Numerous colonization enterprises launched or consolidated their operations in the 1850s. Two among them stood out due to the sheer ambition of their efforts to recruit, transport, and settle foreign migrants: the Mucury Company, originally established in 1847, and the Associação Central de Colonização (Central Colonization Association, hereafter ACC), founded in 1854. Both shared an interest in wide-ranging peopling projects and in record-shattering profits. Both also depended on government subsidies as their financial lifeline. They even shared members across their rosters, which signaled a growing enthusiasm for corporate colonization that transcended political inclinations. Yet the commonalities stopped where these companies’distinct ends began. As a private corporation bankrolled by the central government and captained by a trusted apparatchik of the imperial bureaucracy, the ACC sought to define itself as the leading colono supplier of the day with its base of operations in Rio. Mucury, in turn, was the brainchild of a liberal firebrand from Minas Gerais, Teófilo Ottoni, who sought to people and economically jumpstart a politically strategic corner of his home province by opening river access to the Atlantic. To enact their programs, both companies confronted logistical and political barriers that the new cabinet organized at the emperor’s behest in 1857 tried to remediate in numerous if often questionable ways.

All the while, patrons’ abuses and colono mutinies fed into growing denunciations of a “white slavery” that imperiled the integrity of these and other companies’ operations. Despite scandals, however, company favor requests continued to stream onto the desk of the new prime minister, Pedro de Araújo Lima, known as the marquês de Olinda after obtaining his highest noble title in 1854. As the two most prominent company drives at the time, the ACC and Mucury hauled in problems with a high level of public exposure that compromised the Brazilian government due to its direct aid to both enterprises. The situation thus forced the new cabinet to a reckoning with its own possibilities and limitations in responding to an urgent and multifaceted conundrum. Indeed, Olinda found himself at multiple crossroads at once. One of the dilemmas arising from this scenario obligated him to choose which companies to favor and to what extent. Another involved deciding whether to give in to international recriminations against these companies’ colono recruitments or to defend them against accusations of malfeasance, fraud, and egregious mistreatment of colonos.

In the background, a more familiar quandary lurked: as the unwitting heir to the marquês de Paraná and the cabinet he led from 1853 to his death in 1856, Olinda was expected to continue with the improvements expected by the emperor but also with a politics of conciliação (conciliation) that laid to rest the partisan animosities of the previous decade.Footnote ¹ Paraná had sternly overseen a political turn toward decreased partisanship against the wishes of his fellow saquaremas. No less conservative, Olinda inherited the mantle of conciliation and its calling to preserve a tenuous peace but also a host of divisive questions left unresolved by Paraná, including whether the state should intervene directly in economic and development affairs rather than promote them from a distance. This question indicted the prior cabinet’s twin pillars of improvement and conciliation, and now colonization companies’ travails inevitably foisted it upon Olinda. Olinda’s ministry remains a historiographical lacuna in many respects – relatively brief at one year and seven months, it was overshadowed both by the conciliação and by the magnitude of other events, including the Panic of 1857 and the Paraguayan War (1864–1870). Olinda’s attitudes and actions also resist easy categorization. Even though in 1837 he had commanded the reactionaries’ Regresso, he now spearheaded a heterogeneous cabinet that even included a liberal in the Finance portfolio.

Colonization illuminates the blind spots surrounding Olinda’s premiership, as bourgeoning company drives forced colonization to the top of his agenda. Moreover, by design as well as accident, colonization transformed Olinda into the quintessential regulator and consolidated the Brazilian government’s oversight attributions over colonization companies. As such, Olinda betrays an important paradigm shift in the development of the Brazilian state. If, as an áulico in the 1840s he had traced the lineaments of a robust regulatory state in relation to colonization, the ACC, Mucury, and their tribulations only strengthened his regulatory veer. Yet they also opened the door to a more opportunistic state, as Olinda understood official backing as a tool to cut losses as much as to preempt political challenges.

Hence, this chapter examines the launch of two dashing new colonization companies, the innovations in their midst, and the political predicaments – and calculations – they gave rise to. Mucury and the ACC possessed a new edge in terms of the nature and scale of their endeavors as much as in their internal organization and operations, which renovated politicians’ and businessmen’s expectations regarding the promises of colonization companies.Footnote ² Looking past their excited emergence quickly uncovers the innumerable complications these companies dregdged up. Their political underpinnings and their respective relationships to government reveal the tensions between company runs and cabinet imperatives, and shed light on how these companies’ future and Olinda’s politics were mutually constitutive. The ACC’s and Mucury’s trajectories demonstrate that political concerns were never too far from the surface of colonization company activities, which inevitably brought myriad diplomatic troubles in their wake. Yet those seemingly faulty tendencies played a crucial role in stoking government action, ultimately compelling Olinda to embody a forceful, if later politically opportunistic, regulatory swerve.

The Mucury Company, or Colonization as a Political Gamble

The notorious exaltado deputy Teófilo Ottoni stepped back from politics at the tail end of the so-called Liberal quinquennium (1844–1848), tired of the reformist timidity of successive liberal-moderate cabinets.Footnote ³ Ottoni had not become a radical overnight. As the first of eleven children, and a third-generation descendant of a Genoese exile who settled in Minas in the 1720s, Teófilo came of age in the Vila do Príncipe, where he and his brothers learned Latin and read the hallmarks of classical republicanism. In 1828, he graduated at the top of his class from the Navy Academy in Rio, while living with his uncle, a Romantic poet and veteran deputy of the Lisbon Courts, and mingling with journalist Evaristo da Veiga and then-moderate Vasconcelos. Then, as an official vote counter in the 1828 elections, Ottoni had the gall to fine the War minister for an apparent breach. In retribution, he received orders to station in Africa or the Amazon but opted instead to abandon the Navy and return to his hometown, where in 1832 he set up the Sentinella do Serro, a newspaper guided by republican and democratic principles, and a political association, the Sociedade Promotora do Bem Público. Elected to the new provincial assembly in 1835, and to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Ottoni joined a secret society organized by Antônio Carlos de Andrada and went on to spearhead the liberal uprising of 1842 in Minas.Footnote ⁴ He was soon imprisoned and condemned for insurrection, but his sentence was commuted by the general amnesty of 1844. Ottoni then rushed back into the Chamber as part of a liberal comeback but by 1847 became deeply disillusioned.Footnote ⁵

Ottoni may have sensed conservatives’ impending return when he poured his energies into the Mucury Navigation and Colonization Company, and so his turn to colonization did not represent a political capitulation but rather a voyage deeper into politics. The new company primarily aimed to open river access to the northern regions of Minas Gerais, but colonization soon became its principal remit. The company’s peopling activities could have important electoral repercussions. The districts where Mucury operated already contained a large population hovering around 411,309, most of it free according to Ottoni. A demographic uptick by means of “a great number of emigrants and colonos” could potentially deliver new voters, particularly after the 1846 electoral reform established property qualifications of as little as 200$ for votantes, or first-round voters (those who voted for “second-round” electors but could still vote for councilmen and local judges), which meant that colonos could qualify once they naturalized.Footnote ⁶ This voter increase would technically help Ottoni carve out a new province in northern Minas and improve his chances for representation at the Court.Footnote ⁷ Ultimately, Ottoni aimed at a landslide victory over conservative provincial antagonists to upset the balance of representation in the imperial legislature.

