance, the abandoned colony of Rio Pardo came back to life in 1862 to house an “emigration of nationals,” which numbered 2,000 individuals from the drought-stricken interior. A similar experiment followed in Piauí.Footnote ⁶ In view of these experiences, Brazilian spendthrifts quickly found that promoting national colonies – establishments peopled by the working poor rather than foreign colonos – could pave the way for a post-abolition future.

According to prevalent scholarship, Brazil’s gradual abolition laws during this time generated a labor shortage panic that increased demand for foreign colonos. Frantic calls for braços para a lavoura compounded racist attitudes, reputedly, to shape Brazilian planters’ preferences for white European workers. Yet, contrary to this accepted narrative, standards about migrant or settler adequacy were much talked about but proved elusive on the ground, raising the question about whether they were in fact the driving force of colonization. Rather, colonization advocates depended on sudden windows of opportunity to identify target migrant pools and activate their received wisdom on the “science of colonization.” Diverse factors contributed to the random consideration of particular populations from across the world for Brazilian colonization, displacing labor replacement ploys or selective racial or national parameters as guideposts for directed migrations.

Indeed, for myriad reasons, a medley of migrant groups arrived in Brazil in quick succession, including Polish exiles, US Confederate veterans, and Algerian settlers. Their often competitive wrangling for government favors laid bare the opportunistic character of migrations in the midst of widespread global conflict. These crises-propelled arrivals also structured a dynamic interplay between local, national, and international factors that had a mobilizing effect on Brazilian statesmen. Imperial officials issued orders for meeting these expatriates’ needs and demands as much as to resolve the dilemmas they dragged in, and local and provincial authorities enthusiastically rushed to comply or to adapt. Ultimately, however, colonization powered forth thanks to a daring, if also problem-ridden, combination of migrant expatriates heading to Brazil to fully exploit perceived advantages and the drive of a new colonization company hoping to capitalize from bringing them to Brazil.

Polish Emigration and the Limits of the Catholic Connection

Addressing the Chamber of Deputies in 1860, the new Agriculture minister anticipated rising migrant entries – but only in the far-off future. If the United States had taken dozens of years since the Homestead Act to lure growing numbers of settlers, he argued, Brazil required more than the seven years elapsed since its Land Law Ordinance of 1854 to do the same. But foreign colonization projects soon began to land on the imperial government’s docket by force of circumstance, without the effort or expenses that England invested in Australia, France in Algeria, or the United States in “a vast German network … to apprehend new guests.”Footnote ⁷

The first overseas proposal came with a new Polish exodus following Russia’s disastrous suppression of the January Uprising of 1863. Led by Catholic Poles, the rebellion coincided with Napoléon III’s ambitions over the Rhine, which threatened war in the western Polish regions occupied by Prussia.Footnote ⁸ These events had already stoked concerted emigration schemes such as the one offered to emperor Maximilian I of Mexico by John Pope Hennessy, an Irish-Catholic member of the British Parliament who supported a stronger British intervention in Poland.Footnote ⁹ Now, a similar proposal arrived in Brazil with count Anton von Ladislaw Jasienski, an aristocratic London exile of the earlier Polish rebellion of 1830–1831 who docked at Recife in 1864 to organize the Associação Promotora da Colonização Polaca (Association for the Promotion of Polish Colonization).

In its inaugural meeting, a board of directors tasked Jasienski with opening affiliates across Brazil’s dioceses. The Polish Association found favor in Church circles, including in the northernmost province of Pará, but struggled to expand beyond them due to its professedly apolitical nature. “Men of all parties belong to it,” Jasienski tried insisting, “because they all belong to the banner of humanity and patriotism.” To underscore this message, the Associação even suggested that Polish settlers could man the imperial army in the bourgeoning war against Paraguay. For months, however, Jasienski obtained courteous expressions of interest but no financial backing from Rio elites. Nonetheless, at the end of 1865 he did secure an incorporation decree from Pedro II, who also promised public lands somewhere in São Paulo or Paraná.Footnote ¹⁰

Brazilians themselves showed little interest in Polish migrations. By his own account, Jasienski clashed with both locals and resident foreigners who objected to the Associação’s Catholicism. For instance, months after obtaining his incorporation decree, Jasienski went to Pernambuco to procure similar favors. But the president of the the Associação Comercial Beneficiente in Recife, Philip F. Needham, who was not Catholic, remained noncommittal, which prompted Jasienski to withdraw to the Pimenteiras military colony.Footnote ¹¹

By that point, Jasienski also understood that another class of civil war expatriates had overtaken the imagination of his potential supporters: the Confederate veterans making their appearance across Brazilian regions and seen by many as a more enterprising migrant cohort. “I must not hide to Your Majesty,” Jasienski confessed to Pedro II, “that the greatest, most valuable sympathies are reserved for the Americans … the motive for such predilection seemed to me a bad symptom for the future of the Monarchy and of Religion in this Province.” In the early weeks of 1867, as numerous entrepreneurs from the US South embarked on expeditions to settle in Brazil, Jasienski left for New York, where he tried to procure the recently appointed Brazilian emigration agent, Quintino Bocaiúva. Jasienski’s plan was to pick Catholic Poles arriving from Russian, Prussian, or Hanse lands for re-shipment to Brazil to reap the same advantages the Brazilian government showered upon US emigrants.Footnote ¹²

Other Polish wanderers arrived at the Court besides Jasienski. In February 1866, vicar Karol Mikoszewski addressed cariocas in the Correio Mercantil. A leading figurehead in the Provisional National Government after the Uprising of 1863, Mikoszewski was one of the reputed organizers of insurgent Catholic peasant freeholds. Critics described him as the Polish revolutionary government’s “most implacable judge” and said he had “assassinated, stabbed, hanged, poisoned, strangled, dishonored and stolen from the poor who had not wished to follow the revolutionary current.” Yet, as the envoy of a relatively obscure Central Commission on Polish Immigration, he had come to Rio representing the victims of “Muscovite barbarity.” With a more compelling message than Jansieski’s, the vicar spoke of martyrdom and Siberian exiles, evoking the Catholic fervor and valor of Polish rebels against Russian oppression, themes that echoed favorably in Brazilian cries against Paraguayan dictator Solano López and in the hushed reservations of ultramontane elites against religious freedom. Machado de Assis wrote a gushing portrait of Mikoszewski, describing aid to Polish expatriates as “an act of Christian charity, and a way of rendering cult … to their immortal patriotism.” Even satirical weeklies joined the cause, with one inviting “all people of good taste and inclined to charity” in Rio to a benefit concert for the Polish.Footnote ¹³