To begin, Ottoni rekindled provincial ties long cultivated by his family in a region adrift from influential mineiros at the Court. Close relatives hopped into action. While his brother Cristiano ran for the Chamber to keep a political lifeline, cousin Honório Esteves provided practical intelligence as director of Indians in the Mucuri region and as provincial commissioner appointed to study river navigation in 1846. Another cousin who was a councilman in Minas Novas connected Ottoni to a regional elite vying for the creation of a new province. When Ottoni opened the first subscriptions, his family snatched 577 of 1,000 available shares, that is, 58 percent of the Company’s initial public offering, with regional elites taking the rest together with prestigious backers like the liberal tycoon visconde de Mauá, the second largest subscriber after Ottoni.Footnote ⁸ With its start-up capital secured, the Mucury Company obtained imperial and provincial contracts on May and August 1847. Ottoni then launched expeditions on the Mucuri river to render a clear idea of rapids and unnavigable portions in its course, discovering that steamships could only reach up to the very first waterfall. This transfer point, Santa Clara, was 22 leagues distant from Minas Novas but still offered a better option than the 160–180 leagues of mule-pack trails separating Minas Novas from the Court. Indeed, investors remained enthusiastic about making the Mucuri “rich and populated.” Within weeks, speculators and planters from across the province hastily and informally claimed lands by posse, grabbing the most profitable locations along the projected commercial thoroughfare after the press trumpeted “the immense profits” that awaited the Mucury Company.Footnote ⁹

Ottoni thrived amid recurrent challenges. Despite the new conservative ministry of 1848 (which, nonetheless, included colonization-friendly figures like Monte Alegre and Olinda) and the fraudulent 1849 elections abetted by the central government, Ottoni secured a two-year extension to meet some of his contractual obligations from a lame-duck provincial assembly. But in 1850, the incoming president tried to sabotage him, authorizing the province to become the leading shareholder by purchasing 1,000 shares. In 1854, the provincial assembly finally authorized the credit necessary for Minas to purchase shares and effectively become the new majority shareholder. As such, the provincial government demanded a drastic increase in the maximum votes allowed for any single shareholder, changing the ceiling from the prior limit of 6–40 votes in what amounted to a corporate takeover.

Yet the change freed Ottoni to focus on his management role and continue attending to the trouble-plagued roadworks from Santa Clara to the Mucuri tributary of Todos os Santos. The first Portuguese workers brought from Rio either deserted or fell ill, and the Polish engineer and recruiter hired by Ottoni was killed. Ottoni carried on, pressing his brother on surveying activities and accelerating transport between Rio and the São José port on the Mucuri delta, a 30-hour trip that could be delayed by up to 30 days by stopovers in nearby Caravelas. When the imperial government offered an 18-conto subsidy for a navigation line to Espírito Santo, Ottoni sat on the Praça do Comércio’s special commission examining bids and successfully offered his own, aiming for the subvention even if his ships would have to stop in Vitória before docking at São José. With the help of ex-minister Monte Alegre, Ottoni obtained the contract and purchased the 70-contos-worth Mucury steamer, showing his ability to surmount logistical challenges and rally conservatives to his cause.Footnote ¹⁰

Ottoni’s brio found its complement in relatively equitable, transparent, and accountable corporate practices, which helped the company stand out among other enterprises. Mucury’s original rules allowed a gradual increment of shareholder voting power at the rate of one vote for every five shares bought but capped the maximum votes at six, thus limiting the power of the largest shareholders. As early as 1852, an independent audit commission of shareholders that included Ottoni’s friend Mauá concluded that “one must admire what the director has accomplished and at such little expense,” forecasting that its “conspicuous administration … could soon place the Mucury Company as one of the most useful, prosperous and brilliant associations of the Empire.” By 1854, the Company enjoyed a respectable position among public companies at the Court, yielding a yearly dividend of 10$618 for every 300$ share, which made it the third most lucrative company, even ahead of Mauá’s Amazon Company, and allowed Ottoni to boast that no other enterprise “offered so many and such secure guarantees of prosperity.”Footnote ¹¹

Regarding settlement, however, the 1852 commission struck a somber note. Even Ottoni admitted that the Company had “dragged its feet in colonization matters.”Footnote ¹² Mucury contractually agreed with the Minas government that two-thirds of its labor would be free and preferably foreign and promised the imperial government to populate its land grant with 60 colono couples per square league within a decade. The auditors recommended eliminating obstacles to smooth colonization operations, including internal passport taxes for colonos instituted by an 1842 ordinance.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, Ottoni sought to cut losses by addressing indigenous depredations on his colony, christened Filadelfia in accordance to his democratic creed. To do so, he employed “pacification” strategies including gift exchanges and Indian língoas (translators) to establish a regional diplomacy with itinerant indigenous groups, one of whose ultimate intentions was to turn indigenous peoples to seasonal agricultural work to supply foodstuffs for incoming colonos. Yet Ottoni’s “pacification” lost to his concern with the security of property. When some Indians attacked a company expedition, Ottoni welcomed plans for a military colony in the area and periodically continued to ask the president for reinforcements.Footnote ¹⁴

The Mucury Company rapidly turned to peopling as its principal activity, maximizing any available opportunity to obtain and retain foreign settlers. The new Urucú military colony provided a haven for the first cohorts. Aware that a fungal blight devastated vineyards in Madeira, Ottoni recruited 153 colonos from the island who made it to Urucú in 1855 and were “swimming in abundance” by the time 162 Belgians and Dutch joined them in 1858. In addition to the slaves employed by Ottoni and the indigenous groups around Filadelfia and Santa Clara, Portuguese islanders, German speakers, and Chinese colonos diversified Company rosters. Similarly, Ottoni varied his catchment strategies but always relied on trusted employees rather than “ordinary colonization agents who obtain a prize for every colono they hire.” Robert Schlobach – the new head engineer – siphoned colonos through Hamburg. Another agent, a Prussian by the name of Moritz Horn, set out to Potsdam to hire colonos with the aid of his father, a local politician. Ottoni himself hired a hundred Chinese colonos from the imperial government’s contract with Sampson & Tappan, later claiming that he never considered the Chinese as colonos but as ideal wage laborers, or “machines to substitute slave workers.”Footnote ¹⁵

Ottoni also sought to benefit from a resurgent Portuguese colono trade that entailed familiar complications. He contracted Antônio Martins Lage, the shipping magnate who refused the SPC presidency back in 1837 and who owned the Ilha das Enxadas, a lucrative shipyard and charcoal station in Guanabara Bay. Lage cleared the 1,000-ton, copper-lined Brazilian galleon Palmyra with the Navy Auditor, as required, and tried to acquit his captain from a scandal in 1856 concerning a colono voyage overcrowded with minors and passportless emigrants.Footnote ¹⁶ In São Miguel, the Palmyra offered travel advances and free passage to Mucuri, free room and board for ten months in Santa Clara, some wardrobe, a modest stipend, and the possibility of buying or leasing land from the Company. But the 224 colonos who arrived in Rio on January 1858 refused to continue on to Mucuri. Rather than obligate them, Ottoni rescinded their contracts without charge and tried to recoup losses by luring colonos from other enterprises. When 70 Portuguese workers landed from Porto for the ACC and a larger load of 232 colonos from Prussia, Hesse, Holstein for the União e Indústria Company, Ottoni published an advertisement addressed “to the colonos recently arrived from Europe” offering free travel to Mucuri and land on credit.Footnote ¹⁷

For the colonos who took him at his word, Ottoni made good on his promises and showed care for their health. At Santa Clara, he relied on Dr. Manoel Esteves Ottoni and on two “well known medics” from Rio to tend to the sickly. When a bout of typhoid hit, he allowed Dr. Robert Avé-Lallemant to take colonos for more medical care at the Court. Later, he also got in touch with the marquês de Abrantes, then president of the Casa da Misericórdia, to keep track of 86 colonos he had sent for treatment due to “ulcers in their feet,” fevers, and gastro-intestinal conditions. Foreign observers attested to Ottoni’s concerns for colono well-being in this epidemiologically challenging environment, with some emphasizing colonos’ ability to send remittances to their families and even grow their own food within 8 or 10 months of arrival.Footnote ¹⁸

Yet Ottoni’s concern for colonos was not entirely selfless. His relatives and associates benefited considerably from their presence once they acquired the first available plots in Filadelfia and offered them to colonos through aforamento, a type of long-term land lease.Footnote ¹⁹ Teófilo’s brothers Augusto and Ernesto also bought lands along Todos os Santos to establish chácaras (farmsteads) for local provisioning. Ernesto, cousin Tristão Vieira, Minas Novas notables, and even Robert Schlobach’s brother set up earthenware, hardware, and wholesale shops starting in 1857. Ottoni’s circle, then, built land and commercial markets on the backs of arriving foreigners and the thousand or so Brazilian squatters living around Santa Clara and Filadelfia.Footnote ²⁰