How much pecuniary support Mikoszewski received in Rio remains anyone’s guess, but Polish migration to Brazil nevertheless increased as Poles from the Prussian province of Upper Silesia fled Germanization policies and other hardships.Footnote ¹⁴ Several entrepreneurs in Paraná united under a colonization company by the name of Sociedade Colonizadora Pereira Alves and Bendaszewski & Cia. brought 1,097 Polish colonos from 1873 to 1878. As part of a government contract in 1874, the main associates – colonel José Antonio Pereira and Eugênio Bendasewski, a Polish shopkeeper in Rio – committed to importing 4,000 Basques, Slavs, Germans, Lombards, and Belgians within four years into the colonies of Pereira and Euphrasina, on the bay of Paranaguá. Even though their contract was rescinded in 1877 due to their failure to fulfill their quota, they still profited from the experience, as Bendaszewski got elected to Curitiba’s city council in the years ahead.Footnote ¹⁵

The for-profit Polish migration Jasienski envisioned following political defeat did not materialize due to changing conditions of receptivity. The political leanings of a younger Brazilian generation neutralized Catholicism as a parameter that automatically spelled a preference for certain migrant groups. In addition, the concurrent arrival of Confederate expatriates as potential settlers in Brazil eclipsed for a time any Polish emigration schemes, which would nonetheless take hold later on in response to different political circumstances in Europe and only once the Confederate fever in Brazil had passed.

A Penchant for Confederates

Jasienski and Mikoszewski did not find the support they expected partly because they failed to engage a rising cadre of young radicals taking politics by storm – a group that later became known as the “generation of 1870.” These promising professionals enjoyed the protection of old-guard Liberals like Joaquim Saldanha Marinho, who in 1860 acquired the third most important newspaper in Brazil, the Diário do Rio de Janeiro (DRJ) (where Quintino Bocaiúva worked as coeditor), and who would shortly become grão-mestre of the Grande Oriente Unido. And they enjoyed the support of Antonio Francisco de Paula Souza, a Liberal Paulista heading a prominent family clan from Itu, in the vicinity of Campinas and Sorocaba, who rose from deputy in 1863 to minister of Agriculture in 1866.Footnote ¹⁶ However, many of these younger Liberals were not born into privilege and faced obstacles to government employment and political placements. By the 1860s, a law degree and political patronage no longer guaranteed entry into the most selective circles of imperial society, much less to government.Footnote ¹⁷ Hence, professional occupations such as journalism absorbed this floating talent pool, while business undertakings furnished some financial independence and a hard-won political acumen.

Notably, these aspiring politicians were prepared to cash in when Confederate veterans mulled leaving their homelands for Mexico, British Honduras, and the Brazilian Empire. A rambunctious, pro-slavery foreign policy and a fledging southern navalism in the decades before the Civil War preceded and informed talk of emigration among unreconstructed southerners.Footnote ¹⁸ Since the 1790s, debates about emigration in the United States had focused on the possibility of expatriating freedmen and women to Haiti or Africa, ideas that Black communities in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere weighed differently and hotly debated.Footnote ¹⁹ But the tables turned when the tightening sectional crisis over the future of slavery in new US territories and the tenuous compromises reached during the 1850s transformed white slaveholders themselves into prospective expatriates. After losing the war in 1865, unreconstructed southerners heeded long-standing campaigns for US expansion into Latin America, especially those of Navy officer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who had spent years talking up the Amazon basin as a future Mississippi. Advocating to expand a “policy of commerce,” Maury touted an American Amazon through the popular southern improvement journal DeBow’s Review and at the southern commercial conferences of 1852 and 1853 in New Orleans and Memphis. The findings of an exploratory voyage to the Amazon commissioned by him also came out in pamphlet form, telling an even wider audience of the agricultural potential of a region closed off to international navigation.Footnote ²⁰

Information about Brazil more generally circulated in the United States through other media. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist trained under von Martius, delivered lectures on Brazilian zoology in US university circuits even before he completed his own tour of the Amazon in 1865 and published A Journey in Brazil in 1868. His travel companion, Dr. Hartt, enraptured audiences with lively reports on their findings, going so far as to produce a live boa constrictor during a New York presentation. US readers were perhaps more familiar with Brazil and the Brazilians (1857), a popular work written by Methodist minister Daniel Kidder and Presbyterian missionary James Fletcher, which coincidentally reached its sixth print run in 1867 as emigration drives from the US South got underway.Footnote ²¹ The first English newspaper published in Brazil, the weekly Anglo-Brazilian Times, also made its rounds in US ports through the new Brazil-New York steam-packet line, while its founder and editor, an Irishman by the name of William Scully, put forth a guidebook to show that a move to Brazil promised “prospects far superior to those offered by Australia, New Zealand, or the United States.”Footnote ²²

Yet emigration remained a contentious subject in the US South. New Orleans minister Ballard Dunn acknowledged that emigration was not for everyone even as he rambled against federal taxes and the putative insecurity of life and property after the war.Footnote ²³ Northern papers encouraged “anticipative exiles” from the south to “stay at home” and “fight what remains of this contest at the ballot-box.” When the ex-Confederate major Lansford Warren Hastings readied “five hundred unreconstructed brethren” to leave Alabama for Brazil, one newspaper described the expedition as “full of woe” and forecasted that “all Alabama may be in Brazil some morning” as it warned readers of Hastings’s attempt to profit from contractual “forfeitures” incurred by passengers unprepared or with excess baggage on the day of departure. In the South, too, newspapers cautioned that emigration contracts for Brazil were regarded “more in the breach than in the observance.” “Let our people stay at home,” it read. Brazil, where Blacks and whites mingled “indistinctly,” was “no country for them.”Footnote ²⁴ Notwithstanding racist predictions, queries about Brazil overwhelmed the vice-consular offices Brazil had set up in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Pensacola. From late February to early December 1865, Brazil’s minister Joaquim Nascentes de Azambuja (brother of the ACC director Bernardo Nascentes de Azambuja, discussed in Chapter 6) received at least 75 inquiries about emigration at the Brazilian legation in Washington, the vast majority from southern states but at least 12 from non-Confederate or border states.Footnote ²⁵ At first, official response fell short of this surge in interest. Brazil’s general consul only tepidly promoted Brazil as a destination. Yet, after the Anglo-Brazilian Times published an overview of the “favors of emigration,” Brazil’s vice-consul in New Orleans distributed “official information” without authorization in order to incite migrants to head for Brazil. And when Brazilian deputies pressed the general consul on his own passivity on the matter, he finally hurried a brochure with land prices and other conditions of emigrant reception.Footnote ²⁶