The Mucury Company fell behind its contractual obligations notwithsatnding its bustling activities. In late 1855, the imperial government allotted more lands to the Company and land sales proceeded apace, but colono importation rates lagged behind. Up to 1858, Ottoni imported 1,113 foreigners, with a real net total of 1,091. This put the Company behind its commitment to import 1,000 colonos per year between 1857 and 1859 in exchange for a 300-conto interest-free government loan to be disbursed gradually as Ottoni fulfilled migrant quotas. But costs were already prohibitive. Colono recruitment and transport to Rio, and then to Mucuri, exhausted the Company’s accounts, which Ottoni dented further by forgiving colono contracts or debts. From 1857 to 1859, colonization-related expenses more than doubled from 5.88 percent to 12.8 percent of the total operating budget.Footnote ²¹

During that time, other companies outsmarted or outshone Mucury. The Amazon Company imported 963 Portuguese colonos directly to Pará within three years of incorporation but abandoned colono drives in 1857 after contemplating their huge expenses.Footnote ²² The Companhia União e Indústria incorporated in 1854 by Mariano Procópio Ferreira Lage for macadamized roadwork between Petrópolis and Juíz de Fora struck an almost identical deal as Mucury’s by committing to 2,000 foreign workers within three years in return for an interest-free 200-conto loan from the imperial government (disbursable in five installments versus Mucury’s three). After a failed recruitment drive in Schleswig-Holstein in 1858, Procópio’s recruiter in Hamburg reported immense difficulties in finding emigrants willing to head to the projected colony of Pedro II, just beyond the União e Indústria’s endpoint in Minas. Yet Procópio sought Dr. Schmidt’s help, and before the end of the year, 1,170 colonos arrived from Hamburg – 370 more than he requested. By the end of the decade, 1,112 colonos had permanently settled in Pedro II as the road inched toward Petrópolis.Footnote ²³

In vain, Ottoni sought help from the ACC instead, which ceded only some colonos to make up for the Palmyra’s Azoreans even though, Ottoni noted, “the hostel at the Ilha do Bom Jesus was full to the brim.” Besides this “provocation,” these colonos allegedly included “proven harlots, ex-sailors and veterans” from the “taverns and public squares of Europe.” Ottoni also got the cold shoulder from ACC president Manuel Vieira Tosta, barão de Muritiba, when he requested a credit to help colonos defray land clearance costs. The ACC was then striving to become the leading colono purveyor for individuals and firms alike and as such became Mucury’s top competitor in recruitment activities. Ottoni complained to Olinda that his company could barely meet colono quotas “due to the ruinous competition carried out by ACC agents against [Mucury’s] correspondents in Europe.” Only an advance of Mucury’s government loan could offset the deleterious effects of the ACC recruitments. But no funds would be forthcoming. Olinda had too much at stake to walk back on his support for the ACC, especially amid the tenuous balance of forces he sought to maintain in the post-conciliation.Footnote ²⁴

The Acme of Government-Run Peopling

The ACC was the brainchild of Bernardo Augusto Nascentes de Azambuja, who made a name for himself as municipal judge at the Court and ascended to important district judge seats as a result of overseeing a case against senator José Martiniano de Alencar (Sr.) for alleged involvement in the liberal uprisings of 1842. By the early 1850s, Azambuja sat as 1 of the 10 deputies for Rio in the Chamber. As in Ottoni’s case, family ties were central to Azambuja, whose entry into politics and his stability as a middling bureaucrat owed much to a coterie of brothers in similarly middling positions in the Imperial Chamber, Rio’s police, and the administrative backbenches of various ministries.Footnote ²⁵

With his siblings as a weatherglass, Azambuja articulated the ACC’s principles in a string of articles at the start of 1853. He began with a call for the “rightful execution” of the 1850 Land Law and for the “wealthiest planters” to “gradually substitute slave service with free labor.” Then, Azambuja proposed a centralized association to promote foreign migration to Brazil through government and private funds, in close collaboration with European emigration agencies and in communication with new welcoming hubs in provincial capitals across the Empire. His ideas invoked Land Law stipulations empowering government to import a fixed number of colonos at the expense of the Treasury and to issue additional credits whenever costs exceeded budget allocations for colonization. Finally, Azambuja’s blueprint also prioritized surveying and selling public lands as much as propaganda to battle German newspapers’ “calumnies” against emigration to Brazil.Footnote ²⁶

Azambuja’s proposal incited the Empire minister and one-time empresario hopeful Francisco Gonçalves Martins to call a commission to draft the ordinance activating the Land Law, which he filled with old colonization mavericks like Calmon, Paraíba Valley plantaters Baependi and José Teixeira Leite, and ex-SPC member Caetano Alberto Soares. The Land Ordinance passed in 1854 and established a Lands and Colonization Department with the unserendipitous selection of Azambuja as its interim director. The appointment helped the ACC take root by giving Azambuja an insider’s view of emergent policy proposals and colonization efforts in newly opening frontiers.

As the ACC incorporated, Azambuja accompanied minister Ferraz’s 1855 decree abolishing restrictive residency permits for foreigners and allowing them to use their passports for travel within the Empire and a later decree expediting naturalization procedures by eliminating residency prerequisites and allowing district councils and justices of peace to certify requests. Shortly after, a budget law established the first regulations over colono transports by tethering anchorage exemptions for colono vessels to yet-to-be-determined rules.Footnote ²⁷ Azambuja may have also gotten wind of novel ideas conveyed through diplomatic channels. From Madrid, for instance, Francisco de Varnhagen proposed an Empire-wide land census geared to establish property taxes on both cultivated and fallow lands, a corrective for the ills of large-holding perpetuated by the Land Ordinance of 1854. In his view, properties reverting to public lands, including aforamentos (to be abolished under the project’s terms), should be sold and priced according to their distance to the nearest urban center or rail line, but, Varnhagen believed, empresarios involved in “European agricultural colonization” should also receive free land grants. From Berlin, consul Sturz also championed an “adequate general land tax” to fix Brazil’s “shoddy colonization” and eliminate “emphytheutic schemes” and parceria contracts so as to outcompete Montevideo’s new consul in Berlin, who was speculating in lands to give German emigration a “concentrated direction” toward Uruguay.Footnote ²⁸

Azambuja may have downplayed these international threats as he came to understand that internal frontiers like the newly created province of Paraná generated strong demand for colono-provisioning companies like the ACC. Carved out of the southern paulista district of Curitiba, Paraná speedily evolved into an export powerhouse linked to Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, and Montevideo. Even though its main port, Paranaguá, lagged behind Rio or Salvador, by 1855 it outstripped Desterro, doubling the latter’s revenues and tripling its export values. New colonies in Paraná, however, took time to flourish, including Charles Peret Gentil’s Superaguy, whose director lasted but eight months.Footnote ²⁹ Paraná’s first president, Zacarias de Góis e Vasconcelos, blamed Indian raids such as the one against the military colony of Guarapuava and probably bristled at Kaingang, Guaraní, or Kaiowá peoples’ negotiations with the imperial government to secure land claims, at times successfully.Footnote ³⁰ The ACC could, at any rate, help colonization endeavors establish a firmer footing by purveying colonos to self-styled frontiersman like João da Silva Machado, Luiz Vergueiro’s co-organizer in the Santos colonization company back in 1836. Machado, known as barão de Antonina, was a liberal linked by kin to the Vergueiros who had nonetheless combated the revolts of 1842 and consequently earned his title. In 1854, he became senator for Paraná and continued to expand ongoing roadworks with liberated Africans around the military colony of Jataí. As Antonina lobbied for military outposts like the ones built in Pernambuco and Alagoas in the proximity of indigenous settlements, the imperial government authorized eight new indigenous colonies next to presidios or old Jesuit aldéas along the Paraná river as part of a larger flurry of measures for Paraná’s development.Footnote ³¹ Antonina thus began importing Portuguese settlers to new outposts as far inland as Mato Grosso, confirming for Azambuja a growing market demand for colonos.Footnote ³²

As novel ideas circulated and agrarian frontiers ratcheted up, Azambuja officially incorporated the ACC in April 1855 in an inaugural assembly at the Praça do Comércio. Eighty-six attendees commanding up to 377 votes and covering two-thirds of available shares quickly confirmed Azambuja as vice-president. The largely symbolic presidency unanimously went to the marquês de Monte Alegre. Two others elected to the executive board had also matched Azambuja with 373 votes: Luiz Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck, the author of Idéas sobre colonisação, and Francisco José Fialho. Meanwhile, elected members for an administrative council – a consultive body for the board – included former áulicos and statesmen from the imperial stratosphere such as Abrantes and the visconde de Ipanema, whose lands south of the Court the ACC could tap for colonos.