Scientific accounts and commercial propaganda compelled US southern agents to visit Brazil in search of favorable settlement contracts and subsidies. In mid-1865, a Shreveport paper alleged that Maury had obtained more than the 1,000 acres offered to each Confederate veteran, a promising start for an emigration drive if only emperor Maximilian of Mexico had not subsequently hired him as his own colonization agent instead.Footnote ²⁷ Soon, southern prospectors sent optimistic reports from Brazil. Robert Meriwether and H. A. Shaw, two scouts commissioned by the Southern Colonization Society of Edgefield, wrote back to South Carolina with excited impressions about interior São Paulo.Footnote ²⁸ An ex-Confederate surgeon by the name of James McFadden Gaston offered greater details, referencing American merchants, coffee factors, and railroad engineers who could help the newly arrived establish a footing in a strange land.Footnote ²⁹ Within three days of arrival in Rio in September 1865, Gaston secured an audience with Ignácio da Cunha Galvão, the appointed head of a new colonization secretariat created as part of the 1864 revisions of Olinda’s Emigrant Transport Ordinance (1858). Galvão avidly welcomed Gaston and began drawing contracts for land sales and government aid.Footnote ³⁰ Compared to Azorean or German colonos or even to Jasienski’s efforts, Gaston’s ease of access to government conduits was unparalleled.

Local officials also responded energetically to prospectors beyond São Paulo and Paraná, the two provinces attracting the most southerners. As president of Minas Gerais in 1865, an eager Saldanha Marinho reported to Bocaiúva that he had “obtained much in favor of American emigration” from the provincial assembly, a deed he repeated as São Paulo’s president in 1867–1868.Footnote ³¹ Such enthusiasm might have given Bocaiúva the first inklings of the role that a colonization agent could play, for which he would have found further confirmation in other provinces. In Bahia, for instance, president Manoel Pinto de Sousa Dantas organized a special commission of six “illustrious citizens experienced in public affairs” to devise guidelines for encouraging the settlement of the colonos americanos along the Jequitinhonha and Pardo rivers. The leading recommendation of the commission, one of whose members professed that “Yankees” possessed the “congenital quality … of never ceasing to work,” was to appoint a special emigration agent in the United States.Footnote ³²

As they waited for this future Brazilian agent to materialize, officials in provinces far and wide across the Empire did their best to please US incomers. Authorities in Belém, for instance, flocked to Lansford Warren Hastings when he arrived in mid-May 1866. Hastings was an adventurer who walked the Oregon trail in 1842, sat at the California constitutional convention in 1849, and partook in Confederate and filibustering schemes around the southwest border with Mexico before a newspaper described him as one of many “disappointed applicants to the office of Governor” in Alabama. Nevertheless, paraenses treated him obsequiously, offering accommodations and subsidizing survey tours on an Amazon Company steamer, whose very owner, the barão de Mauá, credited Hastings’ presence with the projected aperture of the Amazon to international commerce on 7 September 1867. Indeed, a month to the day of the Amazon’s opening, Hastings signed a contract with Pará’s government endowing him with 60 square leagues of public lands between the Tapajós and Curuá rivers close to Santarém. Minister Sousa Dantas prodded provincial authorities to begin land surveying activities for the Hastings grant immediately. When, months later, a party of American emigrants came to inspect the Hastings grant, they, too, were afforded free room and board for an entire month in Santarém.Footnote ³³

In the end, however, numerous miscommunications and delays revealed the chasm between government officers’ eagerness to please Confederate migrants and the actual execution of their plans. While provincial governments hustled to survey lands and provide arrivals with a reception center, accountability became a problem. Pará’s provincial president approved 26:000$000 in loans to Hastings for land measuring and parceling activities and appointed two Brazilian engineers to begin work, but months later land surveys remained incomplete. Authorities later refused to pay an American surveyor who stepped in to continue land measurements. Meanwhile, it became clear through the provincial president’s communications that allotted funds were being employed for the daily sustenance of auxiliary personnel and for objects for personal use.Footnote ³⁴

Bahia, too, had to come to terms with other such accounting problems, each of which showed how initial government promises of financial support could spiral into greater spending. Having already received 1:400$000 in loans from the provincial treasury, US migrants John Ogden and Henry Thompson demanded an additional advance of 600$000 in late 1866. The commission convoked by Sousa Dantas while still Bahia’s president had recommended that no more than one conto (1:000$000) be disbursed in loans to the first 50 families that settled in the Jequitinhonha valley. Hence, the new request effectively doubled the initially stipulated quantities. Nonetheless, the demand was met.

And news spread fast. Ogden’s and Thompson’s success in attaining the increment inspired Charles Rowley, another prospector, to look into favors from Bahian officials on top of those already on offer by the central government. His efforts led one official to warn that “Government should be cautious and remain informed of their proceedings.”Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, the government slowly awoke to the need for policing contractual compliance. From New York, the Brazilian consul suggested spying on prospectors like Gen. William Wallace Wood by having vice-consuls “observe his goings” to ascertain “his position and influence” and “the means he has at his disposal.” On paper, the alarm seemed unwarranted because Wood had obtained promising conditions from Brazilian officials for the thousand families from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia he allegedly represented. But a few months later, Wood in fact found stable employment, settled down in Natchez and suspended his efforts.Footnote ³⁶

Significantly, Brazilian officials seemed to willfully ignore the fact that the demise of slavery in the United States was a primary motivation for southern “fire-eaters” to seek new abodes overseas. So much was evident in the US press. According to the New York Herald, these “‘last ditch’ men who say they cannot and will not remain in the South or a country where the negroes are free,” looked to Brazil as a potential homestead “where they can once more … live under a slave government.”Footnote ³⁷ Accordingly, Gaston, Meriwether, and Shaw, all of whom were prior slavers, actively pressured the Agriculture minister to revoke the law of 7 November 1831 prohibiting the importation of enslaved persons and non-Brazilian libertos. They alleged that their freedmen and women would accompany their old enslavers as free laborers of their own accord.