The ACC’s charter and board elections strengthened Azambuja’s hand to negotiate government benefits and solidify the ACC as a profit-yielding enterprise with at least five income streams: transatlantic transport costs aboard its own vessels or chartered ships; sales, leases, or aforamentos of any land under its ownership; fees charged to “spontaneous emigrants” seeking its services or staying at its hostel; interest rates on colono loans; and room and board services to its own recently arrived colonos. In the run-up to the ACC’s government contract of 1857 negotiated with Manoel Felizardo, the new director of the Lands and Colonization Directorate, Azambuja secured a new source of earnings: a 30$ government prize for every adult colono, and 20$ for minors aged 5–10, plus an interest-free 1,000-conto government loan to import 50,000 colonos within 5 years.Footnote ³³ Stable revenue sources and government privileges tethered to company performance seemd to foolproof ACC finances.

Azambuja drafted statutes that greatly eased requirements for participation relative to other colonization companies by offering one of the cheapest share prices at the time(100$), at half the cost of one Banco do Brasil share, a third of Mucury’s, a quarter of an Amazon Company’s, and five and ten times more affordable respectively than a single entry into União e Indústria and the Macaé and Campos navigation company. Also, subscribers could transfer their shares and thus underwrite other commercial transactions, and exchange scrip for equivalent value in ACC land plots. Azambuja also facilitated participation in general assemblies by setting the quorum for biannual meetings at one-quarter of all shareholders and allowing absent members to delegate votes to other members.

With these generous conditions, the public readily welcomed the ACC. Some 267 shareholders had signed up at the time of the government contract. Voting was initially staggered at 1 vote per 10-share interval up to 100 shares. Between 100 and a ceiling of 300 shares, members only obtained 1 vote per 50 shares. Hence, while a considerable cleavage existed in company participation between the members with the least shares and those with the most, the latter’s power was capped at 14 votes. Even the smallest shareholders enjoyed a modicum of representation: ownership of 5–10 shares yielded 1 vote, eligibility for board positions started at 10. Only 14 percent of subscribers owned more than 50 shares. The rest leaned heavily toward the middle and lowest ranks of ownership, with 25.5 percent owning exactly 50 shares, and 45 percent owning 20 shares or less (Figure 6.1). The ACC’s low entry threshold led to membership concentration in the lowest rates. Meanwhile, middle-tier shareholders made up the largest single group and left a wide gap between them and the highest-rate shareholders because they probably found greater voting power less appealing, given that such a large cohort of low-rate members had a balancing effect over the voting power of those with the most shares. This solid low- and middle-ownership base that did not require more shares to have their voices heard made the ACC into a less seigneurial company than the SPC or CCB. Wheras five viscondes, three barões, and three marqueses featured as members, bureaucrats, merchants, and military men made the bulk of ACC and contributed decisively not only to increasing its start-up capital to 1.557:500$ by 1857, but also producing a 731-réis dividend.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 6.1 Distribution of ACC share ownership, 1857

Soon, the ACC assembled a remarkable colono conveyance network. In Rio, it leased the Santo Antônio convent and opened a hostel in the Ilha do Bom Jesus to house arriving colonos until they were contracted by third parties. As part of renegotiations in 1857, the imperial household ceded one of its properties, the Quinta do Cajú in the present-day area of the Ilha do Fundão, with its yearly pension of 2:400$000, for the construction of a large-scale migrant inn. Overseas, the company organized a competitive recruitment system. It subcontracted ad hoc recruitment drives in the Azores, bringing in one shipload of 116 in 1858 and another of 245 colonos in 1859, and it opened agencies in Paris, Porto, and Berlin, which respectively hauled 1,563, 569, and 137 colonos to Brazil in 1858.Footnote ³⁵

A diverse cast manned these agencies. In Berlin, the ACC hired Dr. Schmidt, Brazil’s old vice-consul, who had the experience to surmount Prussian strictures against emigration. In Paris, a close friend of ACC board member Fialho who worked at the Brazilian legation facilitated contact with a French firm, H. Beaucourt & Comp., hired to supply 6,000 colonos to the ACC.Footnote ³⁶ Meanwhile in Porto, the ACC depended on Guilherme Augusto Machado Pereira, a wealthy merchant who resided in Brazil until 1852 and sat on the fiscal board of the Banco Mercantil Portuense. At lower pay, the ACC also employed a cunning recruiter by the name of Antonio Joaquim de Andrade Villares, who had hired colonos for the barão de Nova Friburgo and could more inconspicuously recruit colonos without passports and even minors, helping the ACC meet its migrant quotas by illicit means.Footnote ³⁷

Yet the ACC’s ballooning costs provoked a polemic about the government’s obligations to colonization companies. In April 1858, critics maligned private colonization as a racket that exhausted public funds in the name of the common good.Footnote ³⁸ The main attack came from an anonymous contributor nicknamed Vadius, later revealed to be the conservative mathematician Cândido Baptista de Oliveira. As enovy to Russia, Cândido Baptista had mailed colonization literature back to Brazil; as provincial vice-president, he helped Aureliano with the Delrue colonos. But, as Vadius, he believed that “colonization for money” was “the worst kind” and thought it unconscionable that “respectable … personalities at the court” condoned “making money” as the ACC’s ultimate goal. Vadius claimed that the ACC’s outsized government loan was meant to pay its top managers and called attention to the Empire minister’s scandalous guarantees of a 7 percent return in dividends at all costs. Dovetailing with sardonic criticisms of “the wages, bonuses … and subventions” for the “great management services” charged by ACC principals, Vadius ran the numbers and concluded that government subsidies would feed the problem by mushrooming beyond projections with per capita prizes on colonos rising to 42$, exponentially costlier than Herman Blumenau’s and Léonce Aubé’s rate of 5$, and Montravel’s and Caetano Dias’s 13$. In Vadius’s view, government could only make good on returns if it instead surveyed and readied lands for sale to incentivize both foreign and Brazilian settlers. Even though over the course of several weeks two other aliases – Junius and Alpha – responded feverishly to these claims, citing Pedro II’s throne speeches and the late Paraná’s own sanction of the the 6,000-conto ACC credit, Vadius carried the day.Footnote ³⁹

In the heat of controversy, Monte Alegre resigned as ACC’s president. Azambuja then issued a public explanation of the ACC’s shortcomings, citing an “insufficiency of means at its disposal” that handicapped it in relation to other countries’ colono recruitment drives. The ACC tried renegotiating its government contract, raising per capita prizes to 80–120$ for the first 4,000 individuals – far higher than Vadius imagined – and trying to apply its 2,000-conto loan, used mainly as credit for planters to request colonos, to other uses.Footnote ⁴⁰ In return for these allowances, the imperial government assigned a fiscal officer to the ACC who also became its president: the barão de Muritiba, a wealthy conservative senator from Bahia who had just retired from the Tribunal da Relação and was close with colonization empresarios and bureaucrats, including Aureliano, Abrantes, ex-SPC shareholder João Pereira do Faro, and colono importer Antonio Martins Lage, the latter two as board members of the Botafogo Club presided over by Muritiba.Footnote ⁴¹

Muritiba’s appointment expedited colono voyages for some months. About a dozen vessels arrived from Porto and Bremen with Portuguese field hands or Prussian and Hessian artisans for Rio Grande do Sul, the União e Indústria, Mucury, and the ACC itself. But arrivals tapered off from 2,385 in 1858 to 1,630 the next year, far below the ACC’s obligation to recruit 10,000 during that time. A month into Muritiba’s appointment, the ACC’s dividends dipped to the lowest rungs among the 48 public companies at the Court and certainly the lowest among the six colonization companies despite the unprecedented subsidies it received. Muritiba ceded the presidency to senator Cândido Borges Monteiro in 1859, but the ACC continued to tailspin following rumors that Borges siphoned shareholder capital for Muritiba to rent some property.Footnote ⁴²