The matter came to a head when, against initial objections from the Brazilian consul, Mississippi planter John Abraham Cole embarked from New York to Rio with some of his former slaves in early 1866. His case came before the Justice section of the Conselho de Estado, which emitted an opinion against the importation of Cole’s slaves, citing the 1831 law to avoid the fraudulent importation of slaves under the guise of freedmen.Footnote ³⁸ Significantly, the three authors of this opinion – which was quickly sanctioned by the emperor – were old-guard politicians that critically espoused modernizing trends: Nabuco de Araújo, the chief advocate for the international opening of the Amazon; Eusébio de Queirós, the author of the slave trade ban of 1850; and Francisco Jê Acaiaba de Montezuma, now visconde Jequitinhonha, the auditor of SPC finances in 1839 (see Chapter 3). But even after the Conselho’s 1866 decision, southern emigrants continued to cite slavery to justify their translocation to Brazil. James Cone of Brenham, Texas, for example, couched his requests to Bahia’s president on the basis of his and his compatriots’ search for “some country where the institution of slavery still existed, whose climate & productions were similar to those of the late Confederate States & whose Government & laws were such as to give full protection to life, liberty & property.”Footnote ³⁹

Liberals and emergent republicans had some reason to turn a blind eye to slaveholding among US settlers. For one thing, the Brazilian Empire had steered clear of the US Civil War, maintaining a semblance of neutrality.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then there was cotton. Even before the collapse of US cotton exports in 1862–1863, cotton enjoyed a renaissance in São Paulo driven in part by the exhausted soil of the old coffee frontier in the Paraíba Valley, as the district council of Bananal confirmed to São Paulo’s provincial president in 1861.Footnote ⁴¹ Improvers saw the decline of coffee as fertile ground for innovation. In a “Manual for the Cotton Cultivator,” Cândido Nascentes de Azambuja (brother to the director of the Land and Colonization division and the ACC founder) assayed international cotton markets, identifying New Orleans and Algeria as the most productive. The following year, AIN editor and ex-SCT member Frederico Burlamaque published his Monographia do algodoeiro and supervised experimental cotton cultivars at the IIFA, where he served as secretary under the marquês de Abrantes. By 1863, Agriculture minister Pedro de Alcântara Bellegarde distributed 1,000 lbs. of Georgia cotton seeds donated by US chargé d’affaires William van Vleck Lidgerwood, as he celebrated that “the progressive increase of the culture and harvesting of cotton across the Empire make it the most lucrative of all cultures.” As the Confederate emigration to Brazil picked up its pace, the Anglo-Brazilian Times echoed this prediction, reminding readers that cotton was “a staple … well adapted to the capabilities of white labor and small proprietorship” and so perfectly fitting for newcomers from the US South, heralds of a new cotton era.Footnote ⁴²

Brazilian officials’ and intellectuals’ riveting enthusiasm for Confederate exiles, especially in preference over Polish migrants, serves as a salient reminder that colonization did not simply reflect a transition to free labor. Rather, in this era of global conflict, it sat at the juncture of complex labor, economic, and expatriate streams that in various ways overlapped with planter and government interests. Soon, the vogue for Confederate veterans also dovetailed with a new colonization company whose express purpose was to exploit both Southerners’ interest and pro-US emigration sentiment in Brazil.

The Sociedade Internacional de Imigração: Unlikely Alliances and the Pitfalls of Yankeesmo

As global conflicts brought various new migrations into focus, Brazilian planters, urban professionals, and government figures rushed to make the most of peopling initiatives. In early 1866, landowners from the exhausted coffee frontiers rallied together with old-time liberals, brokers, planters, and young republicans around Vassouras planter Caetano Furquim de Almeida’s call to establish a new colonization association. Furquim de Almeida was long familiar with colonization as the younger brother of late Baptista Caetano de Almeida, the São João d’el Rei luminary who kickstarted the Azorean colono trade in 1835 with captain Jardim (see Chapter 3).Footnote ⁴³ Having married into the Teixeira Leite family led by the barão de Vassouras, Furquim de Almeida now belonged to an old plantation elite seeking economic alternatives and new improvement methods, including colonization.Footnote ⁴⁴

The first meeting had poor attendance. But discussions remained enthusiastic and, thanks to foreign attendees, substantive. A coffee factor with the surname Schmidt (with unclear relationship to Brazil’s vice-consul in German cities) underlined the necessity of “liberal measures” and better communication routes to increase migrant arrivals. US broker Charles Nathan in turn suggested that the proposed association focus on attracting emigrants from the US South, which benefited concurrent efforts to organize a steamship line between southern states and Brazil. Francisco Travassos Valdez, who had served as a Portuguese official in the Luso-British mixed commissions at Angola and the Cape of Good Hope, as government secretary in Timor, and as secretary of Portugal’s special commission on colonization and indigenous work in overseas provinces, recommended Portuguese colonial policies, including state-sponsored Azorean and Madeiran emigration, land distribution, and a credit-purveying Banco de Ultramar.Footnote ⁴⁵

Quintino Bocaiúva, soon to become Brazilian agent in New York, tried to bring these various strands together while restoring the focus on colonization. Invoking peopling tropes, he proffered that the “most noble aspiration of American peoples must be to nullify of the desert” through immigration, which required rural credit and, notably, liberties like civil marriage, which went against the grain of Catholic precepts. He then celebrated a current bill on limited liability associations that could promote “the spirit of association [and] fecundate the sources of public wealth,” encapsulating attendees’ collective anticipation of profits from the proposed company.Footnote ⁴⁶

The group elected to a charter-drafting commission reflected a balance of foreign and national members including Furquim; Tavares Bastos; US broker C. J. Harrah; Portuguese merchant and director in Rio of the Brazilian and Portuguese Bank Limited, Rodrigo Pereira Felício; German merchant and interim Württemberg consul, Herman Haupt; and the Irish editor William Scully. Soon after, the Sociedade Internacional de Imigração (SII) came to light.Footnote ⁴⁷ Board elections held few surprises: Furquim took the presidency and Tavares Bastos became executive director, while Bocaiúva and Fernando Castiço, a Portuguese journalist at the Court, joined Haupt, Harrah, and Scully as board members. The SII began operations within and beyond the Court, true to its mission to seek “the whole country’s support.” Bocaiúva’s editorials courted supporters regardless of political preferences or nationality, pontificating that directed migrations were a “national question [that] should not be of interest only to those of this or that party, but to everyone.” Membership swelled to 343 subscribers, of whom 285 paid their dues. The SII won the unstinting support of Bahia’s Commercial Association, which saw it as contributing to peopling by providing “good services” in the form of immigrant hostels and colonies.Footnote ⁴⁸