Troubles in the Colono Trade: Fraud, Exploitation, and Illicit Gains

By the late 1850s, tales of abuse had become legend. A song from Lisbon’s carnival even parodied the figure of the recruiter for “the land of the banana” who hooked unwitting youngsters with his words.Footnote ⁴³ Stories of naive emigrants falling prey to false promises, of young Portuguese treated like enslaved Africans, and of workers sapped of their vital savings began reaching wider audiences. Paulo e Maria, ou a escravatura branca, a play about star-crossed lovers staged at Lisbon’s Teatro de Dom Fernando in late 1858, narrated the fate of a young man, Paulo, coaxed to emigrate to Brazil only to work among slaves. With its melodramatic turns – the colono trader was revealed as Paulo’s father and Paulo’s lover Maria committed suicide after herself traveling to Brazil to find him – the plot was a cautionary tale about the misfortunes awaiting emigrants, and a timely anti-emigration agitprop. Rio audiences would have had a taste of these themes and adaptations if the one-act tragedy O engajamento na cidade do Porto, ou os traficantes de escravos brancos, already on sale in one bookstore, had passed muster with the Dramatic Conservatory, which quickly censored it.Footnote ⁴⁴

The real stories behind these dramatic reenactments piled up, as news of packed and understocked ships fed the old trope of a “white slavery” or the belief that European emigrants were traded and treated like enslaved Africans. Portuguese newspapers rushed to denounce the inefficacy of existing laws to curtail emigration in the face of incidents like that of brigantine Arrogante, which arrived at Recife from São Miguel in December 1853 overloaded with 400 colonos without passports.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Portuguese community in Recife contemplated in dismay how colonos threw themselves overboard when the ship dropped anchor. Portuguese merchants mobilized against vice-consul Joaquim Baptista Moreira – nephew of the consul in Rio – and pressured Lisbon to dismiss him for his complacency and complicity. Abuses continued into 1855, often with serious consequences, as when the Portuguese galleon Defensor arrived in Belém with 288 colonos and a bout of cholera that infected enslaved stevedores and continued to spread along the colonos’ voyage on an Amazon Company’s steamship all the way to Óbidos.Footnote ⁴⁶

Portuguese lawmakers tried to stem abuses and poor transport conditions with the Law of 20 July 1855, which regulated contracting in Portuguese territory and forbade clandestine exits. Yet the arrival in late 1858 of the Brazilian galleon Dous Amigos in Rio with a jarring load of 603 passengers from São Miguel signaled that abuses only grew to new proportions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Brazil’s service contract law of 1837 severely blunted Portuguese diplomats’ ability to claim jurisdiction over Portuguese subjects and enforce their government’s orders. More troublingly still, these envoys themselves often contributed to colono abuses. In 1858, João Baptista Moreira, Portugal’s vice-consul and chargé from 1827 to 1834, and consul general in Brazil after 1835, faced accusations that he had helped the barão de Nova Friburgo hire two underaged Portuguese colonos. Indeed, in 1862, after Moreira’s retirement, the Portuguese government investigated the consular archive and found widespread evidence of corruption. Whereas in 1835 – his first year as consul – Moreira boasted of liquidating more than 23 inventories of Portuguese subjects worth almost 17 contos, it now emerged that, over the following quarter century, he had embezzled Portuguese subjects’ intestate inheritances, with at least 42 contos missing from the consulate’s coffers. Dealing with colonos and their troubles provided Moreira with illicit opportunities of self-enrichment that complemented formal ones such as the SPC shares he had once owned. His record also proved that abuses took on many forms and could even come from those entrusted to protect colonos.Footnote ⁴⁸

These revelations coincided with broader calls to rein in colono recruitments in Porto. In 1859, ACC agent Villares was accused by a Portuguese deputy of deceiving workers hired for São Paulo roadworks in 1855, who only saw their contracts once in high seas. Villares claimed the workers had freely signed their contracts and some in the press saw no wrongdoing, but the Portuguese government denounced the ACC for contractual lapses, claiming that “emigrants were deposited in an island far from the city, with no communications; that they arrived with onerous debts, etc., etc.” The ACC cautiously severed its links to Villares, but by then the harm was done, as the Portuguese government forbade any exits from Porto to Brazil involving Villares or any other ACC agent.Footnote ⁴⁹

The ACC’s dealings in Paris brought even greater calamities. Late in 1857, the ACC managing director Francisco José Fialho engaged in talks with Manoel Ferreira Pinto, a Portuguese merchant, Cantagalo planter, Petrópolis Railroad Company president, and fellow member of the ACC. Pinto had tried to launch a colono-purveying enterprise in 1853 but instead became the factor for a Parisian firm led by a Henri Beaucourt, who he recommended to Fialho to import colonos for the ACC. Fialho devised a 13-conto contract to Beaucourt’s liking: the firm would import as many colonos as the ACC needed but from ports and steamship lines of its own choosing, set up its own agencies where it saw fit, and determine upfront and travel accommodation costs as long as these did not increase colono debts in Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁰ With the contract signed in early 1858, the ship Liguria departed Genoa with 420 colonos but, after calling at Gibraltar with sick passengers, the captain made for Mahon without explanation. Colonos mutinied and, forcing a landing in Marseilles, had to be repatriated. Despite this fiasco, Beaucourt continued to send colonos to poor reviews from Brazilian contractors. After welcoming about 122 of these, Ottoni even referred to them as the “refuse of diverse recruitment expeditions,” though acknowledging that a “turbulent minority” that protested in Santa Clara due to unmet expectations had showed him a “Beaucourt contract” and translations of Beaucourt’s ads confirming deceitful promises and illegal surcharges.Footnote ⁵¹

Olinda and the new ACC president, Muritiba, had to deal personally with the fallout of Beaucourt’s frauds when the Bavarian consul requested the repatriation of a 60-year-old tailor named J. T. Seeligner and his family, who received false assurances of quick employment from Beaucourt. Privately, Muritiba accused the Seelingers of trying to obtain advantages in cahoots with Beaucourt and confessed to Olinda, “If this precedent passes, any who do not encounter Eldorado among us will believe themselves in the right to allege deception and demand repatriation.”Footnote ⁵² Publicly, Muritiba found the perfect scapegoat in an ACC commissioner working with Beaucourt in Antwerp (coincidentally, Fialho’s friend from the Paris legation) and summarily discharged him.Footnote ⁵³ Beaucourt in turn continued to send colonos until the end of the year and spent the next battling insurers for his losses with the Liguria.Footnote ⁵⁴

The imperial government’s troubles regarding colonization extended well beyond the ACC’s dealings. The most serious problem stemmed from colono restiveness in the Vergueiros’ Ibicaba and Angélica plantations in 1856–1857. The problems had started with recruitment, when in 1855 a number of Swiss men and women took up the offers of Emil Paravicini, who worked as agent on call for the ACC’s representative in Hamburg as well as for the HCV, Caetano Dias da Silva’s Rio Novo, Vergueiro & Co., and even some enterprises in the United States. Among the departed was Thomas Davatz, a school teacher commissioned by the cantonal government of Graubünden to report on the conditions encountered in Brazil. Davatz picked coffee and taught classes at Ibicaba, which readied him to respond to the forty-five questions provided by cantonal authorities on a range of topics, from schooling and weather vagaries to the items colonos received from planters and the price of land allotments. Davatz failed to report back when the Vergueiros got wind of his gloomy report mentioning inequities such as the recalculation of colono debts based on favorable exchange rates for Brazilian currency, which lengthened repayment times. Luiz Vergueiro threatened to murder Davatz, who organized fellow workers to write to the Swiss consulate in Rio. After a heated discussion between the two, a group of colonos picked up their tools and went to Davatz’s aid on 24 Dec. 1856 – the start of the alleged “uprising of the sharecroppers.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Without news from Davatz, Graübunden officials and the cantonal governments of Zürich and Bern sounded the alarm and demanded explanations from Paravicini, who offered to consult the Vergueiros for subsidies to send a Swiss investigator. In November 1856, Zürich dispatched a young chemist, Dr. Jakob Heusser, as commissioner to São Paulo. Once there, Heusser spoke with colonos at Ibicaba, Angélica, Senador Vergueiro, and other plantations, sharing his first impressions with his superiors by April 1857 and concluding his report back in Europe. During Heusser’s inquiry, the Vergueiros stopped at nothing to get the imperial government on their side.Footnote ⁵⁶ José Vergueiro pestered Justice minister Nabuco de Araújo, alluding to an “infernal plan” implicating slaves and a looming invasion of European warships and alleging a republican conspiracy to take the province by arms. “Davatz,” he claimed, “is an astute man … of cold blood and Jesuitic education.” In a separate letter to the provincial vice-president, Vergueiro warned of the alleged co-conspirator, a colono named Oswald, who was supposedly banished from Switzerland “for being a Communist, from where he went to Algeria” before arriving in Campinas, “from where he sent calumnious correspondence to Europe” against the Vergueiros. The conciliation cabinet responded calmly to José Vergueiro’s demands for imperial troops in Ibicaba and neighboring colonies. But the War minister, marquês de Caxias, who had crushed the 1842 liberal revolts, would not rush to aid his nemeses.Footnote ⁵⁷

Provincial authorities did appoint someone to investigate the Vergueiros’ allegations. For three weeks in early 1857, Alagoan jurisconsult and interim police chief in São Paulo, José Tavares Bastos (father of the rising liberal Aureliano Tavares Bastos) conducted interviews around the region’s plantations, concluding that the agitation was limited to Ibicaba and that colono complaints appeared legitimate. Yet his report blamed deficiencies in Brazilian law rather than the Vergueiros, highlighting faults in judicial proceedings, vigilance over service contracts, and poor selection parameters for imported colonos. Among 17 remedies, Tavares Bastos Sr. suggested updating the 1837 contract law and typifying contractual infractions in detail, correcting flaws in parceria such as monetary value calculations across currencies, greater oversight over the employment of minors, and proscribing prison sentences for cases of non-payment or absenteeism.Footnote ⁵⁸

Whereas these recommendations were either willfully ignored or fell through the cracks of the ministerial transition of 4 May 1857, Heusser’s report still had the power to force changes. The Vergueiros desperately tried to preempt the report, feigning friendship with Heusser and even hiring his helper as a colono. José Vergueiro went as far as publicizing a questionably translated thank you note from Heusser to make it appear as an official report and asked the JC to publish Heusser’s letters to the former Swiss consul in Rio, Charles Peret Gentil – a close acquaintance of the Vergueiros and author of a flattering tract on their colonies.Footnote ⁵⁹ Allegedly, in this letter Heusser admitted that the Vergueiros did not run “a simple money-oriented speculation” and blamed their enemies for inciting the uprising. The new Swiss consul called the ruse.Footnote ⁶⁰ And by year’s end, the Swiss cantons wrote to Olinda with strenuous objections over their findings on egregious abuses of power and exorbitant interest rates on (inheritable) colono debts, protesting the very nature of parceria contracts as favoring Brazilian entrepreneurs. Swiss officials demanded all of Vergueiro’s colonos “freed from slavery” and transported to state-run colonies before they published their documentation and Davatz’s own account of his time in São Paulo.Footnote ⁶¹

Countering Abuses, Strengthening the State?

With Brazilian colonization vaulted into such a profound crisis, Olinda did not sit idle. His trajectory had duly prepared him for this moment, including his lifelong government service as deputy, senator, regent, minister in eight cabinets (four of which he presided), his presidency of the SPC back in 1836, and his tenure in the Conselho de Estado. He began his crisis response by publishing internal communications with his Foreign minister regarding the colono revolts and the Swiss inquiries, following suit with a longer pamphlet unsparingly defending the Vergueiros. Olinda extolled parceria contracts while excusing or offering bland correctives to the problems in Ibicaba. Translators were in short supply, he claimed. If a juíz de paz had a conflict of interest, other judges could step in. And then he shifted blame. He hit back at Swiss authorities for sending their elderly, sick, and poor, and cited the Swiss consul’s own observations on that point as well as his celebration of Vergueiro establishments only four months before the disturbances. As if following the Vergueiros’ tactics, Olinda reproduced Heusser’s letter to them and unearthed Swiss consular reports confirming that colonos could relinquish their debts in a few years. Indeed, “if well understood,” the parceria system could “protect men against hunger and cold in this sumptuous Brazil; and could offer, if not wealth and independence, at least a pleasant, even happy, subsistence” according to Olinda. Only those seeking “unearned advantages” and seduced by “fallacious promises” of liquidated debts and free land could squander the benefits of parceria.Footnote ⁶²

Olinda’s indelicate response served as a perfect divertissement as he sought correctives to colonization’s blatant flaws by consulting statesmen across the political spectrum. Earlier, he had taken stock of fellow conservatives’ opinions. Soares de Andréa, the general who quashed the Cabanagem and the 1842 revolts, had shared his preference for prioritizing military and indigenous colonies in the northeastern provinces and refraining from “looking for colonos in their own lands,” offering instead government loans and subsidies to companies with contracts that avoided “excessive usury.”Footnote ⁶³ Olinda had also relied on the practical assessments of allies closer to the ground such as Felizardo, whose recommendation of Hermann Blumenau as an “honest and active man”’ contributed to Olinda ratifying the empresario’s contract for his Itajaí colony within a month following a two-year wait.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, Olinda’s appointee to the Rio Grande do Sul presidency, Ângelo Muniz da Silva Ferraz, brought news on the struggles of empresarios like Montravel, who had only imported 49 colonos in 1857, and Jacob Rheingantz and his unfertile land grant.Footnote ⁶⁵

Ex-Empire minister Luiz Pedreira do Couto Ferraz also counseled Olinda, but in contrast to conservative visions of a discreet state, he leaned in favor of active government support for colonization. “With time,” Ferraz had become “more convinced that immigration [would] not advance, much less become centralized, without some sacrifice on the part of the Treasury.” Government had to exceed “present expenditures and allocations … to prove efficacious” while cost-saving by substituting wages with foodstuffs and medicine.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ferraz’s notes coincided with the overtures of a longtime German resident in Rio who invoked emigrant drives to Chile, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope to convince Brazilian authorities to cover all travel expenses for his countrymen, warning that “what comes cheap ends up being costly” and offering model contracts between Hamburg authorities, shipping firms, and British colonial administrators.Footnote ⁶⁷ By sounding Brazilian statesmen’s ideas about colonization, Olinda realized that more direct government action was imperative.

Liberals also furnished Olinda with invaluable suggestions. Francisco de Paula Souza recommended keeping Joseph Hörmeyer, an Austrian-born veteran Brummer conscripted to fight Rosas in 1851, in the government’s payroll as an emigration propagandist. Hörmeyer, who had already completed a commissioned handbook for emigrants to Brazil with an appendix on the Mucury Company settlements, received a pay raise from Olinda and by 1859 began publishing a journal that saw four volumes until 1861. An envious Sturz, already resigned from his diplomatic post, fulminated Hörmeyer as Brazil’s “speaking trumpet.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Erstwhile Foreign minister Ernesto Ferreira França also enriched Olinda’s reflections, even though the two had a long-standing enmity since Olinda’s attempts to foil Ferreira França’s senate run for Pernambuco in 1847–1848.Footnote ⁶⁹ A decade later, Ferreira França became a new Supreme Court minister, reaching the highest echelons of imperial politics. And after championing peopling for years, he undertook a tour of German lands that positioned him well to counsel government on emigration affairs. He informed Olinda of the leading emigrant shipping firms of Robert Miles Sloman and Johann Godeffroy; warned about smaller agencies trying to sabotage the Brazilian recruiter, Dr. Schmidt; and turned Olinda’s attention to Hamburg’s Emigration Authority (Auswanderer-Behörde), a bureau that fixed prices, resolved conflicts, and cared for migrants’ well-being ahead of departure.Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition, Ferreira França’s remittances to the IHGB provided the most thorough update of colonization holdings since the early 1840s, including his own book on German-Brazilian relations published in Dresden; works on British colonization; many more on German emigration to the United States, Chile, Honduras, and New Zealand; and even one book on Austrian colonization in Hungary useful to think about internal frontiers like Paraná.Footnote ⁷¹