The SII’s diffuse remit earned it ample favors while in practice it pursued a reformist agenda. From its first meeting, the company got the blessing of Agriculture minister Paula Souza and colonization secretary Galvão, who offered to cover rent in any building of its choosing. The SII soon opened a migrant hostel on the rua da Imperatriz. At the same time, it commissioned reprints of Antonio Joaquim de Macedo’s Da liberdade religiosa no Brasil and Portuguese liberal Alexandre Herculano’s Estudos sobre o casamento civil in order to allay concerns that migrants’ creeds or family inheritances (due to non-Catholic marriages) would go unprotected in Brazil. “In effect,” preached Tavares Bastos in the first company report in 1867, “to pretend that the system of public land sales by itself had been enough to attract Old-World emigrants … would be an incomplete and inexact appreciation.” To follow the US model, Brazil had to cultivate “individual liberties, local subsidies, decentralization, popular education,” in short, “all the driving forces that constitute the mechanisms of modern democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The Court’s top dailies and the Commercial Association of Rio de Janeiro provided firm footing for the SII. Its diverse membership included brokers, lawyers, business owners, customs officials, and philanthropists. One, John Frederik Russell, was a high officer in the National Guard and a pharmacist at the Largo do Machado. Others were partners in Mauá’s companies.Footnote ⁵⁰ Prominent public officials included José Ignácio Silveira da Mota, soon to be senator and owner of the Ilha das Flores, a future migrant hostel. There were offspring of old colonization advocates and extended planter kin, including Henrique Lahmeyer, an important coffee factor married to Furquim’s daughter. Journalists and scribes such as Adolph Hubert, editor of the Courier du Brésil and early disseminator of Allan Kardec’s texts in Brazil, and Francisco Leão Cohn, a National Guard lieutenant and copyreader for the Diário Official, completed the list.

Bocaiúva outshone other members in promoting the SII, using his position as new DRJ editor to praise it and report on its operations with a verve that transcended the simple agrarianism of Saldanha Marinho’s earlier editorship.Footnote ⁵¹ As a successful playwright, Bocaiúva dramatized old topics, arguing that land tenure and immigration promotion were indissolubly tied to larger questions of political rights and even to a higher national calling.Footnote ⁵² He even dared antagonize senator José de Alencar regarding the Brazilian Constitution’s ban on naturalized foreigners’ eligibility to political office, even though they agreed on the inviolability of foreigners’ marriages and religious freedoms.Footnote ⁵³ “The press” itself, said Bocaiúva, was “an apostolate.” And as one of the principal if most contentious preachers of the SII’s mission, he left the DRJ to spread the word among potential emigrants themselves.

Bocaiúva arrived in New York in late October 1866. Interested parties who read his ads or leaflets found him amid the downtown bustle at 26 Broadway, a stone’s throw away from where one of the anchorages for the Brooklyn Bridge would soon begin construction. From his new stead, special agent Bocaiúva collected information on available resources for colonos from sympathetic provincial authorities in Brazil like Rio Grande do Sul president Francisco do Rego Barros, brother to the Rego Barros who had recruited the Brummers many years earlier. In view of both provincial and imperial government inducements, Bocaiúva hence began to target US citizens as well as newly arrived Germans and Irishmen.Footnote ⁵⁴ Top dailies were dismayed at the hundreds of men lined up on any given week outside Bocaiúva’s office. And none of them were Black. As Bocaiúva’s handbills made clear, “no colored people” were “permitted as emigrants,” in keeping with prohibitions on the importation of slaves “from any country whatever” established in principle in 1831 and reinforced in 1850. For Bocaiúva, it made sense to reprise these precedents in preparation for the possibility that ex-Confederates would bring formerly enslaved workers to Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁵

Yet the huddled masses that “crowded [the entrance to the office] from morning till night” were not in fact the “Americans” for whom, apparently, Brazilians felt “a warm affection” as “models of enterprise, science, skill, and progressiveness.” To draw in this kind of emigrant and avoid “the poorer classes,” Bocaiúva publicized that emigrants could attain up to 125,000 braças of land at varying prices in provinces of their own choosing (Figure 7.1). Colonos were also exempted from import duties for their belongings and from military (though not National Guard) service, and they could naturalize as Brazilians within two years. Furthermore, the Brazilian government would offer room and board in a migrant hostel upon arrival, transport to their final destination, subsistence for the first six months, land surveying and clearing, agricultural implements, seeds, and a “provisional house” awaiting them in their new “homestead.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 7.1 Bocaiúva’s propaganda to lure “enterprising” Americans

FGV-CPDOC, QBccp 1855.08.21.

Image courtesy of CPDOC-FGV.

To calm public excitement over Brazilian promises, Bocaiúva set a $50 fee as a “guarantee of good faith” that would be duly reimbursed to emigrants once en route to Brazil. Incensed critics saw the charge as profiteering, including Johann Jakob Sturz, who was in the United States at the time and now sported a “hostile spirit against Brazil.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In response, an anonymous contributor to the New York Times under the pseudonym “Veritas” – no doubt Bocaiúva himself – defended Bocaiúva’s credentials and cited Cornelius Garrison, owner of the steamship line to Brazil engaged with Brazilian diplomats since 1863, as a reputable associate who lent further credit to the Brazilian agency’s work.Footnote ⁵⁸

Full Steam Ahead: Cuban Contributions to a Brazilian Recruitment Network

A tight-knit community of Cuban merchants and exiles in New York grounded Bocaiúva’s operations thanks to his close friend Bernardo Caymari, a savvy Cuban entrepreneur. Caymari had made a name for himself when the US government brought suit against him and Fausta Mora, a Cuban scion who owned many Manhattan properties, for freighting “merchandise” to either Confederate or Juarista rebels in Texas and hauling back $60,000-worth of cotton from Brownsville.Footnote ⁵⁹ With Bocaiúva at hand, Caymari swiftly navigated Brazil’s bureaucracy to obtain a contract between the Brazilian government and the United States and Brazil Mail Steamship Company (hereafter USBM), which he secured in February 1866. The new packet service departed New York to stop at the international hub of St. Thomas before proceeding to Belém, Recife, Salvador, and Rio. As USBM representative, Caymari also secured a lucrative contract to convey US emigrants to Brazilian ports, with USBM obtaining 10 percent of the price of passage up front and receiving reimbursements within a month.Footnote ⁶⁰ As part of the deal, the USBM agreed to verify that emigrants were in fact agricultural workers and to comply with Olinda’s 1858 Emigrant Transport Ordinance. The terms of agreement spanned two years at the height of the US exodus, which showed that New York interests prevailed over Charles Nathan’s earlier attempt to establish southern steamship lines directly from the south, especially when the USBM also began covering departures from New Orleans at twice the cost as from New York.

Approved by minister Paula Souza, Caymari’s contract also assigned Bocaiúva as company agent, a position that would allow him to bridge the interests of the SII, the USBM, and the Brazilian government.Footnote ⁶¹ In New York, Bocaiúva worked expeditiously. Synchronizing with the Brazilian legation, conveniently located across the street from his office, and the USBM’s bureau, a few blocks south on Broadway in no. 5 Bowling Green. He contrived a massive emigrant sweep in record time, which earned him praise in Brazil. When a shipment of 220 migrants landed at Rio aboard the South America, an exultant Tavares Bastos told him of a private letter in which the emperor himself purportedly instructed Agriculture minister Sousa Dantas “to encourage Bocaiúva, who has talent and shows great inclination to be of service … Carry on, then. Go ahead!”Footnote ⁶²

Bocaiúva’s exertions set in motion a migrant inflow that scholars estimate at 2,000 US southerners, but which was likely higher considering that 279 and 522 emigrants left respectively from New York and New Orleans in the second quarter of 1867 alone.Footnote ⁶³ It was unclear how much Bocaiúva’s precautions may have contributed to the southern port’s greater departures over New York, where most transports from the US South would stop en route to Brazil. Regardless, it was profits that benchmarked Bocaiúva’s efficacy. From March to December 1867, Caymari billed the Agriculture ministry twenty times on behalf of the USBM for rendered services totaling 256:130$055. This astronomical sum represented 24 percent of the ministry’s entire budget for Lands and Colonization on that fiscal year. An additional – and contentious – receipt for a single steamship voyage from New Orleans in August increased the bill by over 51 contos. No wonder, then, that minister Sousa Dantas had to request two supplemental credits – one in May, one in December – for that year’s budget while he contested the August charge. In typical fashion, Bocaiúva’s recruitments and the USBM stretched thin available government allocations.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Brazilian government struggled to cope with the rapid pace and steep costs of emigrant recruitment. For example, Sousa Dantas made little headway in accommodating the South America’s emigrants despite a month’s notice of their arrival. The SII had to house 150 of the passengers in its hostel on Imperatriz street while Sousa Dantas barely managed to send 70 more to the government-run hostel further north at Praia Formosa. Poor selection parameters and poor public opinion also riddled the enterprise. Sousa Dantas realized that the South America settlers strayed far from the reputed industriousness of US emigrants.

In response, the USBM instructed Bocaiúva to produce passenger lists before departures. According to official instructions, Bocaiúva organized emigrants into three distinct classes. Those of first class – the most resourceful – were entitled to 30 percent reduction in the cost of travel, while a second class composed of those who lost their fortunes in the Civil War would receive favorable government loans. But Bocaiúva’s success lay on a third class comprised of “simple workers” or “proletarians” responsible for covering their own travel costs or finding a planter who did. Predictably, many of the migrants sent by Bocaiúva failed to meet their debt obligations within days or weeks of arrival.

Critics in the press took note. It was claimed, for instance, that the “emigrants … that came to Iguape” comprised all the “vagrants, vagabonds and lock-pickers from the streets of New York,” having committed “disorders of all kinds, fires, assassination attempts, thefts.” “Why not make Brazil into the Fernando Noronha of the United States?,” concluded one letter, referring to Brazil’s most notorious island penal colony, which some had recently proposed turning into an agricultural colony. An exasperated Sousa Dantas ordered Bocaiúva to move his operations to New Orleans, where he could respond to fresh inquiries from southerners and oversee expeditions like the one organized by Frank McMullan, a veteran of William Walker’s filibustering and a lobbyist for a steamship line from Louisiana to Rio (Figure 7.2).Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 7.2 The North America, one of USBM’s state-of-the-art steamers

The North America, The Mariners’ Museum Collections, 1941.0645.000001.

Image courtesy of The Mariners’ Museum.

Accidents and mishaps further complicated operations and tarnished the SII’s image. Early in 1867, and only three hours out of New York, the USBM’s 1,796-ton North America almost collided with a Danish vessel returning from Rio with coffee. Although a collision was averted, the Danish ship sank and sustained five deaths. Their ship made an emergency stop at Martinique before continuing to Brazil with its 262 immigrants, but “a great bustle” yet awaited it in Rio. Once arrived, several colonos were held as suspects in connection to the homicide of a “poor employee of the Chamber of Deputies who was walking by” when a shot pierced the night air in Imperatriz street. A JC correspondent acerbically jested, “don’t send us North Americans like the ones recently arrived, for they say they are famous rowdies. I don’t know where poor Brazil will end up with this furor, this fashion of Yankeesmo (Yankeeism).”Footnote ⁶⁶

Nonetheless, in 1867, at least 10,032 migrants entered Rio de Janeiro, even if only 1,575 of these were US citizens. In no small part, this success was owing to a new deputy colonization agent hired by Bocaiúva: Domingo de Goicuria, the exiled son of a wealthy merchant family from Havana, and also Bernardo Caymari’s father-in-law.Footnote ⁶⁷ Goicuria brought with him critical connections and experience spanning the breadth of colonization efforts throughout the hemisphere. During the 1830s and ‘40s young Goicuria worked for his father’s firm in England. Inspired by post-abolition experiments in Jamaica, in 1846 he offered the Spanish Crown a plan to import colonos to Cuba from his parents’ homeland in northern Spain, but slave traffickers sabotaged his attempts to obtain a contract from the Junta de Fomento. Goicuria’s reformism eventually earned him his exile, where he enmeshed himself in a revolutionary Cuban diaspora and a sprawling transatlantic political network.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1854, conservative Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna sold indigenous prisoners from the Caste War in Yucatán to Goicuria’s family firm in Cuba.Footnote ⁶⁹ Two years later, Goicuria found himself collaborating with William Walker in Nicaragua, hoping to eventually turn his forces toward Cuba. In 1862, a different Mexican president, Benito Juárez, appointed Goicuria Mexican commissioner to Washington, DC, where Goicuria tried to sell Cozumel island for the Lincoln administration to settle freedmen in the event of an emancipation decree (the proceeds of such sale would go to repay a loan Goicuria had provided to the Mexican government).Footnote ⁷⁰

Ever on the coattails of international plots, Goicuria set to work in Brazil’s Emigration Agency. Within a month, he arranged for the Marmion to convey 300 emigrants to Brazil, a task made easier by his decision to move the office to the USBM headquarters in Bowling Green. Months later, he sent the North America back to Rio with 136 “field hands.”Footnote ⁷¹ With the northern winter, however, Goicuria’s endeavors began to show some wear, in part because he lacked information required to accurately perform his tasks. In a confidential memo to Bocaiúva, he asked for land maps and the names of fazendas for sale, rates for daily wages, details about the availability of fish and oysters in Brazil as requested by potential emigrants, and a portrait of Pedro II and Teresa Cristina to grace his office walls. Notwithstanding his dearth of resources and even decorations, Goicuria continued to move large sums of money.