Olinda used these ideas to take stock of the government’s record on companies. In draft notes, he surveyed colonization efforts in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, the United States, and Australia and concentrated on French Algeria, where the pacification of the Kabylie in 1857 had paved the way for a specialized colonial ministry that trumped the reformism of Saint-Simonian state officials graduated from the École Polytéchnique. The new “system to fuse French colonos with Arabs and Moors” laid bare, for Olinda, the shortcomings of earlier Algerian colonization and signaled the “uselessness of government sacrifices to sustain companies.” “Beautiful theories and prestigious names,” he asserted, “have hereto served as the sole bases for these enterprises, founded … on the hope that, once colonies start out, Government is obligated to continue protecting and subsidizing them.” Olinda concluded that “neither country nor colonos have profited from these enterprises” and that “a commercial association … cannot offer the advantages that one would think at first sight.”Footnote ⁷²

Although Olinda settled on the wisdom of terminating company subsidies and directing funds instead to land-clearing activities and colonos’ initial sustenance in colonization nuclei, he took action to reinforce the ACC by authorizing new rules to oversee its recruitment agencies. These new measures sought to transform recruitment by offering per capita prizes for recruiters in compliance and by making agents, shipowners, and captains financially liable for reported abuses.Footnote ⁷³ But Olinda was not simply giving the ACC free rein, which became clear when he also approved new ACC statutes that gave the imperial government almost full control of the company by allowing the prime minister to appoint the ACC’s president and vice-president. In other words, Olinda solidified his belief in terminating subsidies by bringing the company under direct government oversight, if not outright control. And yet, refusing to abandon the principle of profit, these government rules also increased per capita prizes for adult colonos (50$) and children (30$ each).Footnote ⁷⁴

Even more impactfully, Olinda swiftly enacted the first official ordinance regulating emigrant voyages. The new Regulamento de transporte de emigrantes (Emigrant Transport Ordinance) became a decisive policy benchmark not only because it empowered the Brazilian government to oversee migrant transports but also to carry out its own. Its blueprint originated in a budget law for 1856–1857 that mandated greater oversight over colonization and was greatly enhanced by Olinda’s decades-long engagement with the colono trade. The Ordinance allowed Olinda to bring Brazilian policies in line with international efforts to improve maritime conveyance of contract workers such as the British inquiries into coolie transports seeking to curtail mortality rates as thousands of laborers shipped out of India following the Sepoy rebellion of 1857.Footnote ⁷⁵ Olinda’s Ordinance established a ratio of one colono per ton and minimum space dimensions for every passenger. It regulated food rations, kitchens, beds, and medical personnel according to passenger load and instituted sanitary measures like separating animals from humans. For the first time in Brazilian law, the Ordinance also restricted entry of physically or psychologically disabled individuals unaccompanied by relatives. Captains would have to produce detailed passenger manifests and preserve copies of contracts for all colonos onboard. Stringent supervision and the application of fines for violations fell under the Lands Directorate but also involved the Navy’s surgeon-general, the Navy auditor, and the customs director. The Ordinance deterred would-be offenders with fines that doubled emigrant travel costs and incentivized those in charge of applying it with a gratuity for every case resulting in fines. Significantly, the Ordinance left its mark until the end of the Empire as its compliance became an obligatory precondition for all colonization contracts.Footnote ⁷⁶

Olinda’s actions reined in the private business of colonization for governmental purposes but proved insufficient to revert the tide against emigration to Brazil. Sturz himself, who angrily resigned from his post in 1858, referred to “brain-burned Olinda” and to the “oligarchical and exploitative principles” that guided him, likening the Emigrant Transport Ordinance to a police ordinance for Helots.Footnote ⁷⁷ More substantive discussions took place in the Berlin-based Zentral-Verein für deutsche Auswanderungs-und Kolonisations-Angelegenheiten (Central Association for German Emigration and Colonization Matters), which gave a space to the grievances of Prussian mercenaries who fought for Brazil against Rosas and even to one much older veteran of Pedro I’s Cisplatina War, Samuel Gottfried Kerst, who chastised Brazilian attempts to replace enslaved Africans with German proletarians and called instead for a German national colonization in Uruguay.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Brazilian press reported on some of the Zentral-Verein’s demands, including that German colonos receive “all the rights and liberties afforded to the Brazilian-born.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Paraná’s earlier cabinet had kept abreast of some of the developments orbiting the Zentral-Verein, particularly the Hapsburg Empire’s attempts to cut exits to Brazil in 1853 as part of a neo-absolutist awakening under the new monarch, Francis Joseph, and an interior minister disinclined to police another wave of exiles as in 1848.Footnote ⁸⁰ And yet, up until the Ibicaba and Beaucourt scandals, Brazilian statesmen did not fully grasp the weight of the Zentral-Verein nor of its spirited and diverse membership, which included Hamburg’s shipping magnate Robert Sloman and Göttingen luminary Dr. Wäppaus; HCV president Schröder and secretary W. Hühn; colonization empresarios involved in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, and California; and the Prussian War and Interior ministers, Eduard von Bonin and August von der Heydt.

In 1859, with Zentral-Verein discussions and the Swiss inquiries in the background, von der Heydt issued a watershed decree halting emigration to Brazil. The Heydt Rescript of 3 November 1859 forbade any direct financing of emigrant voyages as well as any related propaganda riling up young men to take leave for Rio. The measure, which remained in effect in unified Germany until 1898, drastically reduced the number of migrants arriving to Brazil from Hamburg and Bremen and ravaged the HCV, which struggled to meet its migrant quotas until it reorganized in 1897 as the new Hanseatic Colonial Society. Coming in the wake of a forceful wave of reformist measures in Brazil, the Heydt Rescript appeared in its face to be an unexpected repudiation of Olinda’s efforts to rein in the colono trade and bring colonization companies into line.

However, the Rescript was not a reflex response to the abuses at Ibicaba, as scholars have long thought. Its intention, rather, was to retain military personnel at a time when Prussia most needed its soldiers. Napoléon III and Franz Joseph I had just agreed to the Treaty of Villafranca finalizing the Franco-Piedmontese war in which France had supported the Count of Cavour’s bid to make the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia independent from Habsburg control. With enemy troops mobilized but suddenly disengaged from conflict, von der Heydt understood that the time had come for Prussia to stand guard. As Wilhelm of Prussia became prince regent during his brother Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s deathbed, the replacement of War minister von Bonin with Albrecht von Roon, who lionized military reform, refashioned Prussian forces. After debates raged for much of 1858 and 1859, “the money was there but the able-bodied recruits were not.”Footnote ⁸¹ Minister Roon pushed to modify the Service Law facilitating recruitments and absorb the militia known as the Landwehr into formal army regiments. Meanwhile, von der Heydt sought to contribute by stalling emigrant exits to destinations that had historically absorbed Prussian recruits.