Goicuria contributed to Brazilian colonization more specifically by amassing a practical archive of useful referents to serve as models, which he shared with Bocaiúva.Footnote ⁷² Goicuria’s collection of documents included a sample “Contrato de arrendamiento” stipulating sharecropping conditions in Cuban ingenios (Figure 7.3) and a sample contract and blank “Order to Import Workers” from the American Emigration Company (AEC), whose offices were located in no. 3 Bowling Green adjacent to the USBM’s and therefore right along the path of Goicuria’s business rounds. The AEC was a migrant-recruitment enterprise championed by secretary of state William Seward and supported by US consuls abroad following the Act to Encourage Immigration of 4 July 1864. As such, via Goicuria, it served as a model for the SII, which also probably collected the migrants discarded by the AEC. However, the Brazilian agency’s problems coincided, too, with local campaigns against the AEC. Mayor and local rail entrepreneur Charles Godfrey Gunther accused it of importing strike-breakers and reducing European “redemptioners” to the status of Mexican peons. Subsequently, the withdrawal of federal support for the AEC in 1868 may have contributed to the Brazilian agency’s declining performance.Footnote ⁷³

Figure 7.3 Useful exemplars: A model of a Cuban arrendamiento contract furnished by Goicuria

FGV-CPDOC, QBccp1855.08.21-pasta 5.

Image courtesy of CPDOC-FGV.

Goicuria’s activities took a sharp turn for the worse when two of his organized shipments generated complaints and protracted litigation, which jeopardized not only the SII’s reputation but the imperial government’s as well. The first case involved the Catherine Whiting, which Goicuria chartered in New Orleans in late June 1867. Passengers and crew clashed on the way to Rio – a situation that Caymari attributed to sectional tensions. However, as soon as the vessel docked in Rio, some passengers lodged formal complaints about travel conditions with Galvão, who ordered a thorough examination of conditions aboard. The result was a 18:000$000 fine on the ship captain for violations of the 1858 Emigrant Transport Ordinance. Caymari paid bail at the Customs house, but he also began the long process of contesting the charges. Still unresolved in 1869, a Conselho opinion signed by 1857–1858 cabinet veterans Olinda and Souza Franco dismissed his case on a technicality – Caymari had missed a 10-day window to appeal the Conselho’s decision.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1872, the inheritors of the late captain of the Catherine Whiting successfully reopened the case with the help of the US consul in Rio.

A second legal quagmire involved the Circassian, which Goicuria chartered from its owner Ernest Fiedler for an emigrant-transport trip from New Orleans. Three days after the chartering, Sousa Dantas signed Goicuria’s letter of dismissal, but, unknowingly, the Circassian went ahead and purchased supplies at its station in Bremen, racked up $12,000-worth of repairs when it landed in New York, and in early December 1867 finally arrived in New Orleans, where Brazil’s consul had not inscribed even one passenger for the trip.Footnote ⁷⁵ The ship’s captain waited for the time window prescribed in the contract drawn by Goicuria. When the time expired, the captain tried to charge demurrage fees. Brazil’s consul refused to pay and announced that the Brazilian chargé in Washington, DC had ordered the Circassian withdrawn from any government contracts. Years-long appeals followed. In its 1873 decision on the matter, the Conselho’s Empire section concluded that the Brazilian chargé’s intervention had led to a misunderstanding and that the captain’s claim could not exceed US$20,000. But then, surprisingly, the Conselho denied that the said contract had been authorized in the first place, attributing full liability to the parties who had signed. Goicuria’s dismissal allowed the Brazilian government to plausibly deny its involvement in the Circassian affair. But the case dragged on when the captain’s widow claimed damages, which eventually resulted in the publication of a damning report by her lawyer, the boisterous southern abolitionist and acrid anti-Catholic, Hinton Rowan Helper, which channeled the affair all the way to the congressional floor in 1884. Brazil’s mishandling of colonization affairs had dire and lasting implications for its reputation in the United States.Footnote ⁷⁶

Indeed, Brazilians’ excitement with US migrants gave way to unsalvageable disagreements over suspect business dealings in multiple directions. Ballard Dunn was accused of embezzling settlers and posing as a government official in Louisiana. In response, he accused Goicuria of overcharging for the 200 spots aboard the Marmion. Charles Nathan also came under attack for allegedly overcharging Dunn for a loan for land purchases initially offered as interest-free. Caught in his “mistake,” Nathan charged the correct amount but then spread rumors about Dunn’s speculations around the Marmion.Footnote ⁷⁷ For both Dunn and Nathan, however, business continued. Nathan, in particular, ventured into new commercial opportunities with a contract to import 3,000 settlers from southern US ports. Even though logistical problems soon earned his scheme a “bad repute,” three years later Nathan was in Portugal recruiting workers for plantations in Louisiana.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even Eça de Queirós poked fun at his efforts in his sardonic monthly, As farpas.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps the most significant facet of his ongoing activities was that he continued to peddle new steam lines to Brazil and other parts of South America, showing how the SII inspired durable and consecutive rackets based on directed migrations.Footnote ⁸⁰

Violent dissensions also broke out among two of the most prominent SII board members. After deputies criticized Bocaiúva for importing “bad colonos” who could eventually “dominate” Brazilians, and exactly a day before Sousa Dantas dismissed Goicuria, editor William Scully described Goicuria as “unscrupulous,” his “sole object being to gain a bounty” as a “man-catcher” sporting a conscience at the level of “his breeches’ pocket.” Scully used the opportunity to advocate for a line from Liverpool and for similar benefits to be offered to European settlers. Bocaiúva responded to Scully’s “most insolent insults” by defending Goicuria’s actions, including the extra per capita surcharges he was authorized to apply. Not only was Goicuria mentioned in Cochin’s study of abolition, Bocaiúva remarked, but he was the kind of gentleman who would never set his office on fire in order to collect insurance, as he insinuated Scully had done. The polemic continued on the pages of the DRJ, now owned by Caymari, and the Correio Mercantil, where Scully claimed Bocaiúva had “swapped his family name for that of any animal … to escape creditors” and routinely “begged for commissions from government.”Footnote ⁸¹ Though arguably about colonization, this aggressive controversy disclosed alleged shams and swindles that only accentuated the overarching profit-seeking motive of its participants.

The USBM plied through the scandal, continuing operations until the expiration of company subsidies in 1875. In contrast, however, the Brazilian Agency in New York did close. Goicuria arrived in Rio in early 1868 and tagged along with Bocaiúva and Caymari as they schemed new speculations, including reselling privileges for trolley tracks to the suburbs.Footnote ⁸² But when rebellion broke out in Cuba in October, Goicuria left to organize an expeditionary force to join the rebels in the Ten Years’ War. Rushing to the island, he was soon captured and executed by garrote vil in 1870. Back in Rio, Bocaiúva eulogized his friend and recognized his service – his form of acknowledgment that, with Goicuria’s passing, the Brazilian colonization adventure in New York was also laid to rest.Footnote ⁸³

The SII and its New York agency embodied a multigenerational and politically inclusive experiment: a colonization company that interlocked variously and opportunisitcally with the Brazilian government, a powerful steamship company, and ongoing civil wars across the hemisphere and beyond. Yet, after Poles were displaced as ideal migrants, Brazilians’ aspirations of banking on the stream of US southerners wishing to leave their country met one calamity after another. Nevertheless, as the hopes placed on Confederates vanished and, with them, the SII, the larger enterprise of colonization endured as its leading businessmen trained their sights on new opportunities in the future ahead. Indeed, Bocaiúva’s experiences paved the way for an upward political trajectory that saw him eventually become Foreign minister in the Republican government that deposed the Brazilian Empire in 1889. The migration policies he espoused then, at the high point of the era of mass migrations, harkened back to the SII and his formative time in New York.

* * *

To be sure, despite the dissolution of the SII, migrants continued to arrive, propelled by fresh world crises, attracted by old Brazilian promises, and overseen by new government approaches to colonization. During the pro-Confederate vogue and the launch of the SII and the New York agency, Brazilian authorities learned how to better ensure access to services for desirable migrants and how to improve administrative oversight over settlement processes.

In the heat of the SII launch, minister Sousa Dantas approved a new Ordinance for State Colonies (1867) meant to guide land surveying and distribution of state-owned lands but also the administration and organized settlement of those lands by foreign colonos. This and other new regulations had a significant domino effect on colonization. Within the new framework, deputies discussed a bequest to grant lands for colonization to Pedro II’s daughter, princess Isabel, and her husband, prince Gaston d’Orleans, count d’Eu, whom she had married in 1864. At the same time, Bocaiúva’s friend and SII secretary Tavares Bastos took advantage of the new regulations to bring the government into an even more liberal colonization agenda. In the Chamber of Deputies, he pushed a raft of bills dealing with civil marriage, open ports in colonies, land grants for colonization, work contract and naturalization reforms, and the prohibition of slavery in cities with over 20,000 inhabitants within a decade. For the moment, most of these fell by the wayside, especially the proposal on civil marriage, which was destroyed by a Conselho decision on the impossibility of Protest-Catholic marriages.Footnote ⁸⁴ Still, those very same ideas became the ideological pillars of the SII. Indeed, the SII’s only surviving report was accompanied by Tavares Bastos’s “Memória sobre a imigração” in 1867, which served as a statement of reformist principles for the new company.

Tavares Bastos drew much of his inspiration from an award-winning treatise on the history of nineteenth-century migrations by Jules Duval, and in doing so reinforced not only the crossed gazes between Brazil and Algeria as parallel colonization horizons, but their connections. As the Fourierist editor of L’écho d’Oran, Duval was also the author of influential works on French colonial policy and one of many Saint-simonians invested in Algerian colonization who had previously looked toward Brazil. In 1867, seeing Brazil’s exhibits at the International Exposition in Paris, he concluded that the Blumenau colony would help Brazil “take its place among the choir of countries in full march toward civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Coincidentally, at that time too, Brazil’s first consul in Algiers, François Ravan (appointed at the tail end of Olinda’s administration in 1858), and his vice-consul in Oran, Victor Masurel (appointed in 1861), put in motion a plan that would directly connect Brazil and Algeria.Footnote ⁸⁶ Beginning in 1867, these diplomats facilitated the arrival of yet another cohort of troubled expatriates to Brazil, when a group of colons from Oran mulled emigrating after a year of periodic seismic activity and prolonged drought. Within a year, five Algerian settlers left for Rio as prospectors to procure government favors. The Agriculture minister quickly made funds available to Paraná’s provincial president in order to “offer all the possible benefits to establish a great current of immigrants of proven behavior and inclined to work.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Thanks to such subsidies, three of the prospectors purchased land in the outskirts of Curitiba and sent for their fellow colons back in Algeria. In February 1869, about 90 German and French settlers arrived in Antonina, Paraná, from Algeria to hopeful expectations that they would rally French markets for Brazilian coffee.Footnote ⁸⁸ The vice-consul at Oran cautioned against replicating this drive, suggesting it was better to wait due to “the hardships endured by the Algerians after several years of locust invasions, bad harvests … famine, [and] bad administration.” But Brazilian officials were optimistic that their new regulations would sort out any complications.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Ordinance for State Colonies in fact made it easy for authorities to furnish the Algerians with tools, ready-made houses, food rations, and demarcated lands paid for in installments. But the colons quickly learned to leverage such good will to their advantage and profit. As they prepared to cultivate wheat and vines, their consul requested seeds from the imperial government. Then, one of the initial prospectors asked for more funds to finish his house, while the other two demanded – and obtained – ox-driven plows. The colons also pleaded for lands for their wives, with one even pretending he had separated from his. After the provincial president called out this “trick to obtain undue benefits,” the government withheld recognition of the Algerian settlement as an official colony as per the 1867 ordinance.Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite the negative letters sent by one of the prospectors to French newspapers, still in 1874 other Algerian colons arrived from Oran and Tlemcen, including a entire French family, and Spanish workers originally from Almería.Footnote ⁹¹ By then, however, the initial colons had moved elsewhere. As with the Poles, dissipating hopes of an Algerian migration put in evidence that regulatory frameworks in themselves fell short of sustaining robust emigrant sweeps. Without a company to incite and buttress those migrations, and excite authorities to please them, migrants expelled from troubled contexts could hardly secure a footing in Brazil.

The Algerian episode bookended a series of potentially profitable migration drives propelled by war-torn and crisis-ridden contexts from around the world. Polish, US, and Algerian arrivals, and even a revolutionary and savvy Cuban diaspora, signaled an amplified global profile for Brazilian colonization as much as a challenging transnational crossroads. Regional and national conflagrations bifurcated diplomatic channels, business endeavors, reformist efforts, professional aspirations, lives, and friendships. This time of turmoil also generated countless opportunities to enact and profit from directed migrations and colonization schemes. But these opportunities cut many different ways. Refugees and expatriates saw Brazilian colonization as a path both to political survival and transactional gains. Once their schemes were on the move, intellectuals, politicians, and planters across the Brazilian Empire saw these displaced outcasts – the dregs of the era’s armed conflicts and imperial conquests – as beacons of agrarian and cultural improvement. War expatriated people, to be sure. It also activated governmental rationales, company-making practices, and agile improvisations all centered on the profit-bearing potential of displacement.