Still, Brazilian colonization did not grind to a stop in spite of the Heydt Rescript. The arrival of 581 colonos from Portugal and Italy heralded an upward trend ahead of December, the peak month for migrant arrivals.Footnote ⁸² In Bahia, some 105 colonos arrived in 1858–1859, many of them minors headed to Engenho Novo, a sugar estate where 15 colonos had already repaid their debts by 1860. Building on these low-key attainments, Bahian planters sought the ACC to request colonos from Saxony, contacting the appropriate consul while asking for government favors for a national colony on the Rio Pardo, signaling the growing acceptance of mixed colonies.Footnote ⁸³ Meanwhile, after taking over the ACC, authorities in Rio continued to goad fazendeiros to hire colonos in order to consolidate demand.Footnote ⁸⁴ The new Agriculture ministry established in 1860 took over colonization matters and kept Hörmeyer on its roster so that, under the new minister’s orders, he could go after a “hostile” Bremen gazette publishing “calumnious and indolent falsities.” With Sturz decamping to the United States and intermittently attacking Brazil, Hörmeyer was the last scribe standing until minister Felizardo also destined funds to the vice-consul in Porto for the purpose of “flattening out any remaining obstacles for Portuguese emigration to the Empire.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Colonization companies were less resilient than the colono trade in general. The ACC dragged on by handling multiple logistics of migrant arrvials. In 1860, it redirected at least 130 incoming German colonos and others from Mucury to Rio Grande do Sul, exploiting ACC’s close relationship with the province established thanks to ACC president Muritiba’s conservative connections to the prior provincial president, Ângelo Muniz, who rose to the Empire ministry.Footnote ⁸⁶ The ACC continued to welcome incomers at the Bom Jesus hostel until at least 1863, the last years for which any information is available. By then, it had imported 5,908 colonos and managed the disembarkation and lodging of another 3,938 imported by the government. Requests for colono and foreign offers for emigration drives continued to arrive after 1859, including one in 1862 from the Frankfurt Society for the Protection of Emigrants asking for information on existing colonies and available lands. But the ACC never regained the vitality of its early days. In 1863, its third president, Borges Monteiro, reported on the closure of the Porto agency due to its runaway debts and inability to meet colono quotas on account of increased Portuguese vigilance over underaged emigrants. Surprisingly, the ACC still issued its ninth round of dividend payments to shareholders, which at 5 contos was one of the highest yet and brought the total profits produced by the company to almost 32 contos. At that rate, the ACC would have generated the equivalent of its initial government loan within a decade.

This bounty had Olinda to thank for. After seeing his cabinet sink, Olinda strove to secure its colonization-reformist thrust. A year later at the Conselho, Olinda partook in arguments over a credit approved in 1856 allowing government to spend up to six thousand contos in colonization. Because funds remained as the credit expired and financial commitments tied to the credits had yet to be fulfilled, the Conselho had to determine whether the funds could be used beyond their initial deadline, even though an affirmative response amounted to extending one cabinet’s policies beyond its incumbency. Olinda claimed that any portion of the credit committed to a specified expense within the valid period did in fact authorize spending beyond any deadline in order to meet those commitments. The law, he emphasized, did not state that expenditures had to be completed within the stipulated three-year window. Because it “fell upon Government to consult the interests of colonization so as to determine the time window for their realization,” the ACC could in effect continue to receive government subsidies tied to the 1856 credit. Olinda’s patronage thus carried on beyond his cabinet thanks to a deft opinion joined by ex-ACC president Monte Alegre and Limpo de Abreu, the minister who publicized the SPC’s statutes in 1836.Footnote ⁸⁷

Olinda’s generosity did not extend to the Mucury Company, however. Even though Ottoni sat on the board of the Banco do Brasil, his company depended entirely on government aid.Footnote ⁸⁸ After settling 1,013 colonos, Ottoni asked the government for an extension of the terms of contract and an advance on a previously agreed subsidy in late 1858, but Olinda responded curtly. The Mucury contract signed at the end of 1856, only months apart from the ACC’s credit decree, entitled Ottoni to a 300-conto loan to be disbursed in equal installments over three years. Near the end of 1858, Ottoni had received only 70 contos. But because he had surpassed his annual colono quota of 1,000 and sorely required additional funding, he requested that the remaining portion of the loan be made available to fulfill ongoing expenses. Counseled by Felizardo, Olinda took a reserved approach, agreeing to advance no more than a hundred contos per year, as stipulated, and with disbursements directly tethered to colono arrival rates. The “small sum estimated to promote colonization,” Olinda explained, “demands that the strictest economy be observed.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Olinda had shown no shortage of means to keep the ACC afloat. As Mucury’s agents in Leipzig reported to Ottoni, the Brazilian government authorized the ACC to recruit a thousand colonos with travel costs paid by Brazilian diplomats in Lisbon, Hamburg, Antwerp, and other ports. Recognizing that they “could not provide large advancements as they do,” Ottoni’s men concluded that “any who wish to emigrate to Brazil will preferably go to the ACC.”Footnote ⁹⁰ As his agents lost ground, Ottoni bore the implicit brunt of Olinda’s preference for the ACC.

Withheld funds came as a death sentence for the Mucury Company, with Olinda’s admonishing tone a further reminder of the true partial nature of the post-conciliation state. In Ottoni’s own telling, recent colono cohorts purveyed by the Land Directorate and the ACC had brought chaos to Mucury’s colonies. Olinda could not patronize another enterprise prone to uprisings or diplomatic inquiries.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1860, Finance minister Silva Ferraz effectively shuttered the Company by canceling the government’s commitments, coinciding almost perfectly with Ottoni’s failed electoral run for a Chamber seat for Minas. In a detailed final report to shareholders, Ottoni exculpated himself from the Company’s fate. He then published an incendiary tract against the electoral reform of 1860 that cleared his name after his defeat.

In the tract, Ottoni invoked his 13 years of experience at the helm of the Mucury Company to get credit for opening communications in landlocked Minas, and laid bare his expectation that the nascent parishes around Filadelfia would provide electoral clout. Surely, the earlier electoral reform of 1855, which facilitated the creation of smaller districts, would have allowed Ottoni and his supporters to enter the Chamber en masse, propelled by the new settlements in the Mucuri valley. But the redistricting of the province mandated by the 1860 electoral reform undercut that expected support in those places where only voters could “prove whether the Mucury Company’s empresario is a speculator or a patriot.” Ottoni raged against the sure victory denied him but presaged a vengeful return: “If a partial vote tore me from there, a thousand impartial votes may designate me for another seat in which, uncovering … the oligarchy, I will have the glory to serve.”Footnote ⁹² Colonos elsewhere had already mobilized socially and politically, establishing mutual aid societies and organizing against electoral irregularities, as a group of 135 colonos from Petrópolis did when they were intentionally excluded from their district’s qualifying lists.Footnote ⁹³ Olinda accompanied these developments through Conselho discussions on the rights of naturalized Brazilians, in particular those born of foreign colonos, and so he was perfectly aware of the political implications of peopling the Mucuri and did not look kindly on the electoral weaponization of colonization frontiers.Footnote ⁹⁴

* * *

The ACC and the Mucury Company embodied a bourgeoning, more streamlined colonization entrepreneurialism aiming to correct the failings of prior efforts. Yet the inevitable scandals that accompanied their activities reinforced their reliance on government support and resulted in divergent destinies that laid bare enduring tensions beyond the conciliation period. Conservatives and moderates who shared Olinda’s vision of a centralized monarchical state and strong regulatory prerogatives obtained government backing, while those with a more radical track record who could use colonization to build new constituencies fell short of receiving similar treatment despite their efforts to comply with, and even exceed, contractual expectations. Dismissing Ottoni allowed Olinda to reestablish what he understood as a political balance. Lanced on every side by conservatives who protested the financial reforms of his liberal minister Bernardo de Souza Franco or the prioritization of colono recruitment over land surveying, the question of who to support and to what extent hung over Olinda’s head like the sword of Damocles.

Forced to choose, Olinda ended up favoring the ACC over the Mucury Company, spelling the latter’s doom and flagging that dormant political enmities could resurface after conciliation. But the problems raised by colonization enterprises forced Olinda to adopt more nuanced decisions that defied partisanship. When foreign governments recriminated Brazilian empresarios for abusing colonos, Olinda closed ranks around his countrymen and adamantly defended another liberal firm, Vergueiro & Co. Eventually, Olinda’s cabinet dissolved. But his interventions in colonization matters had immense repercussions. The product of a damage-control response and in-depth study of colonization, Olinda’s Emigrant Transport Ordinance became a mainstay of colonization contracts up to the end of the Brazilian Empire in 1889. Through it, Olinda put forth a potent claim for regulation that sounded both the limits and possibilities of state intervention in the lives of companies and in the colono trade.

Colonization defied narrow definitions of government action and confronted cabinets with a true litmus test on their impact, raising key questions about governmental power, responsibilities, and capacities. How far could the government go in financing private enterprises through direct subsidies? And when should the imperial state step in as local incidents mushroomed into international recriminations? Olinda inherited these dilemmas together with the conciliation’s expectations of a government that balanced conservative and liberal creeds. His responses ultimately demonstrated that government would only do so much to mobilize colonization enterprises. Rather, it would develop the regulations to help colonization companies flourish as long as they responded to its interests, and to rein them in when they did not.